Daily Papers

We present a differentiable model that explicitly models boundaries -- including contours, corners and junctions -- using a new mechanism that we call boundary attention. We show that our model provides accurate results even when the boundary signal is very weak or is swamped by noise. Compared to previous classical methods for finding faint boundaries, our model has the advantages of being differentiable; being scalable to larger images; and automatically adapting to an appropriate level of geometric detail in each part of an image. Compared to previous deep methods for finding boundaries via end-to-end training, it has the advantages of providing sub-pixel precision, being more resilient to noise, and being able to process any image at its native resolution and aspect ratio.

Recent text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating high-resolution images from text but struggle with precise control over spatial composition and object counting. To address these challenges, several studies developed layout-to-image (L2I) approaches that incorporate layout instructions into text-to-image models. However, existing L2I methods typically require either fine-tuning pretrained parameters or training additional control modules for the diffusion models. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot L2I approach, BACON (Boundary Attention Constrained generation), which eliminates the need for additional modules or fine-tuning. Specifically, we use text-visual cross-attention feature maps to quantify inconsistencies between the layout of the generated images and the provided instructions, and then compute loss functions to optimize latent features during the diffusion reverse process. To enhance spatial controllability and mitigate semantic failures in complex layout instructions, we leverage pixel-to-pixel correlations in the self-attention feature maps to align cross-attention maps and combine three loss functions constrained by boundary attention to update latent features. Comprehensive experimental results on both L2I and non-L2I pretrained diffusion models demonstrate that our method outperforms existing zero-shot L2I techniuqes both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of image composition on the DrawBench and HRS benchmarks.

Two-branch network architecture has shown its efficiency and effectiveness in real-time semantic segmentation tasks. However, direct fusion of high-resolution details and low-frequency context has the drawback of detailed features being easily overwhelmed by surrounding contextual information. This overshoot phenomenon limits the improvement of the segmentation accuracy of existing two-branch models. In this paper, we make a connection between Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers and reveal that a two-branch network is equivalent to a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller, which inherently suffers from similar overshoot issues. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel three-branch network architecture: PIDNet, which contains three branches to parse detailed, context and boundary information, respectively, and employs boundary attention to guide the fusion of detailed and context branches. Our family of PIDNets achieve the best trade-off between inference speed and accuracy and their accuracy surpasses all the existing models with similar inference speed on the Cityscapes and CamVid datasets. Specifically, PIDNet-S achieves 78.6% mIOU with inference speed of 93.2 FPS on Cityscapes and 80.1% mIOU with speed of 153.7 FPS on CamVid.

We design controlled experiments to study HOW generative language models, like GPT, learn context-free grammars (CFGs) -- diverse language systems with a tree-like structure capturing many aspects of natural languages, programs, and logics. CFGs are as hard as pushdown automata, and can be ambiguous so that verifying if a string satisfies the rules requires dynamic programming. We construct synthetic data and demonstrate that even for difficult (long and ambiguous) CFGs, pre-trained transformers can learn to generate sentences with near-perfect accuracy and impressive diversity. More importantly, we delve into the physical principles behind how transformers learns CFGs. We discover that the hidden states within the transformer implicitly and precisely encode the CFG structure (such as putting tree node information exactly on the subtree boundary), and learn to form "boundary to boundary" attentions resembling dynamic programming. We also cover some extension of CFGs as well as the robustness aspect of transformers against grammar mistakes. Overall, our research provides a comprehensive and empirical understanding of how transformers learn CFGs, and reveals the physical mechanisms utilized by transformers to capture the structure and rules of languages.

This paper presents a new approach to recognize elements in floor plan layouts. Besides walls and rooms, we aim to recognize diverse floor plan elements, such as doors, windows and different types of rooms, in the floor layouts. To this end, we model a hierarchy of floor plan elements and design a deep multi-task neural network with two tasks: one to learn to predict room-boundary elements, and the other to predict rooms with types. More importantly, we formulate the room-boundary-guided attention mechanism in our spatial contextual module to carefully take room-boundary features into account to enhance the room-type predictions. Furthermore, we design a cross-and-within-task weighted loss to balance the multi-label tasks and prepare two new datasets for floor plan recognition. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our network over the state-of-the-art methods.

Temporal sentence grounding aims to localize moments relevant to a language description. Recently, DETR-like approaches achieved notable progress by predicting the center and length of a target moment. However, they suffer from the issue of center misalignment raised by the inherent ambiguity of moment centers, leading to inaccurate predictions. To remedy this problem, we propose a novel boundary-oriented moment formulation. In our paradigm, the model no longer needs to find the precise center but instead suffices to predict any anchor point within the interval, from which the boundaries are directly estimated. Based on this idea, we design a boundary-aligned moment detection transformer, equipped with a dual-pathway decoding process. Specifically, it refines the anchor and boundaries within parallel pathways using global and boundary-focused attention, respectively. This separate design allows the model to focus on desirable regions, enabling precise refinement of moment predictions. Further, we propose a quality-based ranking method, ensuring that proposals with high localization qualities are prioritized over incomplete ones. Experiments on three benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Pilhyeon/BAM-DETR.

High-quality instance and panoptic segmentation has traditionally relied on dense instance-level annotations such as masks, boxes, or points, which are costly, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. Unsupervised and weakly-supervised approaches reduce this burden but remain constrained by semantic backbone constraints and human bias, often producing merged or fragmented outputs. We present TRACE (TRAnsforming diffusion Cues to instance Edges), showing that text-to-image diffusion models secretly function as instance edge annotators. TRACE identifies the Instance Emergence Point (IEP) where object boundaries first appear in self-attention maps, extracts boundaries through Attention Boundary Divergence (ABDiv), and distills them into a lightweight one-step edge decoder. This design removes the need for per-image diffusion inversion, achieving 81x faster inference while producing sharper and more connected boundaries. On the COCO benchmark, TRACE improves unsupervised instance segmentation by +5.1 AP, and in tag-supervised panoptic segmentation it outperforms point-supervised baselines by +1.7 PQ without using any instance-level labels. These results reveal that diffusion models encode hidden instance boundary priors, and that decoding these signals offers a practical and scalable alternative to costly manual annotation. Project Page: https://shjo-april.github.io/TRACE/

Medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning, where accurate boundary delineation is essential for precise lesion localization, organ identification, and quantitative assessment. In recent years, deep learning-based methods have significantly advanced segmentation accuracy. However, two major challenges remain. First, the performance of these methods heavily relies on large-scale annotated datasets, which are often difficult to obtain in medical scenarios due to privacy concerns and high annotation costs. Second, clinically challenging scenarios, such as low contrast in certain imaging modalities and blurry lesion boundaries caused by malignancy, still pose obstacles to precise segmentation. To address these challenges, we propose MedSAM-CA, an architecture-level fine-tuning approach that mitigates reliance on extensive manual annotations by adapting the pretrained foundation model, Medical Segment Anything (MedSAM). MedSAM-CA introduces two key components: the Convolutional Attention-Enhanced Boundary Refinement Network (CBR-Net) and the Attention-Enhanced Feature Fusion Block (Atte-FFB). CBR-Net operates in parallel with the MedSAM encoder to recover boundary information potentially overlooked by long-range attention mechanisms, leveraging hierarchical convolutional processing. Atte-FFB, embedded in the MedSAM decoder, fuses multi-level fine-grained features from skip connections in CBR-Net with global representations upsampled within the decoder to enhance boundary delineation accuracy. Experiments on publicly available datasets covering dermoscopy, CT, and MRI imaging modalities validate the effectiveness of MedSAM-CA. On dermoscopy dataset, MedSAM-CA achieves 94.43% Dice with only 2% of full training data, reaching 97.25% of full-data training performance, demonstrating strong effectiveness in low-resource clinical settings.

Self-attention is usually described as a flexible, content-adaptive way to mix a token with information from its past. We reinterpret causal self-attention transformers, the backbone of modern foundation models, within a probabilistic framework, much as classical PCA is extended to probabilistic PCA. This reformulation reveals a key structural consequence of the underlying change of variables: a barrier constraint emerges on the parameters of self-attention. The resulting geometry exposes a degeneracy boundary where the attention-induced mapping becomes locally ill-conditioned, yielding a stability-margin interpretation analogous to the margin in support vector machines. This, in turn, naturally gives rise to the concept of support tokens. We further show that causal transformers define a consistent stochastic process over infinite token sequences, providing a rigorous probabilistic foundation for sequence modeling. Building on this view, we derive a Bayesian MAP training objective that requires only a minimal modification to standard LLM training: adding a smooth log-barrier penalty to the usual cross-entropy loss. Empirically, the resulting training objective improves robustness to input perturbations and sharpens the margin geometry of the learned representations without sacrificing out-of-sample accuracy.

One of the bottlenecks for instance segmentation today lies in the conflicting requirements of high-resolution inputs and lightweight, real-time inference. To address this bottleneck, we present a Polygon Detection Transformer (Poly-DETR) to reformulate instance segmentation as sparse vertex regression via Polar Representation, thereby eliminating the reliance on dense pixel-wise mask prediction. Considering the box-to-polygon reference shift in Detection Transformers, we propose Polar Deformable Attention and Position-Aware Training Scheme to dynamically update supervision and focus attention on boundary cues. Compared with state-of-the-art polar-based methods, Poly-DETR achieves a 4.7 mAP improvement on MS COCO test-dev. Moreover, we construct a parallel mask-based counterpart to support a systematic comparison between polar and mask representations. Experimental results show that Poly-DETR is more lightweight in high-resolution scenarios, reducing memory consumption by almost half on Cityscapes dataset. Notably, on PanNuke (cell segmentation) and SpaceNet (building footprints) datasets, Poly-DETR surpasses its mask-based counterpart on all metrics, which validates its advantage on regular-shaped instances in domain-specific settings.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is the dominant paradigm for inference-time scaling in language models, yet the causal influence of individual steps on the final answer poorly understood. We estimate each step's causal importance via early exit and use this measure to study how answers form across the reasoning traces of several model families. Across diverse tasks, we find that reasoning typically crosses a commitment boundary -- a sharp transition from transient intermediate guesses to a stable, high-confidence answer. This transition often happens in a single step, well before the model's reasoning block ends, and is followed by epiphenomenal CoT steps that leave the final answer probability unaltered. Using attention probes, we show that answer-formation stages can be linearly decoded from intermediate reasoning steps with high accuracy and generalize robustly to unseen reasoning tasks. We exploit this signal to early-exit reasoning blocks at the commitment boundary, reducing the length of CoTs up to 55\% on average with negligible impact on model performance.

Balancing fine-grained local modeling with long-range dependency capture under computational constraints remains a central challenge in sequence modeling. While Transformers provide strong token mixing, they suffer from quadratic complexity, whereas Mamba-style selective state-space models (SSMs) scale linearly but often struggle to capture high-rank and synchronous global interactions. We present a consistency boundary analysis that characterizes when diagonal short-memory SSMs can approximate causal attention and identifies structural gaps that remain. Motivated by this analysis, we propose InfoMamba, an attention-free hybrid architecture. InfoMamba replaces token-level self-attention with a concept bottleneck linear filtering layer that serves as a minimal-bandwidth global interface and integrates it with a selective recurrent stream through information-maximizing fusion (IMF). IMF dynamically injects global context into the SSM dynamics and encourages complementary information usage through a mutual-information-inspired objective. Extensive experiments on classification, dense prediction, and non-vision tasks show that InfoMamba consistently outperforms strong Transformer and SSM baselines, achieving competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-offs while maintaining near-linear scaling.

Although deep models have greatly improved the accuracy and robustness of image segmentation, obtaining segmentation results with highly accurate boundaries and fine structures is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network (BASNet), which comprises a predict-refine architecture and a hybrid loss, for highly accurate image segmentation. The predict-refine architecture consists of a densely supervised encoder-decoder network and a residual refinement module, which are respectively used to predict and refine a segmentation probability map. The hybrid loss is a combination of the binary cross entropy, structural similarity and intersection-over-union losses, which guide the network to learn three-level (ie, pixel-, patch- and map- level) hierarchy representations. We evaluate our BASNet on two reverse tasks including salient object segmentation, camouflaged object segmentation, showing that it achieves very competitive performance with sharp segmentation boundaries. Importantly, BASNet runs at over 70 fps on a single GPU which benefits many potential real applications. Based on BASNet, we further developed two (close to) commercial applications: AR COPY & PASTE, in which BASNet is integrated with augmented reality for "COPYING" and "PASTING" real-world objects, and OBJECT CUT, which is a web-based tool for automatic object background removal. Both applications have already drawn huge amount of attention and have important real-world impacts. The code and two applications will be publicly available at: https://github.com/NathanUA/BASNet.

The practical needs of the ``right to be forgotten'' and poisoned data removal call for efficient machine unlearning techniques, which enable machine learning models to unlearn, or to forget a fraction of training data and its lineage. Recent studies on machine unlearning for deep neural networks (DNNs) attempt to destroy the influence of the forgetting data by scrubbing the model parameters. However, it is prohibitively expensive due to the large dimension of the parameter space. In this paper, we refocus our attention from the parameter space to the decision space of the DNN model, and propose Boundary Unlearning, a rapid yet effective way to unlearn an entire class from a trained DNN model. The key idea is to shift the decision boundary of the original DNN model to imitate the decision behavior of the model retrained from scratch. We develop two novel boundary shift methods, namely Boundary Shrink and Boundary Expanding, both of which can rapidly achieve the utility and privacy guarantees. We extensively evaluate Boundary Unlearning on CIFAR-10 and Vggface2 datasets, and the results show that Boundary Unlearning can effectively forget the forgetting class on image classification and face recognition tasks, with an expected speed-up of 17times and 19times, respectively, compared with retraining from the scratch.

We propose a hierarchical attention mechanism based on two-level overlapping Schwarz domain decomposition. The method is motivated by the observation that two-level Schwarz domain decomposition methods combine local subdomain corrections with a coarse level that communicates global, long-range information. We test its usefulness in the context of finite-dimensional operator learning using a simple, one-dimensional diffusion problem with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Although elementary, this problem provides a controlled sequence-to-sequence setting in which the exact nonlocal solution operator is known. After discretization, learning the solution operator amounts to approximating the inverse of a symmetric positive definite matrix. As a baseline, we use a global softmax-free low-rank attention operator of the form QK^T. The proposed construction replaces this dense global factorization by a two-level additive structure: local low-rank attention blocks on overlapping subdomains are combined with a coarse attention block. The resulting operator has the form $M_θ^{-1} = ΦQ_0 K_0^T Φ^T + sum_{i=1}^{N} R_i^T D_i^{1/2} Q_i K_i^T D_i^{1/2} R_i. Here R_i restricts to an overlapping subdomain, D_i is a partition-of-unity weight, and Φ$ is a coarse interpolation (or prolongation) matrix. Numerical experiments for synthetic Fourier right-hand sides indicate that the domain-decomposition attention operator is able to train faster and can give more accurate approximations than a global low-rank attention baseline while using significantly fewer parameters.

