Daily Papers

Deep reinforcement learning policies, despite their outstanding efficiency in simulated visual control tasks, have shown disappointing ability to generalize across disturbances in the input training images. Changes in image statistics or distracting background elements are pitfalls that prevent generalization and real-world applicability of such control policies. We elaborate on the intuition that a good visual policy should be able to identify which pixels are important for its decision, and preserve this identification of important sources of information across images. This implies that training of a policy with small generalization gap should focus on such important pixels and ignore the others. This leads to the introduction of saliency-guided Q-networks (SGQN), a generic method for visual reinforcement learning, that is compatible with any value function learning method. SGQN vastly improves the generalization capability of Soft Actor-Critic agents and outperforms existing stateof-the-art methods on the Deepmind Control Generalization benchmark, setting a new reference in terms of training efficiency, generalization gap, and policy interpretability.

Efficient, reliable and reproducible target volume delineation is a key step in the effective planning of breast radiotherapy. However, post-operative breast target delineation is challenging as the contrast between the tumor bed volume (TBV) and normal breast tissue is relatively low in CT images. In this study, we propose to mimic the marker-guidance procedure in manual target delineation. We developed a saliency-based deep learning segmentation (SDL-Seg) algorithm for accurate TBV segmentation in post-operative breast irradiation. The SDL-Seg algorithm incorporates saliency information in the form of markers' location cues into a U-Net model. The design forces the model to encode the location-related features, which underscores regions with high saliency levels and suppresses low saliency regions. The saliency maps were generated by identifying markers on CT images. Markers' locations were then converted to probability maps using a distance-transformation coupled with a Gaussian filter. Subsequently, the CT images and the corresponding saliency maps formed a multi-channel input for the SDL-Seg network. Our in-house dataset was comprised of 145 prone CT images from 29 post-operative breast cancer patients, who received 5-fraction partial breast irradiation (PBI) regimen on GammaPod. The performance of the proposed method was compared against basic U-Net. Our model achieved mean (standard deviation) of 76.4 %, 6.76 mm, and 1.9 mm for DSC, HD95, and ASD respectively on the test set with computation time of below 11 seconds per one CT volume. SDL-Seg showed superior performance relative to basic U-Net for all the evaluation metrics while preserving low computation cost. The findings demonstrate that SDL-Seg is a promising approach for improving the efficiency and accuracy of the on-line treatment planning procedure of PBI, such as GammaPod based PBI.

Existing approaches for video moment retrieval and highlight detection are not able to align text and video features efficiently, resulting in unsatisfying performance and limited production usage. To address this, we propose a novel architecture that utilizes recent foundational video models designed for such alignment. Combined with the introduced Saliency-Guided Cross Attention mechanism and a hybrid DETR architecture, our approach significantly enhances performance in both moment retrieval and highlight detection tasks. For even better improvement, we developed InterVid-MR, a large-scale and high-quality dataset for pretraining. Using it, our architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the QVHighlights, Charades-STA and TACoS benchmarks. The proposed approach provides an efficient and scalable solution for both zero-shot and fine-tuning scenarios in video-language tasks.

Common editing operations performed by professional photographers include the cleanup operations: de-emphasizing distracting elements and enhancing subjects. These edits are challenging, requiring a delicate balance between manipulating the viewer's attention while maintaining photo realism. While recent approaches can boast successful examples of attention attenuation or amplification, most of them also suffer from frequent unrealistic edits. We propose a realism loss for saliency-guided image enhancement to maintain high realism across varying image types, while attenuating distractors and amplifying objects of interest. Evaluations with professional photographers confirm that we achieve the dual objective of realism and effectiveness, and outperform the recent approaches on their own datasets, while requiring a smaller memory footprint and runtime. We thus offer a viable solution for automating image enhancement and photo cleanup operations.

Mix-up training approaches have proven to be effective in improving the generalization ability of Deep Neural Networks. Over the years, the research community expands mix-up methods into two directions, with extensive efforts to improve saliency-guided procedures but minimal focus on the arbitrary path, leaving the randomization domain unexplored. In this paper, inspired by the superior qualities of each direction over one another, we introduce a novel method that lies at the junction of the two routes. By combining the best elements of randomness and saliency utilization, our method balances speed, simplicity, and accuracy. We name our method R-Mix following the concept of "Random Mix-up". We demonstrate its effectiveness in generalization, weakly supervised object localization, calibration, and robustness to adversarial attacks. Finally, in order to address the question of whether there exists a better decision protocol, we train a Reinforcement Learning agent that decides the mix-up policies based on the classifier's performance, reducing dependency on human-designed objectives and hyperparameter tuning. Extensive experiments further show that the agent is capable of performing at the cutting-edge level, laying the foundation for a fully automatic mix-up. Our code is released at [https://github.com/minhlong94/Random-Mixup].

While deep neural networks show great performance on fitting to the training distribution, improving the networks' generalization performance to the test distribution and robustness to the sensitivity to input perturbations still remain as a challenge. Although a number of mixup based augmentation strategies have been proposed to partially address them, it remains unclear as to how to best utilize the supervisory signal within each input data for mixup from the optimization perspective. We propose a new perspective on batch mixup and formulate the optimal construction of a batch of mixup data maximizing the data saliency measure of each individual mixup data and encouraging the supermodular diversity among the constructed mixup data. This leads to a novel discrete optimization problem minimizing the difference between submodular functions. We also propose an efficient modular approximation based iterative submodular minimization algorithm for efficient mixup computation per each minibatch suitable for minibatch based neural network training. Our experiments show the proposed method achieves the state of the art generalization, calibration, and weakly supervised localization results compared to other mixup methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/snu-mllab/Co-Mixup.

In visual-based Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents often struggle to generalize well to environmental variations in the state space that were not observed during training. The variations can arise in both task-irrelevant features, such as background noise, and task-relevant features, such as robot configurations, that are related to the optimal decisions. To achieve generalization in both situations, agents are required to accurately understand the impact of changed features on the decisions, i.e., establishing the true associations between changed features and decisions in the policy model. However, due to the inherent correlations among features in the state space, the associations between features and decisions become entangled, making it difficult for the policy to distinguish them. To this end, we propose Saliency-Guided Features Decorrelation (SGFD) to eliminate these correlations through sample reweighting. Concretely, SGFD consists of two core techniques: Random Fourier Functions (RFF) and the saliency map. RFF is utilized to estimate the complex non-linear correlations in high-dimensional images, while the saliency map is designed to identify the changed features. Under the guidance of the saliency map, SGFD employs sample reweighting to minimize the estimated correlations related to changed features, thereby achieving decorrelation in visual RL tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate that SGFD can generalize well on a wide range of test environments and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in handling both task-irrelevant variations and task-relevant variations.

