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SubscribeGAP: A Graph-aware Language Model Framework for Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation
Recent improvements in KG-to-text generation are due to additional auxiliary pre-training tasks designed to give the fine-tune task a boost in performance. These tasks require extensive computational resources while only suggesting marginal improvements. Here, we demonstrate that by fusing graph-aware elements into existing pre-trained language models, we are able to outperform state-of-the-art models and close the gap imposed by additional pre-training tasks. We do so by proposing a mask structure to capture neighborhood information and a novel type encoder that adds a bias to the graph-attention weights depending on the connection type. Experiments on two KG-to-text benchmark datasets show our models are competitive while involving fewer parameters and no additional pre-training tasks. By formulating the problem as a framework, we can interchange the various proposed components and begin interpreting KG-to-text generative models based on the topological and type information found in a graph.
ProxSparse: Regularized Learning of Semi-Structured Sparsity Masks for Pretrained LLMs
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in natural language processing tasks, yet their massive size makes serving them inefficient and costly. Semi-structured pruning has emerged as an effective method for model acceleration, but existing approaches are suboptimal because they focus on local, layer-wise optimizations using heuristic rules, failing to leverage global feedback. We present ProxSparse, a learning-based framework for mask selection enabled by regularized optimization. ProxSparse transforms the rigid, non-differentiable mask selection process into a smoother optimization procedure, allowing gradual mask exploration with flexibility. ProxSparse does not involve additional weight updates once the mask is determined. Our extensive evaluations on 7 widely used models show that ProxSparse consistently outperforms previously proposed semi-structured mask selection methods with significant improvement, demonstrating the effectiveness of our learned approach towards semi-structured pruning.
Polyline Path Masked Attention for Vision Transformer
Global dependency modeling and spatial position modeling are two core issues of the foundational architecture design in current deep learning frameworks. Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision, leveraging the powerful global dependency modeling capability of the self-attention mechanism. Furthermore, Mamba2 has demonstrated its significant potential in natural language processing tasks by explicitly modeling the spatial adjacency prior through the structured mask. In this paper, we propose Polyline Path Masked Attention (PPMA) that integrates the self-attention mechanism of ViTs with an enhanced structured mask of Mamba2, harnessing the complementary strengths of both architectures. Specifically, we first ameliorate the traditional structured mask of Mamba2 by introducing a 2D polyline path scanning strategy and derive its corresponding structured mask, polyline path mask, which better preserves the adjacency relationships among image tokens. Notably, we conduct a thorough theoretical analysis on the structural characteristics of the proposed polyline path mask and design an efficient algorithm for the computation of the polyline path mask. Next, we embed the polyline path mask into the self-attention mechanism of ViTs, enabling explicit modeling of spatial adjacency prior. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, including image classification, object detection, and segmentation, demonstrate that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches based on both state-space models and Transformers. For example, our proposed PPMA-T/S/B models achieve 48.7%/51.1%/52.3% mIoU on the ADE20K semantic segmentation task, surpassing RMT-T/S/B by 0.7%/1.3%/0.3%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/zhongchenzhao/PPMA.
PTQ1.61: Push the Real Limit of Extremely Low-Bit Post-Training Quantization Methods for Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer severe performance degradation when facing extremely low-bit (sub 2-bit) quantization. Several existing sub 2-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) methods utilize a mix-precision scheme by leveraging an unstructured fine-grained mask to explicitly distinguish salient weights, while which introduces an extra 1-bit or more per weight. To explore the real limit of PTQ, we propose an extremely low-bit PTQ method called PTQ1.61, which enables weight quantization to 1.61-bit for the first time. Specifically, we first introduce a one-dimensional structured mask with negligibly additional 0.0002-bit per weight based on input activations from the perspective of reducing the upper bound of quantization error to allocate corresponding salient weight channels to 4-bit. For non-salient channels binarization, an efficient block-wise scaling factors optimization framework is then presented to take implicit row-wise correlations and angular biases into account. Different from prior works that concentrate on adjusting quantization methodologies, we further propose a novel paradigm called quantization preprocessing, where we argue that transforming the weight distribution of the pretrained model before quantization can alleviate the difficulty in per-channel extremely low-bit PTQ. Extensive experiments indicate our PTQ1.61 achieves state-of-the-art performance in extremely low-bit quantization. Codes are available at https://github.com/zjq0455/PTQ1.61.
Text4Seg++: Advancing Image Segmentation via Generative Language Modeling
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities in vision-language tasks. However, effectively integrating image segmentation into these models remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a novel text-as-mask paradigm that casts image segmentation as a text generation problem, eliminating the need for additional decoders and significantly simplifying the segmentation process. Our key innovation is semantic descriptors, a new textual representation of segmentation masks where each image patch is mapped to its corresponding text label. We first introduce image-wise semantic descriptors, a patch-aligned textual representation of segmentation masks that integrates naturally into the language modeling pipeline. To enhance efficiency, we introduce the Row-wise Run-Length Encoding (R-RLE), which compresses redundant text sequences, reducing the length of semantic descriptors by 74% and accelerating inference by 3times, without compromising performance. Building upon this, our initial framework Text4Seg achieves strong segmentation performance across a wide range of vision tasks. To further improve granularity and compactness, we propose box-wise semantic descriptors, which localizes regions of interest using bounding boxes and represents region masks via structured mask tokens called semantic bricks. This leads to our refined model, Text4Seg++, which formulates segmentation as a next-brick prediction task, combining precision, scalability, and generative efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on natural and remote sensing datasets show that Text4Seg++ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models across diverse benchmarks without any task-specific fine-tuning, while remaining compatible with existing MLLM backbones. Our work highlights the effectiveness, scalability, and generalizability of text-driven image segmentation within the MLLM framework.
Leveraging Structured Pruning of Convolutional Neural Networks
Structured pruning is a popular method to reduce the cost of convolutional neural networks, that are the state of the art in many computer vision tasks. However, depending on the architecture, pruning introduces dimensional discrepancies which prevent the actual reduction of pruned networks. To tackle this problem, we propose a method that is able to take any structured pruning mask and generate a network that does not encounter any of these problems and can be leveraged efficiently. We provide an accurate description of our solution and show results of gains, in energy consumption and inference time on embedded hardware, of pruned convolutional neural networks.
Structure-Aware Fill-in-the-Middle Pretraining for Code
Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) is a common pretraining method for code LLMs, where models complete code segments given surrounding context. However, existing LLMs treat code as plain text and mask random character spans. We propose and evaluate AST-FIM, a pretraining strategy that leverages Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) to mask complete syntactic structures at scale, ensuring coherent training examples better aligned with universal code structures and common code editing patterns such as blocks, expressions, or functions. To evaluate real-world fill-in-the-middle (FIM) programming tasks, we introduce Real-FIM-Eval, a benchmark derived from 30,000+ GitHub commits across 12 languages. On infilling tasks, experiments on 1B and 8B parameter models show that AST-FIM is particularly beneficial for real-world code editing as it outperforms standard random-character FIM by up to 5 pts on standard FIM benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gonglinyuan/ast_fim.
ASGDiffusion: Parallel High-Resolution Generation with Asynchronous Structure Guidance
Training-free high-resolution (HR) image generation has garnered significant attention due to the high costs of training large diffusion models. Most existing methods begin by reconstructing the overall structure and then proceed to refine the local details. Despite their advancements, they still face issues with repetitive patterns in HR image generation. Besides, HR generation with diffusion models incurs significant computational costs. Thus, parallel generation is essential for interactive applications. To solve the above limitations, we introduce a novel method named ASGDiffusion for parallel HR generation with Asynchronous Structure Guidance (ASG) using pre-trained diffusion models. To solve the pattern repetition problem of HR image generation, ASGDiffusion leverages the low-resolution (LR) noise weighted by the attention mask as the structure guidance for the denoising step to ensure semantic consistency. The proposed structure guidance can significantly alleviate the pattern repetition problem. To enable parallel generation, we further propose a parallelism strategy, which calculates the patch noises and structure guidance asynchronously. By leveraging multi-GPU parallel acceleration, we significantly accelerate generation speed and reduce memory usage per GPU. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively and efficiently addresses common issues like pattern repetition and achieves state-of-the-art HR generation.
Graph-KV: Breaking Sequence via Injecting Structural Biases into Large Language Models
Modern large language models (LLMs) are inherently auto-regressive, requiring input to be serialized into flat sequences regardless of their structural dependencies. This serialization hinders the model's ability to leverage structural inductive biases, especially in tasks such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and reasoning on data with native graph structures, where inter-segment dependencies are crucial. We introduce Graph-KV with the potential to overcome this limitation. Graph-KV leverages the KV-cache of text segments as condensed representations and governs their interaction through structural inductive biases. In this framework, 'target' segments selectively attend only to the KV-caches of their designated 'source' segments, rather than all preceding segments in a serialized sequence. This approach induces a graph-structured block mask, sparsifying attention and enabling a message-passing-like step within the LLM. Furthermore, strategically allocated positional encodings for source and target segments reduce positional bias and context window consumption. We evaluate Graph-KV across three scenarios: (1) seven RAG benchmarks spanning direct inference, multi-hop reasoning, and long-document understanding; (2) Arxiv-QA, a novel academic paper QA task with full-text scientific papers structured as citation ego-graphs; and (3) paper topic classification within a citation network. By effectively reducing positional bias and harnessing structural inductive biases, Graph-KV substantially outperforms baselines, including standard costly sequential encoding, across various settings. Code and the Graph-KV data are publicly available.
Think Thrice Before You Act: Progressive Thought Refinement in Large Language Models
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that progressive refinement, rather than providing a single answer, results in more accurate and thoughtful outputs. However, existing methods often rely heavily on supervision signals to evaluate previous responses, making it difficult to assess output quality in more open-ended scenarios effectively. Additionally, these methods are typically designed for specific tasks, which limits their generalization to new domains. To address these limitations, we propose Progressive Thought Refinement (PTR), a framework that enables LLMs to refine their responses progressively. PTR operates in two phases: (1) Thought data construction stage: We propose a weak and strong model collaborative selection strategy to build a high-quality progressive refinement dataset to ensure logical consistency from thought to answers, and the answers are gradually refined in each round. (2) Thought-Mask Fine-Tuning Phase: We design a training structure to mask the "thought" and adjust loss weights to encourage LLMs to refine prior thought, teaching them to implicitly understand "how to improve" rather than "what is correct." Experimental results show that PTR significantly enhances LLM performance across ten diverse tasks (avg. from 49.6% to 53.5%) without task-specific fine-tuning. Notably, in more open-ended tasks, LLMs also demonstrate substantial improvements in the quality of responses beyond mere accuracy, suggesting that PTR truly teaches LLMs to self-improve over time.
Semantically Structured Image Compression via Irregular Group-Based Decoupling
Image compression techniques typically focus on compressing rectangular images for human consumption, however, resulting in transmitting redundant content for downstream applications. To overcome this limitation, some previous works propose to semantically structure the bitstream, which can meet specific application requirements by selective transmission and reconstruction. Nevertheless, they divide the input image into multiple rectangular regions according to semantics and ignore avoiding information interaction among them, causing waste of bitrate and distorted reconstruction of region boundaries. In this paper, we propose to decouple an image into multiple groups with irregular shapes based on a customized group mask and compress them independently. Our group mask describes the image at a finer granularity, enabling significant bitrate saving by reducing the transmission of redundant content. Moreover, to ensure the fidelity of selective reconstruction, this paper proposes the concept of group-independent transform that maintain the independence among distinct groups. And we instantiate it by the proposed Group-Independent Swin-Block (GI Swin-Block). Experimental results demonstrate that our framework structures the bitstream with negligible cost, and exhibits superior performance on both visual quality and intelligent task supporting.
Selective Structured State-Spaces for Long-Form Video Understanding
Effective modeling of complex spatiotemporal dependencies in long-form videos remains an open problem. The recently proposed Structured State-Space Sequence (S4) model with its linear complexity offers a promising direction in this space. However, we demonstrate that treating all image-tokens equally as done by S4 model can adversely affect its efficiency and accuracy. To address this limitation, we present a novel Selective S4 (i.e., S5) model that employs a lightweight mask generator to adaptively select informative image tokens resulting in more efficient and accurate modeling of long-term spatiotemporal dependencies in videos. Unlike previous mask-based token reduction methods used in transformers, our S5 model avoids the dense self-attention calculation by making use of the guidance of the momentum-updated S4 model. This enables our model to efficiently discard less informative tokens and adapt to various long-form video understanding tasks more effectively. However, as is the case for most token reduction methods, the informative image tokens could be dropped incorrectly. To improve the robustness and the temporal horizon of our model, we propose a novel long-short masked contrastive learning (LSMCL) approach that enables our model to predict longer temporal context using shorter input videos. We present extensive comparative results using three challenging long-form video understanding datasets (LVU, COIN and Breakfast), demonstrating that our approach consistently outperforms the previous state-of-the-art S4 model by up to 9.6% accuracy while reducing its memory footprint by 23%.
SAM-DiffSR: Structure-Modulated Diffusion Model for Image Super-Resolution
Diffusion-based super-resolution (SR) models have recently garnered significant attention due to their potent restoration capabilities. But conventional diffusion models perform noise sampling from a single distribution, constraining their ability to handle real-world scenes and complex textures across semantic regions. With the success of segment anything model (SAM), generating sufficiently fine-grained region masks can enhance the detail recovery of diffusion-based SR model. However, directly integrating SAM into SR models will result in much higher computational cost. In this paper, we propose the SAM-DiffSR model, which can utilize the fine-grained structure information from SAM in the process of sampling noise to improve the image quality without additional computational cost during inference. In the process of training, we encode structural position information into the segmentation mask from SAM. Then the encoded mask is integrated into the forward diffusion process by modulating it to the sampled noise. This adjustment allows us to independently adapt the noise mean within each corresponding segmentation area. The diffusion model is trained to estimate this modulated noise. Crucially, our proposed framework does NOT change the reverse diffusion process and does NOT require SAM at inference. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, showcasing superior performance in suppressing artifacts, and surpassing existing diffusion-based methods by 0.74 dB at the maximum in terms of PSNR on DIV2K dataset. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lose4578/SAM-DiffSR.
A Structure-Aware Relation Network for Thoracic Diseases Detection and Segmentation
Instance level detection and segmentation of thoracic diseases or abnormalities are crucial for automatic diagnosis in chest X-ray images. Leveraging on constant structure and disease relations extracted from domain knowledge, we propose a structure-aware relation network (SAR-Net) extending Mask R-CNN. The SAR-Net consists of three relation modules: 1. the anatomical structure relation module encoding spatial relations between diseases and anatomical parts. 2. the contextual relation module aggregating clues based on query-key pair of disease RoI and lung fields. 3. the disease relation module propagating co-occurrence and causal relations into disease proposals. Towards making a practical system, we also provide ChestX-Det, a chest X-Ray dataset with instance-level annotations (boxes and masks). ChestX-Det is a subset of the public dataset NIH ChestX-ray14. It contains ~3500 images of 13 common disease categories labeled by three board-certified radiologists. We evaluate our SAR-Net on it and another dataset DR-Private. Experimental results show that it can enhance the strong baseline of Mask R-CNN with significant improvements. The ChestX-Det is released at https://github.com/Deepwise-AILab/ChestX-Det-Dataset.
Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions
Modern image inpainting systems, despite the significant progress, often struggle with large missing areas, complex geometric structures, and high-resolution images. We find that one of the main reasons for that is the lack of an effective receptive field in both the inpainting network and the loss function. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new method called large mask inpainting (LaMa). LaMa is based on i) a new inpainting network architecture that uses fast Fourier convolutions (FFCs), which have the image-wide receptive field; ii) a high receptive field perceptual loss; iii) large training masks, which unlocks the potential of the first two components. Our inpainting network improves the state-of-the-art across a range of datasets and achieves excellent performance even in challenging scenarios, e.g. completion of periodic structures. Our model generalizes surprisingly well to resolutions that are higher than those seen at train time, and achieves this at lower parameter&time costs than the competitive baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/saic-mdal/lama.