Long-context decoding in LLMs is IO-bound: each token re-reads an ever-growing KV cache. Prior accelerations cut bytes via compression, which lowers fidelity, or selection/eviction, which restricts what remains accessible, and both can degrade delayed recall and long-form generation. We introduce MAC-Attention, a fidelity- and access-preserving alternative that accelerates decoding by reusing prior attention computations for semantically similar recent queries. It starts with a match stage that performs pre-RoPE L2 matching over a short local window; an amend stage rectifies the reused attention by recomputing a small band near the match boundary; and a complete stage fuses the rectified results with fresh attention computed on the KV tail through a numerically stable merge. On a match hit, the compute and bandwidth complexity is constant regardless of context length. The method is model-agnostic and composes with IO-aware kernels, paged-KV managers, and MQA/GQA. Across LongBench v2 (120K), RULER (120K), and LongGenBench (16K continuous generation), compared to the latest FlashInfer library, MAC-Attention reduces KV accesses by up to 99%, cuts token generation latency by over 60% at 128K, and achieves over 14.3x attention-phase speedups, up to 2.6x end-to-end, while maintaining full-attention quality. By reusing computation, MAC-Attention delivers long-context inference that is both fast and faithful. Code is available here: https://github.com/YJHMITWEB/MAC-Attention.git

We develop a unified mathematical framework for certified Top-k attention truncation that quantifies approximation error at both the distribution and output levels. For a single attention distribution P and its Top-k truncation hat P, we show that the total-variation distance coincides with the discarded softmax tail mass and satisfies TV(P,hat P)=1-e^{-KL(hat PVert P)}, yielding sharp Top-k-specific bounds in place of generic inequalities. From this we derive non-asymptotic deterministic bounds -- from a single boundary gap through multi-gap and blockwise variants -- that control TV(P,hat P) using only the ordered logits. Using an exact head-tail decomposition, we prove that the output error factorizes as |Attn(q,K,V)-Attn_k(q,K,V)|_2=τ|μ_{tail}-μ_{head}|_2 with τ=TV(P,hat P), yielding a new head-tail diameter bound |Attn(q,K,V)-Attn_k(q,K,V)|_2leτ,diam_{H,T} and refinements linking the error to Var_P(V). Under an i.i.d. Gaussian score model s_isimmathcal N(μ,σ^2) we derive closed-form tail masses and an asymptotic rule for the minimal k_varepsilon ensuring TV(P,hat P)levarepsilon, namely k_varepsilon/napproxΦ_c(σ+Φ^{-1}(varepsilon)). Experiments on bert-base-uncased and synthetic logits confirm the predicted scaling of k_varepsilon/n and show that certified Top-k can reduce scored keys by 2-4times on average while meeting the prescribed total-variation budget.

Colonoscopy is an effective technique for detecting colorectal polyps, which are highly related to colorectal cancer. In clinical practice, segmenting polyps from colonoscopy images is of great importance since it provides valuable information for diagnosis and surgery. However, accurate polyp segmentation is a challenging task, for two major reasons: (i) the same type of polyps has a diversity of size, color and texture; and (ii) the boundary between a polyp and its surrounding mucosa is not sharp. To address these challenges, we propose a parallel reverse attention network (PraNet) for accurate polyp segmentation in colonoscopy images. Specifically, we first aggregate the features in high-level layers using a parallel partial decoder (PPD). Based on the combined feature, we then generate a global map as the initial guidance area for the following components. In addition, we mine the boundary cues using a reverse attention (RA) module, which is able to establish the relationship between areas and boundary cues. Thanks to the recurrent cooperation mechanism between areas and boundaries, our PraNet is capable of calibrating any misaligned predictions, improving the segmentation accuracy. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on five challenging datasets across six metrics show that our PraNet improves the segmentation accuracy significantly, and presents a number of advantages in terms of generalizability, and real-time segmentation efficiency.

Automatic chord recognition (ACR) via deep learning models has gradually achieved promising recognition accuracy, yet two key challenges remain. First, prior work has primarily focused on audio-domain ACR, while symbolic music (e.g., score) ACR has received limited attention due to data scarcity. Second, existing methods still overlook strategies that are aligned with human music analytical practices. To address these challenges, we make two contributions: (1) we introduce POP909-CL, an enhanced version of POP909 dataset with tempo-aligned content and human-corrected labels of chords, beats, keys, and time signatures; and (2) We propose BACHI, a symbolic chord recognition model that decomposes the task into different decision steps, namely boundary detection and iterative ranking of chord root, quality, and bass (inversion). This mechanism mirrors the human ear-training practices. Experiments demonstrate that BACHI achieves state-of-the-art chord recognition performance on both classical and pop music benchmarks, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each module.

Due to the rapid development of large language models, people increasingly often encounter texts that may start as written by a human but continue as machine-generated. Detecting the boundary between human-written and machine-generated parts of such texts is a challenging problem that has not received much attention in literature. We attempt to bridge this gap and examine several ways to adapt state of the art artificial text detection classifiers to the boundary detection setting. We push all detectors to their limits, using the Real or Fake text benchmark that contains short texts on several topics and includes generations of various language models. We use this diversity to deeply examine the robustness of all detectors in cross-domain and cross-model settings to provide baselines and insights for future research. In particular, we find that perplexity-based approaches to boundary detection tend to be more robust to peculiarities of domain-specific data than supervised fine-tuning of the RoBERTa model; we also find which features of the text confuse boundary detection algorithms and negatively influence their performance in cross-domain settings.

With the maturity of depth sensors, the vulnerability of 3D point cloud models has received increasing attention in various applications such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. Previous 3D adversarial attackers either follow the white-box setting to iteratively update the coordinate perturbations based on gradients, or utilize the output model logits to estimate noisy gradients in the black-box setting. However, these attack methods are hard to be deployed in real-world scenarios since realistic 3D applications will not share any model details to users. Therefore, we explore a more challenging yet practical 3D attack setting, i.e., attacking point clouds with black-box hard labels, in which the attacker can only have access to the prediction label of the input. To tackle this setting, we propose a novel 3D attack method, termed 3D Hard-label attacker (3DHacker), based on the developed decision boundary algorithm to generate adversarial samples solely with the knowledge of class labels. Specifically, to construct the class-aware model decision boundary, 3DHacker first randomly fuses two point clouds of different classes in the spectral domain to craft their intermediate sample with high imperceptibility, then projects it onto the decision boundary via binary search. To restrict the final perturbation size, 3DHacker further introduces an iterative optimization strategy to move the intermediate sample along the decision boundary for generating adversarial point clouds with smallest trivial perturbations. Extensive evaluations show that, even in the challenging hard-label setting, 3DHacker still competitively outperforms existing 3D attacks regarding the attack performance as well as adversary quality.

Real-time semantic segmentation presents the dual challenge of designing efficient architectures that capture large receptive fields for semantic understanding while also refining detailed contours. Vision transformers model long-range dependencies effectively but incur high computational cost. To address these challenges, we introduce the Large Kernel Attention (LKA) mechanism. Our proposed Bilateral Efficient Visual Attention Network (BEVANet) expands the receptive field to capture contextual information and extracts visual and structural features using Sparse Decomposed Large Separable Kernel Attentions (SDLSKA). The Comprehensive Kernel Selection (CKS) mechanism dynamically adapts the receptive field to further enhance performance. Furthermore, the Deep Large Kernel Pyramid Pooling Module (DLKPPM) enriches contextual features by synergistically combining dilated convolutions and large kernel attention. The bilateral architecture facilitates frequent branch communication, and the Boundary Guided Adaptive Fusion (BGAF) module enhances boundary delineation by integrating spatial and semantic features under boundary guidance. BEVANet achieves real-time segmentation at 33 FPS, yielding 79.3% mIoU without pretraining and 81.0% mIoU on Cityscapes after ImageNet pretraining, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance. The code and model is available at https://github.com/maomao0819/BEVANet.

A Transformer-based deep direct sampling method is proposed for electrical impedance tomography, a well-known severely ill-posed nonlinear boundary value inverse problem. A real-time reconstruction is achieved by evaluating the learned inverse operator between carefully designed data and the reconstructed images. An effort is made to give a specific example to a fundamental question: whether and how one can benefit from the theoretical structure of a mathematical problem to develop task-oriented and structure-conforming deep neural networks? Specifically, inspired by direct sampling methods for inverse problems, the 1D boundary data in different frequencies are preprocessed by a partial differential equation-based feature map to yield 2D harmonic extensions as different input channels. Then, by introducing learnable non-local kernels, the direct sampling is recast to a modified attention mechanism. The new method achieves superior accuracy over its predecessors and contemporary operator learners and shows robustness to noises in benchmarks. This research shall strengthen the insights that, despite being invented for natural language processing tasks, the attention mechanism offers great flexibility to be modified in conformity with the a priori mathematical knowledge, which ultimately leads to the design of more physics-compatible neural architectures.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability to answer various queries as a general-purpose assistant. The continuous multi-modal large language models (MLLM) empower LLMs with the ability to perceive visual signals. The launch of GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) has generated significant interest in the research communities. GPT-4V(ison) has demonstrated significant power in both academia and industry fields, as a focal point in a new artificial intelligence generation. Though significant success was achieved by GPT-4V, exploring MLLMs in domain-specific analysis (e.g., marine analysis) that required domain-specific knowledge and expertise has gained less attention. In this study, we carry out the preliminary and comprehensive case study of utilizing GPT-4V for marine analysis. This report conducts a systematic evaluation of existing GPT-4V, assessing the performance of GPT-4V on marine research and also setting a new standard for future developments in MLLMs. The experimental results of GPT-4V show that the responses generated by GPT-4V are still far away from satisfying the domain-specific requirements of the marine professions. All images and prompts used in this study will be available at https://github.com/hkust-vgd/Marine_GPT-4V_Eval

In this work, we provide a thorough investigation of gist-based context compression methods to improve long-context processing in large language models. We focus on two key questions: (1) How well can these methods replace full attention models? and (2) What potential failure patterns arise due to compression? Through extensive experiments, we show that while gist-based compression can achieve near-lossless performance on tasks like retrieval-augmented generation and long-document QA, it faces challenges in tasks like synthetic recall. Furthermore, we identify three key failure patterns: lost by the boundary, lost if surprise, and lost along the way. To mitigate these issues, we propose two effective strategies: fine-grained autoencoding, which enhances the reconstruction of original token information, and segment-wise token importance estimation, which adjusts optimization based on token dependencies. Our work provides valuable insights into the understanding of gist token-based context compression and offers practical strategies for improving compression capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) are displaying emergent abilities for math reasoning tasks,and there is a growing attention on enhancing the ability of open-source LLMs through supervised fine-tuning (SFT).In this paper, we aim to explore a general data strategy for supervised data to help optimize and expand math reasoning ability.Firstly, we determine the ability boundary of reasoning paths augmentation by identifying these paths' minimal optimal set.Secondly, we validate that different abilities of the model can be cumulatively enhanced by Mix of Minimal Optimal Sets of corresponding types of data, while our models MMOS achieve SOTA performance on series base models under much lower construction costs.Besides, we point out GSM-HARD is not really hard and today's LLMs no longer lack numerical robustness.Also, we provide an Auto Problem Generator for robustness testing and educational applications.Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/cyzhh/MMOS.

Recently, stereo vision based on lightweight RGBD cameras has been widely used in various fields. However, limited by the imaging principles, the commonly used RGB-D cameras based on TOF, structured light, or binocular vision acquire some invalid data inevitably, such as weak reflection, boundary shadows, and artifacts, which may bring adverse impacts to the follow-up work. In this paper, we propose a new model for depth image completion based on the Attention Guided Gated-convolutional Network (AGG-Net), through which more accurate and reliable depth images can be obtained from the raw depth maps and the corresponding RGB images. Our model employs a UNet-like architecture which consists of two parallel branches of depth and color features. In the encoding stage, an Attention Guided Gated-Convolution (AG-GConv) module is proposed to realize the fusion of depth and color features at different scales, which can effectively reduce the negative impacts of invalid depth data on the reconstruction. In the decoding stage, an Attention Guided Skip Connection (AG-SC) module is presented to avoid introducing too many depth-irrelevant features to the reconstruction. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the popular benchmarks NYU-Depth V2, DIML, and SUN RGB-D.

The integration of long-context capabilities with visual understanding unlocks unprecedented potential for Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, the quadratic attention complexity during the pre-filling phase remains a significant obstacle to real-world deployment. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MMInference (Multimodality Million tokens Inference), a dynamic sparse attention method that accelerates the prefilling stage for long-context multi-modal inputs. First, our analysis reveals that the temporal and spatial locality of video input leads to a unique sparse pattern, the Grid pattern. Simultaneously, VLMs exhibit markedly different sparse distributions across different modalities. We introduce a permutation-based method to leverage the unique Grid pattern and handle modality boundary issues. By offline search the optimal sparse patterns for each head, MMInference constructs the sparse distribution dynamically based on the input. We also provide optimized GPU kernels for efficient sparse computations. Notably, MMInference integrates seamlessly into existing VLM pipelines without any model modifications or fine-tuning. Experiments on multi-modal benchmarks-including Video QA, Captioning, VisionNIAH, and Mixed-Modality NIAH-with state-of-the-art long-context VLMs (LongVila, LlavaVideo, VideoChat-Flash, Qwen2.5-VL) show that MMInference accelerates the pre-filling stage by up to 8.3x at 1M tokens while maintaining accuracy. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/MMInference.

