Daily Papers

The success of Hyper-Connections (HC) in neural networks (NN) has also highlighted issues related to its training instability and restricted scalability. The Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) mitigate these challenges by projecting the residual connection space onto a Birkhoff polytope, however, it faces two issues: 1) its iterative Sinkhorn-Knopp (SK) algorithm does not always yield exact doubly stochastic residual matrices; 2) mHC incurs a prohibitive O(n^3C) parameter complexity with n as the width of the residual stream and C as the feature dimension. The recently proposed mHC-lite reparametrizes the residual matrix via the Birkhoff-von-Neumann theorem to guarantee double stochasticity, but also faces a factorial explosion in its parameter complexity, O left( nC cdot n! right). To address both challenges, we propose KromHC, which uses the Kronecker products of smaller doubly stochastic matrices to parametrize the residual matrix in mHC. By enforcing manifold constraints across the factor residual matrices along each mode of the tensorized residual stream, KromHC guarantees exact double stochasticity of the residual matrices while reducing parameter complexity to O(n^2C). Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that KromHC matches or even outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) mHC variants, while requiring significantly fewer trainable parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/wz1119/KromHC.

The residual stream mediates communication between transformer decoder layers via linear reads and writes of non-linear computations. While sparse-dictionary learning-based methods locate features in the residual stream, and activation patching methods discover circuits within the model, the mechanism by which features flow through the residual stream remains understudied. Understanding this dynamic can better inform jailbreaking protections, enable early detection of model mistakes, and their correction. In this work, we propose Activation Transport Operators (ATO), linear maps from upstream to downstream residuals k layers later, evaluated in feature space using downstream SAE decoder projections. We empirically demonstrate that these operators can determine whether a feature has been linearly transported from a previous layer or synthesised from non-linear layer computation. We develop the notion of transport efficiency, for which we provide an upper bound, and use it to estimate the size of the residual stream subspace that corresponds to linear transport. We empirically demonstrate the linear transport, report transport efficiency and the size of the residual stream's subspace involved in linear transport. This compute-light (no finetuning, <50 GPU-h) method offers practical tools for safety, debugging, and a clearer picture of where computation in LLMs behaves linearly.

Learning-based 3D visual geometry models have benefited substantially from large-scale transformers. Among these, StreamVGGT leverages frame-wise causal attention for strong streaming reconstruction, but suffers from unbounded KV cache growth, leading to escalating memory consumption and inference latency as input frames accumulate. We propose XStreamVGGT, a tuning-free approach that systematically compresses the KV cache through joint pruning and quantization, enabling extremely memory-efficient streaming inference. Specifically, redundant KVs originating from multi-view inputs are pruned through efficient token importance identification, enabling a fixed memory budget. Leveraging the unique distribution of KV tensors, we incorporate KV quantization to further reduce memory consumption. Extensive evaluations show that XStreamVGGT achieves mostly negligible performance degradation while substantially reducing memory usage by 4.42times and accelerating inference by 5.48times, enabling scalable and practical streaming 3D applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ywh187/XStreamVGGT/.

In this paper, we present an efficient method for storing fine-tuned models by leveraging the low-rank properties of weight residuals. Our key observation is that weight residuals in large overparameterized models exhibit even stronger low-rank characteristics. Based on this insight, we propose Efficient Residual Encoding (ERE), a novel approach that achieves efficient storage of fine-tuned model weights by approximating the low-rank weight residuals. Furthermore, we analyze the robustness of weight residuals and push the limit of storage efficiency by utilizing additional quantization and layer-wise rank allocation. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces memory footprint while preserving performance in various tasks and modalities. We release our code.

Deep residual networks were shown to be able to scale up to thousands of layers and still have improving performance. However, each fraction of a percent of improved accuracy costs nearly doubling the number of layers, and so training very deep residual networks has a problem of diminishing feature reuse, which makes these networks very slow to train. To tackle these problems, in this paper we conduct a detailed experimental study on the architecture of ResNet blocks, based on which we propose a novel architecture where we decrease depth and increase width of residual networks. We call the resulting network structures wide residual networks (WRNs) and show that these are far superior over their commonly used thin and very deep counterparts. For example, we demonstrate that even a simple 16-layer-deep wide residual network outperforms in accuracy and efficiency all previous deep residual networks, including thousand-layer-deep networks, achieving new state-of-the-art results on CIFAR, SVHN, COCO, and significant improvements on ImageNet. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/szagoruyko/wide-residual-networks

Residual connections are pivotal for deep neural networks, enabling greater depth by mitigating vanishing gradients. However, in standard residual updates, the module's output is directly added to the input stream. This can lead to updates that predominantly reinforce or modulate the existing stream direction, potentially underutilizing the module's capacity for learning entirely novel features. In this work, we introduce Orthogonal Residual Update: we decompose the module's output relative to the input stream and add only the component orthogonal to this stream. This design aims to guide modules to contribute primarily new representational directions, fostering richer feature learning while promoting more efficient training. We demonstrate that our orthogonal update strategy improves generalization accuracy and training stability across diverse architectures (ResNetV2, Vision Transformers) and datasets (CIFARs, TinyImageNet, ImageNet-1k), achieving, for instance, a +4.3\%p top-1 accuracy gain for ViT-B on ImageNet-1k.

Large language model inference is both memory-intensive and time-consuming, often requiring distributed algorithms to efficiently scale. Various model parallelism strategies are used in multi-gpu training and inference to partition computation across multiple devices, reducing memory load and computation time. However, using model parallelism necessitates communication of information between GPUs, which has been a major bottleneck and limits the gains obtained by scaling up the number of devices. We introduce Ladder Residual, a simple architectural modification applicable to all residual-based models that enables straightforward overlapping that effectively hides the latency of communication. Our insight is that in addition to systems optimization, one can also redesign the model architecture to decouple communication from computation. While Ladder Residual can allow communication-computation decoupling in conventional parallelism patterns, we focus on Tensor Parallelism in this paper, which is particularly bottlenecked by its heavy communication. For a Transformer model with 70B parameters, applying Ladder Residual to all its layers can achieve 30% end-to-end wall clock speed up at inference time with TP sharding over 8 devices. We refer the resulting Transformer model as the Ladder Transformer. We train a 1B and 3B Ladder Transformer from scratch and observe comparable performance to a standard dense transformer baseline. We also show that it is possible to convert parts of the Llama-3.1 8B model to our Ladder Residual architecture with minimal accuracy degradation by only retraining for 3B tokens.

Attention matrices are fundamental to transformer research, supporting a broad range of applications including interpretability, visualization, manipulation, and distillation. Yet, most existing analyses focus on individual attention heads or layers, failing to account for the model's global behavior. While prior efforts have extended attention formulations across multiple heads via averaging and matrix multiplications or incorporated components such as normalization and FFNs, a unified and complete representation that encapsulates all transformer blocks is still lacking. We address this gap by introducing TensorLens, a novel formulation that captures the entire transformer as a single, input-dependent linear operator expressed through a high-order attention-interaction tensor. This tensor jointly encodes attention, FFNs, activations, normalizations, and residual connections, offering a theoretically coherent and expressive linear representation of the model's computation. TensorLens is theoretically grounded and our empirical validation shows that it yields richer representations than previous attention-aggregation methods. Our experiments demonstrate that the attention tensor can serve as a powerful foundation for developing tools aimed at interpretability and model understanding. Our code is attached as a supplementary.

Online free-viewpoint video (FVV) streaming is a challenging problem, which is relatively under-explored. It requires incremental on-the-fly updates to a volumetric representation, fast training and rendering to satisfy real-time constraints and a small memory footprint for efficient transmission. If achieved, it can enhance user experience by enabling novel applications, e.g., 3D video conferencing and live volumetric video broadcast, among others. In this work, we propose a novel framework for QUantized and Efficient ENcoding (QUEEN) for streaming FVV using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS). QUEEN directly learns Gaussian attribute residuals between consecutive frames at each time-step without imposing any structural constraints on them, allowing for high quality reconstruction and generalizability. To efficiently store the residuals, we further propose a quantization-sparsity framework, which contains a learned latent-decoder for effectively quantizing attribute residuals other than Gaussian positions and a learned gating module to sparsify position residuals. We propose to use the Gaussian viewspace gradient difference vector as a signal to separate the static and dynamic content of the scene. It acts as a guide for effective sparsity learning and speeds up training. On diverse FVV benchmarks, QUEEN outperforms the state-of-the-art online FVV methods on all metrics. Notably, for several highly dynamic scenes, it reduces the model size to just 0.7 MB per frame while training in under 5 sec and rendering at 350 FPS. Project website is at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/projects/queen

Deep residual networks have emerged as a family of extremely deep architectures showing compelling accuracy and nice convergence behaviors. In this paper, we analyze the propagation formulations behind the residual building blocks, which suggest that the forward and backward signals can be directly propagated from one block to any other block, when using identity mappings as the skip connections and after-addition activation. A series of ablation experiments support the importance of these identity mappings. This motivates us to propose a new residual unit, which makes training easier and improves generalization. We report improved results using a 1001-layer ResNet on CIFAR-10 (4.62% error) and CIFAR-100, and a 200-layer ResNet on ImageNet. Code is available at: https://github.com/KaimingHe/resnet-1k-layers

This paper introduces an end-to-end residual network that operates entirely on the Poincar\'e ball model of hyperbolic space. Hyperbolic learning has recently shown great potential for visual understanding, but is currently only performed in the penultimate layer(s) of deep networks. All visual representations are still learned through standard Euclidean networks. In this paper we investigate how to learn hyperbolic representations of visual data directly from the pixel-level. We propose Poincar\'e ResNet, a hyperbolic counterpart of the celebrated residual network, starting from Poincar\'e 2D convolutions up to Poincar\'e residual connections. We identify three roadblocks for training convolutional networks entirely in hyperbolic space and propose a solution for each: (i) Current hyperbolic network initializations collapse to the origin, limiting their applicability in deeper networks. We provide an identity-based initialization that preserves norms over many layers. (ii) Residual networks rely heavily on batch normalization, which comes with expensive Fr\'echet mean calculations in hyperbolic space. We introduce Poincar\'e midpoint batch normalization as a faster and equally effective alternative. (iii) Due to the many intermediate operations in Poincar\'e layers, we lastly find that the computation graphs of deep learning libraries blow up, limiting our ability to train on deep hyperbolic networks. We provide manual backward derivations of core hyperbolic operations to maintain manageable computation graphs.

Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers---8x deeper than VGG nets but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

As the parameter size of large language models (LLMs) continues to expand, the need for a large memory footprint and high communication bandwidth have become significant bottlenecks for the training and inference of LLMs. To mitigate these bottlenecks, various tensor compression techniques have been proposed to reduce the data size, thereby alleviating memory requirements and communication pressure. Our research found that video codecs, despite being originally designed for compressing videos, show excellent efficiency when compressing various types of tensors. We demonstrate that video codecs can be versatile and general-purpose tensor codecs while achieving the state-of-the-art compression efficiency in various tasks. We further make use of the hardware video encoding and decoding module available on GPUs to create a framework capable of both inference and training with video codecs repurposed as tensor codecs. This greatly reduces the requirement for memory capacity and communication bandwidth, enabling training and inference of large models on consumer-grade GPUs.

Generative models are reshaping the live-streaming industry by redefining how content is created, styled, and delivered. Previous image-based streaming diffusion models have powered efficient and creative live streaming products but have hit limits on temporal consistency due to the foundation of image-based designs. Recent advances in video diffusion have markedly improved temporal consistency and sampling efficiency for offline generation. However, offline generation systems primarily optimize throughput by batching large workloads. In contrast, live online streaming operates under strict service-level objectives (SLOs): time-to-first-frame must be minimal, and every frame must meet a per-frame deadline with low jitter. Besides, scalable multi-GPU serving for real-time streams remains largely unresolved so far. To address this, we present StreamDiffusionV2, a training-free pipeline for interactive live streaming with video diffusion models. StreamDiffusionV2 integrates an SLO-aware batching scheduler and a block scheduler, together with a sink-token--guided rolling KV cache, a motion-aware noise controller, and other system-level optimizations. Moreover, we introduce a scalable pipeline orchestration that parallelizes the diffusion process across denoising steps and network layers, achieving near-linear FPS scaling without violating latency guarantees. The system scales seamlessly across heterogeneous GPU environments and supports flexible denoising steps (e.g., 1--4), enabling both ultra-low-latency and higher-quality modes. Without TensorRT or quantization, StreamDiffusionV2 renders the first frame within 0.5s and attains 58.28 FPS with a 14B-parameter model and 64.52 FPS with a 1.3B-parameter model on four H100 GPUs, making state-of-the-art generative live streaming practical and accessible--from individual creators to enterprise-scale platforms.

Perceiving and reconstructing 4D spatial-temporal geometry from videos is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task. To facilitate interactive and real-time applications, we propose a streaming 4D visual geometry transformer that shares a similar philosophy with autoregressive large language models. We explore a simple and efficient design and employ a causal transformer architecture to process the input sequence in an online manner. We use temporal causal attention and cache the historical keys and values as implicit memory to enable efficient streaming long-term 4D reconstruction. This design can handle real-time 4D reconstruction by incrementally integrating historical information while maintaining high-quality spatial consistency. For efficient training, we propose to distill knowledge from the dense bidirectional visual geometry grounded transformer (VGGT) to our causal model. For inference, our model supports the migration of optimized efficient attention operator (e.g., FlashAttention) from the field of large language models. Extensive experiments on various 4D geometry perception benchmarks demonstrate that our model increases the inference speed in online scenarios while maintaining competitive performance, paving the way for scalable and interactive 4D vision systems. Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/StreamVGGT.

Transformers are slow to train on videos due to extremely large numbers of input tokens, even though many video tokens are repeated over time. Existing methods to remove such uninformative tokens either have significant overhead, negating any speedup, or require tuning for different datasets and examples. We present Run-Length Tokenization (RLT), a simple approach to speed up video transformers inspired by run-length encoding for data compression. RLT efficiently finds and removes runs of patches that are repeated over time prior to model inference, then replaces them with a single patch and a positional encoding to represent the resulting token's new length. Our method is content-aware, requiring no tuning for different datasets, and fast, incurring negligible overhead. RLT yields a large speedup in training, reducing the wall-clock time to fine-tune a video transformer by 30% while matching baseline model performance. RLT also works without any training, increasing model throughput by 35% with only 0.1% drop in accuracy. RLT speeds up training at 30 FPS by more than 100%, and on longer video datasets, can reduce the token count by up to 80%. Our project page is at https://rccchoudhury.github.io/projects/rlt/.