Mask & Match: Learning to Recognize Handwritten Math with Self-Supervised Attention
Recognizing handwritten mathematical expressions (HMER) is a challenging task due to the inherent two-dimensional structure, varying symbol scales, and complex spatial relationships among symbols. In this paper, we present a self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for HMER that eliminates the need for expensive labeled data. Our approach begins by pretraining an image encoder using a combination of global and local contrastive loss, enabling the model to learn both holistic and fine-grained representations. A key contribution of this work is a novel self-supervised attention network, which is trained using a progressive spatial masking strategy. This attention mechanism is designed to learn semantically meaningful focus regions, such as operators, exponents, and nested mathematical notation, without requiring any supervision. The progressive masking curriculum encourages the network to become increasingly robust to missing or occluded visual information, ultimately improving structural understanding. Our complete pipeline consists of (1) self-supervised pretraining of the encoder, (2) self-supervised attention learning, and (3) supervised fine-tuning with a transformer decoder to generate LATEX sequences. Extensive experiments on CROHME benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing SSL and fully supervised baselines, validating the effectiveness of our progressive attention mechanism in enhancing HMER performance. Our codebase can be found here.
HAP: Structure-Aware Masked Image Modeling for Human-Centric Perception
Model pre-training is essential in human-centric perception. In this paper, we first introduce masked image modeling (MIM) as a pre-training approach for this task. Upon revisiting the MIM training strategy, we reveal that human structure priors offer significant potential. Motivated by this insight, we further incorporate an intuitive human structure prior - human parts - into pre-training. Specifically, we employ this prior to guide the mask sampling process. Image patches, corresponding to human part regions, have high priority to be masked out. This encourages the model to concentrate more on body structure information during pre-training, yielding substantial benefits across a range of human-centric perception tasks. To further capture human characteristics, we propose a structure-invariant alignment loss that enforces different masked views, guided by the human part prior, to be closely aligned for the same image. We term the entire method as HAP. HAP simply uses a plain ViT as the encoder yet establishes new state-of-the-art performance on 11 human-centric benchmarks, and on-par result on one dataset. For example, HAP achieves 78.1% mAP on MSMT17 for person re-identification, 86.54% mA on PA-100K for pedestrian attribute recognition, 78.2% AP on MS COCO for 2D pose estimation, and 56.0 PA-MPJPE on 3DPW for 3D pose and shape estimation.
DiffFashion: Reference-based Fashion Design with Structure-aware Transfer by Diffusion Models
Image-based fashion design with AI techniques has attracted increasing attention in recent years. We focus on a new fashion design task, where we aim to transfer a reference appearance image onto a clothing image while preserving the structure of the clothing image. It is a challenging task since there are no reference images available for the newly designed output fashion images. Although diffusion-based image translation or neural style transfer (NST) has enabled flexible style transfer, it is often difficult to maintain the original structure of the image realistically during the reverse diffusion, especially when the referenced appearance image greatly differs from the common clothing appearance. To tackle this issue, we present a novel diffusion model-based unsupervised structure-aware transfer method to semantically generate new clothes from a given clothing image and a reference appearance image. In specific, we decouple the foreground clothing with automatically generated semantic masks by conditioned labels. And the mask is further used as guidance in the denoising process to preserve the structure information. Moreover, we use the pre-trained vision Transformer (ViT) for both appearance and structure guidance. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models, generating more realistic images in the fashion design task. Code and demo can be found at https://github.com/Rem105-210/DiffFashion.
Modeling All-Atom Glycan Structures via Hierarchical Message Passing and Multi-Scale Pre-training
Understanding the various properties of glycans with machine learning has shown some preliminary promise. However, previous methods mainly focused on modeling the backbone structure of glycans as graphs of monosaccharides (i.e., sugar units), while they neglected the atomic structures underlying each monosaccharide, which are actually important indicators of glycan properties. We fill this blank by introducing the GlycanAA model for All-Atom-wise Glycan modeling. GlycanAA models a glycan as a heterogeneous graph with monosaccharide nodes representing its global backbone structure and atom nodes representing its local atomic-level structures. Based on such a graph, GlycanAA performs hierarchical message passing to capture from local atomic-level interactions to global monosaccharide-level interactions. To further enhance model capability, we pre-train GlycanAA on a high-quality unlabeled glycan dataset, deriving the PreGlycanAA model. We design a multi-scale mask prediction algorithm to endow the model about different levels of dependencies in a glycan. Extensive benchmark results show the superiority of GlycanAA over existing glycan encoders and verify the further improvements achieved by PreGlycanAA. We maintain all resources at https://github.com/kasawa1234/GlycanAA
MAKIMA: Tuning-free Multi-Attribute Open-domain Video Editing via Mask-Guided Attention Modulation
Diffusion-based text-to-image (T2I) models have demonstrated remarkable results in global video editing tasks. However, their focus is primarily on global video modifications, and achieving desired attribute-specific changes remains a challenging task, specifically in multi-attribute editing (MAE) in video. Contemporary video editing approaches either require extensive fine-tuning or rely on additional networks (such as ControlNet) for modeling multi-object appearances, yet they remain in their infancy, offering only coarse-grained MAE solutions. In this paper, we present MAKIMA, a tuning-free MAE framework built upon pretrained T2I models for open-domain video editing. Our approach preserves video structure and appearance information by incorporating attention maps and features from the inversion process during denoising. To facilitate precise editing of multiple attributes, we introduce mask-guided attention modulation, enhancing correlations between spatially corresponding tokens and suppressing cross-attribute interference in both self-attention and cross-attention layers. To balance video frame generation quality and efficiency, we implement consistent feature propagation, which generates frame sequences by editing keyframes and propagating their features throughout the sequence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAKIMA outperforms existing baselines in open-domain multi-attribute video editing tasks, achieving superior results in both editing accuracy and temporal consistency while maintaining computational efficiency.
Exploiting the Brain's Network Structure for Automatic Identification of ADHD Subjects
Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is a common behavioral problem affecting children. In this work, we investigate the automatic classification of ADHD subjects using the resting state Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) sequences of the brain. We show that the brain can be modeled as a functional network, and certain properties of the networks differ in ADHD subjects from control subjects. We compute the pairwise correlation of brain voxels' activity over the time frame of the experimental protocol which helps to model the function of a brain as a network. Different network features are computed for each of the voxels constructing the network. The concatenation of the network features of all the voxels in a brain serves as the feature vector. Feature vectors from a set of subjects are then used to train a PCA-LDA (principal component analysis-linear discriminant analysis) based classifier. We hypothesized that ADHD-related differences lie in some specific regions of the brain and using features only from those regions is sufficient to discriminate ADHD and control subjects. We propose a method to create a brain mask that includes the useful regions only and demonstrate that using the feature from the masked regions improves classification accuracy on the test data set. We train our classifier with 776 subjects and test on 171 subjects provided by The Neuro Bureau for the ADHD-200 challenge. We demonstrate the utility of graph-motif features, specifically the maps that represent the frequency of participation of voxels in network cycles of length 3. The best classification performance (69.59%) is achieved using 3-cycle map features with masking. Our proposed approach holds promise in being able to diagnose and understand the disorder.
Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) (Ho et al. 2020) have shown impressive results on image and waveform generation in continuous state spaces. Here, we introduce Discrete Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (D3PMs), diffusion-like generative models for discrete data that generalize the multinomial diffusion model of Hoogeboom et al. 2021, by going beyond corruption processes with uniform transition probabilities. This includes corruption with transition matrices that mimic Gaussian kernels in continuous space, matrices based on nearest neighbors in embedding space, and matrices that introduce absorbing states. The third allows us to draw a connection between diffusion models and autoregressive and mask-based generative models. We show that the choice of transition matrix is an important design decision that leads to improved results in image and text domains. We also introduce a new loss function that combines the variational lower bound with an auxiliary cross entropy loss. For text, this model class achieves strong results on character-level text generation while scaling to large vocabularies on LM1B. On the image dataset CIFAR-10, our models approach the sample quality and exceed the log-likelihood of the continuous-space DDPM model.
Lightweight and Post-Training Structured Pruning for On-Device Large Lanaguage Models
Considering the hardware-friendly characteristics and broad applicability, structured pruning has emerged as an efficient solution to reduce the resource demands of large language models (LLMs) on resource-constrained devices. Traditional structured pruning methods often need fine-tuning to recover performance loss, which incurs high memory overhead and substantial data requirements, rendering them unsuitable for on-device applications. Additionally, post-training structured pruning techniques typically necessitate specific activation functions or architectural modifications, thereby limiting their scope of applications. Herein, we introduce COMP, a lightweight post-training structured pruning method that employs a hybrid-granularity pruning strategy. COMP initially prunes selected model layers based on their importance at a coarse granularity, followed by fine-grained neuron pruning within the dense layers of each remaining model layer. To more accurately evaluate neuron importance, COMP introduces a new matrix condition-based metric. Subsequently, COMP utilizes mask tuning to recover accuracy without the need for fine-tuning, significantly reducing memory consumption. Experimental results demonstrate that COMP improves performance by 6.13\% on the LLaMA-2-7B model with a 20\% pruning ratio compared to LLM-Pruner, while simultaneously reducing memory overhead by 80\%.
CascadeTabNet: An approach for end to end table detection and structure recognition from image-based documents
An automatic table recognition method for interpretation of tabular data in document images majorly involves solving two problems of table detection and table structure recognition. The prior work involved solving both problems independently using two separate approaches. More recent works signify the use of deep learning-based solutions while also attempting to design an end to end solution. In this paper, we present an improved deep learning-based end to end approach for solving both problems of table detection and structure recognition using a single Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model. We propose CascadeTabNet: a Cascade mask Region-based CNN High-Resolution Network (Cascade mask R-CNN HRNet) based model that detects the regions of tables and recognizes the structural body cells from the detected tables at the same time. We evaluate our results on ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2019 and TableBank public datasets. We achieved 3rd rank in ICDAR 2019 post-competition results for table detection while attaining the best accuracy results for the ICDAR 2013 and TableBank dataset. We also attain the highest accuracy results on the ICDAR 2019 table structure recognition dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate effective transfer learning and image augmentation techniques that enable CNNs to achieve very accurate table detection results. Code and dataset has been made available at: https://github.com/DevashishPrasad/CascadeTabNet
Mask-to-Height: A YOLOv11-Based Architecture for Joint Building Instance Segmentation and Height Classification from Satellite Imagery
Accurate building instance segmentation and height classification are critical for urban planning, 3D city modeling, and infrastructure monitoring. This paper presents a detailed analysis of YOLOv11, the recent advancement in the YOLO series of deep learning models, focusing on its application to joint building extraction and discrete height classification from satellite imagery. YOLOv11 builds on the strengths of earlier YOLO models by introducing a more efficient architecture that better combines features at different scales, improves object localization accuracy, and enhances performance in complex urban scenes. Using the DFC2023 Track 2 dataset -- which includes over 125,000 annotated buildings across 12 cities -- we evaluate YOLOv11's performance using metrics such as precision, recall, F1 score, and mean average precision (mAP). Our findings demonstrate that YOLOv11 achieves strong instance segmentation performance with 60.4\% mAP@50 and 38.3\% mAP@50--95 while maintaining robust classification accuracy across five predefined height tiers. The model excels in handling occlusions, complex building shapes, and class imbalance, particularly for rare high-rise structures. Comparative analysis confirms that YOLOv11 outperforms earlier multitask frameworks in both detection accuracy and inference speed, making it well-suited for real-time, large-scale urban mapping. This research highlights YOLOv11's potential to advance semantic urban reconstruction through streamlined categorical height modeling, offering actionable insights for future developments in remote sensing and geospatial intelligence.
MGMap: Mask-Guided Learning for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction
Currently, high-definition (HD) map construction leans towards a lightweight online generation tendency, which aims to preserve timely and reliable road scene information. However, map elements contain strong shape priors. Subtle and sparse annotations make current detection-based frameworks ambiguous in locating relevant feature scopes and cause the loss of detailed structures in prediction. To alleviate these problems, we propose MGMap, a mask-guided approach that effectively highlights the informative regions and achieves precise map element localization by introducing the learned masks. Specifically, MGMap employs learned masks based on the enhanced multi-scale BEV features from two perspectives. At the instance level, we propose the Mask-activated instance (MAI) decoder, which incorporates global instance and structural information into instance queries by the activation of instance masks. At the point level, a novel position-guided mask patch refinement (PG-MPR) module is designed to refine point locations from a finer-grained perspective, enabling the extraction of point-specific patch information. Compared to the baselines, our proposed MGMap achieves a notable improvement of around 10 mAP for different input modalities. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that our approach showcases strong robustness and generalization capabilities. Our code can be found at https://github.com/xiaolul2/MGMap.
MoPE-CLIP: Structured Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Models with Module-wise Pruning Error Metric
Vision-language pre-trained models have achieved impressive performance on various downstream tasks. However, their large model sizes hinder their utilization on platforms with limited computational resources. We find that directly using smaller pre-trained models and applying magnitude-based pruning on CLIP models leads to inflexibility and inferior performance. Recent efforts for VLP compression either adopt uni-modal compression metrics resulting in limited performance or involve costly mask-search processes with learnable masks. In this paper, we first propose the Module-wise Pruning Error (MoPE) metric, accurately assessing CLIP module importance by performance decline on cross-modal tasks. Using the MoPE metric, we introduce a unified pruning framework applicable to both pre-training and task-specific fine-tuning compression stages. For pre-training, MoPE-CLIP effectively leverages knowledge from the teacher model, significantly reducing pre-training costs while maintaining strong zero-shot capabilities. For fine-tuning, consecutive pruning from width to depth yields highly competitive task-specific models. Extensive experiments in two stages demonstrate the effectiveness of the MoPE metric, and MoPE-CLIP outperforms previous state-of-the-art VLP compression methods.
Asymmetric Mask Scheme for Self-Supervised Real Image Denoising
In recent years, self-supervised denoising methods have gained significant success and become critically important in the field of image restoration. Among them, the blind spot network based methods are the most typical type and have attracted the attentions of a large number of researchers. Although the introduction of blind spot operations can prevent identity mapping from noise to noise, it imposes stringent requirements on the receptive fields in the network design, thereby limiting overall performance. To address this challenge, we propose a single mask scheme for self-supervised denoising training, which eliminates the need for blind spot operation and thereby removes constraints on the network structure design. Furthermore, to achieve denoising across entire image during inference, we propose a multi-mask scheme. Our method, featuring the asymmetric mask scheme in training and inference, achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing real noisy image datasets. All the source code will be made available to the public.
SketchEdit: Mask-Free Local Image Manipulation with Partial Sketches
Sketch-based image manipulation is an interactive image editing task to modify an image based on input sketches from users. Existing methods typically formulate this task as a conditional inpainting problem, which requires users to draw an extra mask indicating the region to modify in addition to sketches. The masked regions are regarded as holes and filled by an inpainting model conditioned on the sketch. With this formulation, paired training data can be easily obtained by randomly creating masks and extracting edges or contours. Although this setup simplifies data preparation and model design, it complicates user interaction and discards useful information in masked regions. To this end, we investigate a new paradigm of sketch-based image manipulation: mask-free local image manipulation, which only requires sketch inputs from users and utilizes the entire original image. Given an image and sketch, our model automatically predicts the target modification region and encodes it into a structure agnostic style vector. A generator then synthesizes the new image content based on the style vector and sketch. The manipulated image is finally produced by blending the generator output into the modification region of the original image. Our model can be trained in a self-supervised fashion by learning the reconstruction of an image region from the style vector and sketch. The proposed method offers simpler and more intuitive user workflows for sketch-based image manipulation and provides better results than previous approaches. More results, code and interactive demo will be available at https://zengxianyu.github.io/sketchedit.