The increase in computing power and the necessity of AI-assisted decision-making boost the growing application of large language models (LLMs). Along with this, the potential retention of sensitive data of LLMs has spurred increasing research into machine unlearning. However, existing unlearning approaches face a critical dilemma: Aggressive unlearning compromises model utility, while conservative strategies preserve utility but risk hallucinated responses. This significantly limits LLMs' reliability in knowledge-intensive applications. To address this, we introduce a novel Attention-Shifting (AS) framework for selective unlearning. AS is driven by two design objectives: (1) context-preserving suppression that attenuates attention to fact-bearing tokens without disrupting LLMs' linguistic structure; and (2) hallucination-resistant response shaping that discourages fabricated completions when queried about unlearning content. AS realizes these objectives through two attention-level interventions, which are importance-aware suppression applied to the unlearning set to reduce reliance on memorized knowledge and attention-guided retention enhancement that reinforces attention toward semantically essential tokens in the retained dataset to mitigate unintended degradation. These two components are jointly optimized via a dual-loss objective, which forms a soft boundary that localizes unlearning while preserving unrelated knowledge under representation superposition. Experimental results show that AS improves performance preservation over the state-of-the-art unlearning methods, achieving up to 15% higher accuracy on the ToFU benchmark and 10% on the TDEC benchmark, while maintaining competitive hallucination-free unlearning effectiveness. Compared to existing methods, AS demonstrates a superior balance between unlearning effectiveness, generalization, and response reliability.

The rapid advancement in large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced their ability to generate coherent and contextually relevant text, raising concerns about the misuse of AI-generated content and making it critical to detect it. However, the task remains challenging, particularly in unseen domains or with unfamiliar LLMs. Leveraging LLM next-token distribution outputs offers a theoretically appealing approach for detection, as they encapsulate insights from the models' extensive pre-training on diverse corpora. Despite its promise, zero-shot methods that attempt to operationalize these outputs have met with limited success. We hypothesize that one of the problems is that they use the mean to aggregate next-token distribution metrics across tokens, when some tokens are naturally easier or harder to predict and should be weighted differently. Based on this idea, we propose the Perplexity Attention Weighted Network (PAWN), which uses the last hidden states of the LLM and positions to weight the sum of a series of features based on metrics from the next-token distribution across the sequence length. Although not zero-shot, our method allows us to cache the last hidden states and next-token distribution metrics on disk, greatly reducing the training resource requirements. PAWN shows competitive and even better performance in-distribution than the strongest baselines (fine-tuned LMs) with a fraction of their trainable parameters. Our model also generalizes better to unseen domains and source models, with smaller variability in the decision boundary across distribution shifts. It is also more robust to adversarial attacks, and if the backbone has multilingual capabilities, it presents decent generalization to languages not seen during supervised training, with LLaMA3-1B reaching a mean macro-averaged F1 score of 81.46% in cross-validation with nine languages.

In this paper, we present a one-stage framework TriDet for temporal action detection. Existing methods often suffer from imprecise boundary predictions due to the ambiguous action boundaries in videos. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel Trident-head to model the action boundary via an estimated relative probability distribution around the boundary. In the feature pyramid of TriDet, we propose an efficient Scalable-Granularity Perception (SGP) layer to mitigate the rank loss problem of self-attention that takes place in the video features and aggregate information across different temporal granularities. Benefiting from the Trident-head and the SGP-based feature pyramid, TriDet achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging benchmarks: THUMOS14, HACS and EPIC-KITCHEN 100, with lower computational costs, compared to previous methods. For example, TriDet hits an average mAP of 69.3% on THUMOS14, outperforming the previous best by 2.5%, but with only 74.6% of its latency. The code is released to https://github.com/sssste/TriDet.

We present GeoTransolver, a Multiscale Geometry-Aware Physics Attention Transformer for CAE that replaces standard attention with GALE, coupling physics-aware self-attention on learned state slices with cross-attention to a shared geometry/global/boundary-condition context computed from multi-scale ball queries (inspired by DoMINO) and reused in every block. Implemented and released in NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo, GeoTransolver persistently projects geometry, global and boundary condition parameters into physical state spaces to anchor latent computations to domain structure and operating regimes. We benchmark GeoTransolver on DrivAerML, Luminary SHIFT-SUV, and Luminary SHIFT-Wing, comparing against Domino, Transolver (as released in PhysicsNeMo), and literature-reported AB-UPT, and evaluate drag/lift R2 and Relative L1 errors for field variables. GeoTransolver delivers better accuracy, improved robustness to geometry/regime shifts, and favorable data efficiency; we include ablations on DrivAerML and qualitative results such as contour plots and design trends for the best GeoTransolver models. By unifying multiscale geometry-aware context with physics-based attention in a scalable transformer, GeoTransolver advances operator learning for high-fidelity surrogate modeling across complex, irregular domains and non-linear physical regimes.

To address the limitations of Transformer decoders in capturing edge details, recognizing local textures and modeling spatial continuity, this paper proposes a novel decoder framework specifically designed for medical image segmentation, comprising three core modules. First, the Adaptive Cross-Fusion Attention (ACFA) module integrates channel feature enhancement with spatial attention mechanisms and introduces learnable guidance in three directions (planar, horizontal, and vertical) to enhance responsiveness to key regions and structural orientations. Second, the Triple Feature Fusion Attention (TFFA) module fuses features from Spatial, Fourier and Wavelet domains, achieving joint frequency-spatial representation that strengthens global dependency and structural modeling while preserving local information such as edges and textures, making it particularly effective in complex and blurred boundary scenarios. Finally, the Structural-aware Multi-scale Masking Module (SMMM) optimizes the skip connections between encoder and decoder by leveraging multi-scale context and structural saliency filtering, effectively reducing feature redundancy and improving semantic interaction quality. Working synergistically, these modules not only address the shortcomings of traditional decoders but also significantly enhance performance in high-precision tasks such as tumor segmentation and organ boundary extraction, improving both segmentation accuracy and model generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework provides an efficient and practical solution for medical image segmentation.

This paper systematically diagnoses the training failure modes of Token-Choice sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) on video Diffusion Transformers. Starting from a pretrained dense model of about 5 billion parameters, we convert it into an MoE architecture following three laws: routed experts exactly clone the original FFN weights, shared experts are initialized to zero for verification and then to extremely small non-zero noise for actual training, while only the gating networks start from random initialization. Experiments reveal a hierarchy of five failure modes: (1) linear routers suffer global soft saturation with complete expert homogenization; (2) MLP routers introduce selective deadlock, where roughly one-third of layers degenerate into a single-expert mode that cannot be prevented by increasing the auxiliary loss; (3) cross-attention routers exhibit preliminary self-recovery, yet about nine layers remain stubbornly deadlocked; (4) deadlocked layers display a U-shaped distribution, concentrated in shallow visual processing layers and deep semantic integration layers; (5) bfloat16 mixed precision causes tiny weight updates to be truncated to zero by hardware. Based on routing decision time series over 65 million tokens across 5,000 training steps, we propose the Functional Redundancy Hypothesis: deadlock is a rational waiting strategy before the shared expert matures within the gate-shared expert-routed expert triadic system. This hypothesis is supported by the theory of functional redundancy in systems biology. On the engineering side, we summarize the Three Laws of dense-to-MoE conversion and provide a complete solution for the bfloat16 precision trap. We calibrate the current capability boundary of the Token-Choice paradigm and outline a three-step evolutionary roadmap from visual unification to a world model.

We study KV cache eviction under a shared globally capped decode-time harness. Seven policies (LRU, H2O, SnapKV, StreamingLLM, Ada-KV, QUEST, Random) share a prompt-boundary vulnerability: without structural protection, they collapse to near-zero quality on six pure-transformer models (F1leq0.064). Reserving 10\% of cache at each boundary recovers 69--90\% of the C{=}2{,}048 reference-ceiling quality on seven LongBench models at C{=}256 (13\% retention); a ten-model panel spans 68--98\%. An attention-mass pilot (Qwen2.5-3B, N{=}30) suggests why: the position-0 sink holds {sim}75% of prefix mass, while other boundary tokens sit near {sim}0.41{times} uniform expectation, so attention scorers retain the sink but still drop structurally critical tokens. With protection, simplified score-isolation variants are TOST-equivalent to LRU at K{=}32 (Δ{=}0.02); at K{=}8, attention policies pairwise converge yet beat LRU by 0.011--0.021 F1 across C{=}256 and C{=}512. Faithful Ada-KV/QUEST add {sim}0.03--0.04 F1 on Mistral-7B and Phi-3.5 beyond simplified variants. A NIAH-32K regime-transfer pilot on Qwen3-4B (decode vs.\ prefill, C{in}{512,2048}) shows near-identical protection lifts (ratio 0.99--1.00). At 64K, protection helps but recovery is modest; faithful per-head scoring matches full-cache ceiling on Gemma-3-4B at 6.3\% retention only when the model already supports strong 64K retrieval without eviction. Overall: protection dominates; scoring differences are secondary once boundaries are guarded; per-head allocation gives a further modest gain.

Camouflaged object detection segments objects with intrinsic similarity and edge disruption. Current detection methods rely on accumulated complex components. Each approach adds components such as boundary modules, attention mechanisms, and multi-scale processors independently. This accumulation creates a computational burden without proportional gains. To manage this complexity, they process at reduced resolutions, eliminating fine details essential for camouflage. We present SPEGNet, addressing fragmentation through a unified design. The architecture integrates multi-scale features via channel calibration and spatial enhancement. Boundaries emerge directly from context-rich representations, maintaining semantic-spatial alignment. Progressive refinement implements scale-adaptive edge modulation with peak influence at intermediate resolutions. This design strikes a balance between boundary precision and regional consistency. SPEGNet achieves 0.887 S_alpha on CAMO, 0.890 on COD10K, and 0.895 on NC4K, with real-time inference speed. Our approach excels across scales, from tiny, intricate objects to large, pattern-similar ones, while handling occlusion and ambiguous boundaries. Code, model weights, and results are available on https://github.com/Baber-Jan/SPEGNet{https://github.com/Baber-Jan/SPEGNet}.

Image customization, a crucial technique for industrial media production, aims to generate content that is consistent with reference images. However, current approaches conventionally separate image customization into position-aware and position-free customization paradigms and lack a universal framework for diverse customization, limiting their applications across various scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose IC-Custom, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates position-aware and position-free image customization through in-context learning. IC-Custom concatenates reference images with target images to a polyptych, leveraging DiT's multi-modal attention mechanism for fine-grained token-level interactions. We introduce the In-context Multi-Modal Attention (ICMA) mechanism with learnable task-oriented register tokens and boundary-aware positional embeddings to enable the model to correctly handle different task types and distinguish various inputs in polyptych configurations. To bridge the data gap, we carefully curated a high-quality dataset of 12k identity-consistent samples with 8k from real-world sources and 4k from high-quality synthetic data, avoiding the overly glossy and over-saturated synthetic appearance. IC-Custom supports various industrial applications, including try-on, accessory placement, furniture arrangement, and creative IP customization. Extensive evaluations on our proposed ProductBench and the publicly available DreamBench demonstrate that IC-Custom significantly outperforms community workflows, closed-source models, and state-of-the-art open-source approaches. IC-Custom achieves approximately 73% higher human preference across identity consistency, harmonicity, and text alignment metrics, while training only 0.4% of the original model parameters. Project page: https://liyaowei-stu.github.io/project/IC_Custom

Quantifying exhaled CO2 from free-roaming cattle is both a direct indicator of rumen metabolic state and a prerequisite for farm-scale carbon accounting, yet no existing system can deliver continuous, spatially resolved measurements without physical confinement or contact. We present TRACE (Thermal Recognition Attentive-Framework for CO2 Emissions from Livestock), the first unified framework to jointly address per-frame CO2 plume segmentation and clip-level emission flux classification from mid-wave infrared (MWIR) thermal video. TRACE contributes three domain-specific advances: a Thermal Gas-Aware Attention (TGAA) encoder that incorporates per-pixel gas intensity as a spatial supervisory signal to direct self-attention toward high-emission regions at each encoder stage; an Attention-based Temporal Fusion (ATF) module that captures breath-cycle dynamics through structured cross-frame attention for sequence-level flux classification; and a four-stage progressive training curriculum that couples both objectives while preventing gradient interference. Benchmarked against fifteen state-of-the-art models on the CO2 Farm Thermal Gas Dataset, TRACE achieves an mIoU of 0.998 and the best result on every segmentation and classification metric simultaneously, outperforming domain-specific gas segmenters with several times more parameters and surpassing all baselines in flux classification. Ablation studies confirm that each component is individually essential: gas-conditioned attention alone determines precise plume boundary localization, and temporal reasoning is indispensable for flux-level discrimination. TRACE establishes a practical path toward non-invasive, continuous, per-animal CO2 monitoring from overhead thermal cameras at commercial scale. Codes are available at https://github.com/taminulislam/trace.

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) holds that as models scale, representations of heterogeneous networks converge toward a shared model of reality. We propose its sequel and boundary, the Capability Convergence Hypothesis (CCH): under a fixed per-token inference budget, representational convergence does not entail capability convergence. Capability instead converges toward a class, the access-complete hybrid: any architecture holding both a compressive O(1)-state channel and a scalable verbatim-index channel. We anchor it on a witness task, the Newton's-apple problem in an infinite stream, and name three resource walls: a Shannon wall barring any o(Nb)-state architecture, a horizon wall barring any fixed window, and a circuit wall barring fixed-depth attention-only composition (conditional on TC0 != NC1). Under an explicit separability assumption a hybrid crosses all three by paying each wall's price, so capability is strictly super-additive under composition. We separate what we prove from what we conjecture: the access-completeness principle rests on information-theoretic lower bounds and pre-registered experiments, while the field-level convergence trend is an economics-motivated conjecture. We report the first pre-registered small-scale tests under criteria frozen before the data: the predicted scissors gap is measured (exact-retrieval error 0.994 vs. 0.000 once a 64-scalar state gains one global-attention layer), the state-tracking bifurcation lands at the registered boundary, and a conjunction witness shows an irreducibly two-channel solution; one prediction failed with its direction reversed and is reported as such. Representational convergence is given freely by scale; capability convergence must be purchased by access structure.

Reliable visual monitoring of chemical experiments remains challenging in transparent glassware, where weak phase boundaries and optical artifacts degrade conventional segmentation. We formulate laboratory phenomena as the time evolution of phase interfaces and introduce the Chemical Transparent Glasses dataset 2.0 (CTG 2.0), a vessel-aware benchmark with 3,668 images, 23 glassware categories, and five multiphase interface types for phase-interface instance segmentation. Building on YOLO11m-seg, we propose LGA-RCM-YOLO, which combines Local-Global Attention (LGA) for robust semantic representation and a Rectangular Self-Calibration Module (RCM) for boundary refinement of thin, elongated interfaces. On CTG 2.0, the proposed model achieves 84.4% AP@0.5 and 58.43% AP@0.5-0.95, improving over the YOLO11m baseline by 6.42 and 8.75 AP points, respectively, while maintaining near real-time inference (13.67 FPS, RTX 3060). An auxiliary color-attribute head further labels liquid instances as colored or colorless with 98.71% precision and 98.32% recall. Finally, we demonstrate continuous process monitoring in separatory-funnel phase separation and crystallization, showing that phase-interface instance segmentation can serve as a practical visual sensor for laboratory automation.