Driving is challenging in conditions like night, rain, and snow. Lack of good labeled datasets has hampered progress in scene understanding under such conditions. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) using large labeled clear-day datasets is a promising research direction in such cases. However, many UDA methods are trained with dominant scene backgrounds (e.g., roads, sky, sidewalks) that appear dramatically different across domains. As a result, they struggle to learn effective features of smaller and often sparse foreground objects (e.g., people, vehicles, signs). In this work, we improve UDA training by applying in-place image warping to focus on salient objects. We design instance-level saliency guidance to adaptively oversample object regions and undersample background areas, which reduces adverse effects from background context and enhances backbone feature learning. Our approach improves adaptation across geographies, lighting, and weather conditions, and is agnostic to the task (segmentation, detection), domain adaptation algorithm, saliency guidance, and underlying model architecture. Result highlights include +6.1 mAP50 for BDD100K Clear rightarrow DENSE Foggy, +3.7 mAP50 for BDD100K Day rightarrow Night, +3.0 mAP50 for BDD100K Clear rightarrow Rainy, and +6.3 mIoU for Cityscapes rightarrow ACDC. Besides, Our method adds minimal training memory and no additional inference latency. Code is available at https://github.com/ShenZheng2000/Instance-Warp

Video Quality Assessment (VQA), which intends to predict the perceptual quality of videos, has attracted increasing attention. Due to factors like motion blur or specific distortions, the quality of different regions in a video varies. Recognizing the region-wise local quality within a video is beneficial for assessing global quality and can guide us in adopting fine-grained enhancement or transcoding strategies. Due to the heavy cost of annotating region-wise quality, the lack of ground truth constraints from relevant datasets further complicates the utilization of local perception. Inspired by the Human Visual System (HVS) that links global quality to the local texture of different regions and their visual saliency, we propose a Kaleidoscope Video Quality Assessment (KVQ) framework, which aims to effectively assess both saliency and local texture, thereby facilitating the assessment of global quality. Our framework extracts visual saliency and allocates attention using Fusion-Window Attention (FWA) while incorporating a Local Perception Constraint (LPC) to mitigate the reliance of regional texture perception on neighboring areas. KVQ obtains significant improvements across multiple scenarios on five VQA benchmarks compared to SOTA methods. Furthermore, to assess local perception, we establish a new Local Perception Visual Quality (LPVQ) dataset with region-wise annotations. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of KVQ in perceiving local distortions. KVQ models and the LPVQ dataset will be available at https://github.com/qyp2000/KVQ.

Pretraining and fine-tuning have emerged as a new paradigm in remote sensing image interpretation. Among them, Masked Autoencoder (MAE)-based pretraining stands out for its strong capability to learn general feature representations via reconstructing masked image regions. However, applying MAE to multispectral remote sensing images remains challenging due to complex backgrounds, indistinct targets, and the lack of semantic guidance during masking, which hinders the learning of underlying structures and meaningful spatial-spectral features. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective approach, Spectral Index-Guided MAE (SIGMAE), for multispectral image pretraining. The core idea is to incorporate domain-specific spectral indices as prior knowledge to guide dynamic token masking toward informative regions. SIGMAE introduces Semantic Saliency-Guided Dynamic Token Masking (SSDTM), a curriculum-style strategy that quantifies each patch's semantic richness and internal heterogeneity to adaptively select the most informative tokens during training. By prioritizing semantically salient regions and progressively increasing sample difficulty, SSDTM enhances spectrally rich and structurally aware representation learning, mitigates overfitting, and reduces redundant computation compared with random masking. Extensive experiments on five widely used datasets covering various downstream tasks, including scene classification, semantic segmentation, object extraction and change detection, demonstrate that SIGMAE outperforms other pretrained geospatial foundation models. Moreover, it exhibits strong spatial-spectral reconstruction capability, even with a 90% mask ratio, and improves complex target recognition under limited labeled data. The source codes and model weights will be released at https://github.com/zxk688/SIGMAE.

Recent studies have examined attention dynamics in large vision-language models (LVLMs) to detect hallucinations. However, existing approaches remain limited in reliably distinguishing hallucinated from factually grounded outputs, as they rely solely on forward-pass attention patterns and neglect gradient-based signals that reveal how token influence propagates through the network. To bridge this gap, we introduce LVLMs-Saliency, a gradient-aware diagnostic framework that quantifies the visual grounding strength of each output token by fusing attention weights with their input gradients. Our analysis uncovers a decisive pattern: hallucinations frequently arise when preceding output tokens exhibit low saliency toward the prediction of the next token, signaling a breakdown in contextual memory retention. Leveraging this insight, we propose a dual-mechanism inference-time framework to mitigate hallucinations: (1) Saliency-Guided Rejection Sampling (SGRS), which dynamically filters candidate tokens during autoregressive decoding by rejecting those whose saliency falls below a context-adaptive threshold, thereby preventing coherence-breaking tokens from entering the output sequence; and (2) Local Coherence Reinforcement (LocoRE), a lightweight, plug-and-play module that strengthens attention from the current token to its most recent predecessors, actively counteracting the contextual forgetting behavior identified by LVLMs-Saliency. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLMs demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucination rates while preserving fluency and task performance, offering a robust and interpretable solution for enhancing model reliability. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhangbaijin/LVLMs-Saliency

Neural network-based visuomotor policies enable robots to perform manipulation tasks but remain susceptible to perceptual attacks. For example, conventional 2D adversarial patches are effective under fixed-camera setups, where appearance is relatively consistent; however, their efficacy often diminishes under dynamic viewpoints from moving cameras, such as wrist-mounted setups, due to perspective distortions. To proactively investigate potential vulnerabilities beyond 2D patches, this work proposes a viewpoint-consistent adversarial texture optimization method for 3D objects through differentiable rendering. As optimization strategies, we employ Expectation over Transformation (EOT) with a Coarse-to-Fine (C2F) curriculum, exploiting distance-dependent frequency characteristics to induce textures effective across varying camera-object distances. We further integrate saliency-guided perturbations to redirect policy attention and design a targeted loss that persistently drives robots toward adversarial objects. Our comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method is effective under various environmental conditions, while confirming its black-box transferability and real-world applicability.

Recent diffusion-based image editing methods commonly rely on text or high-level instructions to guide the generation process, offering intuitive but coarse control. In contrast, we focus on explicit, prompt-free editing, where the user directly specifies the modification by cropping and pasting an object or sub-object into a chosen location within an image. This operation affords precise spatial and visual control, yet it introduces a fundamental challenge: preserving the identity of the pasted object while harmonizing it with its new context. We observe that attention maps in diffusion-based editing models inherently govern whether image regions are preserved or adapted for coherence. Building on this insight, we introduce LooseRoPE, a saliency-guided modulation of rotational positional encoding (RoPE) that loosens the positional constraints to continuously control the attention field of view. By relaxing RoPE in this manner, our method smoothly steers the model's focus between faithful preservation of the input image and coherent harmonization of the inserted object, enabling a balanced trade-off between identity retention and contextual blending. Our approach provides a flexible and intuitive framework for image editing, achieving seamless compositional results without textual descriptions or complex user input.