We introduce StreamDiffusion, a real-time diffusion pipeline designed for interactive image generation. Existing diffusion models are adept at creating images from text or image prompts, yet they often fall short in real-time interaction. This limitation becomes particularly evident in scenarios involving continuous input, such as Metaverse, live video streaming, and broadcasting, where high throughput is imperative. To address this, we present a novel approach that transforms the original sequential denoising into the batching denoising process. Stream Batch eliminates the conventional wait-and-interact approach and enables fluid and high throughput streams. To handle the frequency disparity between data input and model throughput, we design a novel input-output queue for parallelizing the streaming process. Moreover, the existing diffusion pipeline uses classifier-free guidance(CFG), which requires additional U-Net computation. To mitigate the redundant computations, we propose a novel residual classifier-free guidance (RCFG) algorithm that reduces the number of negative conditional denoising steps to only one or even zero. Besides, we introduce a stochastic similarity filter(SSF) to optimize power consumption. Our Stream Batch achieves around 1.5x speedup compared to the sequential denoising method at different denoising levels. The proposed RCFG leads to speeds up to 2.05x higher than the conventional CFG. Combining the proposed strategies and existing mature acceleration tools makes the image-to-image generation achieve up-to 91.07fps on one RTX4090, improving the throughputs of AutoPipline developed by Diffusers over 59.56x. Furthermore, our proposed StreamDiffusion also significantly reduces the energy consumption by 2.39x on one RTX3060 and 1.99x on one RTX4090, respectively.

We explore the use of Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) for high-fidelity generation in vector-quantized generative models. This quantization technique maintains higher data fidelity by employing more in-depth tokens. However, increasing the token number in generative models leads to slower inference speeds. To this end, we introduce ResGen, an efficient RVQ-based discrete diffusion model that generates high-fidelity samples without compromising sampling speed. Our key idea is a direct prediction of vector embedding of collective tokens rather than individual ones. Moreover, we demonstrate that our proposed token masking and multi-token prediction method can be formulated within a principled probabilistic framework using a discrete diffusion process and variational inference. We validate the efficacy and generalizability of the proposed method on two challenging tasks across different modalities: conditional image generation} on ImageNet 256x256 and zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that ResGen outperforms autoregressive counterparts in both tasks, delivering superior performance without compromising sampling speed. Furthermore, as we scale the depth of RVQ, our generative models exhibit enhanced generation fidelity or faster sampling speeds compared to similarly sized baseline models. The project page can be found at https://resgen-genai.github.io

We propose 4Real-Video, a novel framework for generating 4D videos, organized as a grid of video frames with both time and viewpoint axes. In this grid, each row contains frames sharing the same timestep, while each column contains frames from the same viewpoint. We propose a novel two-stream architecture. One stream performs viewpoint updates on columns, and the other stream performs temporal updates on rows. After each diffusion transformer layer, a synchronization layer exchanges information between the two token streams. We propose two implementations of the synchronization layer, using either hard or soft synchronization. This feedforward architecture improves upon previous work in three ways: higher inference speed, enhanced visual quality (measured by FVD, CLIP, and VideoScore), and improved temporal and viewpoint consistency (measured by VideoScore and Dust3R-Confidence).

Image generative models have made significant progress in generating realistic and diverse images, supported by comprehensive guidance from various evaluation metrics. However, current video generative models struggle to generate even short video clips, with limited tools that provide insights for improvements. Current video evaluation metrics are simple adaptations of image metrics by switching the embeddings with video embedding networks, which may underestimate the unique characteristics of video. Our analysis reveals that the widely used Frechet Video Distance (FVD) has a stronger emphasis on the spatial aspect than the temporal naturalness of video and is inherently constrained by the input size of the embedding networks used, limiting it to 16 frames. Additionally, it demonstrates considerable instability and diverges from human evaluations. To address the limitations, we propose STREAM, a new video evaluation metric uniquely designed to independently evaluate spatial and temporal aspects. This feature allows comprehensive analysis and evaluation of video generative models from various perspectives, unconstrained by video length. We provide analytical and experimental evidence demonstrating that STREAM provides an effective evaluation tool for both visual and temporal quality of videos, offering insights into area of improvement for video generative models. To the best of our knowledge, STREAM is the first evaluation metric that can separately assess the temporal and spatial aspects of videos. Our code is available at https://github.com/pro2nit/STREAM.

Most frame-based learned video codecs can be interpreted as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) propagating reference information along the temporal dimension. This work revisits the limitations of the current approaches from an RNN perspective. The output-recurrence methods, which propagate decoded frames, are intuitive but impose dual constraints on the output decoded frames, leading to suboptimal rate-distortion performance. In contrast, the hidden-to-hidden connection approaches, which propagate latent features within the RNN, offer greater flexibility but require large buffer sizes. To address these issues, we propose HyTIP, a learned video coding framework that combines both mechanisms. Our hybrid buffering strategy uses explicit decoded frames and a small number of implicit latent features to achieve competitive coding performance. Experimental results show that our HyTIP outperforms the sole use of either output-recurrence or hidden-to-hidden approaches. Furthermore, it achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods but with a much smaller buffer size, and outperforms VTM 17.0 (Low-delay B) in terms of PSNR-RGB and MS-SSIM-RGB. The source code of HyTIP is available at https://github.com/NYCU-MAPL/HyTIP.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been regarded as a powerful class of models for image recognition problems. Nevertheless, it is not trivial when utilizing a CNN for learning spatio-temporal video representation. A few studies have shown that performing 3D convolutions is a rewarding approach to capture both spatial and temporal dimensions in videos. However, the development of a very deep 3D CNN from scratch results in expensive computational cost and memory demand. A valid question is why not recycle off-the-shelf 2D networks for a 3D CNN. In this paper, we devise multiple variants of bottleneck building blocks in a residual learning framework by simulating 3times3times3 convolutions with 1times3times3 convolutional filters on spatial domain (equivalent to 2D CNN) plus 3times1times1 convolutions to construct temporal connections on adjacent feature maps in time. Furthermore, we propose a new architecture, named Pseudo-3D Residual Net (P3D ResNet), that exploits all the variants of blocks but composes each in different placement of ResNet, following the philosophy that enhancing structural diversity with going deep could improve the power of neural networks. Our P3D ResNet achieves clear improvements on Sports-1M video classification dataset against 3D CNN and frame-based 2D CNN by 5.3% and 1.8%, respectively. We further examine the generalization performance of video representation produced by our pre-trained P3D ResNet on five different benchmarks and three different tasks, demonstrating superior performances over several state-of-the-art techniques.

We present All-Pairs Multi-Field Transforms (AMT), a new network architecture for video frame interpolation. It is based on two essential designs. First, we build bidirectional correlation volumes for all pairs of pixels, and use the predicted bilateral flows to retrieve correlations for updating both flows and the interpolated content feature. Second, we derive multiple groups of fine-grained flow fields from one pair of updated coarse flows for performing backward warping on the input frames separately. Combining these two designs enables us to generate promising task-oriented flows and reduce the difficulties in modeling large motions and handling occluded areas during frame interpolation. These qualities promote our model to achieve state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks with high efficiency. Moreover, our convolution-based model competes favorably compared to Transformer-based models in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NKU/AMT.

The computing cost and memory demand of deep learning pipelines have grown fast in recent years and thus a variety of pruning techniques have been developed to reduce model parameters. The majority of these techniques focus on reducing inference costs by pruning the network after a pass of full training. A smaller number of methods address the reduction of training costs, mostly based on compressing the network via low-rank layer factorizations. Despite their efficiency for linear layers, these methods fail to effectively handle convolutional filters. In this work, we propose a low-parametric training method that factorizes the convolutions into tensor Tucker format and adaptively prunes the Tucker ranks of the convolutional kernel during training. Leveraging fundamental results from geometric integration theory of differential equations on tensor manifolds, we obtain a robust training algorithm that provably approximates the full baseline performance and guarantees loss descent. A variety of experiments against the full model and alternative low-rank baselines are implemented, showing that the proposed method drastically reduces the training costs, while achieving high performance, comparable to or better than the full baseline, and consistently outperforms competing low-rank approaches.

We present STream3R, a novel approach to 3D reconstruction that reformulates pointmap prediction as a decoder-only Transformer problem. Existing state-of-the-art methods for multi-view reconstruction either depend on expensive global optimization or rely on simplistic memory mechanisms that scale poorly with sequence length. In contrast, STream3R introduces an streaming framework that processes image sequences efficiently using causal attention, inspired by advances in modern language modeling. By learning geometric priors from large-scale 3D datasets, STream3R generalizes well to diverse and challenging scenarios, including dynamic scenes where traditional methods often fail. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms prior work across both static and dynamic scene benchmarks. Moreover, STream3R is inherently compatible with LLM-style training infrastructure, enabling efficient large-scale pretraining and fine-tuning for various downstream 3D tasks. Our results underscore the potential of causal Transformer models for online 3D perception, paving the way for real-time 3D understanding in streaming environments. More details can be found in our project page: https://nirvanalan.github.io/projects/stream3r.

With the goal of recovering high-quality image content from its degraded version, image restoration enjoys numerous applications, such as in surveillance, computational photography, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved dramatic improvements over conventional approaches for image restoration task. Existing CNN-based methods typically operate either on full-resolution or on progressively low-resolution representations. In the former case, spatially precise but contextually less robust results are achieved, while in the latter case, semantically reliable but spatially less accurate outputs are generated. In this paper, we present a novel architecture with the collective goals of maintaining spatially-precise high-resolution representations through the entire network and receiving strong contextual information from the low-resolution representations. The core of our approach is a multi-scale residual block containing several key elements: (a) parallel multi-resolution convolution streams for extracting multi-scale features, (b) information exchange across the multi-resolution streams, (c) spatial and channel attention mechanisms for capturing contextual information, and (d) attention based multi-scale feature aggregation. In a nutshell, our approach learns an enriched set of features that combines contextual information from multiple scales, while simultaneously preserving the high-resolution spatial details. Extensive experiments on five real image benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method, named as MIRNet, achieves state-of-the-art results for a variety of image processing tasks, including image denoising, super-resolution, and image enhancement. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MIRNet.

Existing 1D visual tokenizers for autoregressive (AR) generation largely follow the design principles of language modeling, as they are built directly upon transformers whose priors originate in language, yielding single-hierarchy latent tokens and treating visual data as flat sequential token streams. However, this language-like formulation overlooks key properties of vision, particularly the hierarchical and residual network designs that have long been essential for convergence and efficiency in visual models. To bring "vision" back to vision, we propose the Residual Tokenizer (ResTok), a 1D visual tokenizer that builds hierarchical residuals for both image tokens and latent tokens. The hierarchical representations obtained through progressively merging enable cross-level feature fusion at each layer, substantially enhancing representational capacity. Meanwhile, the semantic residuals between hierarchies prevent information overlap, yielding more concentrated latent distributions that are easier for AR modeling. Cross-level bindings consequently emerge without any explicit constraints. To accelerate the generation process, we further introduce a hierarchical AR generator that substantially reduces sampling steps by predicting an entire level of latent tokens at once rather than generating them strictly token-by-token. Extensive experiments demonstrate that restoring hierarchical residual priors in visual tokenization significantly improves AR image generation, achieving a gFID of 2.34 on ImageNet-256 with only 9 sampling steps. Code is available at https://github.com/Kwai-Kolors/ResTok.

Flow-based generative models parameterize probability distributions through an invertible transformation and can be trained by maximum likelihood. Invertible residual networks provide a flexible family of transformations where only Lipschitz conditions rather than strict architectural constraints are needed for enforcing invertibility. However, prior work trained invertible residual networks for density estimation by relying on biased log-density estimates whose bias increased with the network's expressiveness. We give a tractable unbiased estimate of the log density using a "Russian roulette" estimator, and reduce the memory required during training by using an alternative infinite series for the gradient. Furthermore, we improve invertible residual blocks by proposing the use of activation functions that avoid derivative saturation and generalizing the Lipschitz condition to induced mixed norms. The resulting approach, called Residual Flows, achieves state-of-the-art performance on density estimation amongst flow-based models, and outperforms networks that use coupling blocks at joint generative and discriminative modeling.

Modern LLMs are increasingly deep, and depth correlates with performance, albeit with diminishing returns. However, do these models use their depth efficiently? Do they compose more features to create higher-order computations that are impossible in shallow models, or do they merely spread the same kinds of computation out over more layers? To address these questions, we analyze the residual stream of the Llama 3.1 and Qwen 3 family of models. We find: First, comparing the output of the sublayers to the residual stream reveals that layers in the second half contribute much less than those in the first half, with a clear phase transition between the two halves. Second, skipping layers in the second half has a much smaller effect on future computations and output predictions. Third, for multihop tasks, we are unable to find evidence that models are using increased depth to compose subresults in examples involving many hops. Fourth, we seek to directly address whether deeper models are using their additional layers to perform new kinds of computation. To do this, we train linear maps from the residual stream of a shallow model to a deeper one. We find that layers with the same relative depth map best to each other, suggesting that the larger model simply spreads the same computations out over its many layers. All this evidence suggests that deeper models are not using their depth to learn new kinds of computation, but only using the greater depth to perform more fine-grained adjustments to the residual. This may help explain why increasing scale leads to diminishing returns for stacked Transformer architectures.

We present STARFlow, a scalable generative model based on normalizing flows that achieves strong performance in high-resolution image synthesis. The core of STARFlow is Transformer Autoregressive Flow (TARFlow), which combines the expressive power of normalizing flows with the structured modeling capabilities of Autoregressive Transformers. We first establish the theoretical universality of TARFlow for modeling continuous distributions. Building on this foundation, we introduce several key architectural and algorithmic innovations to significantly enhance scalability: (1) a deep-shallow design, wherein a deep Transformer block captures most of the model representational capacity, complemented by a few shallow Transformer blocks that are computationally efficient yet substantially beneficial; (2) modeling in the latent space of pretrained autoencoders, which proves more effective than direct pixel-level modeling; and (3) a novel guidance algorithm that significantly boosts sample quality. Crucially, our model remains an end-to-end normalizing flow, enabling exact maximum likelihood training in continuous spaces without discretization. STARFlow achieves competitive performance in both class-conditional and text-conditional image generation tasks, approaching state-of-the-art diffusion models in sample quality. To our knowledge, this work is the first successful demonstration of normalizing flows operating effectively at this scale and resolution.