A key challenge in graph out-of-distribution (OOD) detection lies in the absence of ground-truth OOD samples during training. Existing methods are typically optimized to capture features within the in-distribution (ID) data and calculate OOD scores, which often limits pre-trained models from representing distributional boundaries, leading to unreliable OOD detection. Moreover, the latent structure of graph data is often governed by multiple underlying factors, which remains less explored. To address these challenges, we propose a novel test-time graph OOD detection method, termed BaCa, that calibrates OOD scores using dual dynamically updated dictionaries without requiring fine-tuning the pre-trained model. Specifically, BaCa estimates graphons and applies a mix-up strategy solely with test samples to generate diverse boundary-aware discriminative topologies, eliminating the need for exposing auxiliary datasets as outliers. We construct dual dynamic dictionaries via priority queues and attention mechanisms to adaptively capture latent ID and OOD representations, which are then utilized for boundary-aware OOD score calibration. To the best of our knowledge, extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that BaCa significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in OOD detection.

Solving complex Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) accurately and efficiently is an essential and challenging problem in all scientific and engineering disciplines. Mesh movement methods provide the capability to improve the accuracy of the numerical solution without increasing the overall mesh degree of freedom count. Conventional sophisticated mesh movement methods are extremely expensive and struggle to handle scenarios with complex boundary geometries. However, existing learning-based methods require re-training from scratch given a different PDE type or boundary geometry, which limits their applicability, and also often suffer from robustness issues in the form of inverted elements. In this paper, we introduce the Universal Mesh Movement Network (UM2N), which -- once trained -- can be applied in a non-intrusive, zero-shot manner to move meshes with different size distributions and structures, for solvers applicable to different PDE types and boundary geometries. UM2N consists of a Graph Transformer (GT) encoder for extracting features and a Graph Attention Network (GAT) based decoder for moving the mesh. We evaluate our method on advection and Navier-Stokes based examples, as well as a real-world tsunami simulation case. Our method outperforms existing learning-based mesh movement methods in terms of the benchmarks described above. In comparison to the conventional sophisticated Monge-Amp\`ere PDE-solver based method, our approach not only significantly accelerates mesh movement, but also proves effective in scenarios where the conventional method fails. Our project page is at https://erizmr.github.io/UM2N/.

Video restoration poses non-trivial challenges in maintaining fidelity while recovering temporally consistent details from unknown degradations in the wild. Despite recent advances in diffusion-based restoration, these methods often face limitations in generation capability and sampling efficiency. In this work, we present SeedVR, a diffusion transformer designed to handle real-world video restoration with arbitrary length and resolution. The core design of SeedVR lies in the shifted window attention that facilitates effective restoration on long video sequences. SeedVR further supports variable-sized windows near the boundary of both spatial and temporal dimensions, overcoming the resolution constraints of traditional window attention. Equipped with contemporary practices, including causal video autoencoder, mixed image and video training, and progressive training, SeedVR achieves highly-competitive performance on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, as well as AI-generated videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate SeedVR's superiority over existing methods for generic video restoration.

While Transformers have become the dominant architecture for visual generation, linear attention models, such as the state-space models (SSM), are increasingly recognized for their efficiency in processing long visual sequences. However, the essential efficiency of these models comes from formulating a limited recurrent state, enforcing causality among tokens that are prone to inconsistent modeling of N-dimensional visual data, leaving questions on their capacity to generate long non-causal sequences. In this paper, we explore the boundary of SSM on image and video generation by building the largest-scale diffusion SSM-Transformer hybrid model to date (5B parameters) based on the sub-quadratic bi-directional Hydra and self-attention, and generate up to 2K images and 360p 8 seconds (16 FPS) videos. Our results demonstrate that the model can produce faithful results aligned with complex text prompts and temporal consistent videos with high dynamics, suggesting the great potential of using SSMs for visual generation tasks.

We propose the onion-peel networks for video completion. Given a set of reference images and a target image with holes, our network fills the hole by referring the contents in the reference images. Our onion-peel network progressively fills the hole from the hole boundary enabling it to exploit richer contextual information for the missing regions every step. Given a sufficient number of recurrences, even a large hole can be inpainted successfully. To attend to the missing information visible in the reference images, we propose an asymmetric attention block that computes similarities between the hole boundary pixels in the target and the non-hole pixels in the references in a non-local manner. With our attention block, our network can have an unlimited spatial-temporal window size and fill the holes with globally coherent contents. In addition, our framework is applicable to the image completion guided by the reference images without any modification, which is difficult to do with the previous methods. We validate that our method produces visually pleasing image and video inpainting results in realistic test cases.

Most state-of-the-art trackers adopt one-stream paradigm, using a single Vision Transformer for joint feature extraction and relation modeling of template and search region images. However, relation modeling between different image patches exhibits significant variations. For instance, background regions dominated by target-irrelevant information require reduced attention allocation, while foreground, particularly boundary areas, need to be be emphasized. A single model may not effectively handle all kinds of relation modeling simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel tracker called SPMTrack based on mixture-of-experts tailored for visual tracking task (TMoE), combining the capability of multiple experts to handle diverse relation modeling more flexibly. Benefiting from TMoE, we extend relation modeling from image pairs to spatio-temporal context, further improving tracking accuracy with minimal increase in model parameters. Moreover, we employ TMoE as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, substantially reducing trainable parameters, which enables us to train SPMTrack of varying scales efficiently and preserve the generalization ability of pretrained models to achieve superior performance. We conduct experiments on seven datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art trackers. The source code is available at https://github.com/WenRuiCai/SPMTrack.

Multi-organ segmentation is a critical yet challenging task due to complex anatomical backgrounds, blurred boundaries, and diverse morphologies. This study introduces the Gradient-aware Adaptive Momentum Evolution Deep Snake (GAMED-Snake) model, which establishes a novel paradigm for contour-based segmentation by integrating gradient-based learning with adaptive momentum evolution mechanisms. The GAMED-Snake model incorporates three major innovations: First, the Distance Energy Map Prior (DEMP) generates a pixel-level force field that effectively attracts contour points towards the true boundaries, even in scenarios with complex backgrounds and blurred edges. Second, the Differential Convolution Inception Module (DCIM) precisely extracts comprehensive energy gradients, significantly enhancing segmentation accuracy. Third, the Adaptive Momentum Evolution Mechanism (AMEM) employs cross-attention to establish dynamic features across different iterations of evolution, enabling precise boundary alignment for diverse morphologies. Experimental results on four challenging multi-organ segmentation datasets demonstrate that GAMED-Snake improves the mDice metric by approximately 2% compared to state-of-the-art methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/SYSUzrc/GAMED-Snake.

Image-based Virtual Try-On (VITON) aims to transfer an in-shop garment image onto a target person. While existing methods focus on warping the garment to fit the body pose, they often overlook the synthesis quality around the garment-skin boundary and realistic effects like wrinkles and shadows on the warped garments. These limitations greatly reduce the realism of the generated results and hinder the practical application of VITON techniques. Leveraging the notable success of diffusion-based models in cross-modal image synthesis, some recent diffusion-based methods have ventured to tackle this issue. However, they tend to either consume a significant amount of training resources or struggle to achieve realistic try-on effects and retain garment details. For efficient and high-fidelity VITON, we propose WarpDiffusion, which bridges the warping-based and diffusion-based paradigms via a novel informative and local garment feature attention mechanism. Specifically, WarpDiffusion incorporates local texture attention to reduce resource consumption and uses a novel auto-mask module that effectively retains only the critical areas of the warped garment while disregarding unrealistic or erroneous portions. Notably, WarpDiffusion can be integrated as a plug-and-play component into existing VITON methodologies, elevating their synthesis quality. Extensive experiments on high-resolution VITON benchmarks and an in-the-wild test set demonstrate the superiority of WarpDiffusion, surpassing state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Language models can perceive visual properties of text despite receiving only sequences of tokens-we mechanistically investigate how Claude 3.5 Haiku accomplishes one such task: linebreaking in fixed-width text. We find that character counts are represented on low-dimensional curved manifolds discretized by sparse feature families, analogous to biological place cells. Accurate predictions emerge from a sequence of geometric transformations: token lengths are accumulated into character count manifolds, attention heads twist these manifolds to estimate distance to the line boundary, and the decision to break the line is enabled by arranging estimates orthogonally to create a linear decision boundary. We validate our findings through causal interventions and discover visual illusions--character sequences that hijack the counting mechanism. Our work demonstrates the rich sensory processing of early layers, the intricacy of attention algorithms, and the importance of combining feature-based and geometric views of interpretability.

Learning representations of CAD models is a largely open problem. While 3D representation learning has flourished around point clouds and meshes, the native format of CAD - boundary representations BReps, which encodes exact parametric surfaces, curves, and their topology, has received little attention as a representation learning substrate. We introduce BRepCLIP, the first framework to align BRep geometry with language and image embeddings through contrastive pretraining. We model each CAD object as a sequence of face and edge tokens with separate discrete vocabularies for surface and curve geometry, augmented with spatial and semantic descriptors that capture surface types (e.g., cylindrical, torus, NURBS) and curve primitives (e.g., line, arc, B-spline). A transformer encoder aggregates these tokens into a global BRep embedding, aligned with CLIP's text and image encoders via a joint contrastive objective. BRepCLIP generates more discriminative and semantically grounded embeddings than existing point-based alternatives, improving Top-1 retrieval over OpenShape by 40.4%, 22.0%, and 23.9% on ABC, CADParser, and Automate, respectively, and improving zero-shot classification on FabWave by 15% in Top-1 score. We further demonstrate its utility as a CAD-aware similarity metric for evaluating text and image-conditioned CAD generation, establishing the importance of structure-aware pretraining for multimodal CAD understanding. Project page is available at https://muhammadusama100.github.io/BrepClip2026/

Director-style prompting, robotic action prediction, and interactive video agents demand temporal grounding over concurrent events -- a regime in which 68% of general clips and over 99% of robotics/gameplay clips contain overlapping events, yet existing multi-event generators rest on a single-active-prompt assumption. However, modern video generators, such as Diffusion Transformers (DiT), represent time as discrete points through point-wise positional encodings. This formulation creates a fundamental dimension mismatch: temporally extended intervals and overlapping events are mathematically unrepresentable to the attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose Time Interval Encoding (TIE), a principled, plug-and-play interval-aware generalization of rotary embeddings that elevates time intervals to first-class primitives inside DiT cross-attention. Rather than introducing another heuristic interval embedding, we show that, within RoPE-compatible bilinear attention, TIE is characterized by two basic principles: Temporal Integrability, which requires an event to aggregate positional evidence over its full duration, and Duration Invariance, which removes the trivial bias toward longer intervals. Under a uniform kernel, this characterization yields an efficient closed-form sinc-based solution that preserves the standard attention interface and naturally attenuates boundary noise through interval integration. Empirically, TIE preserves the visual quality of the base DiT model while substantially improving temporal controllability. In our experiments on the OmniEvents dataset, it improves human-verified Temporal Constraint Satisfaction Rate from 77.34% to 96.03% and reduces temporal boundary error from 0.261s to 0.073s, while also improving trajectory-level temporal alignment metrics. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MatrixTeam-AI/TIE.

Estimating probability distribution is one of the core issues in the NLP field. However, in both deep learning (DL) and pre-DL eras, unlike the vast applications of linear-chain CRF in sequence labeling tasks, very few works have applied tree-structure CRF to constituency parsing, mainly due to the complexity and inefficiency of the inside-outside algorithm. This work presents a fast and accurate neural CRF constituency parser. The key idea is to batchify the inside algorithm for loss computation by direct large tensor operations on GPU, and meanwhile avoid the outside algorithm for gradient computation via efficient back-propagation. We also propose a simple two-stage bracketing-then-labeling parsing approach to improve efficiency further. To improve the parsing performance, inspired by recent progress in dependency parsing, we introduce a new scoring architecture based on boundary representation and biaffine attention, and a beneficial dropout strategy. Experiments on PTB, CTB5.1, and CTB7 show that our two-stage CRF parser achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both settings of w/o and w/ BERT, and can parse over 1,000 sentences per second. We release our code at https://github.com/yzhangcs/crfpar.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable efficacy across various image-to-image tasks. In this research, we introduce Imagine yourself, a state-of-the-art model designed for personalized image generation. Unlike conventional tuning-based personalization techniques, Imagine yourself operates as a tuning-free model, enabling all users to leverage a shared framework without individualized adjustments. Moreover, previous work met challenges balancing identity preservation, following complex prompts and preserving good visual quality, resulting in models having strong copy-paste effect of the reference images. Thus, they can hardly generate images following prompts that require significant changes to the reference image, \eg, changing facial expression, head and body poses, and the diversity of the generated images is low. To address these limitations, our proposed method introduces 1) a new synthetic paired data generation mechanism to encourage image diversity, 2) a fully parallel attention architecture with three text encoders and a fully trainable vision encoder to improve the text faithfulness, and 3) a novel coarse-to-fine multi-stage finetuning methodology that gradually pushes the boundary of visual quality. Our study demonstrates that Imagine yourself surpasses the state-of-the-art personalization model, exhibiting superior capabilities in identity preservation, visual quality, and text alignment. This model establishes a robust foundation for various personalization applications. Human evaluation results validate the model's SOTA superiority across all aspects (identity preservation, text faithfulness, and visual appeal) compared to the previous personalization models.

We present SLICK, a novel framework for precise and robust car damage segmentation that leverages structural priors and domain knowledge to tackle real-world automotive inspection challenges. SLICK introduces five key components: (1) Selective Part Segmentation using a high-resolution semantic backbone guided by structural priors to achieve surgical accuracy in segmenting vehicle parts even under occlusion, deformation, or paint loss; (2) Localization-Aware Attention blocks that dynamically focus on damaged regions, enhancing fine-grained damage detection in cluttered and complex street scenes; (3) an Instance-Sensitive Refinement head that leverages panoptic cues and shape priors to disentangle overlapping or adjacent parts, enabling precise boundary alignment; (4) Cross-Channel Calibration through multi-scale channel attention that amplifies subtle damage signals such as scratches and dents while suppressing noise like reflections and decals; and (5) a Knowledge Fusion Module that integrates synthetic crash data, part geometry, and real-world insurance datasets to improve generalization and handle rare cases effectively. Experiments on large-scale automotive datasets demonstrate SLICK's superior segmentation performance, robustness, and practical applicability for insurance and automotive inspection workflows.

Understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) perform logical reasoning internally remains a fundamental challenge. While prior mechanistic studies focus on identifying taskspecific circuits, they leave open the question of what computational strategies LLMs employ for propositional reasoning. We address this gap through comprehensive analysis of Qwen3 (8B and 14B) on PropLogic-MI, a controlled dataset spanning 11 propositional logic rule categories across one-hop and two-hop reasoning. Rather than asking ''which components are necessary,'' we ask ''how does the model organize computation?'' Our analysis reveals a coherent computational architecture comprising four interlocking mechanisms: Staged Computation (layer-wise processing phases), Information Transmission (information flow aggregation at boundary tokens), Fact Retrospection (persistent re-access of source facts), and Specialized Attention Heads (functionally distinct head types). These mechanisms generalize across model scales, rule types, and reasoning depths, providing mechanistic evidence that LLMs employ structured computational strategies for logical reasoning.

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) aims to adapt pretrained detectors from a source domain to target domains with limited annotations, suffering from severe domain shifts and data scarcity problems. In this work, we find a previously overlooked phenomenon: models exhibit dispersed and unfocused attention in target domains, leading to imprecise localization and redundant predictions, just like a human cannot focus on visual objects. Therefore, we call it the target-domain Astigmatism problem. Analysis on attention distances across transformer layers reveals that regular fine-tuning inherently shows a trend to remedy this problem, but results are still far from satisfactory, which we aim to enhance in this paper. Biologically inspired by the human fovea-style visual system, we enhance the fine-tuning's inherent trend through a center-periphery attention refinement framework, which contains (1) a Positive Pattern Refinement module to reshape attention toward semantic objects using class-specific prototypes, simulating the visual center region; (2) a Negative Context Modulation module to enhance boundary discrimination by modeling background context, simulating the visual periphery region; and (3) a Textual Semantic Alignment module to strengthen center-periphery distinction through cross-modal cues. Our bio-inspired approach transforms astigmatic attention into focused patterns, substantially improving adaptation to target domains. Experiments on six challenging CD-FSOD benchmarks consistently demonstrate improved detection accuracy and establish new state-of-the-art results.

Generating high-quality 360° panoramic videos from perspective input is one of the crucial applications for virtual reality (VR), whereby high-resolution videos are especially important for immersive experience. Existing methods are constrained by computational limitations of vanilla diffusion models, only supporting leq 1K resolution native generation and relying on suboptimal post super-resolution to increase resolution. We introduce CubeComposer, a novel spatio-temporal autoregressive diffusion model that natively generates 4K-resolution 360° videos. By decomposing videos into cubemap representations with six faces, CubeComposer autoregressively synthesizes content in a well-planned spatio-temporal order, reducing memory demands while enabling high-resolution output. Specifically, to address challenges in multi-dimensional autoregression, we propose: (1) a spatio-temporal autoregressive strategy that orchestrates 360° video generation across cube faces and time windows for coherent synthesis; (2) a cube face context management mechanism, equipped with a sparse context attention design to improve efficiency; and (3) continuity-aware techniques, including cube-aware positional encoding, padding, and blending to eliminate boundary seams. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CubeComposer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in native resolution and visual quality, supporting practical VR application scenarios. Project page: https://lg-li.github.io/project/cubecomposer

Attention Model has now become an important concept in neural networks that has been researched within diverse application domains. This survey provides a structured and comprehensive overview of the developments in modeling attention. In particular, we propose a taxonomy which groups existing techniques into coherent categories. We review salient neural architectures in which attention has been incorporated, and discuss applications in which modeling attention has shown a significant impact. We also describe how attention has been used to improve the interpretability of neural networks. Finally, we discuss some future research directions in attention. We hope this survey will provide a succinct introduction to attention models and guide practitioners while developing approaches for their applications.

We introduce an attention-based method that uses learned binary attention masks to ensure that only attended image regions influence the prediction. Context can strongly affect object perception, sometimes leading to biased representations, particularly when objects appear in out-of-distribution backgrounds. At the same time, many image-level object-centric tasks require identifying relevant regions, often requiring context. To address this conundrum, we propose a two-stage framework: stage 1 processes the full image to discover object parts and identify task-relevant regions, while stage 2 leverages input attention masking to restrict its receptive field to these regions, enabling a focused analysis while filtering out potentially spurious information. Both stages are trained jointly, allowing stage 2 to refine stage 1. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness against spurious correlations and out-of-distribution backgrounds.

Dense spatial perception is essential for physical intelligence, where visual systems are expected to recover structured, metric, and actionable representations from pixel observations. Modern visual foundation models tend to prioritize semantic invariance, often at the expense of detailed spatial understanding. In this work, we study vision pretraining through a boundary-centric lens, motivated by the premise that boundaries and shape discontinuities offer essential cues for perceiving geometric properties. Concretely, we propose masked boundary modeling, a self-supervised paradigm that dynamically learns sub-pixel boundary representations and subsequently leverages the discovered boundary-bearing tokens as masked targets to facilitate dense visual token learning. By scaling this framework, we develop LingBot-Vision and demonstrate its efficacy across a diverse set of downstream vision tasks with DINOv3 as a strong baseline. Remarkably, LingBot-Vision drives the progression from LingBot-Depth 1.0 to LingBot-Depth 2.0 for depth completion, and thereby yields enhanced depth estimation, a key pillar for embodied artificial intelligence. Our findings reveal that boundary modeling goes beyond simple line segments and instead serves as a scalable pretraining principle for learning spatially structured visual representations.

Attention mechanisms are a central property of cognitive systems allowing them to selectively deploy cognitive resources in a flexible manner. Attention has been long studied in the neurosciences and there are numerous phenomenological models that try to capture its core properties. Recently attentional mechanisms have become a dominating architectural choice of machine learning and are the central innovation of Transformers. The dominant intuition and formalism underlying their development has drawn on ideas of keys and queries in database management systems. In this work, we propose an alternative Bayesian foundation for attentional mechanisms and show how this unifies different attentional architectures in machine learning. This formulation allows to to identify commonality across different attention ML architectures as well as suggest a bridge to those developed in neuroscience. We hope this work will guide more sophisticated intuitions into the key properties of attention architectures and suggest new ones.

Human attention modelling has proven, in recent years, to be particularly useful not only for understanding the cognitive processes underlying visual exploration, but also for providing support to artificial intelligence models that aim to solve problems in various domains, including image and video processing, vision-and-language applications, and language modelling. This survey offers a reasoned overview of recent efforts to integrate human attention mechanisms into contemporary deep learning models and discusses future research directions and challenges. For a comprehensive overview on the ongoing research refer to our dedicated repository available at https://github.com/aimagelab/awesome-human-visual-attention.

Visual search is important in our daily life. The efficient allocation of visual attention is critical to effectively complete visual search tasks. Prior research has predominantly modelled the spatial allocation of visual attention in images at the pixel level, e.g. using a saliency map. However, emerging evidence shows that visual attention is guided by objects rather than pixel intensities. This paper introduces the Object-level Attention Transformer (OAT), which predicts human scanpaths as they search for a target object within a cluttered scene of distractors. OAT uses an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder captures information about the position and appearance of the objects within an image and about the target. The decoder predicts the gaze scanpath as a sequence of object fixations, by integrating output features from both the encoder and decoder. We also propose a new positional encoding that better reflects spatial relationships between objects. We evaluated OAT on the Amazon book cover dataset and a new dataset for visual search that we collected. OAT's predicted gaze scanpaths align more closely with human gaze patterns, compared to predictions by algorithms based on spatial attention on both established metrics and a novel behavioural-based metric. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of OAT, as it accurately predicts human scanpaths for unseen layouts and target objects.

This paper investigates the limitations of the normalization in attention mechanisms. We begin with a theoretical framework that enables the identification of the model's selective ability and the geometric separation involved in token selection. Our analysis includes explicit bounds on distances and separation criteria for token vectors under softmax scaling. Through experiments with pre-trained GPT-2 model, we empirically validate our theoretical results and analyze key behaviors of the attention mechanism. Notably, we demonstrate that as the number of selected tokens increases, the model's ability to distinguish informative tokens declines, often converging toward a uniform selection pattern. We also show that gradient sensitivity under softmax normalization presents challenges during training, especially at low temperature settings. These findings advance current understanding of softmax-based attention mechanism and motivate the need for more robust normalization and selection strategies in future attention architectures.

The ability to process long contexts is crucial for many natural language processing tasks, yet it remains a significant challenge. While substantial progress has been made in enhancing the efficiency of attention mechanisms, there is still a gap in understanding how attention heads function in long-context settings. In this paper, we observe that while certain heads consistently attend to local information only, others swing between attending to local and long-context information depending on the query. This raises the question: can we identify which heads require long-context information to predict the next token accurately? We demonstrate that it's possible to predict which heads are crucial for long-context processing using only local keys. The core idea here is to exploit a simple model for the long-context scores via second moment approximations. These findings unveil simple properties of attention in the context of long sequences, and open the door to potentially significant gains in efficiency.

Long-context large language models (LLMs) are prone to be distracted by irrelevant contexts. The reason for distraction remains poorly understood. In this paper, we first identify the contextual heads, a special group of attention heads that control the overall attention of the LLM. Then, we demonstrate that distraction arises when contextual heads fail to allocate sufficient attention to relevant contexts and can be mitigated by increasing attention to these contexts. We further identify focus directions, located at the key and query activations of these heads, which enable them to allocate more attention to relevant contexts without explicitly specifying which context is relevant. We comprehensively evaluate the effect of focus direction on various long-context tasks and find out focus directions could help to mitigate the poor task alignment of the long-context LLMs. We believe our findings could promote further research on long-context LLM alignment.

The Transformer architecture processes sequences by implementing a form of neural message-passing that consists of iterative information retrieval (attention), followed by local processing (position-wise MLP). Two types of information are essential under this general computational paradigm: "sensory" information about individual objects, and "relational" information describing the relationships between objects. Standard attention naturally encodes the former, but does not explicitly encode the latter. In this paper, we present an extension of Transformers where multi-head attention is augmented with two distinct types of attention heads, each routing information of a different type. The first type is the standard attention mechanism of Transformers, which captures object-level features, while the second type is a novel attention mechanism we propose to explicitly capture relational information. The two types of attention heads each possess different inductive biases, giving the resulting architecture greater efficiency and versatility. The promise of this approach is demonstrated empirically across a range of tasks.

Interactive segmentation has recently been explored to effectively and efficiently harvest high-quality segmentation masks by iteratively incorporating user hints. While iterative in nature, most existing interactive segmentation methods tend to ignore the dynamics of successive interactions and take each interaction independently. We here propose to model iterative interactive image segmentation with a Markov decision process (MDP) and solve it with reinforcement learning (RL) where each voxel is treated as an agent. Considering the large exploration space for voxel-wise prediction and the dependence among neighboring voxels for the segmentation tasks, multi-agent reinforcement learning is adopted, where the voxel-level policy is shared among agents. Considering that boundary voxels are more important for segmentation, we further introduce a boundary-aware reward, which consists of a global reward in the form of relative cross-entropy gain, to update the policy in a constrained direction, and a boundary reward in the form of relative weight, to emphasize the correctness of boundary predictions. To combine the advantages of different types of interactions, i.e., simple and efficient for point-clicking, and stable and robust for scribbles, we propose a supervoxel-clicking based interaction design. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets have shown that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, with the advantage of fewer interactions, higher accuracy, and enhanced robustness.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant popularity in recent years and have proliferated into many applications. However, their behavior under different learning paradigms is not well explored. We compare ViTs trained through different methods of supervision, and show that they learn a diverse range of behaviors in terms of their attention, representations, and downstream performance. We also discover ViT behaviors that are consistent across supervision, including the emergence of Offset Local Attention Heads. These are self-attention heads that attend to a token adjacent to the current token with a fixed directional offset, a phenomenon that to the best of our knowledge has not been highlighted in any prior work. Our analysis shows that ViTs are highly flexible and learn to process local and global information in different orders depending on their training method. We find that contrastive self-supervised methods learn features that are competitive with explicitly supervised features, and they can even be superior for part-level tasks. We also find that the representations of reconstruction-based models show non-trivial similarity to contrastive self-supervised models. Project website (https://www.cs.umd.edu/~sakshams/vit_analysis) and code (https://www.github.com/mwalmer-umd/vit_analysis) are publicly available.

Many papers have shown that attention heads work in conjunction with each other to perform complex tasks. It's frequently assumed that communication between attention heads is via the addition of specific features to token residuals. In this work we seek to isolate and identify the features used to effect communication and coordination among attention heads in GPT-2 small. Our key leverage on the problem is to show that these features are very often sparsely coded in the singular vectors of attention head matrices. We characterize the dimensionality and occurrence of these signals across the attention heads in GPT-2 small when used for the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. The sparse encoding of signals, as provided by attention head singular vectors, allows for efficient separation of signals from the residual background and straightforward identification of communication paths between attention heads. We explore the effectiveness of this approach by tracing portions of the circuits used in the IOI task. Our traces reveal considerable detail not present in previous studies, shedding light on the nature of redundant paths present in GPT-2. And our traces go beyond previous work by identifying features used to communicate between attention heads when performing IOI.