Data augmentation is a powerful technique to increase the diversity of data, which can effectively improve the generalization ability of neural networks in image recognition tasks. Recent data mixing based augmentation strategies have achieved great success. Especially, CutMix uses a simple but effective method to improve the classifiers by randomly cropping a patch from one image and pasting it on another image. To further promote the performance of CutMix, a series of works explore to use the saliency information of the image to guide the mixing. We systematically study the importance of the saliency information for mixing data, and find that the saliency information is not so necessary for promoting the augmentation performance. Furthermore, we find that the cutting based data mixing methods carry two problems of label misallocation and object information missing, which cannot be resolved simultaneously. We propose a more effective but very easily implemented method, namely ResizeMix. We mix the data by directly resizing the source image to a small patch and paste it on another image. The obtained patch preserves more substantial object information compared with conventional cut-based methods. ResizeMix shows evident advantages over CutMix and the saliency-guided methods on both image classification and object detection tasks without additional computation cost, which even outperforms most costly search-based automatic augmentation methods.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a critical driver for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While recent advancements have focused on reward engineering or data synthesis, few studies exploit the model's intrinsic representation characteristics to guide the training process. In this paper, we first observe the presence of high-magnitude activations within the query and key vectors when processing long contexts. Drawing inspiration from model quantization -- which establishes the criticality of such high-magnitude activations -- and the insight that long-context reasoning inherently exhibits a sparse structure, we hypothesize that these weights serve as the pivotal drivers for effective model optimization. Based on this insight, we propose LongAct, a strategy that shifts from uniform to saliency-guided sparse updates. By selectively updating only the weights associated with these significant activations, LongAct achieves an approximate 8% improvement on LongBench v2 and enhances generalization on the RULER benchmark. Furthermore, our method exhibits remarkable universality, consistently boosting performance across diverse RL algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO. Extensive ablation studies suggest that focusing on these salient features is key to unlocking long-context potential.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on various vision-language tasks, yet their visual perception remains limited. Humans, in comparison, perceive complex scenes efficiently by dynamically scanning and focusing on salient regions in a sequential "blink-like" process. Motivated by this strategy, we first investigate whether MLLMs exhibit similar behavior. Our pilot analysis reveals that MLLMs naturally attend to different visual regions across layers and that selectively allocating more computation to salient tokens can enhance visual perception. Building on this insight, we propose Blink, a dynamic visual token resolution framework that emulates the human-inspired process within a single forward pass. Specifically, Blink includes two modules: saliency-guided scanning and dynamic token resolution. It first estimates the saliency of visual tokens in each layer based on the attention map, and extends important tokens through a plug-and-play token super-resolution (TokenSR) module. In the next layer, it drops the extended tokens when they lose focus. This dynamic mechanism balances broad exploration and fine-grained focus, thereby enhancing visual perception adaptively and efficiently. Extensive experiments validate Blink, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing visual perception and multimodal understanding.

Image-to-image (I2I) translation has achieved strong results in tasks like human relighting and driving scene translation using latent diffusion models (LDMs). However, compact LDMs often struggle to preserve fine-grained structures because the encoder compresses high-resolution inputs into a spatially downsampled latent space. To address this issue, we propose a simple saliency-guided warp-unwarp framework that reallocates spatial representation toward salient regions before encoding, enabling better preservation of structural details without increasing latent resolution. The warped image is processed by the original diffusion model and then mapped back via an inverse warp. In addition, we propose a simple and efficient outpainting-based synthetic data generation pipeline to produce high-quality paired data for image relighting. Our method is model-agnostic, requires no architectural modification, and introduces negligible computational overhead. Experiments on human relighting, driving scene relighting, and translation demonstrate improved structural preservation, lighting faithfulness, and image quality, with our framework extending naturally to video via frame-by-frame application with good temporal stability. Project Webpage: https://shenzheng2000.github.io/WarpI2I.github.io

Current research on video hallucination mitigation primarily focuses on isolated error types, leaving compositional hallucinations, arising from incorrect reasoning over multiple interacting spatial and temporal factors largely underexplored. We introduce OmniVCHall, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate both isolated and compositional hallucinations in video multimodal large language models (VLLMs). OmniVCHall spans diverse video domains, introduces a novel camera-based hallucination type, and defines a fine-grained taxonomy, together with adversarial answer options (e.g., "All are correct" and "None of the above") to prevent shortcut reasoning. The evaluations of 39 representative VLLMs reveal that even advanced models (e.g., Qwen3-VL and GPT-5) exhibit substantial performance degradation. We propose TriCD, a contrastive decoding framework with a triple-pathway calibration mechanism. An adaptive perturbation controller dynamically selects distracting operations to construct negative video variants, while a saliency-guided enhancement module adaptively reinforces grounded token-wise visual evidences. These components are optimized via reinforcement learning to encourage precise decision-making under compositional hallucination settings. Experimental results show that TriCD consistently improves performance across two representative backbones, achieving an average accuracy improvement of over 10%. The data and code can be find at https://github.com/BMRETURN/OmniVCHall.

Background Precise prediction of cancer types is vital for cancer diagnosis and therapy. Important cancer marker genes can be inferred through predictive model. Several studies have attempted to build machine learning models for this task however none has taken into consideration the effects of tissue of origin that can potentially bias the identification of cancer markers. Results In this paper, we introduced several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models that take unstructured gene expression inputs to classify tumor and non-tumor samples into their designated cancer types or as normal. Based on different designs of gene embeddings and convolution schemes, we implemented three CNN models: 1D-CNN, 2D-Vanilla-CNN, and 2D-Hybrid-CNN. The models were trained and tested on combined 10,340 samples of 33 cancer types and 731 matched normal tissues of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Our models achieved excellent prediction accuracies (93.9-95.0%) among 34 classes (33 cancers and normal). Furthermore, we interpreted one of the models, known as 1D-CNN model, with a guided saliency technique and identified a total of 2,090 cancer markers (108 per class). The concordance of differential expression of these markers between the cancer type they represent and others is confirmed. In breast cancer, for instance, our model identified well-known markers, such as GATA3 and ESR1. Finally, we extended the 1D-CNN model for prediction of breast cancer subtypes and achieved an average accuracy of 88.42% among 5 subtypes. The codes can be found at https://github.com/chenlabgccri/CancerTypePrediction.

First-person dynamic spatial reasoning requires models to track continuous motion and precise geometric structure, but the quadratic attention cost of Transformer-based Video-LLMs makes dense visual tokens computationally expensive. Existing token pruning paradigms predominantly rely on discrete static snapshots, failing to preserve the motion and geometric cues essential for reasoning. We propose Event Cascade Pruning (ECP), to our knowledge the first training-free framework that leverages the high-frequency motion cues from event cameras as a continuous event-guided motion prior to guide token selection. ECP combines three stages: Event-Triggered Causal Sampling to anchor motion-informative keyframes, Event-guided Motion Saliency Filtering to suppress event-inactive visual tokens, and Event-Attention Ranking Fusion to calibrate spatial attention with motion-salient dynamics. With 80% visual token reduction, ECP outperforms the full-token baseline (37.62% vs. 36.31%) while achieving 1.89x inference speedup and 52% GFLOPs reduction. We further introduce ESR-Real, the first real-world RGB-event benchmark for first-person spatial reasoning, where ECP improves accuracy by 2.68 percentage points over full-token baselines.

Despite the improved accuracy of deep neural networks, the discovery of adversarial examples has raised serious safety concerns. Most existing approaches for crafting adversarial examples necessitate some knowledge (architecture, parameters, etc.) of the network at hand. In this paper, we focus on image classifiers and propose a feature-guided black-box approach to test the safety of deep neural networks that requires no such knowledge. Our algorithm employs object detection techniques such as SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) to extract features from an image. These features are converted into a mutable saliency distribution, where high probability is assigned to pixels that affect the composition of the image with respect to the human visual system. We formulate the crafting of adversarial examples as a two-player turn-based stochastic game, where the first player's objective is to minimise the distance to an adversarial example by manipulating the features, and the second player can be cooperative, adversarial, or random. We show that, theoretically, the two-player game can con- verge to the optimal strategy, and that the optimal strategy represents a globally minimal adversarial image. For Lipschitz networks, we also identify conditions that provide safety guarantees that no adversarial examples exist. Using Monte Carlo tree search we gradually explore the game state space to search for adversarial examples. Our experiments show that, despite the black-box setting, manipulations guided by a perception-based saliency distribution are competitive with state-of-the-art methods that rely on white-box saliency matrices or sophisticated optimization procedures. Finally, we show how our method can be used to evaluate robustness of neural networks in safety-critical applications such as traffic sign recognition in self-driving cars.