This paper introduces StreamV2V, a diffusion model that achieves real-time streaming video-to-video (V2V) translation with user prompts. Unlike prior V2V methods using batches to process limited frames, we opt to process frames in a streaming fashion, to support unlimited frames. At the heart of StreamV2V lies a backward-looking principle that relates the present to the past. This is realized by maintaining a feature bank, which archives information from past frames. For incoming frames, StreamV2V extends self-attention to include banked keys and values and directly fuses similar past features into the output. The feature bank is continually updated by merging stored and new features, making it compact but informative. StreamV2V stands out for its adaptability and efficiency, seamlessly integrating with image diffusion models without fine-tuning. It can run 20 FPS on one A100 GPU, being 15x, 46x, 108x, and 158x faster than FlowVid, CoDeF, Rerender, and TokenFlow, respectively. Quantitative metrics and user studies confirm StreamV2V's exceptional ability to maintain temporal consistency.

High-resolution video generation, while crucial for digital media and film, is computationally bottlenecked by the quadratic complexity of diffusion models, making practical inference infeasible. To address this, we introduce HiStream, an efficient autoregressive framework that systematically reduces redundancy across three axes: i) Spatial Compression: denoising at low resolution before refining at high resolution with cached features; ii) Temporal Compression: a chunk-by-chunk strategy with a fixed-size anchor cache, ensuring stable inference speed; and iii) Timestep Compression: applying fewer denoising steps to subsequent, cache-conditioned chunks. On 1080p benchmarks, our primary HiStream model (i+ii) achieves state-of-the-art visual quality while demonstrating up to 76.2x faster denoising compared to the Wan2.1 baseline and negligible quality loss. Our faster variant, HiStream+, applies all three optimizations (i+ii+iii), achieving a 107.5x acceleration over the baseline, offering a compelling trade-off between speed and quality, thereby making high-resolution video generation both practical and scalable.

We present an explicit-grid based method for efficiently reconstructing streaming radiance fields for novel view synthesis of real world dynamic scenes. Instead of training a single model that combines all the frames, we formulate the dynamic modeling problem with an incremental learning paradigm in which per-frame model difference is trained to complement the adaption of a base model on the current frame. By exploiting the simple yet effective tuning strategy with narrow bands, the proposed method realizes a feasible framework for handling video sequences on-the-fly with high training efficiency. The storage overhead induced by using explicit grid representations can be significantly reduced through the use of model difference based compression. We also introduce an efficient strategy to further accelerate model optimization for each frame. Experiments on challenging video sequences demonstrate that our approach is capable of achieving a training speed of 15 seconds per-frame with competitive rendering quality, which attains 1000 times speedup over the state-of-the-art implicit methods. Code is available at https://github.com/AlgoHunt/StreamRF.

Recent two-stream deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have made significant progress in recognizing human actions in videos. Despite their success, methods extending the basic two-stream ConvNet have not systematically explored possible network architectures to further exploit spatiotemporal dynamics within video sequences. Further, such networks often use different baseline two-stream networks. Therefore, the differences and the distinguishing factors between various methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or convolutional networks on temporally-constructed feature vectors (Temporal-ConvNet) are unclear. In this work, we first demonstrate a strong baseline two-stream ConvNet using ResNet-101. We use this baseline to thoroughly examine the use of both RNNs and Temporal-ConvNets for extracting spatiotemporal information. Building upon our experimental results, we then propose and investigate two different networks to further integrate spatiotemporal information: 1) temporal segment RNN and 2) Inception-style Temporal-ConvNet. We demonstrate that using both RNNs (using LSTMs) and Temporal-ConvNets on spatiotemporal feature matrices are able to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics to improve the overall performance. However, each of these methods require proper care to achieve state-of-the-art performance; for example, LSTMs require pre-segmented data or else they cannot fully exploit temporal information. Our analysis identifies specific limitations for each method that could form the basis of future work. Our experimental results on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets achieve state-of-the-art performances, 94.1% and 69.0%, respectively, without requiring extensive temporal augmentation.

We introduce a novel class of untrained Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) within the Reservoir Computing (RC) paradigm, called Residual Reservoir Memory Networks (ResRMNs). ResRMN combines a linear memory reservoir with a non-linear reservoir, where the latter is based on residual orthogonal connections along the temporal dimension for enhanced long-term propagation of the input. The resulting reservoir state dynamics are studied through the lens of linear stability analysis, and we investigate diverse configurations for the temporal residual connections. The proposed approach is empirically assessed on time-series and pixel-level 1-D classification tasks. Our experimental results highlight the advantages of the proposed approach over other conventional RC models.

Low-bit weight-only quantization significantly reduces the memory footprint of large language models (LLMs), but disproportionately affects certain examples. We analyze diverse 3-4 bit methods on LLMs ranging from 7B-70B in size and find that the quantization errors of 50 pairs of methods are strongly correlated (avg. 0.82) on FineWeb examples. Moreover, the residual stream magnitudes of full-precision models are indicative of future quantization errors. We further establish a hypothesis that relates the residual stream magnitudes to error amplification and accumulation over layers. Using LLM localization techniques, early exiting, and activation patching, we show that examples with large errors rely on precise residual activations in the late layers, and that the outputs of MLP gates play a crucial role in maintaining the perplexity. Our work reveals why certain examples result in large quantization errors and which model components are most critical for performance preservation.

This paper presents a novel hybrid representation learning framework for streaming data, where an image frame in a video is modeled by an ensemble of two distinct deep neural networks; one is a low-bit quantized network and the other is a lightweight full-precision network. The former learns coarse primary information with low cost while the latter conveys residual information for high fidelity to original representations. The proposed parallel architecture is effective to maintain complementary information since fixed-point arithmetic can be utilized in the quantized network and the lightweight model provides precise representations given by a compact channel-pruned network. We incorporate the hybrid representation technique into an online visual tracking task, where deep neural networks need to handle temporal variations of target appearances in real-time. Compared to the state-of-the-art real-time trackers based on conventional deep neural networks, our tracking algorithm demonstrates competitive accuracy on the standard benchmarks with a small fraction of computational cost and memory footprint.

COMpression with Bayesian Implicit NEural Representations (COMBINER) is a recent data compression method that addresses a key inefficiency of previous Implicit Neural Representation (INR)-based approaches: it avoids quantization and enables direct optimization of the rate-distortion performance. However, COMBINER still has significant limitations: 1) it uses factorized priors and posterior approximations that lack flexibility; 2) it cannot effectively adapt to local deviations from global patterns in the data; and 3) its performance can be susceptible to modeling choices and the variational parameters' initializations. Our proposed method, Robust and Enhanced COMBINER (RECOMBINER), addresses these issues by 1) enriching the variational approximation while retaining a low computational cost via a linear reparameterization of the INR weights, 2) augmenting our INRs with learnable positional encodings that enable them to adapt to local details and 3) splitting high-resolution data into patches to increase robustness and utilizing expressive hierarchical priors to capture dependency across patches. We conduct extensive experiments across several data modalities, showcasing that RECOMBINER achieves competitive results with the best INR-based methods and even outperforms autoencoder-based codecs on low-resolution images at low bitrates. Our PyTorch implementation is available at https://github.com/cambridge-mlg/RECOMBINER/.

Convolutional neural network (CNN) depth is of crucial importance for image super-resolution (SR). However, we observe that deeper networks for image SR are more difficult to train. The low-resolution inputs and features contain abundant low-frequency information, which is treated equally across channels, hence hindering the representational ability of CNNs. To solve these problems, we propose the very deep residual channel attention networks (RCAN). Specifically, we propose a residual in residual (RIR) structure to form very deep network, which consists of several residual groups with long skip connections. Each residual group contains some residual blocks with short skip connections. Meanwhile, RIR allows abundant low-frequency information to be bypassed through multiple skip connections, making the main network focus on learning high-frequency information. Furthermore, we propose a channel attention mechanism to adaptively rescale channel-wise features by considering interdependencies among channels. Extensive experiments show that our RCAN achieves better accuracy and visual improvements against state-of-the-art methods.

Deep learning time-series processing often relies on convolutional neural networks with overlapping windows. This overlap allows the network to produce an output faster than the window length. However, it introduces additional computations. This work explores the potential to optimize computational efficiency during inference by exploiting convolution's shift-invariance properties to skip the calculation of layer activations between successive overlapping windows. Although convolutions are shift-invariant, zero-padding and pooling operations, widely used in such networks, are not efficient and complicate efficient streaming inference. We introduce StreamiNNC, a strategy to deploy Convolutional Neural Networks for online streaming inference. We explore the adverse effects of zero padding and pooling on the accuracy of streaming inference, deriving theoretical error upper bounds for pooling during streaming. We address these limitations by proposing signal padding and pooling alignment and provide guidelines for designing and deploying models for StreamiNNC. We validate our method in simulated data and on three real-world biomedical signal processing applications. StreamiNNC achieves a low deviation between streaming output and normal inference for all three networks (2.03 - 3.55% NRMSE). This work demonstrates that it is possible to linearly speed up the inference of streaming CNNs processing overlapping windows, negating the additional computation typically incurred by overlapping windows.

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have shown remarkable performance in image classification tasks in recent years. Generally, deep neural network architectures are stacks consisting of a large number of convolutional layers, and they perform downsampling along the spatial dimension via pooling to reduce memory usage. Concurrently, the feature map dimension (i.e., the number of channels) is sharply increased at downsampling locations, which is essential to ensure effective performance because it increases the diversity of high-level attributes. This also applies to residual networks and is very closely related to their performance. In this research, instead of sharply increasing the feature map dimension at units that perform downsampling, we gradually increase the feature map dimension at all units to involve as many locations as possible. This design, which is discussed in depth together with our new insights, has proven to be an effective means of improving generalization ability. Furthermore, we propose a novel residual unit capable of further improving the classification accuracy with our new network architecture. Experiments on benchmark CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets have shown that our network architecture has superior generalization ability compared to the original residual networks. Code is available at https://github.com/jhkim89/PyramidNet}

Residual transformations enhance the representational depth and expressive power of large language models (LLMs). However, applying static residual transformations across all tokens in auto-regressive generation leads to a suboptimal trade-off between inference efficiency and generation fidelity. Existing methods, including Early Exiting, Skip Decoding, and Mixture-of-Depth address this by modulating the residual transformation based on token-level complexity. Nevertheless, these approaches predominantly consider the distance traversed by tokens through the model layers, neglecting the underlying velocity of residual evolution. We introduce Mixture of Multi-rate Residuals (M2R2), a framework that dynamically modulates residual velocity to improve early alignment, enhancing inference efficiency. Evaluations on reasoning oriented tasks such as Koala, Self-Instruct, WizardLM, and MT-Bench show M2R2 surpasses state-of-the-art distance-based strategies, balancing generation quality and speedup. In self-speculative decoding setup, M2R2 achieves up to 2.8x speedups on MT-Bench, outperforming methods like 2-model speculative decoding, Medusa, LookAhead Decoding, and DEED. In Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, integrating early residual alignment with ahead-of-time expert loading into high-bandwidth memory (HBM) accelerates decoding, reduces expert-switching bottlenecks, and achieves a 2.9x speedup, making it highly effective in resource-constrained environments.

We present Mobile Video Networks (MoViNets), a family of computation and memory efficient video networks that can operate on streaming video for online inference. 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are accurate at video recognition but require large computation and memory budgets and do not support online inference, making them difficult to work on mobile devices. We propose a three-step approach to improve computational efficiency while substantially reducing the peak memory usage of 3D CNNs. First, we design a video network search space and employ neural architecture search to generate efficient and diverse 3D CNN architectures. Second, we introduce the Stream Buffer technique that decouples memory from video clip duration, allowing 3D CNNs to embed arbitrary-length streaming video sequences for both training and inference with a small constant memory footprint. Third, we propose a simple ensembling technique to improve accuracy further without sacrificing efficiency. These three progressive techniques allow MoViNets to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency on the Kinetics, Moments in Time, and Charades video action recognition datasets. For instance, MoViNet-A5-Stream achieves the same accuracy as X3D-XL on Kinetics 600 while requiring 80% fewer FLOPs and 65% less memory. Code will be made available at https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official/vision.

We propose Strivec, a novel neural representation that models a 3D scene as a radiance field with sparsely distributed and compactly factorized local tensor feature grids. Our approach leverages tensor decomposition, following the recent work TensoRF, to model the tensor grids. In contrast to TensoRF which uses a global tensor and focuses on their vector-matrix decomposition, we propose to utilize a cloud of local tensors and apply the classic CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition to factorize each tensor into triple vectors that express local feature distributions along spatial axes and compactly encode a local neural field. We also apply multi-scale tensor grids to discover the geometry and appearance commonalities and exploit spatial coherence with the tri-vector factorization at multiple local scales. The final radiance field properties are regressed by aggregating neural features from multiple local tensors across all scales. Our tri-vector tensors are sparsely distributed around the actual scene surface, discovered by a fast coarse reconstruction, leveraging the sparsity of a 3D scene. We demonstrate that our model can achieve better rendering quality while using significantly fewer parameters than previous methods, including TensoRF and Instant-NGP.

This paper accelerates video perception, such as semantic segmentation and human pose estimation, by levering cross-frame redundancies. Unlike the existing approaches, which avoid redundant computations by warping the past features using optical-flow or by performing sparse convolutions on frame differences, we approach the problem from a new perspective: low-bit quantization. We observe that residuals, as the difference in network activations between two neighboring frames, exhibit properties that make them highly quantizable. Based on this observation, we propose a novel quantization scheme for video networks coined as Residual Quantization. ResQ extends the standard, frame-by-frame, quantization scheme by incorporating temporal dependencies that lead to better performance in terms of accuracy vs. bit-width. Furthermore, we extend our model to dynamically adjust the bit-width proportional to the amount of changes in the video. We demonstrate the superiority of our model, against the standard quantization and existing efficient video perception models, using various architectures on semantic segmentation and human pose estimation benchmarks.

Neural fields, a category of neural networks trained to represent high-frequency signals, have gained significant attention in recent years due to their impressive performance in modeling complex 3D data, especially large neural signed distance (SDFs) or radiance fields (NeRFs) via a single multi-layer perceptron (MLP). However, despite the power and simplicity of representing signals with an MLP, these methods still face challenges when modeling large and complex temporal signals due to the limited capacity of MLPs. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to address this limitation by incorporating temporal residual layers into neural fields, dubbed ResFields, a novel class of networks specifically designed to effectively represent complex temporal signals. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the properties of ResFields and propose a matrix factorization technique to reduce the number of trainable parameters and enhance generalization capabilities. Importantly, our formulation seamlessly integrates with existing techniques and consistently improves results across various challenging tasks: 2D video approximation, dynamic shape modeling via temporal SDFs, and dynamic NeRF reconstruction. Lastly, we demonstrate the practical utility of ResFields by showcasing its effectiveness in capturing dynamic 3D scenes from sparse sensory inputs of a lightweight capture system.