Pruning-based Topology Refinement of 3D Mesh using a 2D Alpha Mask
Image-based 3D reconstruction has increasingly stunning results over the past few years with the latest improvements in computer vision and graphics. Geometry and topology are two fundamental concepts when dealing with 3D mesh structures. But the latest often remains a side issue in the 3D mesh-based reconstruction literature. Indeed, performing per-vertex elementary displacements over a 3D sphere mesh only impacts its geometry and leaves the topological structure unchanged and fixed. Whereas few attempts propose to update the geometry and the topology, all need to lean on costly 3D ground-truth to determine the faces/edges to prune. We present in this work a method that aims to refine the topology of any 3D mesh through a face-pruning strategy that extensively relies upon 2D alpha masks and camera pose information. Our solution leverages a differentiable renderer that renders each face as a 2D soft map. Its pixel intensity reflects the probability of being covered during the rendering process by such a face. Based on the 2D soft-masks available, our method is thus able to quickly highlight all the incorrectly rendered faces for a given viewpoint. Because our module is agnostic to the network that produces the 3D mesh, it can be easily plugged into any self-supervised image-based (either synthetic or natural) 3D reconstruction pipeline to get complex meshes with a non-spherical topology.
DirectDrag: High-Fidelity, Mask-Free, Prompt-Free Drag-based Image Editing via Readout-Guided Feature Alignment
Drag-based image editing using generative models provides intuitive control over image structures. However, existing methods rely heavily on manually provided masks and textual prompts to preserve semantic fidelity and motion precision. Removing these constraints creates a fundamental trade-off: visual artifacts without masks and poor spatial control without prompts. To address these limitations, we propose DirectDrag, a novel mask- and prompt-free editing framework. DirectDrag enables precise and efficient manipulation with minimal user input while maintaining high image fidelity and accurate point alignment. DirectDrag introduces two key innovations. First, we design an Auto Soft Mask Generation module that intelligently infers editable regions from point displacement, automatically localizing deformation along movement paths while preserving contextual integrity through the generative model's inherent capacity. Second, we develop a Readout-Guided Feature Alignment mechanism that leverages intermediate diffusion activations to maintain structural consistency during point-based edits, substantially improving visual fidelity. Despite operating without manual mask or prompt, DirectDrag achieves superior image quality compared to existing methods while maintaining competitive drag accuracy. Extensive experiments on DragBench and real-world scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of DirectDrag for high-quality, interactive image manipulation. Project Page: https://frakw.github.io/DirectDrag/. Code is available at: https://github.com/frakw/DirectDrag.
LoRA-Edit: Controllable First-Frame-Guided Video Editing via Mask-Aware LoRA Fine-Tuning
Video editing using diffusion models has achieved remarkable results in generating high-quality edits for videos. However, current methods often rely on large-scale pretraining, limiting flexibility for specific edits. First-frame-guided editing provides control over the first frame, but lacks flexibility over subsequent frames. To address this, we propose a mask-based LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) tuning method that adapts pretrained Image-to-Video (I2V) models for flexible video editing. Our approach preserves background regions while enabling controllable edits propagation. This solution offers efficient and adaptable video editing without altering the model architecture. To better steer this process, we incorporate additional references, such as alternate viewpoints or representative scene states, which serve as visual anchors for how content should unfold. We address the control challenge using a mask-driven LoRA tuning strategy that adapts a pre-trained image-to-video model to the editing context. The model must learn from two distinct sources: the input video provides spatial structure and motion cues, while reference images offer appearance guidance. A spatial mask enables region-specific learning by dynamically modulating what the model attends to, ensuring that each area draws from the appropriate source. Experimental results show our method achieves superior video editing performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
MaskLLM: Learnable Semi-Structured Sparsity for Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) are distinguished by their massive parameter counts, which typically result in significant redundancy. This work introduces MaskLLM, a learnable pruning method that establishes Semi-structured (or ``N:M'') Sparsity in LLMs, aimed at reducing computational overhead during inference. Instead of developing a new importance criterion, MaskLLM explicitly models N:M patterns as a learnable distribution through Gumbel Softmax sampling. This approach facilitates end-to-end training on large-scale datasets and offers two notable advantages: 1) High-quality Masks - our method effectively scales to large datasets and learns accurate masks; 2) Transferability - the probabilistic modeling of mask distribution enables the transfer learning of sparsity across domains or tasks. We assessed MaskLLM using 2:4 sparsity on various LLMs, including LLaMA-2, Nemotron-4, and GPT-3, with sizes ranging from 843M to 15B parameters, and our empirical results show substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods. For instance, leading approaches achieve a perplexity (PPL) of 10 or greater on Wikitext compared to the dense model's 5.12 PPL, but MaskLLM achieves a significantly lower 6.72 PPL solely by learning the masks with frozen weights. Furthermore, MaskLLM's learnable nature allows customized masks for lossless application of 2:4 sparsity to downstream tasks or domains. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/MaskLLM.
Seg2Any: Open-set Segmentation-Mask-to-Image Generation with Precise Shape and Semantic Control
Despite recent advances in diffusion models, top-tier text-to-image (T2I) models still struggle to achieve precise spatial layout control, i.e. accurately generating entities with specified attributes and locations. Segmentation-mask-to-image (S2I) generation has emerged as a promising solution by incorporating pixel-level spatial guidance and regional text prompts. However, existing S2I methods fail to simultaneously ensure semantic consistency and shape consistency. To address these challenges, we propose Seg2Any, a novel S2I framework built upon advanced multimodal diffusion transformers (e.g. FLUX). First, to achieve both semantic and shape consistency, we decouple segmentation mask conditions into regional semantic and high-frequency shape components. The regional semantic condition is introduced by a Semantic Alignment Attention Mask, ensuring that generated entities adhere to their assigned text prompts. The high-frequency shape condition, representing entity boundaries, is encoded as an Entity Contour Map and then introduced as an additional modality via multi-modal attention to guide image spatial structure. Second, to prevent attribute leakage across entities in multi-entity scenarios, we introduce an Attribute Isolation Attention Mask mechanism, which constrains each entity's image tokens to attend exclusively to themselves during image self-attention. To support open-set S2I generation, we construct SACap-1M, a large-scale dataset containing 1 million images with 5.9 million segmented entities and detailed regional captions, along with a SACap-Eval benchmark for comprehensive S2I evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Seg2Any achieves state-of-the-art performance on both open-set and closed-set S2I benchmarks, particularly in fine-grained spatial and attribute control of entities.
MaskGWM: A Generalizable Driving World Model with Video Mask Reconstruction
World models that forecast environmental changes from actions are vital for autonomous driving models with strong generalization. The prevailing driving world model mainly build on video prediction model. Although these models can produce high-fidelity video sequences with advanced diffusion-based generator, they are constrained by their predictive duration and overall generalization capabilities. In this paper, we explore to solve this problem by combining generation loss with MAE-style feature-level context learning. In particular, we instantiate this target with three key design: (1) A more scalable Diffusion Transformer (DiT) structure trained with extra mask construction task. (2) we devise diffusion-related mask tokens to deal with the fuzzy relations between mask reconstruction and generative diffusion process. (3) we extend mask construction task to spatial-temporal domain by utilizing row-wise mask for shifted self-attention rather than masked self-attention in MAE. Then, we adopt a row-wise cross-view module to align with this mask design. Based on above improvement, we propose MaskGWM: a Generalizable driving World Model embodied with Video Mask reconstruction. Our model contains two variants: MaskGWM-long, focusing on long-horizon prediction, and MaskGWM-mview, dedicated to multi-view generation. Comprehensive experiments on standard benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which contain normal validation of Nuscene dataset, long-horizon rollout of OpenDV-2K dataset and zero-shot validation of Waymo dataset. Quantitative metrics on these datasets show our method notably improving state-of-the-art driving world model.
CSF-Net: Context-Semantic Fusion Network for Large Mask Inpainting
In this paper, we propose a semantic-guided framework to address the challenging problem of large-mask image inpainting, where essential visual content is missing and contextual cues are limited. To compensate for the limited context, we leverage a pretrained Amodal Completion (AC) model to generate structure-aware candidates that serve as semantic priors for the missing regions. We introduce Context-Semantic Fusion Network (CSF-Net), a transformer-based fusion framework that fuses these candidates with contextual features to produce a semantic guidance image for image inpainting. This guidance improves inpainting quality by promoting structural accuracy and semantic consistency. CSF-Net can be seamlessly integrated into existing inpainting models without architectural changes and consistently enhances performance across diverse masking conditions. Extensive experiments on the Places365 and COCOA datasets demonstrate that CSF-Net effectively reduces object hallucination while enhancing visual realism and semantic alignment. The code for CSF-Net is available at https://github.com/chaeyeonheo/CSF-Net.
RAM++: Robust Representation Learning via Adaptive Mask for All-in-One Image Restoration
This work presents Robust Representation Learning via Adaptive Mask (RAM++), a two-stage framework for all-in-one image restoration. RAM++ integrates high-level semantic understanding with low-level texture generation to achieve content-oriented robust restoration. It addresses the limitations of existing degradation-oriented methods in extreme scenarios (e.g., degradations strongly coupled with image structures). RAM++ also mitigates common challenges such as unbalanced performance across tasks, overfitting to seen degradations, and weak generalization to unseen ones through three key designs: 1) Adaptive Semantic-Aware Mask (AdaSAM): a pretraining strategy that applies pixel-level masks to semantically rich and textured regions. This design enables the network to learn both generative priors and image content priors from various degradations. 2) Mask Attribute Conductance (MAC): a selective fine-tuning strategy that adjusts the layers with higher contributions to bridge the integrity gap between masked pretraining and full-image fine-tuning while retaining learned priors. 3) Robust Feature Regularization (RFR): a strategy that leverages DINOv2's semantically consistent and degradation-invariant representations, together with efficient feature fusion, to achieve faithful and semantically coherent restoration. With these designs, RAM++ achieves robust, well-balanced, and state-of-the-art performance across seen, unseen, extreme, and mixed degradations. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/DragonisCV/RAM
PATMAT: Person Aware Tuning of Mask-Aware Transformer for Face Inpainting
Generative models such as StyleGAN2 and Stable Diffusion have achieved state-of-the-art performance in computer vision tasks such as image synthesis, inpainting, and de-noising. However, current generative models for face inpainting often fail to preserve fine facial details and the identity of the person, despite creating aesthetically convincing image structures and textures. In this work, we propose Person Aware Tuning (PAT) of Mask-Aware Transformer (MAT) for face inpainting, which addresses this issue. Our proposed method, PATMAT, effectively preserves identity by incorporating reference images of a subject and fine-tuning a MAT architecture trained on faces. By using ~40 reference images, PATMAT creates anchor points in MAT's style module, and tunes the model using the fixed anchors to adapt the model to a new face identity. Moreover, PATMAT's use of multiple images per anchor during training allows the model to use fewer reference images than competing methods. We demonstrate that PATMAT outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of image quality, the preservation of person-specific details, and the identity of the subject. Our results suggest that PATMAT can be a promising approach for improving the quality of personalized face inpainting.
CMAMRNet: A Contextual Mask-Aware Network Enhancing Mural Restoration Through Comprehensive Mask Guidance
Murals, as invaluable cultural artifacts, face continuous deterioration from environmental factors and human activities. Digital restoration of murals faces unique challenges due to their complex degradation patterns and the critical need to preserve artistic authenticity. Existing learning-based methods struggle with maintaining consistent mask guidance throughout their networks, leading to insufficient focus on damaged regions and compromised restoration quality. We propose CMAMRNet, a Contextual Mask-Aware Mural Restoration Network that addresses these limitations through comprehensive mask guidance and multi-scale feature extraction. Our framework introduces two key components: (1) the Mask-Aware Up/Down-Sampler (MAUDS), which ensures consistent mask sensitivity across resolution scales through dedicated channel-wise feature selection and mask-guided feature fusion; and (2) the Co-Feature Aggregator (CFA), operating at both the highest and lowest resolutions to extract complementary features for capturing fine textures and global structures in degraded regions. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CMAMRNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, effectively preserving both structural integrity and artistic details in restored murals. The code is available at~https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet{https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet}.
DiffAtlas: GenAI-fying Atlas Segmentation via Image-Mask Diffusion
Accurate medical image segmentation is crucial for precise anatomical delineation. Deep learning models like U-Net have shown great success but depend heavily on large datasets and struggle with domain shifts, complex structures, and limited training samples. Recent studies have explored diffusion models for segmentation by iteratively refining masks. However, these methods still retain the conventional image-to-mask mapping, making them highly sensitive to input data, which hampers stability and generalization. In contrast, we introduce DiffAtlas, a novel generative framework that models both images and masks through diffusion during training, effectively ``GenAI-fying'' atlas-based segmentation. During testing, the model is guided to generate a specific target image-mask pair, from which the corresponding mask is obtained. DiffAtlas retains the robustness of the atlas paradigm while overcoming its scalability and domain-specific limitations. Extensive experiments on CT and MRI across same-domain, cross-modality, varying-domain, and different data-scale settings using the MMWHS and TotalSegmentator datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods, particularly in limited-data and zero-shot modality segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/M3DV/DiffAtlas.
STEP: Learning N:M Structured Sparsity Masks from Scratch with Precondition
Recent innovations on hardware (e.g. Nvidia A100) have motivated learning N:M structured sparsity masks from scratch for fast model inference. However, state-of-the-art learning recipes in this regime (e.g. SR-STE) are proposed for non-adaptive optimizers like momentum SGD, while incurring non-trivial accuracy drop for Adam-trained models like attention-based LLMs. In this paper, we first demonstrate such gap origins from poorly estimated second moment (i.e. variance) in Adam states given by the masked weights. We conjecture that learning N:M masks with Adam should take the critical regime of variance estimation into account. In light of this, we propose STEP, an Adam-aware recipe that learns N:M masks with two phases: first, STEP calculates a reliable variance estimate (precondition phase) and subsequently, the variance remains fixed and is used as a precondition to learn N:M masks (mask-learning phase). STEP automatically identifies the switching point of two phases by dynamically sampling variance changes over the training trajectory and testing the sample concentration. Empirically, we evaluate STEP and other baselines such as ASP and SR-STE on multiple tasks including CIFAR classification, machine translation and LLM fine-tuning (BERT-Base, GPT-2). We show STEP mitigates the accuracy drop of baseline recipes and is robust to aggressive structured sparsity ratios.
MAG-Edit: Localized Image Editing in Complex Scenarios via $\underline{M}$ask-Based $\underline{A}$ttention-Adjusted $\underline{G}$uidance
Recent diffusion-based image editing approaches have exhibited impressive editing capabilities in images with simple compositions. However, localized editing in complex scenarios has not been well-studied in the literature, despite its growing real-world demands. Existing mask-based inpainting methods fall short of retaining the underlying structure within the edit region. Meanwhile, mask-free attention-based methods often exhibit editing leakage and misalignment in more complex compositions. In this work, we develop MAG-Edit, a training-free, inference-stage optimization method, which enables localized image editing in complex scenarios. In particular, MAG-Edit optimizes the noise latent feature in diffusion models by maximizing two mask-based cross-attention constraints of the edit token, which in turn gradually enhances the local alignment with the desired prompt. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in achieving both text alignment and structure preservation for localized editing within complex scenarios.