Recent video masked autoencoder (MAE) works have designed improved masking algorithms focused on saliency. These works leverage visual cues such as motion to mask the most salient regions. However, the robustness of such visual cues depends on how often input videos match underlying assumptions. On the other hand, natural language description is an information dense representation of video that implicitly captures saliency without requiring modality-specific assumptions, and has not been explored yet for video MAE. To this end, we introduce a novel text-guided masking algorithm (TGM) that masks the video regions with highest correspondence to paired captions. Without leveraging any explicit visual cues for saliency, our TGM is competitive with state-of-the-art masking algorithms such as motion-guided masking. To further benefit from the semantics of natural language for masked reconstruction, we next introduce a unified framework for joint MAE and masked video-text contrastive learning. We show that across existing masking algorithms, unifying MAE and masked video-text contrastive learning improves downstream performance compared to pure MAE on a variety of video recognition tasks, especially for linear probe. Within this unified framework, our TGM achieves the best relative performance on five action recognition and one egocentric datasets, highlighting the complementary nature of natural language for masked video modeling.

Recent progress in brain-guided image generation has improved the quality of fMRI-based reconstructions; however, fundamental challenges remain in preserving object-level structure and semantic fidelity. Many existing approaches overlook the spatial arrangement of salient objects, leading to conceptually inconsistent outputs. We propose a saliency-driven decoding framework that employs graph-informed saliency priors to translate structural cues from brain signals into spatial masks. These masks, together with semantic information extracted from embeddings, condition a diffusion model to guide image regeneration, helping preserve object conformity while maintaining natural scene composition. In contrast to pipelines that invoke multiple diffusion stages, our approach relies on a single frozen model, offering a more lightweight yet effective design. Experiments show that this strategy improves both conceptual alignment and structural similarity to the original stimuli, while also introducing a new direction for efficient, interpretable, and structurally grounded brain decoding.

Machine unlearning (MU) aims to remove the influence of specific training data while preserving model utility. As the name suggests, MU can be viewed as the inverse of learning, using gradient-based updates to reduce the influence of a forget-set by counteracting the previously learned behavior. Recently, Muon, a gradient descent variant, has been introduced. Muon applies spectral magnitude normalization to encourage exploration of rare directions and demonstrates promising performance. Inspired by Muon, we adopt the spectral view for unlearning and propose Spectral Saliency Unlearning (SSU). SSU thresholds weak singular components and updates only those directions supported by a confident unlearning signal. We further provide theoretical justification for this thresholding approach from the perspective of the forgetting-retention trade-off. Experiments across image classifiers, diffusion models, and LLMs demonstrate SSU's effectiveness.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) typically process hundreds or thousands of visual tokens per image or video frame, incurring quadratic attention cost and substantial redundancy. Existing token reduction methods often ignore the textual query or rely on deep attention maps, whose instability under aggressive pruning leads to degraded semantic alignment. We propose FlashVLM, a text guided visual token selection framework that dynamically adapts visual inputs to the query. Instead of relying on noisy attention weights, FlashVLM computes an explicit cross modal similarity between projected image tokens and normalized text embeddings in the language model space. This extrinsic relevance is fused with intrinsic visual saliency using log domain weighting and temperature controlled sharpening. In addition, a diversity preserving partition retains a minimal yet representative set of background tokens to maintain global context. Under identical token budgets and evaluation protocols, FlashVLM achieves beyond lossless compression, slightly surpassing the unpruned baseline while pruning up to 77.8 percent of visual tokens on LLaVA 1.5, and maintaining 92.8 percent accuracy even under 94.4 percent compression. Extensive experiments on 14 image and video benchmarks demonstrate that FlashVLM delivers state of the art efficiency performance trade offs while maintaining strong robustness and generalization across mainstream VLMs.

Saliency methods have emerged as a popular tool to highlight features in an input deemed relevant for the prediction of a learned model. Several saliency methods have been proposed, often guided by visual appeal on image data. In this work, we propose an actionable methodology to evaluate what kinds of explanations a given method can and cannot provide. We find that reliance, solely, on visual assessment can be misleading. Through extensive experiments we show that some existing saliency methods are independent both of the model and of the data generating process. Consequently, methods that fail the proposed tests are inadequate for tasks that are sensitive to either data or model, such as, finding outliers in the data, explaining the relationship between inputs and outputs that the model learned, and debugging the model. We interpret our findings through an analogy with edge detection in images, a technique that requires neither training data nor model. Theory in the case of a linear model and a single-layer convolutional neural network supports our experimental findings.

Salient object detection (SOD) requires modeling both long-range contextual dependencies and fine-grained structural details, which remains challenging for convolutional, transformer-based, and Mamba-based state space models. While recent Mamba-based state space approaches enable efficient global reasoning, they often struggle to recover precise object boundaries. In contrast, diffusion models capture strong structural priors through iterative denoising, but their use in discriminative dense prediction is still limited due to computational cost and integration challenges. In this work, we propose DGSSM, a diffusion-guided state space (Mamba) framework that formulates multimodal salient object detection as a progressive denoising process. The framework integrates diffusion structural priors with multi-scale state space encoding, adaptive saliency prompting, and an iterative Mamba diffusion refinement mechanism to improve boundary accuracy. A boundary-aware refinement head and self-distillation strategy further enhance spatial coherence and feature consistency. Extensive experiments on 13 public benchmarks across RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T settings demonstrate that DGSSM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics while maintaining a compact model size. These results suggest that diffusion-guided state space modeling is an effective and generalizable paradigm for multimodal dense prediction tasks.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has made remarkable progress in producing high-quality images, but a fundamental challenge remains: creating backgrounds that naturally accommodate text placement without compromising image quality. This capability is non-trivial for real-world applications like graphic design, where clear visual hierarchy between content and text is essential. Prior work has primarily focused on arranging layouts within existing static images, leaving unexplored the potential of T2I models for generating text-friendly backgrounds. We present TextCenGen, a training-free dynamic background adaptation in the blank region for text-friendly image generation. Instead of directly reducing attention in text areas, which degrades image quality, we relocate conflicting objects before background optimization. Our method analyzes cross-attention maps to identify conflicting objects overlapping with text regions and uses a force-directed graph approach to guide their relocation, followed by attention excluding constraints to ensure smooth backgrounds. Our method is plug-and-play, requiring no additional training while well balancing both semantic fidelity and visual quality. Evaluated on our proposed text-friendly T2I benchmark of 27,000 images across four seed datasets, TextCenGen outperforms existing methods by achieving 23% lower saliency overlap in text regions while maintaining 98% of the semantic fidelity measured by CLIP score and our proposed Visual-Textual Concordance Metric (VTCM).