Several video understanding tasks, such as natural language temporal video grounding, temporal activity localization, and audio description generation, require "temporally dense" reasoning over frames sampled at high temporal resolution. However, computing frame-level features for these tasks is computationally expensive given the temporal resolution requirements. In this paper, we make three contributions to reduce the cost of computing features for temporally dense tasks. First, we introduce a vision transformer (ViT) architecture, dubbed ResidualViT, that leverages the large temporal redundancy in videos to efficiently compute temporally dense frame-level features. Our architecture incorporates (i) learnable residual connections that ensure temporal consistency across consecutive frames and (ii) a token reduction module that enhances processing speed by selectively discarding temporally redundant information while reusing weights of a pretrained foundation model. Second, we propose a lightweight distillation strategy to approximate the frame-level features of the original foundation model. Finally, we evaluate our approach across four tasks and five datasets, in both zero-shot and fully supervised settings, demonstrating significant reductions in computational cost (up to 60%) and improvements in inference speed (up to 2.5x faster), all while closely approximating the accuracy of the original foundation model.

By classifying infinite-width neural networks and identifying the *optimal* limit, Tensor Programs IV and V demonstrated a universal way, called muP, for *widthwise hyperparameter transfer*, i.e., predicting optimal hyperparameters of wide neural networks from narrow ones. Here we investigate the analogous classification for *depthwise parametrizations* of deep residual networks (resnets). We classify depthwise parametrizations of block multiplier and learning rate by their infinite-width-then-depth limits. In resnets where each block has only one layer, we identify a unique optimal parametrization, called Depth-muP that extends muP and show empirically it admits depthwise hyperparameter transfer. We identify *feature diversity* as a crucial factor in deep networks, and Depth-muP can be characterized as maximizing both feature learning and feature diversity. Exploiting this, we find that absolute value, among all homogeneous nonlinearities, maximizes feature diversity and indeed empirically leads to significantly better performance. However, if each block is deeper (such as modern transformers), then we find fundamental limitations in all possible infinite-depth limits of such parametrizations, which we illustrate both theoretically and empirically on simple networks as well as Megatron transformer trained on Common Crawl.

Understanding continuous video streams plays a fundamental role in real-time applications including embodied AI and autonomous driving. Unlike offline video understanding, streaming video understanding requires the ability to process video streams frame by frame, preserve historical information, and make low-latency decisions. To address these challenges, our main contributions are three-fold. (i) We develop a novel streaming video backbone, termed as StreamFormer, by incorporating causal temporal attention into a pre-trained vision transformer. This enables efficient streaming video processing while maintaining image representation capability. (ii) To train StreamFormer, we propose to unify diverse spatial-temporal video understanding tasks within a multitask visual-language alignment framework. Hence, StreamFormer learns global semantics, temporal dynamics, and fine-grained spatial relationships simultaneously. (iii) We conduct extensive experiments on online action detection, online video instance segmentation, and video question answering. StreamFormer achieves competitive results while maintaining efficiency, demonstrating its potential for real-time applications.

Existing multimodal large model-based image compression frameworks often rely on a fragmented integration of semantic retrieval, latent compression, and generative models, resulting in suboptimal performance in both reconstruction fidelity and coding efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a residual-guided ultra lowrate image compression named ResULIC, which incorporates residual signals into both semantic retrieval and the diffusion-based generation process. Specifically, we introduce Semantic Residual Coding (SRC) to capture the semantic disparity between the original image and its compressed latent representation. A perceptual fidelity optimizer is further applied for superior reconstruction quality. Additionally, we present the Compression-aware Diffusion Model (CDM), which establishes an optimal alignment between bitrates and diffusion time steps, improving compression-reconstruction synergy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ResULIC, achieving superior objective and subjective performance compared to state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods with - 80.7%, -66.3% BD-rate saving in terms of LPIPS and FID. Project page is available at https: //njuvision.github.io/ResULIC/.

We provide a rigorous analysis of implicit regularization in an overparametrized tensor factorization problem beyond the lazy training regime. For matrix factorization problems, this phenomenon has been studied in a number of works. A particular challenge has been to design universal initialization strategies which provably lead to implicit regularization in gradient-descent methods. At the same time, it has been argued by Cohen et. al. 2016 that more general classes of neural networks can be captured by considering tensor factorizations. However, in the tensor case, implicit regularization has only been rigorously established for gradient flow or in the lazy training regime. In this paper, we prove the first tensor result of its kind for gradient descent rather than gradient flow. We focus on the tubal tensor product and the associated notion of low tubal rank, encouraged by the relevance of this model for image data. We establish that gradient descent in an overparametrized tensor factorization model with a small random initialization exhibits an implicit bias towards solutions of low tubal rank. Our theoretical findings are illustrated in an extensive set of numerical simulations show-casing the dynamics predicted by our theory as well as the crucial role of using a small random initialization.

Neural fields, also known as implicit neural representations (INRs), have shown a remarkable capability of representing, generating, and manipulating various data types, allowing for continuous data reconstruction at a low memory footprint. Though promising, INRs applied to video compression still need to improve their rate-distortion performance by a large margin, and require a huge number of parameters and long training iterations to capture high-frequency details, limiting their wider applicability. Resolving this problem remains a quite challenging task, which would make INRs more accessible in compression tasks. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by introducing neural representations for videos NeRV++, an enhanced implicit neural video representation, as more straightforward yet effective enhancement over the original NeRV decoder architecture, featuring separable conv2d residual blocks (SCRBs) that sandwiches the upsampling block (UB), and a bilinear interpolation skip layer for improved feature representation. NeRV++ allows videos to be directly represented as a function approximated by a neural network, and significantly enhance the representation capacity beyond current INR-based video codecs. We evaluate our method on UVG, MCL JVC, and Bunny datasets, achieving competitive results for video compression with INRs. This achievement narrows the gap to autoencoder-based video coding, marking a significant stride in INR-based video compression research.

One of the core pillars of efficient deep learning methods is architectural improvements such as the residual/skip connection, which has led to significantly better model convergence and quality. Since then the residual connection has become ubiquitous in not just convolutional neural networks but also transformer-based architectures, the backbone of LLMs. In this paper we introduce Learned Augmented Residual Layer (LAuReL) -- a novel generalization of the canonical residual connection -- with the goal to be an in-situ replacement of the latter while outperforming on both model quality and footprint metrics. Our experiments show that using \laurel can help boost performance for both vision and language models. For example, on the ResNet-50, ImageNet 1K task, it achieves 60% of the gains from adding an extra layer, while only adding 0.003% more parameters, and matches it while adding 2.6times fewer parameters.

In recent years, Vision Transformer-based approaches for low-level vision tasks have achieved widespread success. Unlike CNN-based models, Transformers are more adept at capturing long-range dependencies, enabling the reconstruction of images utilizing non-local information. In the domain of super-resolution, Swin-transformer-based models have become mainstream due to their capability of global spatial information modeling and their shifting-window attention mechanism that facilitates the interchange of information between different windows. Many researchers have enhanced model performance by expanding the receptive fields or designing meticulous networks, yielding commendable results. However, we observed that it is a general phenomenon for the feature map intensity to be abruptly suppressed to small values towards the network's end. This implies an information bottleneck and a diminishment of spatial information, implicitly limiting the model's potential. To address this, we propose the Dense-residual-connected Transformer (DRCT), aimed at mitigating the loss of spatial information and stabilizing the information flow through dense-residual connections between layers, thereby unleashing the model's potential and saving the model away from information bottleneck. Experiment results indicate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and performs commendably at the NTIRE-2024 Image Super-Resolution (x4) Challenge. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ming053l/DRCT

We present Waver, a high-performance foundation model for unified image and video generation. Waver can directly generate videos with durations ranging from 5 to 10 seconds at a native resolution of 720p, which are subsequently upscaled to 1080p. The model simultaneously supports text-to-video (T2V), image-to-video (I2V), and text-to-image (T2I) generation within a single, integrated framework. We introduce a Hybrid Stream DiT architecture to enhance modality alignment and accelerate training convergence. To ensure training data quality, we establish a comprehensive data curation pipeline and manually annotate and train an MLLM-based video quality model to filter for the highest-quality samples. Furthermore, we provide detailed training and inference recipes to facilitate the generation of high-quality videos. Building on these contributions, Waver excels at capturing complex motion, achieving superior motion amplitude and temporal consistency in video synthesis. Notably, it ranks among the Top 3 on both the T2V and I2V leaderboards at Artificial Analysis (data as of 2025-07-30 10:00 GMT+8), consistently outperforming existing open-source models and matching or surpassing state-of-the-art commercial solutions. We hope this technical report will help the community more efficiently train high-quality video generation models and accelerate progress in video generation technologies. Official page: https://github.com/FoundationVision/Waver.

The residual vector quantization (RVQ) technique plays a central role in recent advances in neural audio codecs. These models effectively synthesize high-fidelity audio from a limited number of codes due to the hierarchical structure among quantization levels. In this paper, we propose an encoding algorithm to further enhance the synthesis quality of RVQ-based neural codecs at test-time. Firstly, we point out the suboptimal nature of quantized vectors generated by conventional methods. We demonstrate that quantization error can be mitigated by selecting a different set of codes. Subsequently, we present our encoding algorithm, designed to identify a set of discrete codes that achieve a lower quantization error. We then apply the proposed method to pre-trained models and evaluate its efficacy using diverse metrics. Our experimental findings validate that our method not only reduces quantization errors, but also improves synthesis quality.

We introduce a novel generative model for video prediction based on latent flow matching, an efficient alternative to diffusion-based models. In contrast to prior work, we keep the high costs of modeling the past during training and inference at bay by conditioning only on a small random set of past frames at each integration step of the image generation process. Moreover, to enable the generation of high-resolution videos and to speed up the training, we work in the latent space of a pretrained VQGAN. Finally, we propose to approximate the initial condition of the flow ODE with the previous noisy frame. This allows to reduce the number of integration steps and hence, speed up the sampling at inference time. We call our model Random frame conditioned flow Integration for VidEo pRediction, or, in short, RIVER. We show that RIVER achieves superior or on par performance compared to prior work on common video prediction benchmarks, while requiring an order of magnitude fewer computational resources.

Vision Transformer (ViT) demonstrates that Transformer for natural language processing can be applied to computer vision tasks and result in comparable performance to convolutional neural networks (CNN), which have been studied and adopted in computer vision for years. This naturally raises the question of how the performance of ViT can be advanced with design techniques of CNN. To this end, we propose to incorporate two techniques and present ViT-ResNAS, an efficient multi-stage ViT architecture designed with neural architecture search (NAS). First, we propose residual spatial reduction to decrease sequence lengths for deeper layers and utilize a multi-stage architecture. When reducing lengths, we add skip connections to improve performance and stabilize training deeper networks. Second, we propose weight-sharing NAS with multi-architectural sampling. We enlarge a network and utilize its sub-networks to define a search space. A super-network covering all sub-networks is then trained for fast evaluation of their performance. To efficiently train the super-network, we propose to sample and train multiple sub-networks with one forward-backward pass. After that, evolutionary search is performed to discover high-performance network architectures. Experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that ViT-ResNAS achieves better accuracy-MACs and accuracy-throughput trade-offs than the original DeiT and other strong baselines of ViT. Code is available at https://github.com/yilunliao/vit-search.

Learning-based image deraining methods have made great progress. However, the lack of large-scale high-quality paired training samples is the main bottleneck to hamper the real image deraining (RID). To address this dilemma and advance RID, we construct a Large-scale High-quality Paired real rain benchmark (LHP-Rain), including 3000 video sequences with 1 million high-resolution (1920*1080) frame pairs. The advantages of the proposed dataset over the existing ones are three-fold: rain with higher-diversity and larger-scale, image with higher-resolution and higher-quality ground-truth. Specifically, the real rains in LHP-Rain not only contain the classical rain streak/veiling/occlusion in the sky, but also the splashing on the ground overlooked by deraining community. Moreover, we propose a novel robust low-rank tensor recovery model to generate the GT with better separating the static background from the dynamic rain. In addition, we design a simple transformer-based single image deraining baseline, which simultaneously utilize the self-attention and cross-layer attention within the image and rain layer with discriminative feature representation. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of the proposed dataset and deraining method over state-of-the-art.

As artificial intelligence models have exploded in scale and capability, understanding of their internal mechanisms remains a critical challenge. Inspired by the success of dynamical systems approaches in neuroscience, here we propose a novel framework for studying computations in deep learning systems. We focus on the residual stream (RS) in transformer models, conceptualizing it as a dynamical system evolving across layers. We find that activations of individual RS units exhibit strong continuity across layers, despite the RS being a non-privileged basis. Activations in the RS accelerate and grow denser over layers, while individual units trace unstable periodic orbits. In reduced-dimensional spaces, the RS follows a curved trajectory with attractor-like dynamics in the lower layers. These insights bridge dynamical systems theory and mechanistic interpretability, establishing a foundation for a "neuroscience of AI" that combines theoretical rigor with large-scale data analysis to advance our understanding of modern neural networks.

Deep residual architectures, such as ResNet and the Transformer, have enabled models of unprecedented depth, yet a formal understanding of why depth is so effective remains an open question. A popular intuition, following Veit et al. (2016), is that these residual networks behave like ensembles of many shallower models. Our key finding is an explicit analytical formula that verifies this ensemble perspective, proving that increasing network depth is mathematically equivalent to expanding the size of this implicit ensemble. Furthermore, our expansion reveals a hierarchical ensemble structure in which the combinatorial growth of computation paths leads to an explosion in the output signal, explaining the historical necessity of normalization layers in training deep models. This insight offers a first principles explanation for the historical dependence on normalization layers and sheds new light on a family of successful normalization-free techniques like SkipInit and Fixup. However, while these previous approaches infer scaling factors through optimizer analysis or a heuristic analogy to Batch Normalization, our work offers the first explanation derived directly from the network's inherent functional structure. Specifically, our Residual Expansion Theorem reveals that scaling each residual module provides a principled solution to taming the combinatorial explosion inherent to these architectures. We further show that this scaling acts as a capacity controls that also implicitly regularizes the model's complexity.