Attention plays a critical role in human visual experience. Furthermore, it has recently been demonstrated that attention can also play an important role in the context of applying artificial neural networks to a variety of tasks from fields such as computer vision and NLP. In this work we show that, by properly defining attention for convolutional neural networks, we can actually use this type of information in order to significantly improve the performance of a student CNN network by forcing it to mimic the attention maps of a powerful teacher network. To that end, we propose several novel methods of transferring attention, showing consistent improvement across a variety of datasets and convolutional neural network architectures. Code and models for our experiments are available at https://github.com/szagoruyko/attention-transfer

Neighborhood attention reduces the cost of self attention by restricting each token's attention span to its nearest neighbors. This restriction, parameterized by a window size and dilation factor, draws a spectrum of possible attention patterns between linear projection and self attention. Neighborhood attention, and more generally sliding window attention patterns, have long been bounded by infrastructure, particularly in higher-rank spaces (2-D and 3-D), calling for the development of custom kernels, which have been limited in either functionality, or performance, if not both. In this work, we first show that neighborhood attention can be represented as a batched GEMM problem, similar to standard attention, and implement it for 1-D and 2-D neighborhood attention. These kernels on average provide 895% and 272% improvement in full precision latency compared to existing naive kernels for 1-D and 2-D neighborhood attention respectively. We find certain inherent inefficiencies in all unfused neighborhood attention kernels that bound their performance and lower-precision scalability. We also developed fused neighborhood attention; an adaptation of fused dot-product attention kernels that allow fine-grained control over attention across different spatial axes. Known for reducing the quadratic time complexity of self attention to a linear complexity, neighborhood attention can now enjoy a reduced and constant memory footprint, and record-breaking half precision latency. We observe that our fused kernels successfully circumvent some of the unavoidable inefficiencies in unfused implementations. While our unfused GEMM-based kernels only improve half precision performance compared to naive kernels by an average of 496% and 113% in 1-D and 2-D problems respectively, our fused kernels improve naive kernels by an average of 1607% and 581% in 1-D and 2-D problems respectively.

Mamba has recently garnered attention as an effective backbone for vision tasks. However, its underlying mechanism in visual domains remains poorly understood. In this work, we systematically investigate Mamba's representational properties and make three primary contributions. First, we theoretically analyze Mamba's relationship to Softmax and Linear Attention, confirming that it can be viewed as a low-rank approximation of Softmax Attention and thereby bridging the representational gap between Softmax and Linear forms. Second, we introduce a novel binary segmentation metric for activation map evaluation, extending qualitative assessments to a quantitative measure that demonstrates Mamba's capacity to model long-range dependencies. Third, by leveraging DINO for self-supervised pretraining, we obtain clearer activation maps than those produced by standard supervised approaches, highlighting Mamba's potential for interpretability. Notably, our model also achieves a 78.5 percent linear probing accuracy on ImageNet, underscoring its strong performance. We hope this work can provide valuable insights for future investigations of Mamba-based vision architectures.

As the core building block of vision transformers, attention is a powerful tool to capture long-range dependency. However, such power comes at a cost: it incurs a huge computation burden and heavy memory footprint as pairwise token interaction across all spatial locations is computed. A series of works attempt to alleviate this problem by introducing handcrafted and content-agnostic sparsity into attention, such as restricting the attention operation to be inside local windows, axial stripes, or dilated windows. In contrast to these approaches, we propose a novel dynamic sparse attention via bi-level routing to enable a more flexible allocation of computations with content awareness. Specifically, for a query, irrelevant key-value pairs are first filtered out at a coarse region level, and then fine-grained token-to-token attention is applied in the union of remaining candidate regions (\ie, routed regions). We provide a simple yet effective implementation of the proposed bi-level routing attention, which utilizes the sparsity to save both computation and memory while involving only GPU-friendly dense matrix multiplications. Built with the proposed bi-level routing attention, a new general vision transformer, named BiFormer, is then presented. As BiFormer attends to a small subset of relevant tokens in a query adaptive manner without distraction from other irrelevant ones, it enjoys both good performance and high computational efficiency, especially in dense prediction tasks. Empirical results across several computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation verify the effectiveness of our design. Code is available at https://github.com/rayleizhu/BiFormer.

Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied to natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, attention weights are often claimed to confer interpretability, purportedly useful both for providing insights to practitioners and for explaining why a model makes its decisions to stakeholders. We call the latter use of attention mechanisms into question by demonstrating a simple method for training models to produce deceptive attention masks. Our method diminishes the total weight assigned to designated impermissible tokens, even when the models can be shown to nevertheless rely on these features to drive predictions. Across multiple models and tasks, our approach manipulates attention weights while paying surprisingly little cost in accuracy. Through a human study, we show that our manipulated attention-based explanations deceive people into thinking that predictions from a model biased against gender minorities do not rely on the gender. Consequently, our results cast doubt on attention's reliability as a tool for auditing algorithms in the context of fairness and accountability.

Most models of visual attention aim at predicting either top-down or bottom-up control, as studied using different visual search and free-viewing tasks. In this paper we propose the Human Attention Transformer (HAT), a single model that predicts both forms of attention control. HAT uses a novel transformer-based architecture and a simplified foveated retina that collectively create a spatio-temporal awareness akin to the dynamic visual working memory of humans. HAT not only establishes a new state-of-the-art in predicting the scanpath of fixations made during target-present and target-absent visual search and ``taskless'' free viewing, but also makes human gaze behavior interpretable. Unlike previous methods that rely on a coarse grid of fixation cells and experience information loss due to fixation discretization, HAT features a sequential dense prediction architecture and outputs a dense heatmap for each fixation, thus avoiding discretizing fixations. HAT sets a new standard in computational attention, which emphasizes effectiveness, generality, and interpretability. HAT's demonstrated scope and applicability will likely inspire the development of new attention models that can better predict human behavior in various attention-demanding scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/HAT.

We introduce three new attention mechanisms that outperform standard multi-head attention in terms of efficiency and learning capabilities, thereby improving the performance and broader deployability of Transformer models. Our first contribution is Optimised Attention, which performs similarly to standard attention, but has 3/4 as many parameters and one matrix multiplication fewer per head. Next, we introduce Efficient Attention, which performs on par with standard attention with only 1/2 as many parameters as many parameters and two matrix multiplications fewer per head and is up to twice as fast as standard attention. Lastly, we introduce Super Attention, which surpasses standard attention by a significant margin in both vision and natural language processing tasks while having fewer parameters and matrix multiplications. In addition to providing rigorous mathematical comparisons, we evaluate the presented attention mechanisms on MNIST, CIFAR100, IMDB Movie Reviews, and Amazon Reviews datasets.

In this paper we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive approach for incorporating various masking mechanisms into Transformers architectures in a scalable way. We show that recent results on linear causal attention (Choromanski et al., 2021) and log-linear RPE-attention (Luo et al., 2021) are special cases of this general mechanism. However by casting the problem as a topological (graph-based) modulation of unmasked attention, we obtain several results unknown before, including efficient d-dimensional RPE-masking and graph-kernel masking. We leverage many mathematical techniques ranging from spectral analysis through dynamic programming and random walks to new algorithms for solving Markov processes on graphs. We provide a corresponding empirical evaluation.

Precise localization of GUI elements is crucial for the development of GUI agents. Traditional methods rely on bounding box or center-point regression, neglecting spatial interaction uncertainty and visual-semantic hierarchies. Recent methods incorporate attention mechanisms but still face two key issues: (1) ignoring processing background regions causes attention drift from the desired area, and (2) uniform labeling fails to distinguish between center and edges of the target UI element, leading to click imprecision. Inspired by how humans visually process and interact with GUI elements, we propose the Valley-to-Peak (V2P) method to address these issues. To mitigate background distractions, V2P introduces a suppression attention mechanism that minimizes the model's focus on irrelevant regions to highlight the intended region. For the issue of center-edge distinction, V2P applies a Fitts' Law-inspired approach by modeling GUI interactions as 2D Gaussian heatmaps where the weight gradually decreases from the center towards the edges. The weight distribution follows a Gaussian function, with the variance determined by the target's size. Consequently, V2P effectively isolates the target area and teaches the model to concentrate on the most essential point of the UI element. The model trained by V2P achieves the performance with 92.3% and 50.5% on two benchmarks ScreenSpot-v2 and ScreenSpot-Pro. Ablations further confirm each component's contribution, highlighting V2P's generalizability for precise GUI grounding tasks.

Foreground segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision, encompassing various subdivision tasks. Previous research has typically designed task-specific architectures for each task, leading to a lack of unification. Moreover, they primarily focus on recognizing foreground objects without effectively distinguishing them from the background. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of the background and its relationship with the foreground. We introduce FOCUS, the Foreground ObjeCts Universal Segmentation framework that can handle multiple foreground tasks. We develop a multi-scale semantic network using the edge information of objects to enhance image features. To achieve boundary-aware segmentation, we propose a novel distillation method, integrating the contrastive learning strategy to refine the prediction mask in multi-modal feature space. We conduct extensive experiments on a total of 13 datasets across 5 tasks, and the results demonstrate that FOCUS consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art task-specific models on most metrics.

End-to-end models reach state-of-the-art performance for speech recognition, but global soft attention is not monotonic, which might lead to convergence problems, to instability, to bad generalisation, cannot be used for online streaming, and is also inefficient in calculation. Monotonicity can potentially fix all of this. There are several ad-hoc solutions or heuristics to introduce monotonicity, but a principled introduction is rarely found in literature so far. In this paper, we present a mathematically clean solution to introduce monotonicity, by introducing a new latent variable which represents the audio position or segment boundaries. We compare several monotonic latent models to our global soft attention baseline such as a hard attention model, a local windowed soft attention model, and a segmental soft attention model. We can show that our monotonic models perform as good as the global soft attention model. We perform our experiments on Switchboard 300h. We carefully outline the details of our training and release our code and configs.

Foundation models, pre-trained on a large amount of data have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in various downstream tasks. However, in object detection and instance segmentation, two fundamental computer vision tasks heavily reliant on extensive human annotations, foundation models such as SAM and DINO struggle to achieve satisfactory performance. In this study, we reveal that the devil is in the object boundary, i.e., these foundation models fail to discern boundaries between individual objects. For the first time, we probe that CLIP, which has never accessed any instance-level annotations, can provide a highly beneficial and strong instance-level boundary prior in the clustering results of its particular intermediate layer. Following this surprising observation, we propose Zip which Zips up CLip and SAM in a novel classification-first-then-discovery pipeline, enabling annotation-free, complex-scene-capable, open-vocabulary object detection and instance segmentation. Our Zip significantly boosts SAM's mask AP on COCO dataset by 12.5% and establishes state-of-the-art performance in various settings, including training-free, self-training, and label-efficient finetuning. Furthermore, annotation-free Zip even achieves comparable performance to the best-performing open-vocabulary object detecters using base annotations. Code is released at https://github.com/ChengShiest/Zip-Your-CLIP

When an image generation process is guided by both a text prompt and spatial cues, such as a set of bounding boxes, do these elements work in harmony, or does one dominate the other? Our analysis of a pretrained image diffusion model that integrates gated self-attention into the U-Net reveals that spatial grounding often outweighs textual grounding due to the sequential flow from gated self-attention to cross-attention. We demonstrate that such bias can be significantly mitigated without sacrificing accuracy in either grounding by simply rewiring the network architecture, changing from sequential to parallel for gated self-attention and cross-attention. This surprisingly simple yet effective solution does not require any fine-tuning of the network but significantly reduces the trade-off between the two groundings. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements from the original GLIGEN to the rewired version in the trade-off between textual grounding and spatial grounding.

Large pre-trained neural networks such as BERT have had great recent success in NLP, motivating a growing body of research investigating what aspects of language they are able to learn from unlabeled data. Most recent analysis has focused on model outputs (e.g., language model surprisal) or internal vector representations (e.g., probing classifiers). Complementary to these works, we propose methods for analyzing the attention mechanisms of pre-trained models and apply them to BERT. BERT's attention heads exhibit patterns such as attending to delimiter tokens, specific positional offsets, or broadly attending over the whole sentence, with heads in the same layer often exhibiting similar behaviors. We further show that certain attention heads correspond well to linguistic notions of syntax and coreference. For example, we find heads that attend to the direct objects of verbs, determiners of nouns, objects of prepositions, and coreferent mentions with remarkably high accuracy. Lastly, we propose an attention-based probing classifier and use it to further demonstrate that substantial syntactic information is captured in BERT's attention.

We present Boundary IoU (Intersection-over-Union), a new segmentation evaluation measure focused on boundary quality. We perform an extensive analysis across different error types and object sizes and show that Boundary IoU is significantly more sensitive than the standard Mask IoU measure to boundary errors for large objects and does not over-penalize errors on smaller objects. The new quality measure displays several desirable characteristics like symmetry w.r.t. prediction/ground truth pairs and balanced responsiveness across scales, which makes it more suitable for segmentation evaluation than other boundary-focused measures like Trimap IoU and F-measure. Based on Boundary IoU, we update the standard evaluation protocols for instance and panoptic segmentation tasks by proposing the Boundary AP (Average Precision) and Boundary PQ (Panoptic Quality) metrics, respectively. Our experiments show that the new evaluation metrics track boundary quality improvements that are generally overlooked by current Mask IoU-based evaluation metrics. We hope that the adoption of the new boundary-sensitive evaluation metrics will lead to rapid progress in segmentation methods that improve boundary quality.

Attention sinks are tokens, often the beginning-of-sequence (BOS) token, that receive disproportionately high attention despite limited semantic relevance. In this work, we identify a class of attention sinks, which we term secondary sinks, that differ fundamentally from the sinks studied in prior works, which we term primary sinks. While prior works have identified that tokens other than BOS can sometimes become sinks, they were found to exhibit properties analogous to the BOS token. Specifically, they emerge at the same layer, persist throughout the network and draw a large amount of attention mass. Whereas, we find the existence of secondary sinks that arise primarily in middle layers and can persist for a variable number of layers, and draw a smaller, but still significant, amount of attention mass. Through extensive experiments across 11 model families, we analyze where these secondary sinks appear, their properties, how they are formed, and their impact on the attention mechanism. Specifically, we show that: (1) these sinks are formed by specific middle-layer MLP modules; these MLPs map token representations to vectors that align with the direction of the primary sink of that layer. (2) The ell_2-norm of these vectors determines the sink score of the secondary sink, and also the number of layers it lasts for, thereby leading to different impacts on the attention mechanisms accordingly. (3) The primary sink weakens in middle layers, coinciding with the emergence of secondary sinks. We observe that in larger-scale models, the location and lifetime of the sinks, together referred to as sink levels, appear in a more deterministic and frequent manner. Specifically, we identify three sink levels in QwQ-32B and six levels in Qwen3-14B.