Medical image segmentation is a critical component of clinical workflows, enabling accurate diagnosis, treatment planning, and disease monitoring. However, despite the superior performance of transformer-based models over convolutional architectures, their limited interpretability remains a major obstacle to clinical trust and deployment. Existing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques, including gradient-based saliency methods and perturbation-based approaches, are often computationally expensive, require numerous forward passes, and frequently produce noisy or anatomically irrelevant explanations. To address these limitations, we propose XAI-CLIP, an ROI-guided perturbation framework that leverages multimodal vision-language model embeddings to localize clinically meaningful anatomical regions and guide the explanation process. By integrating language-informed region localization with medical image segmentation and applying targeted, region-aware perturbations, the proposed method generates clearer, boundary-aware saliency maps while substantially reducing computational overhead. Experiments conducted on the FLARE22 and CHAOS datasets demonstrate that XAI-CLIP achieves up to a 60\% reduction in runtime, a 44.6\% improvement in dice score, and a 96.7\% increase in Intersection-over-Union for occlusion-based explanations compared to conventional perturbation methods. Qualitative results further confirm cleaner and more anatomically consistent attribution maps with fewer artifacts, highlighting that the incorporation of multimodal vision-language representations into perturbation-based XAI frameworks significantly enhances both interpretability and efficiency, thereby enabling transparent and clinically deployable medical image segmentation systems.

This paper introduces a novel adversarial attack method targeting text classification models, termed the Modified Word Saliency-based Adversarial At-tack (MWSAA). The technique builds upon the concept of word saliency to strategically perturb input texts, aiming to mislead classification models while preserving semantic coherence. By refining the traditional adversarial attack approach, MWSAA significantly enhances its efficacy in evading detection by classification systems. The methodology involves first identifying salient words in the input text through a saliency estimation process, which prioritizes words most influential to the model's decision-making process. Subsequently, these salient words are subjected to carefully crafted modifications, guided by semantic similarity metrics to ensure that the altered text remains coherent and retains its original meaning. Empirical evaluations conducted on diverse text classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in generating adversarial examples capable of successfully deceiving state-of-the-art classification models. Comparative analyses with existing adversarial attack techniques further indicate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of both attack success rate and preservation of text coherence.

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to precisely identify video event segments in response to textual queries. The outputs of VTG tasks manifest as sequences of events, each defined by precise timestamps, saliency scores, and textual descriptions. Despite recent advances, a fundamental limitation persists in existing Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs): they process all task tokens through identical and static pathways, failing to recognize that temporal localization, saliency assessment, and textual generation represent fundamentally distinct tasks requiring specialized processing. To address this, we introduce TimeExpert, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based Video-LLM that effectively decomposes VTG tasks by dynamically routing task-specific tokens (e.g., timestamps, saliency scores) to specialized experts, with increased computational efficiency. Our design choices enable precise handling of each subtask, leading to improved event modeling across diverse VTG applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeExpert consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on various VTG tasks such as Dense Video Captioning, Moment Retrieval, and Video Highlight Detection.

The study of the attribution of input features to the output of neural network models is an active area of research. While numerous Explainable AI (XAI) techniques have been proposed to interpret these models, the systematic and automated evaluation of these methods in sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models is less explored. This paper introduces a new approach for evaluating explainability methods in transformer-based seq2seq models. We use teacher-derived attribution maps as a structured side signal to guide a student model, and quantify the utility of different attribution methods through the student's ability to simulate targets. Using the Inseq library, we extract attribution scores over source-target sequence pairs and inject these scores into the attention mechanism of a student transformer model under four composition operators (addition, multiplication, averaging, and replacement). Across three language pairs (de-en, fr-en, ar-en) and attributions from Marian-MT and mBART models, Attention, Value Zeroing, and Layer Gradient times Activation consistently yield the largest gains in BLEU (and corresponding improvements in chrF) relative to baselines. In contrast, other gradient-based methods (Saliency, Integrated Gradients, DeepLIFT, Input times Gradient, GradientShap) lead to smaller and less consistent improvements. These results suggest that different attribution methods capture distinct signals and that attention-derived attributions better capture alignment between source and target representations in seq2seq models. Finally, we introduce an Attributor transformer that, given a source-target pair, learns to reconstruct the teacher's attribution map. Our findings demonstrate that the more accurately the Attributor can reproduce attribution maps, the more useful an injection of those maps is for the downstream task. The source code can be found on GitHub.

Long-output inference in large language models suffers from severe KV cache memory and bandwidth bottlenecks. While KV cache quantization alleviates this issue, low-bit quantization (e.g., 2-bit) severely degrades model accuracy. Recent mixed-precision key-cache quantization methods mitigate this degradation by allocating higher precision to important key channels, but estimate channel saliency using only key statistics. Through attention logit perturbation analysis at the RoPE channel-pair level, we show that quantization errors in channel pairs with large query--key pair-norm products contribute significantly to logit variation. Based on this insight, we propose PN-Mix, a mixed-precision key-cache quantization method for RoPE-based decoder-only LLMs, which allocates higher precision to salient channel pairs identified once during the prefill stage and reused throughout decoding. Across standard reasoning, code-generation, and AIME benchmarks, PN-Mix with 2.26-bit average precision achieves comparable or better average accuracy than prior mixed-precision methods using 2.32--2.39 bits. Furthermore, in our Pareto sweep, PN-Mix degrades gracefully down to 1.5 bits, whereas the compared baselines exhibit sharper performance drops below 2.25 bits.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are expensive because the LLM processes hundreds of largely redundant visual tokens. Existing token reduction methods typically exploit either vision-encoder saliency (broad but query-agnostic) or LLM cross-attention (query-aware but sparse and costly). We show that neither signal alone is sufficient: fusing them consistently improves performance compared to unimodal visual token selection (ranking). However, making such fusion practical is non-trivial: cross-modal saliency is usually only available inside the LLM (too late for efficient pre-LLM pruning), and the two signals are inherently asymmetric, so naive fusion underutilizes their complementary strengths. We propose ConsensusDrop, a training-free framework that derives a consensus ranking by reconciling vision encoder saliency with query-aware cross-attention, retaining the most informative tokens while compressing the remainder via encoder-guided token merging. Across LLaVA-1.5/NeXT, Video-LLaVA, and other open-source VLMs, ConsensusDrop consistently outperforms prior pruning methods under identical token budgets and delivers a stronger accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier -- preserving near-baseline accuracy even at aggressive token reductions while reducing TTFT and KV cache footprint. Our code will be open-sourced.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently demonstrated strong multimodal understanding, yet their fine-grained visual perception is often constrained by low input resolutions. A common remedy is to partition high-resolution images into multiple sub-images for separate encoding, but this approach drastically inflates the number of visual tokens and introduces prohibitive inference overhead. To overcome this challenge, we propose Pyramid Token Pruning (PTP), a training-free strategy that hierarchically integrates bottom-up visual saliency at both region and token levels with top-down instruction-guided relevance. Inspired by human visual cognition, PTP selectively preserves more tokens from salient regions while further emphasizing those most relevant to task instructions. Extensive experiments on 13 diverse benchmarks show that PTP substantially reduces computational cost, memory usage, and inference latency, with negligible performance degradation.