Recent works on neural network pruning advocate that reducing the depth of the network is more effective in reducing run-time memory usage and accelerating inference latency than reducing the width of the network through channel pruning. In this regard, some recent works propose depth compression algorithms that merge convolution layers. However, the existing algorithms have a constricted search space and rely on human-engineered heuristics. In this paper, we propose a novel depth compression algorithm which targets general convolution operations. We propose a subset selection problem that replaces inefficient activation layers with identity functions and optimally merges consecutive convolution operations into shallow equivalent convolution operations for efficient end-to-end inference latency. Since the proposed subset selection problem is NP-hard, we formulate a surrogate optimization problem that can be solved exactly via two-stage dynamic programming within a few seconds. We evaluate our methods and baselines by TensorRT for a fair inference latency comparison. Our method outperforms the baseline method with higher accuracy and faster inference speed in MobileNetV2 on the ImageNet dataset. Specifically, we achieve 1.41times speed-up with 0.11\%p accuracy gain in MobileNetV2-1.0 on the ImageNet.

Neural audio codecs have recently gained popularity because they can represent audio signals with high fidelity at very low bitrates, making it feasible to use language modeling approaches for audio generation and understanding. Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) has become the standard technique for neural audio compression using a cascade of VQ codebooks. This paper proposes the Multi-Scale Neural Audio Codec, a simple extension of RVQ where the quantizers can operate at different temporal resolutions. By applying a hierarchy of quantizers at variable frame rates, the codec adapts to the audio structure across multiple timescales. This leads to more efficient compression, as demonstrated by extensive objective and subjective evaluations. The code and model weights are open-sourced at https://github.com/hubertsiuzdak/snac.

Autoregressive models for video generation typically operate frame-by-frame, extending next-token prediction from language to video's temporal dimension. We question that unlike word as token is universally agreed in language if frame is a appropriate prediction unit? To address this, we present VideoAR, a unified framework that supports a spectrum of prediction units including full frames, key-detail frames, multiscale refinements, and spatiotemporal cubes. Among these designs, we find model video generation using spatiotemporal cubes as prediction units, which allows autoregressive models to operate across both spatial and temporal dimensions simultaneously. This approach eliminates the assumption that frames are the natural atomic units for video autoregression. We evaluate VideoAR across diverse prediction strategies, finding that cube-based prediction consistently delivers superior quality, speed, and temporal coherence. By removing the frame-by-frame constraint, our video generator surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on VBench while achieving faster inference and enabling seamless scaling to minute-long sequences. We hope this work will motivate rethinking sequence decomposition in video and other spatiotemporal domains.

Vision-language models (VLMs) could power real-time assistants and autonomous agents, but they face a critical challenge: understanding near-infinite video streams without escalating latency and memory usage. Processing entire videos with full attention leads to quadratic computational costs and poor performance on long videos. Meanwhile, simple sliding window methods are also flawed, as they either break coherence or suffer from high latency due to redundant recomputation. In this paper, we introduce StreamingVLM, a model designed for real-time, stable understanding of infinite visual input. Our approach is a unified framework that aligns training with streaming inference. During inference, we maintain a compact KV cache by reusing states of attention sinks, a short window of recent vision tokens, and a long window of recent text tokens. This streaming ability is instilled via a simple supervised fine-tuning (SFT) strategy that applies full attention on short, overlapped video chunks, which effectively mimics the inference-time attention pattern without training on prohibitively long contexts. For evaluation, we build Inf-Streams-Eval, a new benchmark with videos averaging over two hours that requires dense, per-second alignment between frames and text. On Inf-Streams-Eval, StreamingVLM achieves a 66.18% win rate against GPT-4O mini and maintains stable, real-time performance at up to 8 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100. Notably, our SFT strategy also enhances general VQA abilities without any VQA-specific fine-tuning, improving performance on LongVideoBench by +4.30 and OVOBench Realtime by +5.96. Code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/streaming-vlm.

This paper focuses on developing modern, efficient, lightweight models for dense predictions while trading off parameters, FLOPs, and performance. Inverted Residual Block (IRB) serves as the infrastructure for lightweight CNNs, but no counterpart has been recognized by attention-based studies. This work rethinks lightweight infrastructure from efficient IRB and effective components of Transformer from a unified perspective, extending CNN-based IRB to attention-based models and abstracting a one-residual Meta Mobile Block (MMB) for lightweight model design. Following simple but effective design criterion, we deduce a modern Inverted Residual Mobile Block (iRMB) and build a ResNet-like Efficient MOdel (EMO) with only iRMB for down-stream tasks. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, COCO2017, and ADE20K benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our EMO over state-of-the-art methods, e.g., EMO-1M/2M/5M achieve 71.5, 75.1, and 78.4 Top-1 that surpass equal-order CNN-/Attention-based models, while trading-off the parameter, efficiency, and accuracy well: running 2.8-4.0x faster than EdgeNeXt on iPhone14.

Recent developments in Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have enabled models to process long video sequences and demonstrate remarkable performance. Nonetheless, studies predominantly focus on offline video question answering, neglecting memory usage and response speed that are essential in various real-world applications, such as Deepseek services, autonomous driving, and robotics. To mitigate these challenges, we propose LiveVLM, a training-free framework specifically designed for streaming, online video understanding and real-time interaction. Unlike existing works that process videos only after one question is posed, LiveVLM constructs an innovative streaming-oriented KV cache to process video streams in real-time, retain long-term video details and eliminate redundant KVs, ensuring prompt responses to user queries. For continuous video streams, LiveVLM generates and compresses video key-value tensors (video KVs) to reserve visual information while improving memory efficiency. Furthermore, when a new question is proposed, LiveVLM incorporates an online question-answering process that efficiently fetches both short-term and long-term visual information, while minimizing interference from redundant context. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveVLM enables the foundation LLaVA-OneVision model to process 44times number of frames on the same device, and achieves up to 5times speedup in response speed compared with SoTA online methods at an input of 256 frames, while maintaining the same or better model performance.

The profound accumulation of precipitation during intense rainfall events can markedly degrade the quality of images, leading to the erosion of textural details. Despite the improvements observed in existing learning-based methods specialized for heavy rain removal, it is discerned that a significant proportion of these methods tend to overlook the precise reconstruction of the intricate details. In this work, we introduce a simple dual-stage progressive enhancement network, denoted as DPENet, aiming to achieve effective deraining while preserving the structural accuracy of rain-free images. This approach comprises two key modules, a rain streaks removal network (R^2Net) focusing on accurate rain removal, and a details reconstruction network (DRNet) designed to recover the textural details of rain-free images. Firstly, we introduce a dilated dense residual block (DDRB) within R^2Net, enabling the aggregation of high-level and low-level features. Secondly, an enhanced residual pixel-wise attention block (ERPAB) is integrated into DRNet to facilitate the incorporation of contextual information. To further enhance the fidelity of our approach, we employ a comprehensive loss function that accentuates both the marginal and regional accuracy of rain-free images. Extensive experiments conducted on publicly available benchmarks demonstrates the noteworthy efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed DPENet. The source code and pre-trained models are currently available at https://github.com/chdwyb/DPENet.

Recent AI-based 3D content creation has largely evolved along two paths: feed-forward image-to-3D reconstruction approaches and 3D generative models trained with 2D or 3D supervision. In this work, we show that existing feed-forward reconstruction methods can serve as effective latent encoders for training 3D generative models, thereby bridging these two paradigms. By reusing powerful pre-trained reconstruction models, we avoid computationally expensive encoder network training and obtain rich 3D latent features for generative modeling for free. However, the latent spaces of reconstruction models are not well-suited for generative modeling due to their unstructured nature. To enable flow-based model training on these latent features, we develop post-processing pipelines, including protocols to standardize the features and spatial weighting to concentrate on important regions. We further incorporate a 2D image space perceptual rendering loss to handle the high-dimensional latent spaces. Finally, we propose a multi-stream transformer-based rectified flow architecture to achieve linear scaling and high-quality text-conditioned 3D generation. Our framework leverages the advancements of feed-forward reconstruction models to enhance the scalability of 3D generative modeling, achieving both high computational efficiency and state-of-the-art performance in text-to-3D generation.

Streaming visual transformers like StreamVGGT achieve strong 3D perception but suffer from unbounded growth of key value (KV) memory, which limits scalability. We propose a training-free, inference-time token eviction policy that bounds memory by discarding redundant tokens while keeping the most informative ones. Our method uses significantly less memory with little to no drop in accuracy: on 7-Scenes with long sequences it reduces peak memory from 18.63 GB to 9.39 GB while accuracy and completeness drop by only 0.003. Under strict memory budgets, eviction enables denser frame sampling, which improves reconstruction accuracy compared to the baseline. Experiments across video depth estimation (Sintel, KITTI), 3D reconstruction (7-Scenes, NRGBD), and camera pose estimation (Sintel, TUM-dynamics) show that our approach closely matches StreamVGGT at a fraction of the memory and makes long-horizon streaming inference more practical.

Most text-video retrieval methods utilize the text-image pre-trained models like CLIP as a backbone. These methods process each sampled frame independently by the image encoder, resulting in high computational overhead and limiting practical deployment. Addressing this, we focus on efficient text-video retrieval by tackling two key challenges: 1. From the perspective of trainable parameters, current parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods incur high inference costs; 2. From the perspective of model complexity, current token compression methods are mainly designed for images to reduce spatial redundancy but overlook temporal redundancy in consecutive frames of a video. To tackle these challenges, we propose Temporal Token Merging (TempMe), a parameter-efficient and training-inference efficient text-video retrieval architecture that minimizes trainable parameters and model complexity. Specifically, we introduce a progressive multi-granularity framework. By gradually combining neighboring clips, we reduce spatio-temporal redundancy and enhance temporal modeling across different frames, leading to improved efficiency and performance. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our TempMe. Compared to previous parameter-efficient text-video retrieval methods, TempMe achieves superior performance with just 0.50M trainable parameters. It significantly reduces output tokens by 95% and GFLOPs by 51%, while achieving a 1.8X speedup and a 4.4% R-Sum improvement. With full fine-tuning, TempMe achieves a significant 7.9% R-Sum improvement, trains 1.57X faster, and utilizes 75.2% GPU memory usage. The code is available at https://github.com/LunarShen/TempMe.

We present SoundStream, a novel neural audio codec that can efficiently compress speech, music and general audio at bitrates normally targeted by speech-tailored codecs. SoundStream relies on a model architecture composed by a fully convolutional encoder/decoder network and a residual vector quantizer, which are trained jointly end-to-end. Training leverages recent advances in text-to-speech and speech enhancement, which combine adversarial and reconstruction losses to allow the generation of high-quality audio content from quantized embeddings. By training with structured dropout applied to quantizer layers, a single model can operate across variable bitrates from 3kbps to 18kbps, with a negligible quality loss when compared with models trained at fixed bitrates. In addition, the model is amenable to a low latency implementation, which supports streamable inference and runs in real time on a smartphone CPU. In subjective evaluations using audio at 24kHz sampling rate, SoundStream at 3kbps outperforms Opus at 12kbps and approaches EVS at 9.6kbps. Moreover, we are able to perform joint compression and enhancement either at the encoder or at the decoder side with no additional latency, which we demonstrate through background noise suppression for speech.

We explore the application of deep residual learning and dilated convolutions to the keyword spotting task, using the recently-released Google Speech Commands Dataset as our benchmark. Our best residual network (ResNet) implementation significantly outperforms Google's previous convolutional neural networks in terms of accuracy. By varying model depth and width, we can achieve compact models that also outperform previous small-footprint variants. To our knowledge, we are the first to examine these approaches for keyword spotting, and our results establish an open-source state-of-the-art reference to support the development of future speech-based interfaces.

A shared goal of several machine learning communities like continual learning, meta-learning and transfer learning, is to design algorithms and models that efficiently and robustly adapt to unseen tasks. An even more ambitious goal is to build models that never stop adapting, and that become increasingly more efficient through time by suitably transferring the accrued knowledge. Beyond the study of the actual learning algorithm and model architecture, there are several hurdles towards our quest to build such models, such as the choice of learning protocol, metric of success and data needed to validate research hypotheses. In this work, we introduce the Never-Ending VIsual-classification Stream (NEVIS'22), a benchmark consisting of a stream of over 100 visual classification tasks, sorted chronologically and extracted from papers sampled uniformly from computer vision proceedings spanning the last three decades. The resulting stream reflects what the research community thought was meaningful at any point in time, and it serves as an ideal test bed to assess how well models can adapt to new tasks, and do so better and more efficiently as time goes by. Despite being limited to classification, the resulting stream has a rich diversity of tasks from OCR, to texture analysis, scene recognition, and so forth. The diversity is also reflected in the wide range of dataset sizes, spanning over four orders of magnitude. Overall, NEVIS'22 poses an unprecedented challenge for current sequential learning approaches due to the scale and diversity of tasks, yet with a low entry barrier as it is limited to a single modality and well understood supervised learning problems. Moreover, we provide a reference implementation including strong baselines and an evaluation protocol to compare methods in terms of their trade-off between accuracy and compute.

Audio codec models are widely used in audio communication as a crucial technique for compressing audio into discrete representations. Nowadays, audio codec models are increasingly utilized in generation fields as intermediate representations. For instance, AudioLM is an audio generation model that uses the discrete representation of SoundStream as a training target, while VALL-E employs the Encodec model as an intermediate feature to aid TTS tasks. Despite their usefulness, two challenges persist: (1) training these audio codec models can be difficult due to the lack of publicly available training processes and the need for large-scale data and GPUs; (2) achieving good reconstruction performance requires many codebooks, which increases the burden on generation models. In this study, we propose a group-residual vector quantization (GRVQ) technique and use it to develop a novel High Fidelity Audio Codec model, HiFi-Codec, which only requires 4 codebooks. We train all the models using publicly available TTS data such as LibriTTS, VCTK, AISHELL, and more, with a total duration of over 1000 hours, using 8 GPUs. Our experimental results show that HiFi-Codec outperforms Encodec in terms of reconstruction performance despite requiring only 4 codebooks. To facilitate research in audio codec and generation, we introduce AcademiCodec, the first open-source audio codec toolkit that offers training codes and pre-trained models for Encodec, SoundStream, and HiFi-Codec. Code and pre-trained model can be found on: https://github.com/yangdongchao/AcademiCodec{https://github.com/yangdongchao/AcademiCodec}

Tensor Networks (TN) offer a powerful framework to efficiently represent very high-dimensional objects. TN have recently shown their potential for machine learning applications and offer a unifying view of common tensor decomposition models such as Tucker, tensor train (TT) and tensor ring (TR). However, identifying the best tensor network structure from data for a given task is challenging. In this work, we leverage the TN formalism to develop a generic and efficient adaptive algorithm to jointly learn the structure and the parameters of a TN from data. Our method is based on a simple greedy approach starting from a rank one tensor and successively identifying the most promising tensor network edges for small rank increments. Our algorithm can adaptively identify TN structures with small number of parameters that effectively optimize any differentiable objective function. Experiments on tensor decomposition, tensor completion and model compression tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. In particular, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art evolutionary topology search [Li and Sun, 2020] for tensor decomposition of images (while being orders of magnitude faster) and finds efficient tensor network structures to compress neural networks outperforming popular TT based approaches [Novikov et al., 2015].