MOVIS: Enhancing Multi-Object Novel View Synthesis for Indoor Scenes
Repurposing pre-trained diffusion models has been proven to be effective for NVS. However, these methods are mostly limited to a single object; directly applying such methods to compositional multi-object scenarios yields inferior results, especially incorrect object placement and inconsistent shape and appearance under novel views. How to enhance and systematically evaluate the cross-view consistency of such models remains under-explored. To address this issue, we propose MOVIS to enhance the structural awareness of the view-conditioned diffusion model for multi-object NVS in terms of model inputs, auxiliary tasks, and training strategy. First, we inject structure-aware features, including depth and object mask, into the denoising U-Net to enhance the model's comprehension of object instances and their spatial relationships. Second, we introduce an auxiliary task requiring the model to simultaneously predict novel view object masks, further improving the model's capability in differentiating and placing objects. Finally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the diffusion sampling process and carefully devise a structure-guided timestep sampling scheduler during training, which balances the learning of global object placement and fine-grained detail recovery. To systematically evaluate the plausibility of synthesized images, we propose to assess cross-view consistency and novel view object placement alongside existing image-level NVS metrics. Extensive experiments on challenging synthetic and realistic datasets demonstrate that our method exhibits strong generalization capabilities and produces consistent novel view synthesis, highlighting its potential to guide future 3D-aware multi-object NVS tasks.
The SAM2-to-SAM3 Gap in the Segment Anything Model Family: Why Prompt-Based Expertise Fails in Concept-Driven Image Segmentation
This paper investigates the fundamental discontinuity between the latest two Segment Anything Models: SAM2 and SAM3. We explain why the expertise in prompt-based segmentation of SAM2 does not transfer to the multimodal concept-driven paradigm of SAM3. SAM2 operates through spatial prompts points, boxes, and masks yielding purely geometric and temporal segmentation. In contrast, SAM3 introduces a unified vision-language architecture capable of open-vocabulary reasoning, semantic grounding, contrastive alignment, and exemplar-based concept understanding. We structure this analysis through five core components: (1) a Conceptual Break Between Prompt-Based and Concept-Based Segmentation, contrasting spatial prompt semantics of SAM2 with multimodal fusion and text-conditioned mask generation of SAM3; (2) Architectural Divergence, detailing pure vision-temporal design of SAM2 versus integration of vision-language encoders, geometry and exemplar encoders, fusion modules, DETR-style decoders, object queries, and ambiguity-handling via Mixture-of-Experts in SAM3; (3) Dataset and Annotation Differences, contrasting SA-V video masks with multimodal concept-annotated corpora of SAM3; (4) Training and Hyperparameter Distinctions, showing why SAM2 optimization knowledge does not apply to SAM3; and (5) Evaluation, Metrics, and Failure Modes, outlining the transition from geometric IoU metrics to semantic, open-vocabulary evaluation. Together, these analyses establish SAM3 as a new class of segmentation foundation model and chart future directions for the emerging concept-driven segmentation era.
Deep Human Parsing with Active Template Regression
In this work, the human parsing task, namely decomposing a human image into semantic fashion/body regions, is formulated as an Active Template Regression (ATR) problem, where the normalized mask of each fashion/body item is expressed as the linear combination of the learned mask templates, and then morphed to a more precise mask with the active shape parameters, including position, scale and visibility of each semantic region. The mask template coefficients and the active shape parameters together can generate the human parsing results, and are thus called the structure outputs for human parsing. The deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is utilized to build the end-to-end relation between the input human image and the structure outputs for human parsing. More specifically, the structure outputs are predicted by two separate networks. The first CNN network is with max-pooling, and designed to predict the template coefficients for each label mask, while the second CNN network is without max-pooling to preserve sensitivity to label mask position and accurately predict the active shape parameters. For a new image, the structure outputs of the two networks are fused to generate the probability of each label for each pixel, and super-pixel smoothing is finally used to refine the human parsing result. Comprehensive evaluations on a large dataset well demonstrate the significant superiority of the ATR framework over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F1-score reaches 64.38% by our ATR framework, significantly higher than 44.76% based on the state-of-the-art algorithm.
TNCR: Table Net Detection and Classification Dataset
We present TNCR, a new table dataset with varying image quality collected from free websites. The TNCR dataset can be used for table detection in scanned document images and their classification into 5 different classes. TNCR contains 9428 high-quality labeled images. In this paper, we have implemented state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods for table detection to create several strong baselines. Cascade Mask R-CNN with ResNeXt-101-64x4d Backbone Network achieves the highest performance compared to other methods with a precision of 79.7%, recall of 89.8%, and f1 score of 84.4% on the TNCR dataset. We have made TNCR open source in the hope of encouraging more deep learning approaches to table detection, classification, and structure recognition. The dataset and trained model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/abdoelsayed2016/TNCR_Dataset.
Segment Anything Meets Point Tracking
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has established itself as a powerful zero-shot image segmentation model, employing interactive prompts such as points to generate masks. This paper presents SAM-PT, a method extending SAM's capability to tracking and segmenting anything in dynamic videos. SAM-PT leverages robust and sparse point selection and propagation techniques for mask generation, demonstrating that a SAM-based segmentation tracker can yield strong zero-shot performance across popular video object segmentation benchmarks, including DAVIS, YouTube-VOS, and MOSE. Compared to traditional object-centric mask propagation strategies, we uniquely use point propagation to exploit local structure information that is agnostic to object semantics. We highlight the merits of point-based tracking through direct evaluation on the zero-shot open-world Unidentified Video Objects (UVO) benchmark. To further enhance our approach, we utilize K-Medoids clustering for point initialization and track both positive and negative points to clearly distinguish the target object. We also employ multiple mask decoding passes for mask refinement and devise a point re-initialization strategy to improve tracking accuracy. Our code integrates different point trackers and video segmentation benchmarks and will be released at https://github.com/SysCV/sam-pt.
CAT-SAM: Conditional Tuning for Few-Shot Adaptation of Segment Anything Model
The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capability and flexible geometric prompting in general image segmentation. However, SAM often struggles when handling various unconventional images, such as aerial, medical, and non-RGB images. This paper presents CAT-SAM, a ConditionAl Tuning network that adapts SAM toward various unconventional target tasks with just few-shot target samples. CAT-SAM freezes the entire SAM and adapts its mask decoder and image encoder simultaneously with a small number of learnable parameters. The core design is a prompt bridge structure that enables decoder-conditioned joint tuning of the heavyweight image encoder and the lightweight mask decoder. The bridging maps the prompt token of the mask decoder to the image encoder, fostering synergic adaptation of the encoder and the decoder with mutual benefits. We develop two representative tuning strategies for the image encoder which leads to two CAT-SAM variants: one injecting learnable prompt tokens in the input space and the other inserting lightweight adapter networks. Extensive experiments over 11 unconventional tasks show that both CAT-SAM variants achieve superior target segmentation performance consistently even under the very challenging one-shot adaptation setup. Project page: https://xiaoaoran.github.io/projects/CAT-SAM
Stochastic Subnetwork Annealing: A Regularization Technique for Fine Tuning Pruned Subnetworks
Pruning methods have recently grown in popularity as an effective way to reduce the size and computational complexity of deep neural networks. Large numbers of parameters can be removed from trained models with little discernible loss in accuracy after a small number of continued training epochs. However, pruning too many parameters at once often causes an initial steep drop in accuracy which can undermine convergence quality. Iterative pruning approaches mitigate this by gradually removing a small number of parameters over multiple epochs. However, this can still lead to subnetworks that overfit local regions of the loss landscape. We introduce a novel and effective approach to tuning subnetworks through a regularization technique we call Stochastic Subnetwork Annealing. Instead of removing parameters in a discrete manner, we instead represent subnetworks with stochastic masks where each parameter has a probabilistic chance of being included or excluded on any given forward pass. We anneal these probabilities over time such that subnetwork structure slowly evolves as mask values become more deterministic, allowing for a smoother and more robust optimization of subnetworks at high levels of sparsity.
Vision Token Masking Alone Cannot Prevent PHI Leakage in Medical Document OCR: A Systematic Evaluation
Large vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed for optical character recognition (OCR) in healthcare settings, raising critical concerns about protected health information (PHI) exposure during document processing. This work presents the first systematic evaluation of inference-time vision token masking as a privacy-preserving mechanism for medical document OCR using DeepSeek-OCR. We introduce seven masking strategies (V3-V9) targeting different architectural layers (SAM encoder blocks, compression layers, dual vision encoders, projector fusion) and evaluate PHI reduction across HIPAA-defined categories using 100 synthetic medical billing statements (drawn from a corpus of 38,517 annotated documents) with perfect ground-truth annotations. All masking strategies converge to 42.9% PHI reduction, successfully suppressing long-form spatially-distributed identifiers (patient names, dates of birth, physical addresses at 100% effectiveness) while failing to prevent short structured identifiers (medical record numbers, social security numbers, email addresses, account numbers at 0% effectiveness). Ablation studies varying mask expansion radius (r=1,2,3) demonstrate that increased spatial coverage does not improve reduction beyond this ceiling, indicating that language model contextual inference - not insufficient visual masking - drives structured identifier leakage. A simulated hybrid architecture combining vision masking with NLP post-processing achieves 88.6% total PHI reduction (assuming 80% NLP accuracy on remaining identifiers). This negative result establishes boundaries for vision-only privacy interventions in VLMs, provides guidance distinguishing PHI types amenable to vision-level versus language-level redaction, and redirects future research toward decoder-level fine-tuning and hybrid defense-in-depth architectures for HIPAA-compliant medical document processing.
Masked Autoencoders Are Effective Tokenizers for Diffusion Models
Recent advances in latent diffusion models have demonstrated their effectiveness for high-resolution image synthesis. However, the properties of the latent space from tokenizer for better learning and generation of diffusion models remain under-explored. Theoretically and empirically, we find that improved generation quality is closely tied to the latent distributions with better structure, such as the ones with fewer Gaussian Mixture modes and more discriminative features. Motivated by these insights, we propose MAETok, an autoencoder (AE) leveraging mask modeling to learn semantically rich latent space while maintaining reconstruction fidelity. Extensive experiments validate our analysis, demonstrating that the variational form of autoencoders is not necessary, and a discriminative latent space from AE alone enables state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet generation using only 128 tokens. MAETok achieves significant practical improvements, enabling a gFID of 1.69 with 76x faster training and 31x higher inference throughput for 512x512 generation. Our findings show that the structure of the latent space, rather than variational constraints, is crucial for effective diffusion models. Code and trained models are released.
WiFo: Wireless Foundation Model for Channel Prediction
Channel prediction permits to acquire channel state information (CSI) without signaling overhead. However, almost all existing channel prediction methods necessitate the deployment of a dedicated model to accommodate a specific configuration. Leveraging the powerful modeling and multi-task learning capabilities of foundation models, we propose the first space-time-frequency (STF) wireless foundation model (WiFo) to address time-frequency channel prediction tasks in a one-for-all manner. Specifically, WiFo is initially pre-trained over massive and extensive diverse CSI datasets. Then, the model will be instantly used for channel prediction under various CSI configurations without any fine-tuning. We propose a masked autoencoder (MAE)-based network structure for WiFo to handle heterogeneous STF CSI data, and design several mask reconstruction tasks for self-supervised pre-training to capture the inherent 3D variations of CSI. To fully unleash its predictive power, we build a large-scale heterogeneous simulated CSI dataset consisting of 160K CSI samples for pre-training. Simulations validate its superior unified learning performance across multiple datasets and demonstrate its state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot generalization performance via comparisons with other full-shot baselines.
DAMASHA: Detecting AI in Mixed Adversarial Texts via Segmentation with Human-interpretable Attribution
In the age of advanced large language models (LLMs), the boundaries between human and AI-generated text are becoming increasingly blurred. We address the challenge of segmenting mixed-authorship text, that is identifying transition points in text where authorship shifts from human to AI or vice-versa, a problem with critical implications for authenticity, trust, and human oversight. We introduce a novel framework, called Info-Mask for mixed authorship detection that integrates stylometric cues, perplexity-driven signals, and structured boundary modeling to accurately segment collaborative human-AI content. To evaluate the robustness of our system against adversarial perturbations, we construct and release an adversarial benchmark dataset Mixed-text Adversarial setting for Segmentation (MAS), designed to probe the limits of existing detectors. Beyond segmentation accuracy, we introduce Human-Interpretable Attribution (HIA overlays that highlight how stylometric features inform boundary predictions, and we conduct a small-scale human study assessing their usefulness. Across multiple architectures, Info-Mask significantly improves span-level robustness under adversarial conditions, establishing new baselines while revealing remaining challenges. Our findings highlight both the promise and limitations of adversarially robust, interpretable mixed-authorship detection, with implications for trust and oversight in human-AI co-authorship.
Audio-visual Controlled Video Diffusion with Masked Selective State Spaces Modeling for Natural Talking Head Generation
Talking head synthesis is vital for virtual avatars and human-computer interaction. However, most existing methods are typically limited to accepting control from a single primary modality, restricting their practical utility. To this end, we introduce ACTalker, an end-to-end video diffusion framework that supports both multi-signals control and single-signal control for talking head video generation. For multiple control, we design a parallel mamba structure with multiple branches, each utilizing a separate driving signal to control specific facial regions. A gate mechanism is applied across all branches, providing flexible control over video generation. To ensure natural coordination of the controlled video both temporally and spatially, we employ the mamba structure, which enables driving signals to manipulate feature tokens across both dimensions in each branch. Additionally, we introduce a mask-drop strategy that allows each driving signal to independently control its corresponding facial region within the mamba structure, preventing control conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces natural-looking facial videos driven by diverse signals and that the mamba layer seamlessly integrates multiple driving modalities without conflict.
A&B BNN: Add&Bit-Operation-Only Hardware-Friendly Binary Neural Network
Binary neural networks utilize 1-bit quantized weights and activations to reduce both the model's storage demands and computational burden. However, advanced binary architectures still incorporate millions of inefficient and nonhardware-friendly full-precision multiplication operations. A&B BNN is proposed to directly remove part of the multiplication operations in a traditional BNN and replace the rest with an equal number of bit operations, introducing the mask layer and the quantized RPReLU structure based on the normalizer-free network architecture. The mask layer can be removed during inference by leveraging the intrinsic characteristics of BNN with straightforward mathematical transformations to avoid the associated multiplication operations. The quantized RPReLU structure enables more efficient bit operations by constraining its slope to be integer powers of 2. Experimental results achieved 92.30%, 69.35%, and 66.89% on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, respectively, which are competitive with the state-of-the-art. Ablation studies have verified the efficacy of the quantized RPReLU structure, leading to a 1.14% enhancement on the ImageNet compared to using a fixed slope RLeakyReLU. The proposed add&bit-operation-only BNN offers an innovative approach for hardware-friendly network architecture.
Adapting HouseDiffusion for conditional Floor Plan generation on Modified Swiss Dwellings dataset
Automated floor plan generation has recently gained momentum with several methods that have been proposed. The CVAAD Floor Plan Auto-Completion workshop challenge introduced MSD, a new dataset that includes existing structural walls of the building as an additional input constraint. This technical report presents an approach for extending a recent work, HouseDiffusion (arXiv:2211.13287 [cs.CV]), to the MSD dataset. The adaption involves modifying the model's transformer layers to condition on a set of wall lines. The report introduces a pre-processing pipeline to extract wall lines from the binary mask of the building structure provided as input. Additionally, it was found that a data processing procedure that simplifies all room polygons to rectangles leads to better performance. This indicates that future work should explore better representations of variable-length polygons in diffusion models. The code will be made available at a later date.