The advent of open-source AI communities has produced a cornucopia of powerful text-guided diffusion models that are trained on various datasets. While few explorations have been conducted on ensembling such models to combine their strengths. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective method called Saliency-aware Noise Blending (SNB) that can empower the fused text-guided diffusion models to achieve more controllable generation. Specifically, we experimentally find that the responses of classifier-free guidance are highly related to the saliency of generated images. Thus we propose to trust different models in their areas of expertise by blending the predicted noises of two diffusion models in a saliency-aware manner. SNB is training-free and can be completed within a DDIM sampling process. Additionally, it can automatically align the semantics of two noise spaces without requiring additional annotations such as masks. Extensive experiments show the impressive effectiveness of SNB in various applications. Project page is available at https://magicfusion.github.io/.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely adopted for 3D question answering (3D QA). In typical pipelines, visual tokens extracted from multiple viewpoints are concatenated with language tokens and jointly processed by a large language model (LLM) for inference. However, aggregating multi-view observations inevitably introduces severe token redundancy, leading to an overly large visual token set that significantly hinders inference efficiency under constrained token budgets. Visual token pruning has emerged as a prevalent strategy to address this issue. Nevertheless, most existing pruners are primarily tailored to 2D inputs or rely on indirect geometric cues, which limits their ability to explicitly retain semantically critical objects and maintain sufficient spatial coverage for robust 3D reasoning. In this paper, we propose SeGPruner, a semantic-aware and geometry-guided token reduction framework for efficient 3D QA with multi-view images. Specifically, SeGPruner first preserves semantically salient tokens through an attention-based importance module (Saliency-aware Token Selector), ensuring that object-critical evidence is retained. It then complements these tokens with spatially diverse ones via a geometry-guided selector (Geometry-aware Token Diversifier), which jointly considers semantic relevance and 3D geometric distance. This cooperation between saliency preservation and geometry-guided diversification balances object-level evidence and global scene coverage under aggressive token reduction. Extensive experiments on ScanQA and OpenEQA demonstrate that SeGPruner substantially improves inference efficiency, reducing the visual token budget by 91% and inference latency by 86%, while maintaining competitive performance in 3D reasoning tasks.

Saliency maps are increasingly used as design guidance in siRNA efficacy prediction, yet attribution methods are rarely validated before motivating sequence edits. We introduce a pre-synthesis gate: a protocol for counterfactual sensitivity faithfulness that tests whether mutating high-saliency positions changes model output more than composition-matched controls. Cross-dataset transfer reveals two failure modes that would otherwise go undetected: faithful-but-wrong (saliency valid, predictions fail) and inverted saliency (top-saliency edits less impactful than random). Strikingly, models trained on mRNA-level assays collapse on a luciferase reporter dataset, demonstrating that protocol shifts can silently invalidate deployment. Across four benchmarks, 19/20 fold instances pass; the single failure shows inverted saliency. A biology-informed regularizer (BioPrior) strengthens saliency faithfulness with modest, dataset-dependent predictive trade-offs. Our results establish saliency validation as essential pre-deployment practice for explanation-guided therapeutic design. Code is available at https://github.com/shadi97kh/BioPrior.

Although weakly-supervised techniques can reduce the labeling effort, it is unclear whether a saliency model trained with weakly-supervised data (e.g., point annotation) can achieve the equivalent performance of its fully-supervised version. This paper attempts to answer this unexplored question by proving a hypothesis: there is a point-labeled dataset where saliency models trained on it can achieve equivalent performance when trained on the densely annotated dataset. To prove this conjecture, we proposed a novel yet effective adversarial trajectory-ensemble active learning (ATAL). Our contributions are three-fold: 1) Our proposed adversarial attack triggering uncertainty can conquer the overconfidence of existing active learning methods and accurately locate these uncertain pixels. {2)} Our proposed trajectory-ensemble uncertainty estimation method maintains the advantages of the ensemble networks while significantly reducing the computational cost. {3)} Our proposed relationship-aware diversity sampling algorithm can conquer oversampling while boosting performance. Experimental results show that our ATAL can find such a point-labeled dataset, where a saliency model trained on it obtained 97% -- 99% performance of its fully-supervised version with only ten annotated points per image.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) enable breakthroughs in reasoning and parallel decoding but suffer from prohibitive quadratic computational complexity and memory overhead during inference. Current caching techniques accelerate decoding by storing full-layer states, yet impose substantial memory usage that limit long-context applications. Our analysis of attention patterns in dLLMs reveals persistent cross-layer sparsity, with pivotal tokens remaining salient across decoding steps and low-relevance tokens staying unimportant, motivating selective cache eviction. We propose Sparse-dLLM, the first training-free framework integrating dynamic cache eviction with sparse attention via delayed bidirectional sparse caching. By leveraging the stability of token saliency over steps, it retains critical tokens and dynamically evicts unimportant prefix/suffix entries using an attention-guided strategy. Extensive experiments on LLaDA and Dream series demonstrate Sparse-dLLM achieves up to 10times higher throughput than vanilla dLLMs, with comparable performance and similar peak memory costs, outperforming previous methods in efficiency and effectiveness.

Existing structured pruning methods typically rely on multi-stage training procedures that incur high computational costs. Pruning at initialization aims to reduce this burden but often suffers from degraded performance. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient one-cycle structured pruning framework that integrates pre-training, pruning, and fine-tuning into a single training cycle without sacrificing accuracy. The key idea is to identify an optimal sub-network during the early stages of training, guided by norm-based group saliency criteria and structured sparsity regularization. We introduce a novel pruning indicator that detects a stable pruning epoch by measuring the similarity between pruning sub-networks across consecutive training epochs. In addition, group sparsity regularization accelerates convergence, further reducing overall training time. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet using VGG, ResNet, and MobileNet architectures demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while being among the most efficient structured pruning frameworks in terms of training cost. Code is available at https://github.com/ghimiredhikura/OCSPruner.

Backpropagation-based visualizations have been proposed to interpret convolutional neural networks (CNNs), however a theory is missing to justify their behaviors: Guided backpropagation (GBP) and deconvolutional network (DeconvNet) generate more human-interpretable but less class-sensitive visualizations than saliency map. Motivated by this, we develop a theoretical explanation revealing that GBP and DeconvNet are essentially doing (partial) image recovery which is unrelated to the network decisions. Specifically, our analysis shows that the backward ReLU introduced by GBP and DeconvNet, and the local connections in CNNs are the two main causes of compelling visualizations. Extensive experiments are provided that support the theoretical analysis.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has shocked the entire world with its fairly rapid spread and has challenged different sectors. One of the most effective ways to limit its spread is the early and accurate diagnosing infected patients. Medical imaging, such as X-ray and Computed Tomography (CT), combined with the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), plays an essential role in supporting medical personnel in the diagnosis process. Thus, in this article five different deep learning models (ResNet18, ResNet34, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2 and DenseNet161) and their ensemble, using majority voting have been used to classify COVID-19, pneumoni{\ae} and healthy subjects using chest X-ray images. Multilabel classification was performed to predict multiple pathologies for each patient, if present. Firstly, the interpretability of each of the networks was thoroughly studied using local interpretability methods - occlusion, saliency, input X gradient, guided backpropagation, integrated gradients, and DeepLIFT, and using a global technique - neuron activation profiles. The mean Micro-F1 score of the models for COVID-19 classifications ranges from 0.66 to 0.875, and is 0.89 for the ensemble of the network models. The qualitative results showed that the ResNets were the most interpretable models. This research demonstrates the importance of using interpretability methods to compare different models before making a decision regarding the best performing model.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models such as SDXL and FLUX have achieved impressive photorealism, yet small-scale distortions remain pervasive in limbs, face, text and so on. Existing refinement approaches either perform costly iterative re-generation or rely on vision-language models (VLMs) with weak spatial grounding, leading to semantic drift and unreliable local edits. To close this gap, we propose Agentic Retoucher, a hierarchical decision-driven framework that reformulates post-generation correction as a human-like perception-reasoning-action loop. Specifically, we design (1) a perception agent that learns contextual saliency for fine-grained distortion localization under text-image consistency cues, (2) a reasoning agent that performs human-aligned inferential diagnosis via progressive preference alignment, and (3) an action agent that adaptively plans localized inpainting guided by user preference. This design integrates perceptual evidence, linguistic reasoning, and controllable correction into a unified, self-corrective decision process. To enable fine-grained supervision and quantitative evaluation, we further construct GenBlemish-27K, a dataset of 6K T2I images with 27K annotated artifact regions across 12 categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agentic Retoucher consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in perceptual quality, distortion localization and human preference alignment, establishing a new paradigm for self-corrective and perceptually reliable T2I generation.