Attention-based mechanisms are widely used in machine learning, most prominently in transformers. However, hyperparameters such as the rank of the attention matrices and the number of heads are scaled nearly the same way in all realizations of this architecture, without theoretical justification. In this work we show that there are dramatic trade-offs between the rank and number of heads of the attention mechanism. Specifically, we present a simple and natural target function that can be represented using a single full-rank attention head for any context length, but that cannot be approximated by low-rank attention unless the number of heads is exponential in the embedding dimension, even for short context lengths. Moreover, we prove that, for short context lengths, adding depth allows the target to be approximated by low-rank attention. For long contexts, we conjecture that full-rank attention is necessary. Finally, we present experiments with off-the-shelf transformers that validate our theoretical findings.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success, but their occasional content fabrication, or hallucination, limits their practical application. Hallucination arises because LLMs struggle to admit ignorance due to inadequate training on knowledge boundaries. We call it a limitation of LLMs that they can not accurately express their knowledge boundary, answering questions they know while admitting ignorance to questions they do not know. In this paper, we aim to teach LLMs to recognize and express their knowledge boundary, so they can reduce hallucinations caused by fabricating when they do not know. We propose CoKE, which first probes LLMs' knowledge boundary via internal confidence given a set of questions, and then leverages the probing results to elicit the expression of the knowledge boundary. Extensive experiments show CoKE helps LLMs express knowledge boundaries, answering known questions while declining unknown ones, significantly improving in-domain and out-of-domain performance.

While understanding the knowledge boundaries of LLMs is crucial to prevent hallucination, research on knowledge boundaries of LLMs has predominantly focused on English. In this work, we present the first study to analyze how LLMs recognize knowledge boundaries across different languages by probing their internal representations when processing known and unknown questions in multiple languages. Our empirical studies reveal three key findings: 1) LLMs' perceptions of knowledge boundaries are encoded in the middle to middle-upper layers across different languages. 2) Language differences in knowledge boundary perception follow a linear structure, which motivates our proposal of a training-free alignment method that effectively transfers knowledge boundary perception ability across languages, thereby helping reduce hallucination risk in low-resource languages; 3) Fine-tuning on bilingual question pair translation further enhances LLMs' recognition of knowledge boundaries across languages. Given the absence of standard testbeds for cross-lingual knowledge boundary analysis, we construct a multilingual evaluation suite comprising three representative types of knowledge boundary data. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/LLM-Multilingual-Knowledge-Boundaries.

The pursuit of reducing the memory footprint of the self-attention mechanism in multi-headed self attention (MHA) spawned a rich portfolio of methods, e.g., group-query attention (GQA) and multi-head latent attention (MLA). The methods leverage specialized low-rank factorizations across embedding dimensions or attention heads. From the point of view of classical low-rank approximation, these methods are unconventional and raise questions of which objects they really approximate and how to interpret the low-rank behavior of the resulting representations. To answer these questions, this work proposes a generalized view on the weight objects in the self-attention layer and a factorization strategy, which allows us to construct a parameter efficient scheme, called Tucker Attention. Tucker Attention requires an order of magnitude fewer parameters for comparable validation metrics, compared to GQA and MLA, as evaluated in LLM and ViT test cases. Additionally, Tucker Attention~encompasses GQA, MLA, MHA as special cases and is fully compatible with flash-attention and rotary position embeddings (RoPE). This generalization strategy yields insights of the actual ranks achieved by MHA, GQA, and MLA, and further enables simplifications for MLA.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generate responses autoregressively, integrating visual and linguistic information in an evolving context. Prior work on interpretability has focused on individual layers and circuits (where), leaving the token-level dynamics of multimodal computation during generation (when) underexplored. We address this gap and study attention shifts as per semantic role; tracking model attention to image, text, instruction, and previously generated tokens, One Token at a Time (OTaT). We introduce multimodal tasks that require explicit switching between visual and textual context within a single response. Across two mainstream model families and four open-weight MLLMs of varying sizes, we establish consistent patterns: attention to image peaks at tokens requiring image-derived information, instruction tokens are revisited during task transitions, and attention to previously generated tokens increases as the generation progresses. Causal attention blocking interventions validate the functional role of these trends. We profile model behavior under disrupted attention and observe responses falling back to language priors, or exhibiting cross-modal leakage, denial, or recovery. Finally, informed of the attention dynamics through our novel analysis, we propose a simple test-time intervention to boost attention to the relevant modality at the right time, significantly improving multimodal task performance.

Attention guides our gaze to fixate the proper location of the scene and holds it in that location for the deserved amount of time given current processing demands, before shifting to the next one. As such, gaze deployment crucially is a temporal process. Existing computational models have made significant strides in predicting spatial aspects of observer's visual scanpaths (where to look), while often putting on the background the temporal facet of attention dynamics (when). In this paper we present TPP-Gaze, a novel and principled approach to model scanpath dynamics based on Neural Temporal Point Process (TPP), that jointly learns the temporal dynamics of fixations position and duration, integrating deep learning methodologies with point process theory. We conduct extensive experiments across five publicly available datasets. Our results show the overall superior performance of the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/phuselab/tppgaze.

Inspired by recent work in machine translation and object detection, we introduce an attention based model that automatically learns to describe the content of images. We describe how we can train this model in a deterministic manner using standard backpropagation techniques and stochastically by maximizing a variational lower bound. We also show through visualization how the model is able to automatically learn to fix its gaze on salient objects while generating the corresponding words in the output sequence. We validate the use of attention with state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets: Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS COCO.

Attending to what is relevant is fundamental to both the mammalian brain and modern machine learning models such as Transformers. Yet, determining relevance remains a core challenge, traditionally offloaded to learning algorithms like backpropagation. Inspired by recent cellular neurobiological evidence linking neocortical pyramidal cells to distinct mental states, this work shows how models (e.g., Transformers) can emulate high-level perceptual processing and awake thought (imagination) states to pre-select relevant information before applying attention. Triadic neuronal-level modulation loops among questions (Q), clues (keys, K), and hypotheses (values, V) enable diverse, deep, parallel reasoning chains at the representation level and allow a rapid shift from initial biases to refined understanding. This leads to orders-of-magnitude faster learning with significantly reduced computational demand (e.g., fewer heads, layers, and tokens), at an approximate cost of O(N), where N is the number of input tokens. Results span reinforcement learning (e.g., CarRacing in a high-dimensional visual setup), computer vision, and natural language question answering.

The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work positions attention as a privileged substrate that renders the internal logic of LLMs legible, not merely as a byproduct of computation, but as a mechanistic blueprint of reasoning itself. We first distinguish attention heads between locally and globally focused information processing and reveal that locally focused heads produce a sawtooth pattern near the diagonal indicating phrasal chunks, while globally focused heads expose tokens that exert broad downstream influence over future tokens. We formalize these with two metrics: 1) Windowed Average Attention Distance, which measures the extent of backward attention within a clipped window; 2) Future Attention Influence, which quantifies a token's global importance as the average attention it receives from subsequent tokens. Taken together, these signals reveal a recurring preplan-and-anchor mechanism, where the model first performs a long-range contextual reference to generate an introductory token, which is immediately followed by or coincides with a semantic anchor token that organizes subsequent reasoning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce three novel RL strategies that dynamically perform targeted credit assignment to critical nodes (preplan tokens, anchor tokens, and their temporal coupling) and show consistent performance gains across various reasoning tasks. By aligning optimization with the model's intrinsic reasoning rhythm, we aim to transform opaque optimization into an actionable structure-aware process, hoping to offer a potential step toward more transparent and effective optimization of LLM reasoning.

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSSS) aims to improve segmentation performance by utilizing large amounts of unlabeled data with limited labeled samples. Existing methods often suffer from coupling, where over-reliance on initial labeled data leads to suboptimal learning; confirmation bias, where incorrect predictions reinforce themselves repeatedly; and boundary blur caused by limited boundary-awareness and ambiguous edge cues. To address these issues, we propose CW-BASS, a novel framework for SSSS. In order to mitigate the impact of incorrect predictions, we assign confidence weights to pseudo-labels. Additionally, we leverage boundary-delineation techniques, which, despite being extensively explored in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), remain underutilized in SSSS. Specifically, our method: (1) reduces coupling via a confidence-weighted loss that adjusts pseudo-label influence based on their predicted confidence scores, (2) mitigates confirmation bias with a dynamic thresholding mechanism that learns to filter out pseudo-labels based on model performance, (3) tackles boundary blur using a boundary-aware module to refine segmentation near object edges, and (4) reduces label noise through a confidence decay strategy that progressively refines pseudo-labels during training. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscapes demonstrate that CW-BASS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, CW-BASS achieves a 65.9% mIoU on Cityscapes under a challenging and underexplored 1/30 (3.3%) split (100 images), highlighting its effectiveness in limited-label settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/psychofict/CW-BASS.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive advances, yet object hallucination remains a persistent challenge. Existing methods, based on the flawed assumption that omission and fabrication hallucinations share a common cause, often reduce omissions only to trigger more fabrications. In this work, we overturn this view by demonstrating that omission hallucinations arise from insufficient confidence when mapping perceived visual features to linguistic expressions, whereas fabrication hallucinations result from spurious associations within the cross-modal representation space due to statistical biases in the training corpus. Building on findings from visual attention intervention experiments, we propose the Visual-Semantic Attention Potential Field, a conceptual framework that reveals how the model constructs visual evidence to infer the presence or absence of objects. Leveraging this insight, we introduce Visual Potential Field Calibration (VPFC), a plug-and-play hallucination mitigation method that effectively reduces omission hallucinations without introducing additional fabrication hallucinations. Our findings reveal a critical oversight in current object hallucination research and chart new directions for developing more robust and balanced hallucination mitigation strategies.

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing LLMs for tool-use. Specifically, the crucial information in the context will be potentially overlooked by model when it is positioned in the trough zone of the attention waveform, leading to decreased performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference method named Attention Buckets. It allows LLMs to process their input through multiple parallel processes. Each process utilizes a distinct base angle for the rotary position embedding, thereby creating a unique attention waveform. By compensating an attention trough of a particular process with an attention peak of another process, our approach enhances LLM's awareness to various contextual positions, thus mitigating the risk of overlooking crucial information. In the largest tool-use benchmark, our method elevates a 7B model to achieve state-of-the-art performance, comparable to that of GPT-4. On other benchmarks and some RAG tasks, which also demand a thorough understanding of contextual content, Attention Buckets also exhibited notable enhancements in performance.

Images produced by text-to-image diffusion models might not always faithfully represent the semantic intent of the provided text prompt, where the model might overlook or entirely fail to produce certain objects. Existing solutions often require customly tailored functions for each of these problems, leading to sub-optimal results, especially for complex prompts. Our work introduces a novel perspective by tackling this challenge in a contrastive context. Our approach intuitively promotes the segregation of objects in attention maps while also maintaining that pairs of related attributes are kept close to each other. We conduct extensive experiments across a wide variety of scenarios, each involving unique combinations of objects, attributes, and scenes. These experiments effectively showcase the versatility, efficiency, and flexibility of our method in working with both latent and pixel-based diffusion models, including Stable Diffusion and Imagen. Moreover, we publicly share our source code to facilitate further research.

Text-guided image editing aims to modify specific regions of an image according to natural language instructions while maintaining the general structure and the background fidelity. Existing methods utilize masks derived from cross-attention maps generated from diffusion models to identify the target regions for modification. However, since cross-attention mechanisms focus on semantic relevance, they struggle to maintain the image integrity. As a result, these methods often lack spatial consistency, leading to editing artifacts and distortions. In this work, we address these limitations and introduce LOCATEdit, which enhances cross-attention maps through a graph-based approach utilizing self-attention-derived patch relationships to maintain smooth, coherent attention across image regions, ensuring that alterations are limited to the designated items while retaining the surrounding structure. \method consistently and substantially outperforms existing baselines on PIE-Bench, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance and effectiveness on various editing tasks. Code can be found on https://github.com/LOCATEdit/LOCATEdit/

The magnitude of a finite metric space has recently emerged as a novel invariant quantity, allowing to measure the effective size of a metric space. Despite encouraging first results demonstrating the descriptive abilities of the magnitude, such as being able to detect the boundary of a metric space, the potential use cases of magnitude remain under-explored. In this work, we investigate the properties of the magnitude on images, an important data modality in many machine learning applications. By endowing each individual images with its own metric space, we are able to define the concept of magnitude on images and analyse the individual contribution of each pixel with the magnitude vector. In particular, we theoretically show that the previously known properties of boundary detection translate to edge detection abilities in images. Furthermore, we demonstrate practical use cases of magnitude for machine learning applications and propose a novel magnitude model that consists of a computationally efficient magnitude computation and a learnable metric. By doing so, we address the computational hurdle that used to make magnitude impractical for many applications and open the way for the adoption of magnitude in machine learning research.

Understanding how attention varies across individuals has significant scientific and societal impacts. However, existing visual scanpath models treat attention uniformly, neglecting individual differences. To bridge this gap, this paper focuses on individualized scanpath prediction (ISP), a new attention modeling task that aims to accurately predict how different individuals shift their attention in diverse visual tasks. It proposes an ISP method featuring three novel technical components: (1) an observer encoder to characterize and integrate an observer's unique attention traits, (2) an observer-centric feature integration approach that holistically combines visual features, task guidance, and observer-specific characteristics, and (3) an adaptive fixation prioritization mechanism that refines scanpath predictions by dynamically prioritizing semantic feature maps based on individual observers' attention traits. These novel components allow scanpath models to effectively address the attention variations across different observers. Our method is generally applicable to different datasets, model architectures, and visual tasks, offering a comprehensive tool for transforming general scanpath models into individualized ones. Comprehensive evaluations using value-based and ranking-based metrics verify the method's effectiveness and generalizability.

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving force behind many recent state-of-the-art NLP models such as Transformer-based MT models and BERT. These models apply multiple attention mechanisms in parallel, with each attention "head" potentially focusing on different parts of the input, which makes it possible to express sophisticated functions beyond the simple weighted average. In this paper we make the surprising observation that even if models have been trained using multiple heads, in practice, a large percentage of attention heads can be removed at test time without significantly impacting performance. In fact, some layers can even be reduced to a single head. We further examine greedy algorithms for pruning down models, and the potential speed, memory efficiency, and accuracy improvements obtainable therefrom. Finally, we analyze the results with respect to which parts of the model are more reliant on having multiple heads, and provide precursory evidence that training dynamics play a role in the gains provided by multi-head attention.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into high-stakes decision-making. Inspired by the theory of inattentional blindness in human cognition, we investigate whether LLMs, trained on human-preferred corpora that embed attentional biases, exhibit a similar limitation: failing to attend to subtle yet important contextual cues under explicit task instructions. To evaluate this, we introduce the task of explicit-implicit reasoning and present MixRea, a benchmark of 2,246 multiple-choice questions across 9 reasoning types with varying distributions of explicit and implicit information. Evaluation of 21 advanced LLMs shows that even the best-performing reasoning model (Gemini 2.5 Pro) achieves only 42.8\% consistency, revealing widespread inattentional blindness. To mitigate this, we propose Potential Relation Completion Prompting (PRCP), a prompting method that improves reasoning by recovering overlooked causal relations. Further analysis shows that this limitation persists across diverse multi-source reasoning tasks, highlighting the need for more cognitively aligned models.