Does resistance to style-transfer equal Global Shape Bias? Measuring network sensitivity to global shape configuration
Deep learning models are known to exhibit a strong texture bias, while human tends to rely heavily on global shape structure for object recognition. The current benchmark for evaluating a model's global shape bias is a set of style-transferred images with the assumption that resistance to the attack of style transfer is related to the development of global structure sensitivity in the model. In this work, we show that networks trained with style-transfer images indeed learn to ignore style, but its shape bias arises primarily from local detail. We provide a Disrupted Structure Testbench (DiST) as a direct measurement of global structure sensitivity. Our test includes 2400 original images from ImageNet-1K, each of which is accompanied by two images with the global shapes of the original image disrupted while preserving its texture via the texture synthesis program. We found that black{(1) models that performed well on the previous cue-conflict dataset do not fare well in the proposed DiST; (2) the supervised trained Vision Transformer (ViT) lose its global spatial information from positional embedding, leading to no significant advantages over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on DiST. While self-supervised learning methods, especially mask autoencoder significantly improves the global structure sensitivity of ViT. (3) Improving the global structure sensitivity is orthogonal to resistance to style-transfer, indicating that the relationship between global shape structure and local texture detail is not an either/or relationship. Training with DiST images and style-transferred images are complementary, and can be combined to train network together to enhance the global shape sensitivity and robustness of local features.} Our code will be hosted in github: https://github.com/leelabcnbc/DiST
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions
Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) has advanced open-vocabulary segmentation through promptable concept segmentation, allowing users to segment all instances corresponding to a given concept, typically specified with short noun-phrase (NP) prompts. While this marks the first integration of language-level concepts within the SAM family, real-world usage typically requires far richer expressions that include attributes, spatial relations, functionalities, actions, states, and even implicit reasoning over instances. Currently, SAM3 relies on external multi-modal agents to convert complex instructions into NPs and then conduct iterative mask filtering. However, these NP-level concepts remain overly coarse, often failing to precisely represent a specific instance. In this work, we present SAM3-I, an enhanced framework that unifies concept-level understanding and instruction-level reasoning within the SAM family. SAM3-I introduces an instruction-aware cascaded adaptation mechanism that progressively aligns expressive instruction semantics with SAM3's existing vision-language representations, enabling direct instruction-following segmentation without sacrificing its original concept-driven capabilities. Furthermore, we design a structured instruction taxonomy spanning concept, simple, and complex levels, and develop a scalable data engine to construct a dataset with diverse instruction-mask pairs. Experiments show that SAM3-I delivers appealing performance, demonstrating that SAM3 can be effectively extended to follow natural-language instructions while preserving its strong concept grounding. We open-source SAM3-I and provide practical fine-tuning workflows, enabling researchers to adapt it to domain-specific applications. The source code is available here.
Language-Codec: Reducing the Gaps Between Discrete Codec Representation and Speech Language Models
In recent years, large language models have achieved significant success in generative tasks (e.g., speech cloning and audio generation) related to speech, audio, music, and other signal domains. A crucial element of these models is the discrete acoustic codecs, which serves as an intermediate representation replacing the mel-spectrogram. However, there exist several gaps between discrete codecs and downstream speech language models. Specifically, 1) most codec models are trained on only 1,000 hours of data, whereas most speech language models are trained on 60,000 hours; 2) Achieving good reconstruction performance requires the utilization of numerous codebooks, which increases the burden on downstream speech language models; 3) The initial channel of the codebooks contains excessive information, making it challenging to directly generate acoustic tokens from weakly supervised signals such as text in downstream tasks. Consequently, leveraging the characteristics of speech language models, we propose Language-Codec. In the Language-Codec, we introduce a Mask Channel Residual Vector Quantization (MCRVQ) mechanism along with improved Fourier transform structures and larger training datasets to address the aforementioned gaps. We compare our method with competing audio compression algorithms and observe significant outperformance across extensive evaluations. Furthermore, we also validate the efficiency of the Language-Codec on downstream speech language models. The source code and pre-trained models can be accessed at https://github.com/jishengpeng/languagecodec .
Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control
Recent large-scale text-driven synthesis models have attracted much attention thanks to their remarkable capabilities of generating highly diverse images that follow given text prompts. Such text-based synthesis methods are particularly appealing to humans who are used to verbally describe their intent. Therefore, it is only natural to extend the text-driven image synthesis to text-driven image editing. Editing is challenging for these generative models, since an innate property of an editing technique is to preserve most of the original image, while in the text-based models, even a small modification of the text prompt often leads to a completely different outcome. State-of-the-art methods mitigate this by requiring the users to provide a spatial mask to localize the edit, hence, ignoring the original structure and content within the masked region. In this paper, we pursue an intuitive prompt-to-prompt editing framework, where the edits are controlled by text only. To this end, we analyze a text-conditioned model in depth and observe that the cross-attention layers are the key to controlling the relation between the spatial layout of the image to each word in the prompt. With this observation, we present several applications which monitor the image synthesis by editing the textual prompt only. This includes localized editing by replacing a word, global editing by adding a specification, and even delicately controlling the extent to which a word is reflected in the image. We present our results over diverse images and prompts, demonstrating high-quality synthesis and fidelity to the edited prompts.
HER-Seg: Holistically Efficient Segmentation for High-Resolution Medical Images
High-resolution segmentation is critical for precise disease diagnosis by extracting fine-grained morphological details. Existing hierarchical encoder-decoder frameworks have demonstrated remarkable adaptability across diverse medical segmentation tasks. While beneficial, they usually require the huge computation and memory cost when handling large-size segmentation, which limits their applications in foundation model building and real-world clinical scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a holistically efficient framework for high-resolution medical image segmentation, called HER-Seg. Specifically, we first devise a computation-efficient image encoder (CE-Encoder) to model long-range dependencies with linear complexity while maintaining sufficient representations. In particular, we introduce the dual-gated linear attention (DLA) mechanism to perform cascaded token filtering, selectively retaining important tokens while ignoring irrelevant ones to enhance attention computation efficiency. Then, we introduce a memory-efficient mask decoder (ME-Decoder) to eliminate the demand for the hierarchical structure by leveraging cross-scale segmentation decoding. Extensive experiments reveal that HER-Seg outperforms state-of-the-arts in high-resolution medical 2D, 3D and video segmentation tasks. In particular, our HER-Seg requires only 0.59GB training GPU memory and 9.39G inference FLOPs per 1024times1024 image, demonstrating superior memory and computation efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/xq141839/HER-Seg.
Pluralistic Salient Object Detection
We introduce pluralistic salient object detection (PSOD), a novel task aimed at generating multiple plausible salient segmentation results for a given input image. Unlike conventional SOD methods that produce a single segmentation mask for salient objects, this new setting recognizes the inherent complexity of real-world images, comprising multiple objects, and the ambiguity in defining salient objects due to different user intentions. To study this task, we present two new SOD datasets "DUTS-MM" and "DUS-MQ", along with newly designed evaluation metrics. DUTS-MM builds upon the DUTS dataset but enriches the ground-truth mask annotations from three aspects which 1) improves the mask quality especially for boundary and fine-grained structures; 2) alleviates the annotation inconsistency issue; and 3) provides multiple ground-truth masks for images with saliency ambiguity. DUTS-MQ consists of approximately 100K image-mask pairs with human-annotated preference scores, enabling the learning of real human preferences in measuring mask quality. Building upon these two datasets, we propose a simple yet effective pluralistic SOD baseline based on a Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) design. Equipped with two prediction heads, it simultaneously predicts multiple masks using different query prompts and predicts human preference scores for each mask candidate. Extensive experiments and analyses underscore the significance of our proposed datasets and affirm the effectiveness of our PSOD framework.
Mixture of Global and Local Experts with Diffusion Transformer for Controllable Face Generation
Controllable face generation poses critical challenges in generative modeling due to the intricate balance required between semantic controllability and photorealism. While existing approaches struggle with disentangling semantic controls from generation pipelines, we revisit the architectural potential of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) through the lens of expert specialization. This paper introduces Face-MoGLE, a novel framework featuring: (1) Semantic-decoupled latent modeling through mask-conditioned space factorization, enabling precise attribute manipulation; (2) A mixture of global and local experts that captures holistic structure and region-level semantics for fine-grained controllability; (3) A dynamic gating network producing time-dependent coefficients that evolve with diffusion steps and spatial locations. Face-MoGLE provides a powerful and flexible solution for high-quality, controllable face generation, with strong potential in generative modeling and security applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in multimodal and monomodal face generation settings and its robust zero-shot generalization capability. Project page is available at https://github.com/XavierJiezou/Face-MoGLE.
Text-driven Human Motion Generation with Motion Masked Diffusion Model
Text-driven human motion generation is a multimodal task that synthesizes human motion sequences conditioned on natural language. It requires the model to satisfy textual descriptions under varying conditional inputs, while generating plausible and realistic human actions with high diversity. Existing diffusion model-based approaches have outstanding performance in the diversity and multimodality of generation. However, compared to autoregressive methods that train motion encoders before inference, diffusion methods lack in fitting the distribution of human motion features which leads to an unsatisfactory FID score. One insight is that the diffusion model lack the ability to learn the motion relations among spatio-temporal semantics through contextual reasoning. To solve this issue, in this paper, we proposed Motion Masked Diffusion Model (MMDM), a novel human motion masked mechanism for diffusion model to explicitly enhance its ability to learn the spatio-temporal relationships from contextual joints among motion sequences. Besides, considering the complexity of human motion data with dynamic temporal characteristics and spatial structure, we designed two mask modeling strategies: time frames mask and body parts mask. During training, MMDM masks certain tokens in the motion embedding space. Then, the diffusion decoder is designed to learn the whole motion sequence from masked embedding in each sampling step, this allows the model to recover a complete sequence from incomplete representations. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML dataset demonstrate that our mask strategy is effective by balancing motion quality and text-motion consistency.
Autoregressive Pretraining with Mamba in Vision
The vision community has started to build with the recently developed state space model, Mamba, as the new backbone for a range of tasks. This paper shows that Mamba's visual capability can be significantly enhanced through autoregressive pretraining, a direction not previously explored. Efficiency-wise, the autoregressive nature can well capitalize on the Mamba's unidirectional recurrent structure, enabling faster overall training speed compared to other training strategies like mask modeling. Performance-wise, autoregressive pretraining equips the Mamba architecture with markedly higher accuracy over its supervised-trained counterparts and, more importantly, successfully unlocks its scaling potential to large and even huge model sizes. For example, with autoregressive pretraining, a base-size Mamba attains 83.2\% ImageNet accuracy, outperforming its supervised counterpart by 2.0\%; our huge-size Mamba, the largest Vision Mamba to date, attains 85.0\% ImageNet accuracy (85.5\% when finetuned with 384times384 inputs), notably surpassing all other Mamba variants in vision. The code is available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/ARM.
Masked Contrastive Representation Learning
Masked image modelling (e.g., Masked AutoEncoder) and contrastive learning (e.g., Momentum Contrast) have shown impressive performance on unsupervised visual representation learning. This work presents Masked Contrastive Representation Learning (MACRL) for self-supervised visual pre-training. In particular, MACRL leverages the effectiveness of both masked image modelling and contrastive learning. We adopt an asymmetric setting for the siamese network (i.e., encoder-decoder structure in both branches), where one branch with higher mask ratio and stronger data augmentation, while the other adopts weaker data corruptions. We optimize a contrastive learning objective based on the learned features from the encoder in both branches. Furthermore, we minimize the L_1 reconstruction loss according to the decoders' outputs. In our experiments, MACRL presents superior results on various vision benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and two other ImageNet subsets. Our framework provides unified insights on self-supervised visual pre-training and future research.
Semantic Image Synthesis via Diffusion Models
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have achieved remarkable success in various image generation tasks compared with Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs). Recent work on semantic image synthesis mainly follows the de facto GAN-based approaches, which may lead to unsatisfactory quality or diversity of generated images. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on DDPM for semantic image synthesis. Unlike previous conditional diffusion model directly feeds the semantic layout and noisy image as input to a U-Net structure, which may not fully leverage the information in the input semantic mask, our framework processes semantic layout and noisy image differently. It feeds noisy image to the encoder of the U-Net structure while the semantic layout to the decoder by multi-layer spatially-adaptive normalization operators. To further improve the generation quality and semantic interpretability in semantic image synthesis, we introduce the classifier-free guidance sampling strategy, which acknowledge the scores of an unconditional model for sampling process. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art performance in terms of fidelity (FID) and diversity (LPIPS).
Segment Anything in High Quality
The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a big leap in scaling up segmentation models, allowing for powerful zero-shot capabilities and flexible prompting. Despite being trained with 1.1 billion masks, SAM's mask prediction quality falls short in many cases, particularly when dealing with objects that have intricate structures. We propose HQ-SAM, equipping SAM with the ability to accurately segment any object, while maintaining SAM's original promptable design, efficiency, and zero-shot generalizability. Our careful design reuses and preserves the pre-trained model weights of SAM, while only introducing minimal additional parameters and computation. We design a learnable High-Quality Output Token, which is injected into SAM's mask decoder and is responsible for predicting the high-quality mask. Instead of only applying it on mask-decoder features, we first fuse them with early and final ViT features for improved mask details. To train our introduced learnable parameters, we compose a dataset of 44K fine-grained masks from several sources. HQ-SAM is only trained on the introduced detaset of 44k masks, which takes only 4 hours on 8 GPUs. We show the efficacy of HQ-SAM in a suite of 9 diverse segmentation datasets across different downstream tasks, where 7 out of them are evaluated in a zero-shot transfer protocol. Our code and models will be released at https://github.com/SysCV/SAM-HQ.
GCC: Generative Color Constancy via Diffusing a Color Checker
Color constancy methods often struggle to generalize across different camera sensors due to varying spectral sensitivities. We present GCC, which leverages diffusion models to inpaint color checkers into images for illumination estimation. Our key innovations include (1) a single-step deterministic inference approach that inpaints color checkers reflecting scene illumination, (2) a Laplacian decomposition technique that preserves checker structure while allowing illumination-dependent color adaptation, and (3) a mask-based data augmentation strategy for handling imprecise color checker annotations. GCC demonstrates superior robustness in cross-camera scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art worst-25% error rates of 5.15{\deg} and 4.32{\deg} in bi-directional evaluations. These results highlight our method's stability and generalization capability across different camera characteristics without requiring sensor-specific training, making it a versatile solution for real-world applications.
GeoRemover: Removing Objects and Their Causal Visual Artifacts
Towards intelligent image editing, object removal should eliminate both the target object and its causal visual artifacts, such as shadows and reflections. However, existing image appearance-based methods either follow strictly mask-aligned training and fail to remove these causal effects which are not explicitly masked, or adopt loosely mask-aligned strategies that lack controllability and may unintentionally over-erase other objects. We identify that these limitations stem from ignoring the causal relationship between an object's geometry presence and its visual effects. To address this limitation, we propose a geometry-aware two-stage framework that decouples object removal into (1) geometry removal and (2) appearance rendering. In the first stage, we remove the object directly from the geometry (e.g., depth) using strictly mask-aligned supervision, enabling structure-aware editing with strong geometric constraints. In the second stage, we render a photorealistic RGB image conditioned on the updated geometry, where causal visual effects are considered implicitly as a result of the modified 3D geometry. To guide learning in the geometry removal stage, we introduce a preference-driven objective based on positive and negative sample pairs, encouraging the model to remove objects as well as their causal visual artifacts while avoiding new structural insertions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in removing both objects and their associated artifacts on two popular benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/buxiangzhiren/GeoRemover.