To interpret Vision Transformers, post-hoc explanations assign salience scores to input pixels, providing human-understandable heatmaps. However, whether these interpretations reflect true rationales behind the model's output is still underexplored. To address this gap, we study the faithfulness criterion of explanations: the assigned salience scores should represent the influence of the corresponding input pixels on the model's predictions. To evaluate faithfulness, we introduce Salience-guided Faithfulness Coefficient (SaCo), a novel evaluation metric leveraging essential information of salience distribution. Specifically, we conduct pair-wise comparisons among distinct pixel groups and then aggregate the differences in their salience scores, resulting in a coefficient that indicates the explanation's degree of faithfulness. Our explorations reveal that current metrics struggle to differentiate between advanced explanation methods and Random Attribution, thereby failing to capture the faithfulness property. In contrast, our proposed SaCo offers a reliable faithfulness measurement, establishing a robust metric for interpretations. Furthermore, our SaCo demonstrates that the use of gradient and multi-layer aggregation can markedly enhance the faithfulness of attention-based explanation, shedding light on potential paths for advancing Vision Transformer explainability.

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have garnered significant attention, with recent works such as Instant-NGP accelerating NeRF training and evaluation through a combination of hashgrid-based positional encoding and neural networks. However, effectively leveraging the spatial sparsity of 3D scenes remains a challenge. To cull away unnecessary regions of the feature grid, existing solutions rely on prior knowledge of object shape or periodically estimate object shape during training by repeated model evaluations, which are costly and wasteful. To address this issue, we propose HollowNeRF, a novel compression solution for hashgrid-based NeRF which automatically sparsifies the feature grid during the training phase. Instead of directly compressing dense features, HollowNeRF trains a coarse 3D saliency mask that guides efficient feature pruning, and employs an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) pruner to sparsify the 3D saliency mask during training. By exploiting the sparsity in the 3D scene to redistribute hash collisions, HollowNeRF improves rendering quality while using a fraction of the parameters of comparable state-of-the-art solutions, leading to a better cost-accuracy trade-off. Our method delivers comparable rendering quality to Instant-NGP, while utilizing just 31% of the parameters. In addition, our solution can achieve a PSNR accuracy gain of up to 1dB using only 56% of the parameters.

Several recent works have directly extended the image masked autoencoder (MAE) with random masking into video domain, achieving promising results. However, unlike images, both spatial and temporal information are important for video understanding. This suggests that the random masking strategy that is inherited from the image MAE is less effective for video MAE. This motivates the design of a novel masking algorithm that can more efficiently make use of video saliency. Specifically, we propose a motion-guided masking algorithm (MGM) which leverages motion vectors to guide the position of each mask over time. Crucially, these motion-based correspondences can be directly obtained from information stored in the compressed format of the video, which makes our method efficient and scalable. On two challenging large-scale video benchmarks (Kinetics-400 and Something-Something V2), we equip video MAE with our MGM and achieve up to +1.3% improvement compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, our MGM achieves equivalent performance to previous video MAE using up to 66% fewer training epochs. Lastly, we show that MGM generalizes better to downstream transfer learning and domain adaptation tasks on the UCF101, HMDB51, and Diving48 datasets, achieving up to +4.9% improvement compared to baseline methods.

Prompt learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for adapting vision-language models such as CLIP to downstream tasks. However, existing methods often overfit to seen data, leading to significant performance degradation when generalizing to novel classes or unseen domains. To address this limitation, we propose DiSa, a Directional Saliency-Aware Prompt Learning framework that integrates two complementary regularization strategies to enhance generalization. First, our Cross-Interactive Regularization (CIR) fosters cross-modal alignment by enabling cooperative learning between prompted and frozen encoders. Within CIR, a saliency-aware masking strategy guides the image encoder to prioritize semantically critical image regions, reducing reliance on less informative patches. Second, we introduce a directional regularization strategy that aligns visual embeddings with class-wise prototype features in a directional manner to prioritize consistency in feature orientation over strict proximity. This approach ensures robust generalization by leveraging stable prototype directions derived from class-mean statistics. Extensive evaluations on 11 diverse image classification benchmarks demonstrate that DiSa consistently outperforms state-of-the-art prompt learning methods across various settings, including base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, domain generalization, and few-shot learning.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a powerful paradigm for scaling diffusion models in visual generation. Recent advancements have focused on adaptively allocating computational resources across diverse tokens to improve efficiency and performance. However, we identify a routing assignment problem in existing diffusion MoE frameworks: the router fails to accurately allocate more computational resources to salient tokens. Our analysis attributes this failure to the router's reliance on noise-corrupted latent features throughout the denoising process. Such stochastic noise obscures the critical structural and textural information, thereby preventing the router from effectively distinguishing salient tokens. To address this, we propose SharpMoE, a post-training framework with a saliency-harnessing accurate routing mechanism, which utilizes clean latent features as a noise-free guidance signal for routing. By bypassing the noise-distorted inputs, SharpMoE provides the router with clear saliency guidance, enabling the identification of salient tokens even in high-noise stages. Furthermore, we introduce a trajectory routing loss to constrain the compute allocation throughout the multi-step denoising trajectory, ensuring precise resource allocation along the generation rollout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SharpMoE serves as a versatile, plug-and-play solution that further enhances the pretrained, converged MoE models, achieving state-of-the-art performance in visual generation.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) incur prohibitive inference costs due to long visual token sequences. Training-free visual token reduction provides an efficient solution. However, existing methods distort attention distributions, giving rise to a phenomenon we term Attention Logit Collapse. To address this issue, we propose ERA, an Entropy-guided visual token pruning framework with Rectified Attention for efficient MLLMs. Specifically, ERA comprises three crucial components: Dual-view Entropy Pruning (DEP), Bias-aware Token Recycling (BTR), and Logit-preserving Attention Rectification (LAR). First, DEP identifies representative anchor tokens by jointly modeling visual diversity and head-wise saliency. BTR then recycles pruned tokens into their corresponding anchors while estimating a cluster-level logit bias. Building upon this, LAR injects the estimated bias into attention logits, effectively rectifying the collapse induced by token reduction. Together, these components preserve visual evidence even under aggressive compression, enabling robust performance across single-image, multi-image, and video settings on a wide range of MLLMs. Beyond delivering practical acceleration, ERA establishes logit-preserving visual token pruning as a principled framework for efficient MLLMs, unifying theoretical foundation, algorithmic design, and practical deployment. The code is at https://github.com/924973292/ERA.