We introduce a novel segmental-attention model for automatic speech recognition. We restrict the decoder attention to segments to avoid quadratic runtime of global attention, better generalize to long sequences, and eventually enable streaming. We directly compare global-attention and different segmental-attention modeling variants. We develop and compare two separate time-synchronous decoders, one specifically taking the segmental nature into account, yielding further improvements. Using time-synchronous decoding for segmental models is novel and a step towards streaming applications. Our experiments show the importance of a length model to predict the segment boundaries. The final best segmental-attention model using segmental decoding performs better than global-attention, in contrast to other monotonic attention approaches in the literature. Further, we observe that the segmental model generalizes much better to long sequences of up to several minutes.

Attention sink (AS) is a consistent pattern in transformer attention maps where certain tokens (often special tokens or positional anchors) disproportionately attract attention from other tokens. We show that in transformers, AS is not an architectural artifact, but it is the manifestation of a fundamental geometric principle: the establishment of reference frames that anchor representational spaces. We analyze several architectures and identify three distinct reference frame types, centralized, distributed, and bidirectional, that correlate with the attention sink phenomenon. We show that they emerge during the earliest stages of training as optimal solutions to the problem of establishing stable coordinate systems in high-dimensional spaces. We show the influence of architecture components, particularly position encoding implementations, on the specific type of reference frame. This perspective transforms our understanding of transformer attention mechanisms and provides insights for both architecture design and the relationship with AS.

Precise localization of GUI elements is crucial for the development of GUI agents. Traditional methods rely on bounding box or center-point regression, neglecting spatial interaction uncertainty and visual-semantic hierarchies. Recent methods incorporate attention mechanisms but still face two key issues: (1) ignoring processing background regions causes attention drift from the desired area, and (2) uniform modeling the target UI element fails to distinguish between its center and edges, leading to click imprecision. Inspired by how humans visually process and interact with GUI elements, we propose the Valley-to-Peak (V2P) method to address these issues. To mitigate background distractions, V2P introduces a suppression attention mechanism that minimizes the model's focus on irrelevant regions to highlight the intended region. For the issue of center-edge distinction, V2P applies a Fitts' Law-inspired approach by modeling GUI interactions as 2D Gaussian heatmaps where the weight gradually decreases from the center towards the edges. The weight distribution follows a Gaussian function, with the variance determined by the target's size. Consequently, V2P effectively isolates the target area and teaches the model to concentrate on the most essential point of the UI element. The model trained by V2P achieves the performance with 92.4\% and 52.5\% on two benchmarks ScreenSpot-v2 and ScreenSpot-Pro (see Fig.~fig:main_results_charts). Ablations further confirm each component's contribution, underscoring V2P's generalizability in precise GUI grounding tasks and its potential for real-world deployment in future GUI agents.

Many self-attention sublayers in large language models (LLMs) can be removed with little to no loss. We attribute this to the Attention Suppression Hypothesis: during pre-training, some deep attention layers learn to mute their own contribution, leaving the residual stream and the MLP to carry the representation. We propose Gate-Norm, a one-shot, weight-only criterion that ranks attention sublayers by query--key coupling and removes the least coupled ones, requiring no calibration data, no forward passes, no fine-tuning, and no specialized kernels. On 40-layer, 13B-parameter LLaMA models, Gate-Norm prunes the model in under a second. Pruning 8--16 attention sublayers yields up to 1.30times higher inference throughput while keeping average zero-shot accuracy within 2% of the unpruned baseline across BoolQ, RTE, HellaSwag, WinoGrande, ARC-Easy/Challenge, and OpenBookQA. Across these settings, Gate-Norm matches data-driven pruning methods in accuracy while being sim 1000times faster to score layers, enabling practical, data-free compression of LLMs.

Length extrapolation algorithms based on Rotary position embedding (RoPE) have shown promising results in extending the context length of language models. However, understanding how position embedding can capture longer-range contextual information remains elusive. Based on the intuition that different dimensions correspond to different frequency of changes in RoPE encoding, we conducted a dimension-level analysis to investigate the correlation between a hidden dimension of an attention head and its contribution to capturing long-distance dependencies. Using our correlation metric, we identified a particular type of attention heads, which we named Positional Heads, from various length-extrapolated models. These heads exhibit a strong focus on long-range information interaction and play a pivotal role in long input processing, as evidence by our ablation. We further demonstrate the correlation between the efficiency of length extrapolation and the extension of the high-dimensional attention allocation of these heads. The identification of Positional Heads provides insights for future research in long-text comprehension.

Large language models can now process increasingly long inputs, yet their ability to effectively use information spread across long contexts remains limited. We trace this gap to how attention budget is spent during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on long sequences: positional biases and attention sinks cause the model to allocate most of its attention to positionally privileged tokens rather than semantically relevant content. This training-time attention dilution (the starvation of content tokens in the attention distribution) weakens the gradient signal, limiting the model's ability to learn robust long-context capabilities. We introduce FocuSFT, a bilevel optimization framework that addresses this problem at training time. An inner loop adapts lightweight fast-weight parameters on the training context to form a parametric memory that concentrates attention on relevant content, and the outer loop performs SFT conditioned on this sharpened representation. Both loops apply bidirectional attention over context tokens while preserving causal masking for responses, reducing the causal asymmetry that gives rise to attention sinks and aligning inner-outer behavior. On BABILong, FocuSFT improves accuracy by up to +14pp across 4K--32K context lengths; on RULER, it raises CWE aggregation from 72.9\% to 81.1\% at 16K; and on GPQA with agentic tool use, it yields a 24\% relative gain in pass@1. Attention analysis shows that FocuSFT reduces attention sink mass by 529times and triples context engagement during training. Code: https://github.com/JarvisPei/FocuSFT

Object binding, the brain's ability to bind the many features that collectively represent an object into a coherent whole, is central to human cognition. It groups low-level perceptual features into high-level object representations, stores those objects efficiently and compositionally in memory, and supports human reasoning about individual object instances. While prior work often imposes object-centric attention (e.g., Slot Attention) explicitly to probe these benefits, it remains unclear whether this ability naturally emerges in pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs). Intuitively, they could: recognizing which patches belong to the same object should be useful for downstream prediction and thus guide attention. Motivated by the quadratic nature of self-attention, we hypothesize that ViTs represent whether two patches belong to the same object, a property we term IsSameObject. We decode IsSameObject from patch embeddings across ViT layers using a similarity probe, which reaches over 90% accuracy. Crucially, this object-binding capability emerges reliably in self-supervised ViTs (DINO, MAE, CLIP), but markedly weaker in ImageNet-supervised models, suggesting that binding is not a trivial architectural artifact, but an ability acquired through specific pretraining objectives. We further discover that IsSameObject is encoded in a low-dimensional subspace on top of object features, and that this signal actively guides attention. Ablating IsSameObject from model activations degrades downstream performance and works against the learning objective, implying that emergent object binding naturally serves the pretraining objective. Our findings challenge the view that ViTs lack object binding and highlight how symbolic knowledge of "which parts belong together" emerges naturally in a connectionist system.

As the demand for analyzing egocentric videos grows, egocentric visual attention prediction, anticipating where a camera wearer will attend, has garnered increasing attention. However, it remains challenging due to the inherent complexity and ambiguity of dynamic egocentric scenes. Motivated by evidence that scene contextual information plays a crucial role in modulating human attention, in this paper, we present a language-guided scene context-aware learning framework for robust egocentric visual attention prediction. We first design a context perceiver which is guided to summarize the egocentric video based on a language-based scene description, generating context-aware video representations. We then introduce two training objectives that: 1) encourage the framework to focus on the target point-of-interest regions and 2) suppress distractions from irrelevant regions which are less likely to attract first-person attention. Extensive experiments on Ego4D and Aria Everyday Activities (AEA) datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance and enhanced robustness across diverse, dynamic egocentric scenarios.

Since the advent of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in various tasks but remain largely as black-box systems. Consequently, their development relies heavily on data-driven approaches, limiting performance enhancement through changes in internal architecture and reasoning pathways. As a result, many researchers have begun exploring the potential internal mechanisms of LLMs, aiming to identify the essence of their reasoning bottlenecks, with most studies focusing on attention heads. Our survey aims to shed light on the internal reasoning processes of LLMs by concentrating on the interpretability and underlying mechanisms of attention heads. We first distill the human thought process into a four-stage framework: Knowledge Recalling, In-Context Identification, Latent Reasoning, and Expression Preparation. Using this framework, we systematically review existing research to identify and categorize the functions of specific attention heads. Furthermore, we summarize the experimental methodologies used to discover these special heads, dividing them into two categories: Modeling-Free methods and Modeling-Required methods. Also, we outline relevant evaluation methods and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current research and propose several potential future directions. Our reference list is open-sourced at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/Awesome-Attention-Heads.

Existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit insufficient visual attention, leading to hallucinations. To alleviate this problem, some previous studies adjust and amplify visual attention. These methods present a limitation that boosting attention for all visual tokens inevitably increases attention to task irrelevant tokens. To tackle this challenge, we propose a training free attentional intervention algorithm to enhance the attention of task-relevant tokens based on the argument that task-relevant tokens generally demonstrate high visual-textual similarities. Specifically, the vision-text cross-attention submatrices, which represent visual-textual correlations, are extracted to construct the reweighting matrices to reallocate attention. Besides, to enhance the contribution of visual tokens, we inject visual attention values into the beam search decoding to identify solutions with higher visual attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this method significantly reduces hallucinations across mainstream LVLMs, while preserving the accuracy and coherence of generated content.

Transformer-based pre-training techniques of text and layout have proven effective in a number of document understanding tasks. Despite this success, multimodal pre-training models suffer from very high computational and memory costs. Motivated by human reading strategies, this paper presents Skim-Attention, a new attention mechanism that takes advantage of the structure of the document and its layout. Skim-Attention only attends to the 2-dimensional position of the words in a document. Our experiments show that Skim-Attention obtains a lower perplexity than prior works, while being more computationally efficient. Skim-Attention can be further combined with long-range Transformers to efficiently process long documents. We also show how Skim-Attention can be used off-the-shelf as a mask for any Pre-trained Language Model, allowing to improve their performance while restricting attention. Finally, we show the emergence of a document structure representation in Skim-Attention.

Benefiting from the capability of building inter-dependencies among channels or spatial locations, attention mechanisms have been extensively studied and broadly used in a variety of computer vision tasks recently. In this paper, we investigate light-weight but effective attention mechanisms and present triplet attention, a novel method for computing attention weights by capturing cross-dimension interaction using a three-branch structure. For an input tensor, triplet attention builds inter-dimensional dependencies by the rotation operation followed by residual transformations and encodes inter-channel and spatial information with negligible computational overhead. Our method is simple as well as efficient and can be easily plugged into classic backbone networks as an add-on module. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various challenging tasks including image classification on ImageNet-1k and object detection on MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC datasets. Furthermore, we provide extensive in-sight into the performance of triplet attention by visually inspecting the GradCAM and GradCAM++ results. The empirical evaluation of our method supports our intuition on the importance of capturing dependencies across dimensions when computing attention weights. Code for this paper can be publicly accessed at https://github.com/LandskapeAI/triplet-attention

Attention-based architectures, in particular transformers, are at the heart of a technological revolution. Interestingly, in addition to helping obtain state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications, the attention mechanism intrinsically provides meaningful insights on the internal behavior of the model. Can these insights be used as explanations? Debate rages on. In this paper, we mathematically study a simple attention-based architecture and pinpoint the differences between post-hoc and attention-based explanations. We show that they provide quite different results, and that, despite their limitations, post-hoc methods are capable of capturing more useful insights than merely examining the attention weights.

Learning mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces, or operator learning, is essential for many machine learning applications. Although transformer-based operators are popular, they often rely on token-wise attention. These methods treat continuous fields as discrete tokens and usually ignore the global functional structure. We introduce Functional Attention, which reinterprets attention as a functional correspondence between adaptive bases. Inspired by geometric functional maps, our method replaces softmax affinities with structured linear operators. This yields a compact, generalizable, resolution-invariant representation that explicitly captures global dependencies. Experiments demonstrate that Functional Attention can match state-of-the-art performance in many operator learning tasks, including solving PDEs, 3D segmentation, and regression, while remaining robust to varying discretizations. Project page is available at https://github.com/xjffff/FUNCATTN.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and describing visual content, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various vision-language tasks. However, these models frequently exhibit hallucination behavior, where they generate descriptions containing objects or details absent in the input image. Our work investigates this phenomenon by analyzing attention patterns across transformer layers and heads, revealing that hallucinations often stem from progressive degradation of visual grounding in deeper layers. We propose a novel attention modification approach that combines selective token emphasis and head-specific modulation to maintain visual grounding throughout the generation process. Our method introduces two key components: (1) a dual-stream token selection mechanism that identifies and prioritizes both locally informative and spatially significant visual tokens, and (2) an attention head-specific modulation strategy that differentially amplifies visual information processing based on measured visual sensitivity of individual attention heads. Through extensive experimentation on the MSCOCO dataset, we demonstrate that our approach reduces hallucination rates by up to 62.3\% compared to baseline models while maintaining comparable task performance. Our analysis reveals that selectively modulating tokens across attention heads with varying levels of visual sensitivity can significantly improve visual grounding without requiring model retraining.

Modality following serves as the capacity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to selectively utilize multimodal contexts based on user instructions. It is fundamental to ensuring safety and reliability in real-world deployments. However, the underlying mechanisms governing this decision-making process remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate its working mechanism through an information flow lens. Our findings reveal that instruction tokens function as structural anchors for modality arbitration: Shallow attention layers perform non-selective information transfer, routing multimodal cues to these anchors as a latent buffer; Modality competition is resolved within deep attention layers guided by the instruction intent, while MLP layers exhibit semantic inertia, acting as an adversarial force. Furthermore, we identify a sparse set of specialized attention heads that drive this arbitration. Causal interventions demonstrate that manipulating a mere 5% of these critical heads can decrease the modality-following ratio by 60% through blocking, or increase it by 60% through targeted amplification of failed samples. Our work provides a substantial step toward model transparency and offers a principled framework for the orchestration of multimodal information in MLLMs.