Attentive Eraser: Unleashing Diffusion Model's Object Removal Potential via Self-Attention Redirection Guidance
Recently, diffusion models have emerged as promising newcomers in the field of generative models, shining brightly in image generation. However, when employed for object removal tasks, they still encounter issues such as generating random artifacts and the incapacity to repaint foreground object areas with appropriate content after removal. To tackle these problems, we propose Attentive Eraser, a tuning-free method to empower pre-trained diffusion models for stable and effective object removal. Firstly, in light of the observation that the self-attention maps influence the structure and shape details of the generated images, we propose Attention Activation and Suppression (ASS), which re-engineers the self-attention mechanism within the pre-trained diffusion models based on the given mask, thereby prioritizing the background over the foreground object during the reverse generation process. Moreover, we introduce Self-Attention Redirection Guidance (SARG), which utilizes the self-attention redirected by ASS to guide the generation process, effectively removing foreground objects within the mask while simultaneously generating content that is both plausible and coherent. Experiments demonstrate the stability and effectiveness of Attentive Eraser in object removal across a variety of pre-trained diffusion models, outperforming even training-based methods. Furthermore, Attentive Eraser can be implemented in various diffusion model architectures and checkpoints, enabling excellent scalability. Code is available at https://github.com/Anonym0u3/AttentiveEraser.
Protein-ligand binding representation learning from fine-grained interactions
The binding between proteins and ligands plays a crucial role in the realm of drug discovery. Previous deep learning approaches have shown promising results over traditional computationally intensive methods, but resulting in poor generalization due to limited supervised data. In this paper, we propose to learn protein-ligand binding representation in a self-supervised learning manner. Different from existing pre-training approaches which treat proteins and ligands individually, we emphasize to discern the intricate binding patterns from fine-grained interactions. Specifically, this self-supervised learning problem is formulated as a prediction of the conclusive binding complex structure given a pocket and ligand with a Transformer based interaction module, which naturally emulates the binding process. To ensure the representation of rich binding information, we introduce two pre-training tasks, i.e.~atomic pairwise distance map prediction and mask ligand reconstruction, which comprehensively model the fine-grained interactions from both structure and feature space. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of our method across various binding tasks, including protein-ligand affinity prediction, virtual screening and protein-ligand docking.
Sample-adaptive Augmentation for Point Cloud Recognition Against Real-world Corruptions
Robust 3D perception under corruption has become an essential task for the realm of 3D vision. While current data augmentation techniques usually perform random transformations on all point cloud objects in an offline way and ignore the structure of the samples, resulting in over-or-under enhancement. In this work, we propose an alternative to make sample-adaptive transformations based on the structure of the sample to cope with potential corruption via an auto-augmentation framework, named as AdaptPoint. Specially, we leverage a imitator, consisting of a Deformation Controller and a Mask Controller, respectively in charge of predicting deformation parameters and producing a per-point mask, based on the intrinsic structural information of the input point cloud, and then conduct corruption simulations on top. Then a discriminator is utilized to prevent the generation of excessive corruption that deviates from the original data distribution. In addition, a perception-guidance feedback mechanism is incorporated to guide the generation of samples with appropriate difficulty level. Furthermore, to address the paucity of real-world corrupted point cloud, we also introduce a new dataset ScanObjectNN-C, that exhibits greater similarity to actual data in real-world environments, especially when contrasted with preceding CAD datasets. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple corruption benchmarks, including ModelNet-C, our ScanObjectNN-C, and ShapeNet-C.
NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction
We present a novel neural surface reconstruction method, called NeuS, for reconstructing objects and scenes with high fidelity from 2D image inputs. Existing neural surface reconstruction approaches, such as DVR and IDR, require foreground mask as supervision, easily get trapped in local minima, and therefore struggle with the reconstruction of objects with severe self-occlusion or thin structures. Meanwhile, recent neural methods for novel view synthesis, such as NeRF and its variants, use volume rendering to produce a neural scene representation with robustness of optimization, even for highly complex objects. However, extracting high-quality surfaces from this learned implicit representation is difficult because there are not sufficient surface constraints in the representation. In NeuS, we propose to represent a surface as the zero-level set of a signed distance function (SDF) and develop a new volume rendering method to train a neural SDF representation. We observe that the conventional volume rendering method causes inherent geometric errors (i.e. bias) for surface reconstruction, and therefore propose a new formulation that is free of bias in the first order of approximation, thus leading to more accurate surface reconstruction even without the mask supervision. Experiments on the DTU dataset and the BlendedMVS dataset show that NeuS outperforms the state-of-the-arts in high-quality surface reconstruction, especially for objects and scenes with complex structures and self-occlusion.
Structured-Noise Masked Modeling for Video, Audio and Beyond
Masked modeling has emerged as a powerful self-supervised learning framework, but existing methods largely rely on random masking, disregarding the structural properties of different modalities. In this work, we introduce structured noise-based masking, a simple yet effective approach that naturally aligns with the spatial, temporal, and spectral characteristics of video and audio data. By filtering white noise into distinct color noise distributions, we generate structured masks that preserve modality-specific patterns without requiring handcrafted heuristics or access to the data. Our approach improves the performance of masked video and audio modeling frameworks without any computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that structured noise masking achieves consistent improvement over random masking for standard and advanced masked modeling methods, highlighting the importance of modality-aware masking strategies for representation learning.
Towards Improved Input Masking for Convolutional Neural Networks
The ability to remove features from the input of machine learning models is very important to understand and interpret model predictions. However, this is non-trivial for vision models since masking out parts of the input image typically causes large distribution shifts. This is because the baseline color used for masking (typically grey or black) is out of distribution. Furthermore, the shape of the mask itself can contain unwanted signals which can be used by the model for its predictions. Recently, there has been some progress in mitigating this issue (called missingness bias) in image masking for vision transformers. In this work, we propose a new masking method for CNNs we call layer masking in which the missingness bias caused by masking is reduced to a large extent. Intuitively, layer masking applies a mask to intermediate activation maps so that the model only processes the unmasked input. We show that our method (i) is able to eliminate or minimize the influence of the mask shape or color on the output of the model, and (ii) is much better than replacing the masked region by black or grey for input perturbation based interpretability techniques like LIME. Thus, layer masking is much less affected by missingness bias than other masking strategies. We also demonstrate how the shape of the mask may leak information about the class, thus affecting estimates of model reliance on class-relevant features derived from input masking. Furthermore, we discuss the role of data augmentation techniques for tackling this problem, and argue that they are not sufficient for preventing model reliance on mask shape. The code for this project is publicly available at https://github.com/SriramB-98/layer_masking
Incremental Transformer Structure Enhanced Image Inpainting with Masking Positional Encoding
Image inpainting has made significant advances in recent years. However, it is still challenging to recover corrupted images with both vivid textures and reasonable structures. Some specific methods only tackle regular textures while losing holistic structures due to the limited receptive fields of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). On the other hand, attention-based models can learn better long-range dependency for the structure recovery, but they are limited by the heavy computation for inference with large image sizes. To address these issues, we propose to leverage an additional structure restorer to facilitate the image inpainting incrementally. The proposed model restores holistic image structures with a powerful attention-based transformer model in a fixed low-resolution sketch space. Such a grayscale space is easy to be upsampled to larger scales to convey correct structural information. Our structure restorer can be integrated with other pretrained inpainting models efficiently with the zero-initialized residual addition. Furthermore, a masking positional encoding strategy is utilized to improve the performance with large irregular masks. Extensive experiments on various datasets validate the efficacy of our model compared with other competitors. Our codes are released in https://github.com/DQiaole/ZITS_inpainting.
Masking meets Supervision: A Strong Learning Alliance
Pre-training with random masked inputs has emerged as a novel trend in self-supervised training. However, supervised learning still faces a challenge in adopting masking augmentations, primarily due to unstable training. In this paper, we propose a novel way to involve masking augmentations dubbed Masked Sub-branch (MaskSub). MaskSub consists of the main-branch and sub-branch, the latter being a part of the former. The main-branch undergoes conventional training recipes, while the sub-branch merits intensive masking augmentations, during training. MaskSub tackles the challenge by mitigating adverse effects through a relaxed loss function similar to a self-distillation loss. Our analysis shows that MaskSub improves performance, with the training loss converging faster than in standard training, which suggests our method stabilizes the training process. We further validate MaskSub across diverse training scenarios and models, including DeiT-III training, MAE finetuning, CLIP finetuning, BERT training, and hierarchical architectures (ResNet and Swin Transformer). Our results show that MaskSub consistently achieves impressive performance gains across all the cases. MaskSub provides a practical and effective solution for introducing additional regularization under various training recipes. Code available at https://github.com/naver-ai/augsub
Not All Parameters Matter: Masking Diffusion Models for Enhancing Generation Ability
The diffusion models, in early stages focus on constructing basic image structures, while the refined details, including local features and textures, are generated in later stages. Thus the same network layers are forced to learn both structural and textural information simultaneously, significantly differing from the traditional deep learning architectures (e.g., ResNet or GANs) which captures or generates the image semantic information at different layers. This difference inspires us to explore the time-wise diffusion models. We initially investigate the key contributions of the U-Net parameters to the denoising process and identify that properly zeroing out certain parameters (including large parameters) contributes to denoising, substantially improving the generation quality on the fly. Capitalizing on this discovery, we propose a simple yet effective method-termed ``MaskUNet''- that enhances generation quality with negligible parameter numbers. Our method fully leverages timestep- and sample-dependent effective U-Net parameters. To optimize MaskUNet, we offer two fine-tuning strategies: a training-based approach and a training-free approach, including tailored networks and optimization functions. In zero-shot inference on the COCO dataset, MaskUNet achieves the best FID score and further demonstrates its effectiveness in downstream task evaluations. Project page: https://gudaochangsheng.github.io/MaskUnet-Page/
Stare at What You See: Masked Image Modeling without Reconstruction
Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have been prevailing paradigms for large-scale vision representation pre-training. By reconstructing masked image patches from a small portion of visible image regions, MAE forces the model to infer semantic correlation within an image. Recently, some approaches apply semantic-rich teacher models to extract image features as the reconstruction target, leading to better performance. However, unlike the low-level features such as pixel values, we argue the features extracted by powerful teacher models already encode rich semantic correlation across regions in an intact image.This raises one question: is reconstruction necessary in Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with a teacher model? In this paper, we propose an efficient MIM paradigm named MaskAlign. MaskAlign simply learns the consistency of visible patch features extracted by the student model and intact image features extracted by the teacher model. To further advance the performance and tackle the problem of input inconsistency between the student and teacher model, we propose a Dynamic Alignment (DA) module to apply learnable alignment. Our experimental results demonstrate that masked modeling does not lose effectiveness even without reconstruction on masked regions. Combined with Dynamic Alignment, MaskAlign can achieve state-of-the-art performance with much higher efficiency. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/OpenPerceptionX/maskalign.
ColorMAE: Exploring data-independent masking strategies in Masked AutoEncoders
Masked AutoEncoders (MAE) have emerged as a robust self-supervised framework, offering remarkable performance across a wide range of downstream tasks. To increase the difficulty of the pretext task and learn richer visual representations, existing works have focused on replacing standard random masking with more sophisticated strategies, such as adversarial-guided and teacher-guided masking. However, these strategies depend on the input data thus commonly increasing the model complexity and requiring additional calculations to generate the mask patterns. This raises the question: Can we enhance MAE performance beyond random masking without relying on input data or incurring additional computational costs? In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective data-independent method, termed ColorMAE, which generates different binary mask patterns by filtering random noise. Drawing inspiration from color noise in image processing, we explore four types of filters to yield mask patterns with different spatial and semantic priors. ColorMAE requires no additional learnable parameters or computational overhead in the network, yet it significantly enhances the learned representations. We provide a comprehensive empirical evaluation, demonstrating our strategy's superiority in downstream tasks compared to random masking. Notably, we report an improvement of 2.72 in mIoU in semantic segmentation tasks relative to baseline MAE implementations.
Mask^2DiT: Dual Mask-based Diffusion Transformer for Multi-Scene Long Video Generation
Sora has unveiled the immense potential of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture in single-scene video generation. However, the more challenging task of multi-scene video generation, which offers broader applications, remains relatively underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose Mask^2DiT, a novel approach that establishes fine-grained, one-to-one alignment between video segments and their corresponding text annotations. Specifically, we introduce a symmetric binary mask at each attention layer within the DiT architecture, ensuring that each text annotation applies exclusively to its respective video segment while preserving temporal coherence across visual tokens. This attention mechanism enables precise segment-level textual-to-visual alignment, allowing the DiT architecture to effectively handle video generation tasks with a fixed number of scenes. To further equip the DiT architecture with the ability to generate additional scenes based on existing ones, we incorporate a segment-level conditional mask, which conditions each newly generated segment on the preceding video segments, thereby enabling auto-regressive scene extension. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments confirm that Mask^2DiT excels in maintaining visual consistency across segments while ensuring semantic alignment between each segment and its corresponding text description. Our project page is https://tianhao-qi.github.io/Mask2DiTProject.
Improving Speech Representation Learning via Speech-level and Phoneme-level Masking Approach
Recovering the masked speech frames is widely applied in speech representation learning. However, most of these models use random masking in the pre-training. In this work, we proposed two kinds of masking approaches: (1) speech-level masking, making the model to mask more speech segments than silence segments, (2) phoneme-level masking, forcing the model to mask the whole frames of the phoneme, instead of phoneme pieces. We pre-trained the model via these two approaches, and evaluated on two downstream tasks, phoneme classification and speaker recognition. The experiments demonstrated that the proposed masking approaches are beneficial to improve the performance of speech representation.
Mask3D: Pre-training 2D Vision Transformers by Learning Masked 3D Priors
Current popular backbones in computer vision, such as Vision Transformers (ViT) and ResNets are trained to perceive the world from 2D images. However, to more effectively understand 3D structural priors in 2D backbones, we propose Mask3D to leverage existing large-scale RGB-D data in a self-supervised pre-training to embed these 3D priors into 2D learned feature representations. In contrast to traditional 3D contrastive learning paradigms requiring 3D reconstructions or multi-view correspondences, our approach is simple: we formulate a pre-text reconstruction task by masking RGB and depth patches in individual RGB-D frames. We demonstrate the Mask3D is particularly effective in embedding 3D priors into the powerful 2D ViT backbone, enabling improved representation learning for various scene understanding tasks, such as semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and object detection. Experiments show that Mask3D notably outperforms existing self-supervised 3D pre-training approaches on ScanNet, NYUv2, and Cityscapes image understanding tasks, with an improvement of +6.5% mIoU against the state-of-the-art Pri3D on ScanNet image semantic segmentation.
Improving Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture with Diffusion Noise
Self-supervised learning has become an incredibly successful method for feature learning, widely applied to many downstream tasks. It has proven especially effective for discriminative tasks, surpassing the trending generative models. However, generative models perform better in image generation and detail enhancement. Thus, it is natural for us to find a connection between SSL and generative models to further enhance the representation capacity of SSL. As generative models can create new samples by approximating the data distribution, such modeling should also lead to a semantic understanding of the raw visual data, which is necessary for recognition tasks. This enlightens us to combine the core principle of the diffusion model: diffusion noise, with SSL to learn a competitive recognition model. Specifically, diffusion noise can be viewed as a particular state of mask that reveals a close relationship between masked image modeling (MIM) and diffusion models. In this paper, we propose N-JEPA (Noise-based JEPA) to incorporate diffusion noise into MIM by the position embedding of masked tokens. The multi-level noise schedule is a series of feature augmentations to further enhance the robustness of our model. We perform a comprehensive study to confirm its effectiveness in the classification of downstream tasks. Codes will be released soon in public.
Keys to Better Image Inpainting: Structure and Texture Go Hand in Hand
Deep image inpainting has made impressive progress with recent advances in image generation and processing algorithms. We claim that the performance of inpainting algorithms can be better judged by the generated structures and textures. Structures refer to the generated object boundary or novel geometric structures within the hole, while texture refers to high-frequency details, especially man-made repeating patterns filled inside the structural regions. We believe that better structures are usually obtained from a coarse-to-fine GAN-based generator network while repeating patterns nowadays can be better modeled using state-of-the-art high-frequency fast fourier convolutional layers. In this paper, we propose a novel inpainting network combining the advantages of the two designs. Therefore, our model achieves a remarkable visual quality to match state-of-the-art performance in both structure generation and repeating texture synthesis using a single network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, and our conclusions further highlight the two critical factors of image inpainting quality, structures, and textures, as the future design directions of inpainting networks.