We present OpenDCVCs, an open-source PyTorch implementation designed to advance reproducible research in learned video compression. OpenDCVCs provides unified and training-ready implementations of four representative Deep Contextual Video Compression (DCVC) models--DCVC, DCVC with Temporal Context Modeling (DCVC-TCM), DCVC with Hybrid Entropy Modeling (DCVC-HEM), and DCVC with Diverse Contexts (DCVC-DC). While the DCVC series achieves substantial bitrate reductions over both classical codecs and advanced learned models, previous public code releases have been limited to evaluation codes, presenting significant barriers to reproducibility, benchmarking, and further development. OpenDCVCs bridges this gap by offering a comprehensive, self-contained framework that supports both end-to-end training and evaluation for all included algorithms. The implementation includes detailed documentation, evaluation protocols, and extensive benchmarking results across diverse datasets, providing a transparent and consistent foundation for comparison and extension. All code and experimental tools are publicly available at https://gitlab.com/viper-purdue/opendcvcs, empowering the community to accelerate research and foster collaboration.

Normalizing Flows (NFs) are likelihood-based models for continuous inputs. They have demonstrated promising results on both density estimation and generative modeling tasks, but have received relatively little attention in recent years. In this work, we demonstrate that NFs are more powerful than previously believed. We present TarFlow: a simple and scalable architecture that enables highly performant NF models. TarFlow can be thought of as a Transformer-based variant of Masked Autoregressive Flows (MAFs): it consists of a stack of autoregressive Transformer blocks on image patches, alternating the autoregression direction between layers. TarFlow is straightforward to train end-to-end, and capable of directly modeling and generating pixels. We also propose three key techniques to improve sample quality: Gaussian noise augmentation during training, a post training denoising procedure, and an effective guidance method for both class-conditional and unconditional settings. Putting these together, TarFlow sets new state-of-the-art results on likelihood estimation for images, beating the previous best methods by a large margin, and generates samples with quality and diversity comparable to diffusion models, for the first time with a stand-alone NF model. We make our code available at https://github.com/apple/ml-tarflow.

Recent advances in video diffusion models have shifted towards transformer-based architectures, achieving state-of-the-art video generation but at the cost of quadratic attention complexity, which severely limits scalability for longer sequences. We introduce ReHyAt, a Recurrent Hybrid Attention mechanism that combines the fidelity of softmax attention with the efficiency of linear attention, enabling chunk-wise recurrent reformulation and constant memory usage. Unlike the concurrent linear-only SANA Video, ReHyAt's hybrid design allows efficient distillation from existing softmax-based models, reducing the training cost by two orders of magnitude to ~160 GPU hours, while being competitive in the quality. Our light-weight distillation and finetuning pipeline provides a recipe that can be applied to future state-of-the-art bidirectional softmax-based models. Experiments on VBench and VBench-2.0, as well as a human preference study, demonstrate that ReHyAt achieves state-of-the-art video quality while reducing attention cost from quadratic to linear, unlocking practical scalability for long-duration and on-device video generation. Project page is available at https://qualcomm-ai-research.github.io/rehyat.

This paper addresses the challenge of text-conditioned streaming motion generation, which requires us to predict the next-step human pose based on variable-length historical motions and incoming texts. Existing methods struggle to achieve streaming motion generation, e.g., diffusion models are constrained by pre-defined motion lengths, while GPT-based methods suffer from delayed response and error accumulation problem due to discretized non-causal tokenization. To solve these problems, we propose MotionStreamer, a novel framework that incorporates a continuous causal latent space into a probabilistic autoregressive model. The continuous latents mitigate information loss caused by discretization and effectively reduce error accumulation during long-term autoregressive generation. In addition, by establishing temporal causal dependencies between current and historical motion latents, our model fully utilizes the available information to achieve accurate online motion decoding. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing approaches while offering more applications, including multi-round generation, long-term generation, and dynamic motion composition. Project Page: https://zju3dv.github.io/MotionStreamer/

Rectified Flow (RF) models have advanced high-quality image and video synthesis via optimal transport theory. However, when applied to image-to-image translation, they still depend on costly multi-step denoising, hindering real-time applications. Although the recent adversarial training paradigm, CycleGAN-Turbo, works in pretrained diffusion models for one-step image translation, we find that directly applying it to RF models leads to severe convergence issues. In this paper, we analyze these challenges and propose TReFT, a novel method to Tame Rectified Flow models for one-step image Translation. Unlike previous works, TReFT directly uses the velocity predicted by pretrained DiT or UNet as output-a simple yet effective design that tackles the convergence issues under adversarial training with one-step inference. This design is mainly motivated by a novel observation that, near the end of the denoising process, the velocity predicted by pretrained RF models converges to the vector from origin to the final clean image, a property we further justify through theoretical analysis. When applying TReFT to large pretrained RF models such as SD3.5 and FLUX, we introduce memory-efficient latent cycle-consistency and identity losses during training, as well as lightweight architectural simplifications for faster inference. Pretrained RF models finetuned with TReFT achieve performance comparable to sota methods across multiple image translation datasets while enabling real-time inference.

Recent work in image and video generation has been adopting the autoregressive LLM architecture due to its generality and potentially easy integration into multi-modal systems. The crux of applying autoregressive training in language generation to visual generation is discretization -- representing continuous data like images and videos as discrete tokens. Common methods of discretizing images and videos include modeling raw pixel values, which are prohibitively lengthy, or vector quantization, which requires convoluted pre-hoc training. In this work, we propose to directly model images and videos as compressed files saved on computers via canonical codecs (e.g., JPEG, AVC/H.264). Using the default Llama architecture without any vision-specific modifications, we pretrain JPEG-LM from scratch to generate images (and AVC-LM to generate videos as a proof of concept), by directly outputting compressed file bytes in JPEG and AVC formats. Evaluation of image generation shows that this simple and straightforward approach is more effective than pixel-based modeling and sophisticated vector quantization baselines (on which our method yields a 31% reduction in FID). Our analysis shows that JPEG-LM has an especial advantage over vector quantization models in generating long-tail visual elements. Overall, we show that using canonical codec representations can help lower the barriers between language generation and visual generation, facilitating future research on multi-modal language/image/video LLMs.

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on compressing large pre-trained transformer models for resource-constrained devices. However, traditional pruning methods often leave the embedding layer untouched, leading to model over-parameterization. Additionally, they require extensive compression time with large datasets to maintain performance in pruned models. To address these challenges, we propose VTrans, an iterative pruning framework guided by the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) principle. Our method compresses all structural components, including embeddings, attention heads, and layers using VIB-trained masks. This approach retains only essential weights in each layer, ensuring compliance with specified model size or computational constraints. Notably, our method achieves upto 70% more compression than prior state-of-the-art approaches, both task-agnostic and task-specific. We further propose faster variants of our method: Fast-VTrans utilizing only 3% of the data and Faster-VTrans, a time efficient alternative that involves exclusive finetuning of VIB masks, accelerating compression by upto 25 times with minimal performance loss compared to previous methods. Extensive experiments on BERT, ROBERTa, and GPT-2 models substantiate the efficacy of our method. Moreover, our method demonstrates scalability in compressing large models such as LLaMA-2-7B, achieving superior performance compared to previous pruning methods. Additionally, we use attention-based probing to qualitatively assess model redundancy and interpret the efficiency of our approach. Notably, our method considers heads with high attention to special and current tokens in un-pruned model as foremost candidates for pruning while retained heads are observed to attend more to task-critical keywords.

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought substantial computational and memory demands, spurring the adoption of low-bit quantization. While 8-bit and 4-bit formats have become prevalent, extending quantization to 2 bits remains challenging due to severe accuracy degradation. To address this, we propose Residual Refinement Quantization (R2Q)-a novel 2-bit quantization framework that decomposes the process into two sequential 1-bit sub-quantizations, forming an adaptive quantization lattice. Extensive evaluations on Llama, OPT, and Qwen across diverse benchmarks-covering question answering, commonsense reasoning, and language modeling-demonstrate that R2Q consistently outperforms existing 2-bit quantization methods in both fine-grained and coarse-grained settings. By refining quantization through a residual learning mechanism, R2Q enhances performance, improves training stability, and accelerates convergence under extreme compression. Furthermore, its modular design enables seamless integration with existing quantization-aware training (QAT) frameworks.

Video generation is experiencing rapid growth, driven by advances in diffusion models and the development of better and larger datasets. However, producing high-quality videos remains challenging due to the high-dimensional data and the complexity of the task. Recent efforts have primarily focused on enhancing visual quality and addressing temporal inconsistencies, such as flickering. Despite progress in these areas, the generated videos often fall short in terms of motion complexity and physical plausibility, with many outputs either appearing static or exhibiting unrealistic motion. In this work, we propose a framework to improve the realism of motion in generated videos, exploring a complementary direction to much of the existing literature. Specifically, we advocate for the incorporation of a retrieval mechanism during the generation phase. The retrieved videos act as grounding signals, providing the model with demonstrations of how the objects move. Our pipeline is designed to apply to any text-to-video diffusion model, conditioning a pretrained model on the retrieved samples with minimal fine-tuning. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach through established metrics, recently proposed benchmarks, and qualitative results, and we highlight additional applications of the framework.

In this work we explore the latency and accuracy of keyword spotting (KWS) models in streaming and non-streaming modes on mobile phones. NN model conversion from non-streaming mode (model receives the whole input sequence and then returns the classification result) to streaming mode (model receives portion of the input sequence and classifies it incrementally) may require manual model rewriting. We address this by designing a Tensorflow/Keras based library which allows automatic conversion of non-streaming models to streaming ones with minimum effort. With this library we benchmark multiple KWS models in both streaming and non-streaming modes on mobile phones and demonstrate different tradeoffs between latency and accuracy. We also explore novel KWS models with multi-head attention which reduce the classification error over the state-of-art by 10% on Google speech commands data sets V2. The streaming library with all experiments is open-sourced.

Recently, great progress has been achieved in text-to-video (T2V) generation by scaling transformer-based diffusion models to billions of parameters, which can generate high-quality videos. However, existing models typically produce only short clips offline, restricting their use cases in interactive and real-time applications. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing StreamDiT, a streaming video generation model. StreamDiT training is based on flow matching by adding a moving buffer. We design mixed training with different partitioning schemes of buffered frames to boost both content consistency and visual quality. StreamDiT modeling is based on adaLN DiT with varying time embedding and window attention. To practice the proposed method, we train a StreamDiT model with 4B parameters. In addition, we propose a multistep distillation method tailored for StreamDiT. Sampling distillation is performed in each segment of a chosen partitioning scheme. After distillation, the total number of function evaluations (NFEs) is reduced to the number of chunks in a buffer. Finally, our distilled model reaches real-time performance at 16 FPS on one GPU, which can generate video streams at 512p resolution. We evaluate our method through both quantitative metrics and human evaluation. Our model enables real-time applications, e.g. streaming generation, interactive generation, and video-to-video. We provide video results and more examples in our project website: <a href="https://cumulo-autumn.github.io/StreamDiT/">this https URL.</a>

In the evolving field of machine learning, video generation has witnessed significant advancements with autoregressive-based transformer models and diffusion models, known for synthesizing dynamic and realistic scenes. However, these models often face challenges with prolonged inference times, even for generating short video clips such as GIFs. This paper introduces FlashVideo, a novel framework tailored for swift Text-to-Video generation. FlashVideo represents the first successful adaptation of the RetNet architecture for video generation, bringing a unique approach to the field. Leveraging the RetNet-based architecture, FlashVideo reduces the time complexity of inference from O(L^2) to O(L) for a sequence of length L, significantly accelerating inference speed. Additionally, we adopt a redundant-free frame interpolation method, enhancing the efficiency of frame interpolation. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FlashVideo achieves a times9.17 efficiency improvement over a traditional autoregressive-based transformer model, and its inference speed is of the same order of magnitude as that of BERT-based transformer models.

We present a novel image inversion framework and a training pipeline to achieve high-fidelity image inversion with high-quality attribute editing. Inverting real images into StyleGAN's latent space is an extensively studied problem, yet the trade-off between the image reconstruction fidelity and image editing quality remains an open challenge. The low-rate latent spaces are limited in their expressiveness power for high-fidelity reconstruction. On the other hand, high-rate latent spaces result in degradation in editing quality. In this work, to achieve high-fidelity inversion, we learn residual features in higher latent codes that lower latent codes were not able to encode. This enables preserving image details in reconstruction. To achieve high-quality editing, we learn how to transform the residual features for adapting to manipulations in latent codes. We train the framework to extract residual features and transform them via a novel architecture pipeline and cycle consistency losses. We run extensive experiments and compare our method with state-of-the-art inversion methods. Qualitative metrics and visual comparisons show significant improvements. Code: https://github.com/hamzapehlivan/StyleRes

We propose a systematic approach to reduce the memory consumption of deep neural network training. Specifically, we design an algorithm that costs O(sqrt(n)) memory to train a n layer network, with only the computational cost of an extra forward pass per mini-batch. As many of the state-of-the-art models hit the upper bound of the GPU memory, our algorithm allows deeper and more complex models to be explored, and helps advance the innovations in deep learning research. We focus on reducing the memory cost to store the intermediate feature maps and gradients during training. Computation graph analysis is used for automatic in-place operation and memory sharing optimizations. We show that it is possible to trade computation for memory - giving a more memory efficient training algorithm with a little extra computation cost. In the extreme case, our analysis also shows that the memory consumption can be reduced to O(log n) with as little as O(n log n) extra cost for forward computation. Our experiments show that we can reduce the memory cost of a 1,000-layer deep residual network from 48G to 7G with only 30 percent additional running time cost on ImageNet problems. Similarly, significant memory cost reduction is observed in training complex recurrent neural networks on very long sequences.