We present EditIQ, a completely automated framework for cinematically editing scenes captured via a stationary, large field-of-view and high-resolution camera. From the static camera feed, EditIQ initially generates multiple virtual feeds, emulating a team of cameramen. These virtual camera shots termed rushes are subsequently assembled using an automated editing algorithm, whose objective is to present the viewer with the most vivid scene content. To understand key scene elements and guide the editing process, we employ a two-pronged approach: (1) a large language model (LLM)-based dialogue understanding module to analyze conversational flow, coupled with (2) visual saliency prediction to identify meaningful scene elements and camera shots therefrom. We then formulate cinematic video editing as an energy minimization problem over shot selection, where cinematic constraints determine shot choices, transitions, and continuity. EditIQ synthesizes an aesthetically and visually compelling representation of the original narrative while maintaining cinematic coherence and a smooth viewing experience. Efficacy of EditIQ against competing baselines is demonstrated via a psychophysical study involving twenty participants on the BBC Old School dataset plus eleven theatre performance videos. Video samples from EditIQ can be found at https://editiq-ave.github.io/.

State-of-the-art text-to-image models excel at photorealistic rendering but often struggle to capture the layout and object relationships implied by complex prompts. Scene graphs provide a natural structural prior, yet previous graph-guided approaches have typically relied on heavy GAN or diffusion pipelines, which lag behind modern autoregressive architectures in both speed and fidelity. We introduce SATURN (Structured Arrangement of Triplets for Unified Rendering Networks), a lightweight extension to VAR-CLIP that translates a scene graph into a salience-ordered token sequence, enabling a frozen CLIP-VQ-VAE backbone to interpret graph structure while fine-tuning only the VAR transformer. On the Visual Genome dataset, SATURN reduces FID from 56.45% to 21.62% and increases the Inception Score from 16.03 to 24.78, outperforming prior methods such as SG2IM and SGDiff without requiring extra modules or multi-stage training. Qualitative results further confirm improvements in object count fidelity and spatial relation accuracy, showing that SATURN effectively combines structural awareness with state-of-the-art autoregressive fidelity.

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is pivotal for the success of recent reasoning models but suffers from high computational overhead and latency. While prior works attempt to compress CoT via external compressor, they often fail to align with the model's internal reasoning dynamics, resulting in the loss of critical logical steps. This paper presents Compressing Redundancy in Chain-of-Thought via Intrinsic Saliency Pruning (CRISP), a framework that compresses CoT by exploiting the model's intrinsic saliency. Our analysis reveals a distinct phenomenon: the reasoning termination token [object Object] acts as an information anchor, where its attention pattern effectively demarcates essential reasoning from redundancy. Based on this finding, we design a policy that utilizes these intrinsic attention signals to guide atomic compression operations. In contrast to coarse-grained pruning strategies, CRISP strategically distills the reasoning chain to maximize information density while preserving logical coherence. Empirical results across various backbone models and mathematical datasets demonstrate that CRISP achieves a 50-60% reduction in token count without compromising accuracy, effectively mitigating the efficiency bottleneck of long-context reasoning. We open-source our implementation to facilitate further research in efficient reasoning.

Disentangling image content and style is essential for customized image generation. Existing SDXL-based methods struggle to achieve high-quality results, while the recently proposed Flux model fails to achieve effective content-style separation due to its underexplored characteristics. To address these challenges, we conduct a systematic analysis of Flux and make two key observations: (1) Single Dream Blocks are essential for image generation; and (2) Early single stream blocks mainly control content, whereas later blocks govern style. Based on these insights, we propose SplitFlux, which disentangles content and style by fine-tuning the single dream blocks via LoRA, enabling the disentangled content to be re-embedded into new contexts. It includes two key components: (1) Rank-Constrained Adaptation. To preserve content identity and structure, we compress the rank and amplify the magnitude of updates within specific blocks, preventing content leakage into style blocks. (2) Visual-Gated LoRA. We split the content LoRA into two branches with different ranks, guided by image saliency. The high-rank branch preserves primary subject information, while the low-rank branch encodes residual details, mitigating content overfitting and enabling seamless re-embedding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SplitFlux consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior content preservation and stylization quality across diverse scenarios.

In this study, we introduce the Multi-Head Explainer (MHEX), a versatile and modular framework that enhances both the explainability and accuracy of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformer-based models. MHEX consists of three core components: an Attention Gate that dynamically highlights task-relevant features, Deep Supervision that guides early layers to capture fine-grained details pertinent to the target class, and an Equivalent Matrix that unifies refined local and global representations to generate comprehensive saliency maps. Our approach demonstrates superior compatibility, enabling effortless integration into existing residual networks like ResNet and Transformer architectures such as BERT with minimal modifications. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets in medical imaging and text classification show that MHEX not only improves classification accuracy but also produces highly interpretable and detailed saliency scores.

RGB-thermal salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) aims to identify prominent objects by integrating complementary information from RGB and thermal modalities. However, learning the precise boundaries and complete objects remains challenging due to the intrinsic insufficient feature fusion and the extrinsic limitations of data scarcity. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid prompt-driven segment anything model (HyPSAM), which leverages the zero-shot generalization capabilities of the segment anything model (SAM) for RGB-T SOD. Specifically, we first propose a dynamic fusion network (DFNet) that generates high-quality initial saliency maps as visual prompts. DFNet employs dynamic convolution and multi-branch decoding to facilitate adaptive cross-modality interaction, overcoming the limitations of fixed-parameter kernels and enhancing multi-modal feature representation. Moreover, we propose a plug-and-play refinement network (P2RNet), which serves as a general optimization strategy to guide SAM in refining saliency maps by using hybrid prompts. The text prompt ensures reliable modality input, while the mask and box prompts enable precise salient object localization. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, HyPSAM has remarkable versatility, seamlessly integrating with different RGB-T SOD methods to achieve significant performance gains, thereby highlighting the potential of prompt engineering in this field. The code and results of our method are available at: https://github.com/milotic233/HyPSAM.

Control Flow Graphs (CFGs) are critical for analyzing program execution and characterizing malware behavior. With the growing adoption of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), CFG-based representations have proven highly effective for malware detection. This study proposes a novel framework that dynamically constructs CFGs and embeds node features using a hybrid approach combining rule-based encoding and autoencoder-based embedding. A GNN-based classifier is then constructed to detect malicious behavior from the resulting graph representations. To improve model interpretability, we apply state-of-the-art explainability techniques, including GNNExplainer, PGExplainer, and CaptumExplainer, the latter is utilized three attribution methods: Integrated Gradients, Guided Backpropagation, and Saliency. In addition, we introduce a novel aggregation method, called RankFusion, that integrates the outputs of the top-performing explainers to enhance the explanation quality. We also evaluate explanations using two subgraph extraction strategies, including the proposed Greedy Edge-wise Composition (GEC) method for improved structural coherence. A comprehensive evaluation using accuracy, fidelity, and consistency metrics demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of accurate identification of malware samples and generating reliable and interpretable explanations.