Self-Guided Masked Autoencoder
Masked Autoencoder (MAE) is a self-supervised approach for representation learning, widely applicable to a variety of downstream tasks in computer vision. In spite of its success, it is still not fully uncovered what and how MAE exactly learns. In this paper, with an in-depth analysis, we discover that MAE intrinsically learns pattern-based patch-level clustering from surprisingly early stages of pretraining. Upon this understanding, we propose self-guided masked autoencoder, which internally generates informed mask by utilizing its progress in patch clustering, substituting the naive random masking of the vanilla MAE. Our approach significantly boosts its learning process without relying on any external models or supplementary information, keeping the benefit of self-supervised nature of MAE intact. Comprehensive experiments on various downstream tasks verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation
Facial image manipulation has achieved great progress in recent years. However, previous methods either operate on a predefined set of face attributes or leave users little freedom to interactively manipulate images. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a novel framework termed MaskGAN, enabling diverse and interactive face manipulation. Our key insight is that semantic masks serve as a suitable intermediate representation for flexible face manipulation with fidelity preservation. MaskGAN has two main components: 1) Dense Mapping Network (DMN) and 2) Editing Behavior Simulated Training (EBST). Specifically, DMN learns style mapping between a free-form user modified mask and a target image, enabling diverse generation results. EBST models the user editing behavior on the source mask, making the overall framework more robust to various manipulated inputs. Specifically, it introduces dual-editing consistency as the auxiliary supervision signal. To facilitate extensive studies, we construct a large-scale high-resolution face dataset with fine-grained mask annotations named CelebAMask-HQ. MaskGAN is comprehensively evaluated on two challenging tasks: attribute transfer and style copy, demonstrating superior performance over other state-of-the-art methods. The code, models, and dataset are available at https://github.com/switchablenorms/CelebAMask-HQ.
Boosting Large Language Models with Mask Fine-Tuning
The model is usually kept integral in the mainstream large language model (LLM) fine-tuning protocols. No works have questioned whether maintaining the integrity of the model is indispensable for performance. In this work, we introduce Mask Fine-Tuning (MFT), a brand-new LLM fine-tuning paradigm to show that properly breaking the integrity of the model can surprisingly lead to improved performance. Specifically, MFT learns a set of binary masks supervised by the typical LLM fine-tuning objective. Extensive experiments show that MFT gains a consistent performance boost across various domains and backbones (e.g., 1.95%/1.88% average gain in coding with LLaMA2-7B/3.1-8B). Detailed procedures are provided to study the proposed MFT from different hyperparameter perspectives for better insight. In particular, MFT naturally updates the current LLM training protocol by deploying it on a complete well-trained model. This study extends the functionality of mask learning from its conventional network pruning context for model compression to a more general scope.
Mask is All You Need: Rethinking Mask R-CNN for Dense and Arbitrary-Shaped Scene Text Detection
Due to the large success in object detection and instance segmentation, Mask R-CNN attracts great attention and is widely adopted as a strong baseline for arbitrary-shaped scene text detection and spotting. However, two issues remain to be settled. The first is dense text case, which is easy to be neglected but quite practical. There may exist multiple instances in one proposal, which makes it difficult for the mask head to distinguish different instances and degrades the performance. In this work, we argue that the performance degradation results from the learning confusion issue in the mask head. We propose to use an MLP decoder instead of the "deconv-conv" decoder in the mask head, which alleviates the issue and promotes robustness significantly. And we propose instance-aware mask learning in which the mask head learns to predict the shape of the whole instance rather than classify each pixel to text or non-text. With instance-aware mask learning, the mask branch can learn separated and compact masks. The second is that due to large variations in scale and aspect ratio, RPN needs complicated anchor settings, making it hard to maintain and transfer across different datasets. To settle this issue, we propose an adaptive label assignment in which all instances especially those with extreme aspect ratios are guaranteed to be associated with enough anchors. Equipped with these components, the proposed method named MAYOR achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks including DAST1500, MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015, CTW1500, and Total-Text.
Pruning-aware Sparse Regularization for Network Pruning
Structural neural network pruning aims to remove the redundant channels in the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by pruning the filters of less importance to the final output accuracy. To reduce the degradation of performance after pruning, many methods utilize the loss with sparse regularization to produce structured sparsity. In this paper, we analyze these sparsity-training-based methods and find that the regularization of unpruned channels is unnecessary. Moreover, it restricts the network's capacity, which leads to under-fitting. To solve this problem, we propose a novel pruning method, named MaskSparsity, with pruning-aware sparse regularization. MaskSparsity imposes the fine-grained sparse regularization on the specific filters selected by a pruning mask, rather than all the filters of the model. Before the fine-grained sparse regularization of MaskSparity, we can use many methods to get the pruning mask, such as running the global sparse regularization. MaskSparsity achieves 63.03%-FLOPs reduction on ResNet-110 by removing 60.34% of the parameters, with no top-1 accuracy loss on CIFAR-10. On ILSVRC-2012, MaskSparsity reduces more than 51.07% FLOPs on ResNet-50, with only a loss of 0.76% in the top-1 accuracy. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/MaskSparsity. Moreover, we have integrated the code of MaskSparity into a PyTorch pruning toolkit, EasyPruner, at https://gitee.com/casia_iva_engineer/easypruner.
Click2Mask: Local Editing with Dynamic Mask Generation
Recent advancements in generative models have revolutionized image generation and editing, making these tasks accessible to non-experts. This paper focuses on local image editing, particularly the task of adding new content to a loosely specified area. Existing methods often require a precise mask or a detailed description of the location, which can be cumbersome and prone to errors. We propose Click2Mask, a novel approach that simplifies the local editing process by requiring only a single point of reference (in addition to the content description). A mask is dynamically grown around this point during a Blended Latent Diffusion (BLD) process, guided by a masked CLIP-based semantic loss. Click2Mask surpasses the limitations of segmentation-based and fine-tuning dependent methods, offering a more user-friendly and contextually accurate solution. Our experiments demonstrate that Click2Mask not only minimizes user effort but also delivers competitive or superior local image manipulation results compared to SoTA methods, according to both human judgement and automatic metrics. Key contributions include the simplification of user input, the ability to freely add objects unconstrained by existing segments, and the integration potential of our dynamic mask approach within other editing methods.
Edge-Aware Image Manipulation via Diffusion Models with a Novel Structure-Preservation Loss
Recent advances in image editing leverage latent diffusion models (LDMs) for versatile, text-prompt-driven edits across diverse tasks. Yet, maintaining pixel-level edge structures-crucial for tasks such as photorealistic style transfer or image tone adjustment-remains as a challenge for latent-diffusion-based editing. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Structure Preservation Loss (SPL) that leverages local linear models to quantify structural differences between input and edited images. Our training-free approach integrates SPL directly into the diffusion model's generative process to ensure structural fidelity. This core mechanism is complemented by a post-processing step to mitigate LDM decoding distortions, a masking strategy for precise edit localization, and a color preservation loss to preserve hues in unedited areas. Experiments confirm SPL enhances structural fidelity, delivering state-of-the-art performance in latent-diffusion-based image editing. Our code will be publicly released at https://github.com/gongms00/SPL.
MaskNet: Introducing Feature-Wise Multiplication to CTR Ranking Models by Instance-Guided Mask
Click-Through Rate(CTR) estimation has become one of the most fundamental tasks in many real-world applications and it's important for ranking models to effectively capture complex high-order features. Shallow feed-forward network is widely used in many state-of-the-art DNN models such as FNN, DeepFM and xDeepFM to implicitly capture high-order feature interactions. However, some research has proved that addictive feature interaction, particular feed-forward neural networks, is inefficient in capturing common feature interaction. To resolve this problem, we introduce specific multiplicative operation into DNN ranking system by proposing instance-guided mask which performs element-wise product both on the feature embedding and feed-forward layers guided by input instance. We also turn the feed-forward layer in DNN model into a mixture of addictive and multiplicative feature interactions by proposing MaskBlock in this paper. MaskBlock combines the layer normalization, instance-guided mask, and feed-forward layer and it is a basic building block to be used to design new ranking model under various configurations. The model consisting of MaskBlock is called MaskNet in this paper and two new MaskNet models are proposed to show the effectiveness of MaskBlock as basic building block for composing high performance ranking systems. The experiment results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed MaskNet models outperform state-of-the-art models such as DeepFM and xDeepFM significantly, which implies MaskBlock is an effective basic building unit for composing new high performance ranking systems.
Shape-Aware Masking for Inpainting in Medical Imaging
Inpainting has recently been proposed as a successful deep learning technique for unsupervised medical image model discovery. The masks used for inpainting are generally independent of the dataset and are not tailored to perform on different given classes of anatomy. In this work, we introduce a method for generating shape-aware masks for inpainting, which aims at learning the statistical shape prior. We hypothesize that although the variation of masks improves the generalizability of inpainting models, the shape of the masks should follow the topology of the organs of interest. Hence, we propose an unsupervised guided masking approach based on an off-the-shelf inpainting model and a superpixel over-segmentation algorithm to generate a wide range of shape-dependent masks. Experimental results on abdominal MR image reconstruction show the superiority of our proposed masking method over standard methods using square-shaped or dataset of irregular shape masks.
Masked Frequency Modeling for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training
We present Masked Frequency Modeling (MFM), a unified frequency-domain-based approach for self-supervised pre-training of visual models. Instead of randomly inserting mask tokens to the input embeddings in the spatial domain, in this paper, we shift the perspective to the frequency domain. Specifically, MFM first masks out a portion of frequency components of the input image and then predicts the missing frequencies on the frequency spectrum. Our key insight is that predicting masked components in the frequency domain is more ideal to reveal underlying image patterns rather than predicting masked patches in the spatial domain, due to the heavy spatial redundancy. Our findings suggest that with the right configuration of mask-and-predict strategy, both the structural information within high-frequency components and the low-level statistics among low-frequency counterparts are useful in learning good representations. For the first time, MFM demonstrates that, for both ViT and CNN, a simple non-Siamese framework can learn meaningful representations even using none of the following: (i) extra data, (ii) extra model, (iii) mask token. Experimental results on image classification and semantic segmentation, as well as several robustness benchmarks show the competitive performance and advanced robustness of MFM compared with recent masked image modeling approaches. Furthermore, we also comprehensively investigate the effectiveness of classical image restoration tasks for representation learning from a unified frequency perspective and reveal their intriguing relations with our MFM approach.
MaskSketch: Unpaired Structure-guided Masked Image Generation
Recent conditional image generation methods produce images of remarkable diversity, fidelity and realism. However, the majority of these methods allow conditioning only on labels or text prompts, which limits their level of control over the generation result. In this paper, we introduce MaskSketch, an image generation method that allows spatial conditioning of the generation result using a guiding sketch as an extra conditioning signal during sampling. MaskSketch utilizes a pre-trained masked generative transformer, requiring no model training or paired supervision, and works with input sketches of different levels of abstraction. We show that intermediate self-attention maps of a masked generative transformer encode important structural information of the input image, such as scene layout and object shape, and we propose a novel sampling method based on this observation to enable structure-guided generation. Our results show that MaskSketch achieves high image realism and fidelity to the guiding structure. Evaluated on standard benchmark datasets, MaskSketch outperforms state-of-the-art methods for sketch-to-image translation, as well as unpaired image-to-image translation approaches.
Rethinking Patch Dependence for Masked Autoencoders
In this work, we re-examine inter-patch dependencies in the decoding mechanism of masked autoencoders (MAE). We decompose this decoding mechanism for masked patch reconstruction in MAE into self-attention and cross-attention. Our investigations suggest that self-attention between mask patches is not essential for learning good representations. To this end, we propose a novel pretraining framework: Cross-Attention Masked Autoencoders (CrossMAE). CrossMAE's decoder leverages only cross-attention between masked and visible tokens, with no degradation in downstream performance. This design also enables decoding only a small subset of mask tokens, boosting efficiency. Furthermore, each decoder block can now leverage different encoder features, resulting in improved representation learning. CrossMAE matches MAE in performance with 2.5 to 3.7times less decoding compute. It also surpasses MAE on ImageNet classification and COCO instance segmentation under the same compute. Code and models: https://crossmae.github.io
Bootstrap Masked Visual Modeling via Hard Patches Mining
Masked visual modeling has attracted much attention due to its promising potential in learning generalizable representations. Typical approaches urge models to predict specific contents of masked tokens, which can be intuitively considered as teaching a student (the model) to solve given problems (predicting masked contents). Under such settings, the performance is highly correlated with mask strategies (the difficulty of provided problems). We argue that it is equally important for the model to stand in the shoes of a teacher to produce challenging problems by itself. Intuitively, patches with high values of reconstruction loss can be regarded as hard samples, and masking those hard patches naturally becomes a demanding reconstruction task. To empower the model as a teacher, we propose Hard Patches Mining (HPM), predicting patch-wise losses and subsequently determining where to mask. Technically, we introduce an auxiliary loss predictor, which is trained with a relative objective to prevent overfitting to exact loss values. Also, to gradually guide the training procedure, we propose an easy-to-hard mask strategy. Empirically, HPM brings significant improvements under both image and video benchmarks. Interestingly, solely incorporating the extra loss prediction objective leads to better representations, verifying the efficacy of determining where is hard to reconstruct. The code is available at https://github.com/Haochen-Wang409/HPM.
Structure-guided Diffusion Transformer for Low-Light Image Enhancement
While the diffusion transformer (DiT) has become a focal point of interest in recent years, its application in low-light image enhancement remains a blank area for exploration. Current methods recover the details from low-light images while inevitably amplifying the noise in images, resulting in poor visual quality. In this paper, we firstly introduce DiT into the low-light enhancement task and design a novel Structure-guided Diffusion Transformer based Low-light image enhancement (SDTL) framework. We compress the feature through wavelet transform to improve the inference efficiency of the model and capture the multi-directional frequency band. Then we propose a Structure Enhancement Module (SEM) that uses structural prior to enhance the texture and leverages an adaptive fusion strategy to achieve more accurate enhancement effect. In Addition, we propose a Structure-guided Attention Block (SAB) to pay more attention to texture-riched tokens and avoid interference from noisy areas in noise prediction. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance on several popular datasets, validating the effectiveness of SDTL in improving image quality and the potential of DiT in low-light enhancement tasks.
MMP: Towards Robust Multi-Modal Learning with Masked Modality Projection
Multimodal learning seeks to combine data from multiple input sources to enhance the performance of different downstream tasks. In real-world scenarios, performance can degrade substantially if some input modalities are missing. Existing methods that can handle missing modalities involve custom training or adaptation steps for each input modality combination. These approaches are either tied to specific modalities or become computationally expensive as the number of input modalities increases. In this paper, we propose Masked Modality Projection (MMP), a method designed to train a single model that is robust to any missing modality scenario. We achieve this by randomly masking a subset of modalities during training and learning to project available input modalities to estimate the tokens for the masked modalities. This approach enables the model to effectively learn to leverage the information from the available modalities to compensate for the missing ones, enhancing missing modality robustness. We conduct a series of experiments with various baseline models and datasets to assess the effectiveness of this strategy. Experiments demonstrate that our approach improves robustness to different missing modality scenarios, outperforming existing methods designed for missing modalities or specific modality combinations.