High temporal resolution is essential for capturing fine-grained details in video understanding. However, current video large language models (VLLMs) and benchmarks mostly rely on low-frame-rate sampling, such as uniform sampling or keyframe selection, discarding dense temporal information. This compromise avoids the high cost of tokenizing every frame, which otherwise leads to redundant computation and linear token growth as video length increases. While this trade-off works for slowly changing content, it fails for tasks like lecture comprehension, where information appears in nearly every frame and requires precise temporal alignment. To address this gap, we introduce Dense Video Understanding (DVU), which enables high-FPS video comprehension by reducing both tokenization time and token overhead. Existing benchmarks are also limited, as their QA pairs focus on coarse content changes. We therefore propose DIVE (Dense Information Video Evaluation), the first benchmark designed for dense temporal reasoning. To make DVU practical, we present Gated Residual Tokenization (GRT), a two-stage framework: (1) Motion-Compensated Inter-Gated Tokenization uses pixel-level motion estimation to skip static regions during tokenization, achieving sub-linear growth in token count and compute. (2) Semantic-Scene Intra-Tokenization Merging fuses tokens across static regions within a scene, further reducing redundancy while preserving dynamic semantics. Experiments on DIVE show that GRT outperforms larger VLLM baselines and scales positively with FPS. These results highlight the importance of dense temporal information and demonstrate that GRT enables efficient, scalable high-FPS video understanding.

In this paper, we present Reshape Dimensions Network (ReDimNet), a novel neural network architecture for extracting utterance-level speaker representations. Our approach leverages dimensionality reshaping of 2D feature maps to 1D signal representation and vice versa, enabling the joint usage of 1D and 2D blocks. We propose an original network topology that preserves the volume of channel-timestep-frequency outputs of 1D and 2D blocks, facilitating efficient residual feature maps aggregation. Moreover, ReDimNet is efficiently scalable, and we introduce a range of model sizes, varying from 1 to 15 M parameters and from 0.5 to 20 GMACs. Our experimental results demonstrate that ReDimNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in speaker recognition while reducing computational complexity and the number of model parameters.

Recurrent neural network (RNN) and connectionist temporal classification (CTC) have showed successes in many sequence labeling tasks with the strong ability of dealing with the problems where the alignment between the inputs and the target labels is unknown. Residual network is a new structure of convolutional neural network and works well in various computer vision tasks. In this paper, we take advantage of the architectures mentioned above to create a new network for handwritten digit string recognition. First we design a residual network to extract features from input images, then we employ a RNN to model the contextual information within feature sequences and predict recognition results. At the top of this network, a standard CTC is applied to calculate the loss and yield the final results. These three parts compose an end-to-end trainable network. The proposed new architecture achieves the highest performances on ORAND-CAR-A and ORAND-CAR-B with recognition rates 89.75% and 91.14%, respectively. In addition, the experiments on a generated captcha dataset which has much longer string length show the potential of the proposed network to handle long strings.

We introduce a new family of deep neural network models. Instead of specifying a discrete sequence of hidden layers, we parameterize the derivative of the hidden state using a neural network. The output of the network is computed using a black-box differential equation solver. These continuous-depth models have constant memory cost, adapt their evaluation strategy to each input, and can explicitly trade numerical precision for speed. We demonstrate these properties in continuous-depth residual networks and continuous-time latent variable models. We also construct continuous normalizing flows, a generative model that can train by maximum likelihood, without partitioning or ordering the data dimensions. For training, we show how to scalably backpropagate through any ODE solver, without access to its internal operations. This allows end-to-end training of ODEs within larger models.

We present ResMLP, an architecture built entirely upon multi-layer perceptrons for image classification. It is a simple residual network that alternates (i) a linear layer in which image patches interact, independently and identically across channels, and (ii) a two-layer feed-forward network in which channels interact independently per patch. When trained with a modern training strategy using heavy data-augmentation and optionally distillation, it attains surprisingly good accuracy/complexity trade-offs on ImageNet. We also train ResMLP models in a self-supervised setup, to further remove priors from employing a labelled dataset. Finally, by adapting our model to machine translation we achieve surprisingly good results. We share pre-trained models and our code based on the Timm library.

Constructing photo-realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos (FVVs) of dynamic scenes from multi-view videos remains a challenging endeavor. Despite the remarkable advancements achieved by current neural rendering techniques, these methods generally require complete video sequences for offline training and are not capable of real-time rendering. To address these constraints, we introduce 3DGStream, a method designed for efficient FVV streaming of real-world dynamic scenes. Our method achieves fast on-the-fly per-frame reconstruction within 12 seconds and real-time rendering at 200 FPS. Specifically, we utilize 3D Gaussians (3DGs) to represent the scene. Instead of the na\"ive approach of directly optimizing 3DGs per-frame, we employ a compact Neural Transformation Cache (NTC) to model the translations and rotations of 3DGs, markedly reducing the training time and storage required for each FVV frame. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive 3DG addition strategy to handle emerging objects in dynamic scenes. Experiments demonstrate that 3DGStream achieves competitive performance in terms of rendering speed, image quality, training time, and model storage when compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Implicit Neural Representation (INR) has emerged as a powerful tool for encoding discrete signals into continuous, differentiable functions using neural networks. However, these models often have an unfortunate reliance on monolithic architectures to represent high-dimensional data, leading to prohibitive computational costs as dimensionality grows. We propose F-INR, a framework that reformulates INR learning through functional tensor decomposition, breaking down high-dimensional tasks into lightweight, axis-specific sub-networks. Each sub-network learns a low-dimensional data component (e.g., spatial or temporal). Then, we combine these components via tensor operations, reducing forward pass complexity while improving accuracy through specialized learning. F-INR is modular and, therefore, architecture-agnostic, compatible with MLPs, SIREN, WIRE, or other state-of-the-art INR architecture. It is also decomposition-agnostic, supporting CP, TT, and Tucker modes with user-defined rank for speed-accuracy control. In our experiments, F-INR trains 100times faster than existing approaches on video tasks while achieving higher fidelity (+3.4 dB PSNR). Similar gains hold for image compression, physics simulations, and 3D geometry reconstruction. Through this, F-INR offers a new scalable, flexible solution for high-dimensional signal modeling.

In this work, we propose "Residual Attention Network", a convolutional neural network using attention mechanism which can incorporate with state-of-art feed forward network architecture in an end-to-end training fashion. Our Residual Attention Network is built by stacking Attention Modules which generate attention-aware features. The attention-aware features from different modules change adaptively as layers going deeper. Inside each Attention Module, bottom-up top-down feedforward structure is used to unfold the feedforward and feedback attention process into a single feedforward process. Importantly, we propose attention residual learning to train very deep Residual Attention Networks which can be easily scaled up to hundreds of layers. Extensive analyses are conducted on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets to verify the effectiveness of every module mentioned above. Our Residual Attention Network achieves state-of-the-art object recognition performance on three benchmark datasets including CIFAR-10 (3.90% error), CIFAR-100 (20.45% error) and ImageNet (4.8% single model and single crop, top-5 error). Note that, our method achieves 0.6% top-1 accuracy improvement with 46% trunk depth and 69% forward FLOPs comparing to ResNet-200. The experiment also demonstrates that our network is robust against noisy labels.

In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate streaming speech recognition model based on the FastConformer architecture. We adapted the FastConformer architecture for streaming applications through: (1) constraining both the look-ahead and past contexts in the encoder, and (2) introducing an activation caching mechanism to enable the non-autoregressive encoder to operate autoregressively during inference. The proposed model is thoughtfully designed in a way to eliminate the accuracy disparity between the train and inference time which is common for many streaming models. Furthermore, our proposed encoder works with various decoder configurations including Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and RNN-Transducer (RNNT) decoders. Additionally, we introduced a hybrid CTC/RNNT architecture which utilizes a shared encoder with both a CTC and RNNT decoder to boost the accuracy and save computation. We evaluate the proposed model on LibriSpeech dataset and a multi-domain large scale dataset and demonstrate that it can achieve better accuracy with lower latency and inference time compared to a conventional buffered streaming model baseline. We also showed that training a model with multiple latencies can achieve better accuracy than single latency models while it enables us to support multiple latencies with a single model. Our experiments also showed the hybrid architecture would not only speedup the convergence of the CTC decoder but also improves the accuracy of streaming models compared to single decoder models.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and its variants have recently emerged as successful methods for novel view synthesis and 3D scene reconstruction. However, most current NeRF models either achieve high accuracy using large model sizes, or achieve high memory-efficiency by trading off accuracy. This limits the applicable scope of any single model, since high-accuracy models might not fit in low-memory devices, and memory-efficient models might not satisfy high-quality requirements. To this end, we present SlimmeRF, a model that allows for instant test-time trade-offs between model size and accuracy through slimming, thus making the model simultaneously suitable for scenarios with different computing budgets. We achieve this through a newly proposed algorithm named Tensorial Rank Incrementation (TRaIn) which increases the rank of the model's tensorial representation gradually during training. We also observe that our model allows for more effective trade-offs in sparse-view scenarios, at times even achieving higher accuracy after being slimmed. We credit this to the fact that erroneous information such as floaters tend to be stored in components corresponding to higher ranks. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Shiran-Yuan/SlimmeRF.

Convolutional neural networks are now seeing widespread use in a variety of fields, including image classification, facial and object recognition, medical imaging analysis, and many more. In addition, there are applications such as physics-informed simulators in which accurate forecasts in real time with a minimal lag are required. The present neural network designs include millions of parameters, which makes it difficult to install such complex models on devices that have limited memory. Compression techniques might be able to resolve these issues by decreasing the size of CNN models that are created by reducing the number of parameters that contribute to the complexity of the models. We propose a compressed tensor format of convolutional layer, a priori, before the training of the neural network. 3-way kernels or 2-way kernels in convolutional layers are replaced by one-way fiters. The overfitting phenomena will be reduced also. The time needed to make predictions or time required for training using the original Convolutional Neural Networks model would be cut significantly if there were fewer parameters to deal with. In this paper we present a method of a priori compressing convolutional neural networks for finite element (FE) predictions of physical data. Afterwards we validate our a priori compressed models on physical data from a FE model solving a 2D wave equation. We show that the proposed convolutinal compression technique achieves equivalent performance as classical convolutional layers with fewer trainable parameters and lower memory footprint.

Flow matching has emerged as a powerful generative modeling approach with flexible choices of source distribution. While Gaussian distributions are commonly used, the potential for better alternatives in high-dimensional data generation remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel 2D simulation that captures high-dimensional geometric properties in an interpretable 2D setting, enabling us to analyze the learning dynamics of flow matching during training. Based on this analysis, we derive several key insights about flow matching behavior: (1) density approximation can paradoxically degrade performance due to mode discrepancy, (2) directional alignment suffers from path entanglement when overly concentrated, (3) Gaussian's omnidirectional coverage ensures robust learning, and (4) norm misalignment incurs substantial learning costs. Building on these insights, we propose a practical framework that combines norm-aligned training with directionally-pruned sampling. This approach maintains the robust omnidirectional supervision essential for stable flow learning, while eliminating initializations in data-sparse regions during inference. Importantly, our pruning strategy can be applied to any flow matching model trained with a Gaussian source, providing immediate performance gains without the need for retraining. Empirical evaluations demonstrate consistent improvements in both generation quality and sampling efficiency. Our findings provide practical insights and guidelines for source distribution design and introduce a readily applicable technique for improving existing flow matching models. Our code is available at https://github.com/kwanseokk/SourceFM.

Representing features at multiple scales is of great importance for numerous vision tasks. Recent advances in backbone convolutional neural networks (CNNs) continually demonstrate stronger multi-scale representation ability, leading to consistent performance gains on a wide range of applications. However, most existing methods represent the multi-scale features in a layer-wise manner. In this paper, we propose a novel building block for CNNs, namely Res2Net, by constructing hierarchical residual-like connections within one single residual block. The Res2Net represents multi-scale features at a granular level and increases the range of receptive fields for each network layer. The proposed Res2Net block can be plugged into the state-of-the-art backbone CNN models, e.g., ResNet, ResNeXt, and DLA. We evaluate the Res2Net block on all these models and demonstrate consistent performance gains over baseline models on widely-used datasets, e.g., CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. Further ablation studies and experimental results on representative computer vision tasks, i.e., object detection, class activation mapping, and salient object detection, further verify the superiority of the Res2Net over the state-of-the-art baseline methods. The source code and trained models are available on https://mmcheng.net/res2net/.

Deep implicit functions have been found to be an effective tool for efficiently encoding all manner of natural signals. Their attractiveness stems from their ability to compactly represent signals with little to no off-line training data. Instead, they leverage the implicit bias of deep networks to decouple hidden redundancies within the signal. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that additional compression can be achieved by leveraging the redundancies that exist between layers. We propose to use a novel run-time decoder-only hypernetwork - that uses no offline training data - to better model this cross-layer parameter redundancy. Previous applications of hyper-networks with deep implicit functions have applied feed-forward encoder/decoder frameworks that rely on large offline datasets that do not generalize beyond the signals they were trained on. We instead present a strategy for the initialization of run-time deep implicit functions for single-instance signals through a Decoder-Only randomly projected Hypernetwork (D'OH). By directly changing the dimension of a latent code to approximate a target implicit neural architecture, we provide a natural way to vary the memory footprint of neural representations without the costly need for neural architecture search on a space of alternative low-rate structures.

The ability of perceiving fine-grained spatial and temporal information is crucial for video-language retrieval. However, the existing video retrieval benchmarks, such as MSRVTT and MSVD, fail to efficiently evaluate the fine-grained retrieval ability of video-language models (VLMs) due to a lack of detailed annotations. To address this problem, we present FIBER, a FIne-grained BEnchmark for text to video Retrieval, containing 1,000 videos sourced from the FineAction dataset. Uniquely, our FIBER benchmark provides detailed human-annotated spatial annotations and temporal annotations for each video, making it possible to independently evaluate the spatial and temporal bias of VLMs on video retrieval task. Besides, we employ a text embedding method to unlock the capability of fine-grained video-language understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Surprisingly, the experiment results show that our Video Large Language Encoder (VLLE) performs comparably to CLIP-based models on traditional benchmarks and has a stronger capability of fine-grained representation with lower spatial-temporal bias. Project page: https://fiber-bench.github.io.

This article proposes to auto-encode text at byte-level using convolutional networks with a recursive architecture. The motivation is to explore whether it is possible to have scalable and homogeneous text generation at byte-level in a non-sequential fashion through the simple task of auto-encoding. We show that non-sequential text generation from a fixed-length representation is not only possible, but also achieved much better auto-encoding results than recurrent networks. The proposed model is a multi-stage deep convolutional encoder-decoder framework using residual connections, containing up to 160 parameterized layers. Each encoder or decoder contains a shared group of modules that consists of either pooling or upsampling layers, making the network recursive in terms of abstraction levels in representation. Results for 6 large-scale paragraph datasets are reported, in 3 languages including Arabic, Chinese and English. Analyses are conducted to study several properties of the proposed model.

More transformer blocks with residual connections have recently achieved impressive results on various tasks. To achieve better performance with fewer trainable parameters, recent methods are proposed to go shallower by parameter sharing or model compressing along with the depth. However, weak modeling capacity limits their performance. Contrastively, going wider by inducing more trainable matrixes and parameters would produce a huge model requiring advanced parallelism to train and inference. In this paper, we propose a parameter-efficient framework, going wider instead of deeper. Specially, following existing works, we adapt parameter sharing to compress along depth. But, such deployment would limit the performance. To maximize modeling capacity, we scale along model width by replacing feed-forward network (FFN) with mixture-of-experts (MoE). Across transformer blocks, instead of sharing normalization layers, we propose to use individual layernorms to transform various semantic representations in a more parameter-efficient way. To evaluate our plug-and-run framework, we design WideNet and conduct comprehensive experiments on popular computer vision and natural language processing benchmarks. On ImageNet-1K, our best model outperforms Vision Transformer (ViT) by 1.5% with 0.72 times trainable parameters. Using 0.46 times and 0.13 times parameters, our WideNet can still surpass ViT and ViT-MoE by 0.8% and 2.1%, respectively. On four natural language processing datasets, WideNet outperforms ALBERT by 1.8% on average and surpass BERT using factorized embedding parameterization by 0.8% with fewer parameters.

Attention operators have been applied on both 1-D data like texts and higher-order data such as images and videos. Use of attention operators on high-order data requires flattening of the spatial or spatial-temporal dimensions into a vector, which is assumed to follow a multivariate normal distribution. This not only incurs excessive requirements on computational resources, but also fails to preserve structures in data. In this work, we propose to avoid flattening by assuming the data follow matrix-variate normal distributions. Based on this new view, we develop Kronecker attention operators (KAOs) that operate on high-order tensor data directly. More importantly, the proposed KAOs lead to dramatic reductions in computational resources. Experimental results show that our methods reduce the amount of required computational resources by a factor of hundreds, with larger factors for higher-dimensional and higher-order data. Results also show that networks with KAOs outperform models without attention, while achieving competitive performance as those with original attention operators.

Transformers can capture long-range dependencies using self-attention, allowing tokens to attend to all others directly. However, stacking multiple attention layers leads to attention concentration. One natural way to address this issue is to use cross-layer attention, allowing information from earlier layers to be directly accessible to later layers. However, this approach is computationally expensive. To address this problem, we propose Transformer with residual value (ResFormer) which approximates cross-layer attention through adding a residual connection from the values of the the first layer to all subsequent layers. Based on this method, one variant is the Transformer with single layer value (SVFormer), where all layers share the same value embedding from first layer, reducing the KV cache by nearly 50%. Comprehensive empirical evidence demonstrates that ResFormer mitigates attention concentration problem in deeper layers and enhances representation across most layers, outperforming the vanilla Transformer, DenseFormer, and NeuTRENO in training error as well as downstream tasks. SVFormer trains significantly faster than the vanilla Transformer and performs better than other methods like GQA and CLA, with performance influenced by sequence length and cumulative learning rate.

Normalizing Flows (NFs) have been established as a principled framework for generative modeling. Standard NFs consist of a forward process and a reverse process: the forward process maps data to noise, while the reverse process generates samples by inverting it. Typical NF forward transformations are constrained by explicit invertibility, ensuring that the reverse process can serve as their exact analytic inverse. Recent developments in TARFlow and its variants have revitalized NF methods by combining Transformers and autoregressive flows, but have also exposed causal decoding as a major bottleneck. In this work, we introduce Bidirectional Normalizing Flow (BiFlow), a framework that removes the need for an exact analytic inverse. BiFlow learns a reverse model that approximates the underlying noise-to-data inverse mapping, enabling more flexible loss functions and architectures. Experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that BiFlow, compared to its causal decoding counterpart, improves generation quality while accelerating sampling by up to two orders of magnitude. BiFlow yields state-of-the-art results among NF-based methods and competitive performance among single-evaluation ("1-NFE") methods. Following recent encouraging progress on NFs, we hope our work will draw further attention to this classical paradigm.

Recent advances in video generation have achieved remarkable improvements in visual content fidelity. However, the absence of synchronized audio severely undermines immersive experience and restricts practical applications of these technologies. To address this challenge, several pioneering works have explored diffusion transformer architectures for generating plausible video-synchronized audio, including Kling-foley, HunyuanVideo-foley and Thinksound. Distinct from existing works, we introduce an autoregressive audio generation architecture (DreamFoley) that harnesses the capabilities of large vision-language models (VLMs) to jointly model sequential interactions among video, audio, and text modalities. Our approach features a dual-visual encoder module that effectively captures both audio-aligned and text-aligned visual features. Additionally, we employ a Residual Vector Quantization audio tokenizer with a delay-pattern generation scheme to balance the trade-off between training efficiency and audio quality. Moreover, we introduce the classifier-free guidance strategy into VLMs to bootstrap generated audio quality. Furthermore, we establish an efficient data production pipeline to scale audio-video-text triple collection. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our model, achieving promising performance across popular benchmarks. We hope that the findings in this study provide a strong foundation for future video-to-audio generation research. We also release the previously missing audio-visual textual descriptions from the public benchmark, aiming to facilitate subsequent researchers in conducting more convenient and effective evaluations and comparisons.

Digital cameras digitize scene light into linear raw representations, which the image signal processor (ISP) converts into display-ready outputs. While raw data preserves full sensor information--valuable for editing and vision tasks--formats such as Digital Negative (DNG) require large storage, making them impractical in constrained scenarios. In contrast, JPEG is a widely supported format, offering high compression efficiency and broad compatibility, but it is not well-suited for raw storage. This paper presents RawJPEG Adapter, a lightweight, learnable, and invertible preprocessing pipeline that adapts raw images for standard JPEG compression. Our method applies spatial and optional frequency-domain transforms, with compact parameters stored in the JPEG comment field, enabling accurate raw reconstruction. Experiments across multiple datasets show that our method achieves higher fidelity than direct JPEG storage, supports other codecs, and provides a favorable trade-off between compression ratio and reconstruction accuracy.

We introduce Random Feature Representation Boosting (RFRBoost), a novel method for constructing deep residual random feature neural networks (RFNNs) using boosting theory. RFRBoost uses random features at each layer to learn the functional gradient of the network representation, enhancing performance while preserving the convex optimization benefits of RFNNs. In the case of MSE loss, we obtain closed-form solutions to greedy layer-wise boosting with random features. For general loss functions, we show that fitting random feature residual blocks reduces to solving a quadratically constrained least squares problem. We demonstrate, through numerical experiments on 91 tabular datasets for regression and classification, that RFRBoost significantly outperforms traditional RFNNs and end-to-end trained MLP ResNets, while offering substantial computational advantages and theoretical guarantees stemming from boosting theory.

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has recently seen a surge of interest as a simple yet powerful tool for large language models (LLMs) compression, with a growing number of works demonstrating 20-80% parameter reductions at minimal accuracy loss. Previous SVD-based approaches have focused primarily on reducing the memory footprint of model weights, largely overlooking the additional activation memory overhead incurred during inference when applying truncated factors via standard dense CUDA kernels. Our experiments demonstrate that this activation overhead, scaling with sequence length and hidden dimension, prevents current SVD compression techniques from achieving any reduction in peak inference memory, thereby limiting their viability for real-world, on-device deployments. We introduce FlashSVD, a novel, end-to-end rank-aware streaming inference framework specifically designed for SVD-compressed large language models. FlashSVD can be seamlessly integrated with any model that employs SVD-based methods for parameter reduction. By fusing low-rank projection kernels directly into both the self-attention and feed-forward network (FFN) pipelines, FlashSVD avoid materializing full-size activation buffers. Instead, small tiles of the truncated factors are loaded into on-chip SRAM, multiplied and reduced on the fly, and immediately evicted, preserving high GPU occupancy and adding no extra latency. On standard encoder benchmarks (e.g., BERT-Base), FlashSVD cuts peak activation memory by up to 70.2% and intermediate transient memory by 75%, all while incur no accuracy loss with upstreaming compression methods, offering a practical path toward memory-constrained deployment of low-rank LLMs.

This paper presents Randomized AutoRegressive modeling (RAR) for visual generation, which sets a new state-of-the-art performance on the image generation task while maintaining full compatibility with language modeling frameworks. The proposed RAR is simple: during a standard autoregressive training process with a next-token prediction objective, the input sequence-typically ordered in raster form-is randomly permuted into different factorization orders with a probability r, where r starts at 1 and linearly decays to 0 over the course of training. This annealing training strategy enables the model to learn to maximize the expected likelihood over all factorization orders and thus effectively improve the model's capability of modeling bidirectional contexts. Importantly, RAR preserves the integrity of the autoregressive modeling framework, ensuring full compatibility with language modeling while significantly improving performance in image generation. On the ImageNet-256 benchmark, RAR achieves an FID score of 1.48, not only surpassing prior state-of-the-art autoregressive image generators but also outperforming leading diffusion-based and masked transformer-based methods. Code and models will be made available at https://github.com/bytedance/1d-tokenizer

Deep neural network is difficult to train and this predicament becomes worse as the depth increases. The essence of this problem exists in the magnitude of backpropagated errors that will result in gradient vanishing or exploding phenomenon. We show that a variant of regularizer which utilizes orthonormality among different filter banks can alleviate this problem. Moreover, we design a backward error modulation mechanism based on the quasi-isometry assumption between two consecutive parametric layers. Equipped with these two ingredients, we propose several novel optimization solutions that can be utilized for training a specific-structured (repetitively triple modules of Conv-BNReLU) extremely deep convolutional neural network (CNN) WITHOUT any shortcuts/ identity mappings from scratch. Experiments show that our proposed solutions can achieve distinct improvements for a 44-layer and a 110-layer plain networks on both the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Moreover, we can successfully train plain CNNs to match the performance of the residual counterparts. Besides, we propose new principles for designing network structure from the insights evoked by orthonormality. Combined with residual structure, we achieve comparative performance on the ImageNet dataset.

Text-to-video diffusion models enable the generation of high-quality videos that follow text instructions, making it easy to create diverse and individual content. However, existing approaches mostly focus on high-quality short video generation (typically 16 or 24 frames), ending up with hard-cuts when naively extended to the case of long video synthesis. To overcome these limitations, we introduce StreamingT2V, an autoregressive approach for long video generation of 80, 240, 600, 1200 or more frames with smooth transitions. The key components are:(i) a short-term memory block called conditional attention module (CAM), which conditions the current generation on the features extracted from the previous chunk via an attentional mechanism, leading to consistent chunk transitions, (ii) a long-term memory block called appearance preservation module, which extracts high-level scene and object features from the first video chunk to prevent the model from forgetting the initial scene, and (iii) a randomized blending approach that enables to apply a video enhancer autoregressively for infinitely long videos without inconsistencies between chunks. Experiments show that StreamingT2V generates high motion amount. In contrast, all competing image-to-video methods are prone to video stagnation when applied naively in an autoregressive manner. Thus, we propose with StreamingT2V a high-quality seamless text-to-long video generator that outperforms competitors with consistency and motion. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/StreamingT2V

Conditional flow matching (CFM) has emerged as a powerful framework for training continuous normalizing flows due to its computational efficiency and effectiveness. However, standard CFM often produces paths that deviate significantly from straight-line interpolations between prior and target distributions, making generation slower and less accurate due to the need for fine discretization at inference. Recent methods enhance CFM performance by inducing shorter and straighter trajectories but typically rely on computationally expensive mini-batch optimal transport (OT). Drawing insights from entropic optimal transport (EOT), we propose Weighted Conditional Flow Matching (W-CFM), a novel approach that modifies the classical CFM loss by weighting each training pair (x, y) with a Gibbs kernel. We show that this weighting recovers the entropic OT coupling up to some bias in the marginals, and we provide the conditions under which the marginals remain nearly unchanged. Moreover, we establish an equivalence between W-CFM and the minibatch OT method in the large-batch limit, showing how our method overcomes computational and performance bottlenecks linked to batch size. Empirically, we test our method on unconditional generation on various synthetic and real datasets, confirming that W-CFM achieves comparable or superior sample quality, fidelity, and diversity to other alternative baselines while maintaining the computational efficiency of vanilla CFM.

Existing state-of-the-art image tokenization methods leverage diverse semantic features from pre-trained vision models for additional supervision, to expand the distribution of latent representations and thereby improve the quality of image reconstruction and generation. These methods employ a locally supervised approach for semantic supervision, which limits the uniformity of semantic distribution. However, VA-VAE proves that a more uniform feature distribution yields better generation performance. In this work, we introduce a Global Perspective Tokenizer (GloTok), which utilizes global relational information to model a more uniform semantic distribution of tokenized features. Specifically, a codebook-wise histogram relation learning method is proposed to transfer the semantics, which are modeled by pre-trained models on the entire dataset, to the semantic codebook. Then, we design a residual learning module that recovers the fine-grained details to minimize the reconstruction error caused by quantization. Through the above design, GloTok delivers more uniformly distributed semantic latent representations, which facilitates the training of autoregressive (AR) models for generating high-quality images without requiring direct access to pre-trained models during the training process. Experiments on the standard ImageNet-1k benchmark clearly show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and generation quality.

A recurrent structure is a popular framework choice for the task of video super-resolution. The state-of-the-art method BasicVSR adopts bidirectional propagation with feature alignment to effectively exploit information from the entire input video. In this study, we redesign BasicVSR by proposing second-order grid propagation and flow-guided deformable alignment. We show that by empowering the recurrent framework with the enhanced propagation and alignment, one can exploit spatiotemporal information across misaligned video frames more effectively. The new components lead to an improved performance under a similar computational constraint. In particular, our model BasicVSR++ surpasses BasicVSR by 0.82 dB in PSNR with similar number of parameters. In addition to video super-resolution, BasicVSR++ generalizes well to other video restoration tasks such as compressed video enhancement. In NTIRE 2021, BasicVSR++ obtains three champions and one runner-up in the Video Super-Resolution and Compressed Video Enhancement Challenges. Codes and models will be released to MMEditing.