MGMAE: Motion Guided Masking for Video Masked Autoencoding
Masked autoencoding has shown excellent performance on self-supervised video representation learning. Temporal redundancy has led to a high masking ratio and customized masking strategy in VideoMAE. In this paper, we aim to further improve the performance of video masked autoencoding by introducing a motion guided masking strategy. Our key insight is that motion is a general and unique prior in video, which should be taken into account during masked pre-training. Our motion guided masking explicitly incorporates motion information to build temporal consistent masking volume. Based on this masking volume, we can track the unmasked tokens in time and sample a set of temporal consistent cubes from videos. These temporal aligned unmasked tokens will further relieve the information leakage issue in time and encourage the MGMAE to learn more useful structure information. We implement our MGMAE with an online efficient optical flow estimator and backward masking map warping strategy. We perform experiments on the datasets of Something-Something V2 and Kinetics-400, demonstrating the superior performance of our MGMAE to the original VideoMAE. In addition, we provide the visualization analysis to illustrate that our MGMAE can sample temporal consistent cubes in a motion-adaptive manner for more effective video pre-training.
With Limited Data for Multimodal Alignment, Let the STRUCTURE Guide You
Multimodal models have demonstrated powerful capabilities in complex tasks requiring multimodal alignment including zero-shot classification and cross-modal retrieval. However, existing models typically rely on millions of paired multimodal samples, which are prohibitively expensive or infeasible to obtain in many domains. In this work, we explore the feasibility of building multimodal models with limited amount of paired data by aligning pretrained unimodal foundation models. We show that high-quality alignment is possible with as few as tens of thousands of paired samplesx2013less than 1% of the data typically used in the field. To achieve this, we introduce STRUCTURE, an effective regularization technique that preserves the neighborhood geometry of the latent space of unimodal encoders. Additionally, we show that aligning last layers is often suboptimal and demonstrate the benefits of aligning the layers with the highest representational similarity across modalities. These two components can be readily incorporated into existing alignment methods, yielding substantial gains across 24 zero-shot image classification and retrieval benchmarks, with average relative improvement of 51.6% in classification and 91.8% in retrieval tasks. Our results highlight the effectiveness and broad applicability of our framework for limited-sample multimodal learning and offer a promising path forward for resource-constrained domains.
Beyond Masked and Unmasked: Discrete Diffusion Models via Partial Masking
Masked diffusion models (MDM) are powerful generative models for discrete data that generate samples by progressively unmasking tokens in a sequence. Each token can take one of two states: masked or unmasked. We observe that token sequences often remain unchanged between consecutive sampling steps; consequently, the model repeatedly processes identical inputs, leading to redundant computation. To address this inefficiency, we propose the Partial masking scheme (Prime), which augments MDM by allowing tokens to take intermediate states interpolated between the masked and unmasked states. This design enables the model to make predictions based on partially observed token information, and facilitates a fine-grained denoising process. We derive a variational training objective and introduce a simple architectural design to accommodate intermediate-state inputs. Our method demonstrates superior performance across a diverse set of generative modeling tasks. On text data, it achieves a perplexity of 15.36 on OpenWebText, outperforming previous MDM (21.52), autoregressive models (17.54), and their hybrid variants (17.58), without relying on an autoregressive formulation. On image data, it attains competitive FID scores of 3.26 on CIFAR-10 and 6.98 on ImageNet-32, comparable to leading continuous generative models.
Latent Diffusion Models with Masked AutoEncoders
In spite of the remarkable potential of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in image generation, the desired properties and optimal design of the autoencoders have been underexplored. In this work, we analyze the role of autoencoders in LDMs and identify three key properties: latent smoothness, perceptual compression quality, and reconstruction quality. We demonstrate that existing autoencoders fail to simultaneously satisfy all three properties, and propose Variational Masked AutoEncoders (VMAEs), taking advantage of the hierarchical features maintained by Masked AutoEncoders. We integrate VMAEs into the LDM framework, introducing Latent Diffusion Models with Masked AutoEncoders (LDMAEs). Our code is available at https://github.com/isno0907/ldmae.
Learning Layout and Style Reconfigurable GANs for Controllable Image Synthesis
With the remarkable recent progress on learning deep generative models, it becomes increasingly interesting to develop models for controllable image synthesis from reconfigurable inputs. This paper focuses on a recent emerged task, layout-to-image, to learn generative models that are capable of synthesizing photo-realistic images from spatial layout (i.e., object bounding boxes configured in an image lattice) and style (i.e., structural and appearance variations encoded by latent vectors). This paper first proposes an intuitive paradigm for the task, layout-to-mask-to-image, to learn to unfold object masks of given bounding boxes in an input layout to bridge the gap between the input layout and synthesized images. Then, this paper presents a method built on Generative Adversarial Networks for the proposed layout-to-mask-to-image with style control at both image and mask levels. Object masks are learned from the input layout and iteratively refined along stages in the generator network. Style control at the image level is the same as in vanilla GANs, while style control at the object mask level is realized by a proposed novel feature normalization scheme, Instance-Sensitive and Layout-Aware Normalization. In experiments, the proposed method is tested in the COCO-Stuff dataset and the Visual Genome dataset with state-of-the-art performance obtained.
Regularized Mask Tuning: Uncovering Hidden Knowledge in Pre-trained Vision-Language Models
Prompt tuning and adapter tuning have shown great potential in transferring pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to various downstream tasks. In this work, we design a new type of tuning method, termed as regularized mask tuning, which masks the network parameters through a learnable selection. Inspired by neural pathways, we argue that the knowledge required by a downstream task already exists in the pre-trained weights but just gets concealed in the upstream pre-training stage. To bring the useful knowledge back into light, we first identify a set of parameters that are important to a given downstream task, then attach a binary mask to each parameter, and finally optimize these masks on the downstream data with the parameters frozen. When updating the mask, we introduce a novel gradient dropout strategy to regularize the parameter selection, in order to prevent the model from forgetting old knowledge and overfitting the downstream data. Experimental results on 11 datasets demonstrate the consistent superiority of our method over previous alternatives. It is noteworthy that we manage to deliver 18.73% performance improvement compared to the zero-shot CLIP via masking an average of only 2.56% parameters. Furthermore, our method is synergistic with most existing parameter-efficient tuning methods and can boost the performance on top of them. Project page can be found here (https://wuw2019.github.io/R-AMT/).
Decoding with Structured Awareness: Integrating Directional, Frequency-Spatial, and Structural Attention for Medical Image Segmentation
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.
Integrally Pre-Trained Transformer Pyramid Networks
In this paper, we present an integral pre-training framework based on masked image modeling (MIM). We advocate for pre-training the backbone and neck jointly so that the transfer gap between MIM and downstream recognition tasks is minimal. We make two technical contributions. First, we unify the reconstruction and recognition necks by inserting a feature pyramid into the pre-training stage. Second, we complement mask image modeling (MIM) with masked feature modeling (MFM) that offers multi-stage supervision to the feature pyramid. The pre-trained models, termed integrally pre-trained transformer pyramid networks (iTPNs), serve as powerful foundation models for visual recognition. In particular, the base/large-level iTPN achieves an 86.2%/87.8% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, a 53.2%/55.6% box AP on COCO object detection with 1x training schedule using Mask-RCNN, and a 54.7%/57.7% mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation using UPerHead -- all these results set new records. Our work inspires the community to work on unifying upstream pre-training and downstream fine-tuning tasks. Code and the pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/sunsmarterjie/iTPN.
XMask3D: Cross-modal Mask Reasoning for Open Vocabulary 3D Semantic Segmentation
Existing methodologies in open vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation primarily concentrate on establishing a unified feature space encompassing 3D, 2D, and textual modalities. Nevertheless, traditional techniques such as global feature alignment or vision-language model distillation tend to impose only approximate correspondence, struggling notably with delineating fine-grained segmentation boundaries. To address this gap, we propose a more meticulous mask-level alignment between 3D features and the 2D-text embedding space through a cross-modal mask reasoning framework, XMask3D. In our approach, we developed a mask generator based on the denoising UNet from a pre-trained diffusion model, leveraging its capability for precise textual control over dense pixel representations and enhancing the open-world adaptability of the generated masks. We further integrate 3D global features as implicit conditions into the pre-trained 2D denoising UNet, enabling the generation of segmentation masks with additional 3D geometry awareness. Subsequently, the generated 2D masks are employed to align mask-level 3D representations with the vision-language feature space, thereby augmenting the open vocabulary capability of 3D geometry embeddings. Finally, we fuse complementary 2D and 3D mask features, resulting in competitive performance across multiple benchmarks for 3D open vocabulary semantic segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/XMask3D.
Probabilistic Hyper-Graphs using Multiple Randomly Masked Autoencoders for Semi-supervised Multi-modal Multi-task Learning
The computer vision domain has greatly benefited from an abundance of data across many modalities to improve on various visual tasks. Recently, there has been a lot of focus on self-supervised pre-training methods through Masked Autoencoders (MAE) he2022masked,bachmann2022multimae, usually used as a first step before optimizing for a downstream task, such as classification or regression. This is very useful as it doesn't require any manually labeled data. In this work, we introduce Probabilistic Hyper-Graphs using Masked Autoencoders (PHG-MAE): a novel model that unifies the classical work on neural graphs leordeanu2021semi with the modern approach of masked autoencoders under a common theoretical framework. Through random masking of entire modalities, not just patches, the model samples from the distribution of hyper-edges on each forward pass. Additionally, the model adapts the standard MAE algorithm by combining pre-training and fine-tuning into a single training loop. Moreover, our approach enables the creation of inference-time ensembles which, through aggregation, boost the final prediction performance and consistency. Lastly, we show that we can apply knowledge distillation on top of the ensembles with little loss in performance, even with models that have fewer than 1M parameters. While our work mostly focuses on outdoor UAV scenes that contain multiple world interpretations and modalities, the same steps can be followed in other similar domains, such as autonomous driving or indoor robotics. In order to streamline the process of integrating external pre-trained experts for computer vision multi-modal multi-task learning (MTL) scenarios, we developed a data-pipeline software. Using this tool, we have created and released a fully-automated extension of the Dronescapes dataset. All the technical details, code and reproduction steps are publicly released.
Mask Image Watermarking
We present MaskMark, a simple, efficient and flexible framework for image watermarking. MaskMark has two variants: MaskMark-D, which supports global watermark embedding, watermark localization, and local watermark extraction for applications such as tamper detection, and MaskMark-ED, which focuses on local watermark embedding and extraction with enhanced robustness in small regions, enabling localized image protection. Built upon the classical Encoder- Distortion-Decoder training paradigm, MaskMark-D introduces a simple masking mechanism during the decoding stage to support both global and local watermark extraction. A mask is applied to the watermarked image before extraction, allowing the decoder to focus on selected regions and learn local extraction. A localization module is also integrated into the decoder to identify watermark regions during inference, reducing interference from irrelevant content and improving accuracy. MaskMark-ED extends this design by incorporating the mask into the encoding stage as well, guiding the encoder to embed the watermark in designated local regions for enhanced robustness. Comprehensive experiments show that MaskMark achieves state-of-the-art performance in global watermark extraction, local watermark extraction, watermark localization, and multi-watermark embedding. It outperforms all existing baselines, including the recent leading model WAM for local watermarking, while preserving high visual quality of the watermarked images. MaskMark is also flexible, by adjusting the distortion layer, it can adapt to different robustness requirements with just a few steps of fine-tuning. Moreover, our approach is efficient and easy to optimize, requiring only 20 hours on a single A6000 GPU with just 1/15 the computational cost of WAM.
Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation
Image segmentation is about grouping pixels with different semantics, e.g., category or instance membership, where each choice of semantics defines a task. While only the semantics of each task differ, current research focuses on designing specialized architectures for each task. We present Masked-attention Mask Transformer (Mask2Former), a new architecture capable of addressing any image segmentation task (panoptic, instance or semantic). Its key components include masked attention, which extracts localized features by constraining cross-attention within predicted mask regions. In addition to reducing the research effort by at least three times, it outperforms the best specialized architectures by a significant margin on four popular datasets. Most notably, Mask2Former sets a new state-of-the-art for panoptic segmentation (57.8 PQ on COCO), instance segmentation (50.1 AP on COCO) and semantic segmentation (57.7 mIoU on ADE20K).
Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation
Modern approaches typically formulate semantic segmentation as a per-pixel classification task, while instance-level segmentation is handled with an alternative mask classification. Our key insight: mask classification is sufficiently general to solve both semantic- and instance-level segmentation tasks in a unified manner using the exact same model, loss, and training procedure. Following this observation, we propose MaskFormer, a simple mask classification model which predicts a set of binary masks, each associated with a single global class label prediction. Overall, the proposed mask classification-based method simplifies the landscape of effective approaches to semantic and panoptic segmentation tasks and shows excellent empirical results. In particular, we observe that MaskFormer outperforms per-pixel classification baselines when the number of classes is large. Our mask classification-based method outperforms both current state-of-the-art semantic (55.6 mIoU on ADE20K) and panoptic segmentation (52.7 PQ on COCO) models.
FormNetV2: Multimodal Graph Contrastive Learning for Form Document Information Extraction
The recent advent of self-supervised pre-training techniques has led to a surge in the use of multimodal learning in form document understanding. However, existing approaches that extend the mask language modeling to other modalities require careful multi-task tuning, complex reconstruction target designs, or additional pre-training data. In FormNetV2, we introduce a centralized multimodal graph contrastive learning strategy to unify self-supervised pre-training for all modalities in one loss. The graph contrastive objective maximizes the agreement of multimodal representations, providing a natural interplay for all modalities without special customization. In addition, we extract image features within the bounding box that joins a pair of tokens connected by a graph edge, capturing more targeted visual cues without loading a sophisticated and separately pre-trained image embedder. FormNetV2 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on FUNSD, CORD, SROIE and Payment benchmarks with a more compact model size.
Mask to reconstruct: Cooperative Semantics Completion for Video-text Retrieval
Recently, masked video modeling has been widely explored and significantly improved the model's understanding ability of visual regions at a local level. However, existing methods usually adopt random masking and follow the same reconstruction paradigm to complete the masked regions, which do not leverage the correlations between cross-modal content. In this paper, we present Mask for Semantics Completion (MASCOT) based on semantic-based masked modeling. Specifically, after applying attention-based video masking to generate high-informed and low-informed masks, we propose Informed Semantics Completion to recover masked semantics information. The recovery mechanism is achieved by aligning the masked content with the unmasked visual regions and corresponding textual context, which makes the model capture more text-related details at a patch level. Additionally, we shift the emphasis of reconstruction from irrelevant backgrounds to discriminative parts to ignore regions with low-informed masks. Furthermore, we design dual-mask co-learning to incorporate video cues under different masks and learn more aligned video representation. Our MASCOT performs state-of-the-art performance on four major text-video retrieval benchmarks, including MSR-VTT, LSMDC, ActivityNet, and DiDeMo. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.
Mask-ControlNet: Higher-Quality Image Generation with An Additional Mask Prompt
Text-to-image generation has witnessed great progress, especially with the recent advancements in diffusion models. Since texts cannot provide detailed conditions like object appearance, reference images are usually leveraged for the control of objects in the generated images. However, existing methods still suffer limited accuracy when the relationship between the foreground and background is complicated. To address this issue, we develop a framework termed Mask-ControlNet by introducing an additional mask prompt. Specifically, we first employ large vision models to obtain masks to segment the objects of interest in the reference image. Then, the object images are employed as additional prompts to facilitate the diffusion model to better understand the relationship between foreground and background regions during image generation. Experiments show that the mask prompts enhance the controllability of the diffusion model to maintain higher fidelity to the reference image while achieving better image quality. Comparison with previous text-to-image generation methods demonstrates our method's superior quantitative and qualitative performance on the benchmark datasets.
CenterMask : Real-Time Anchor-Free Instance Segmentation
We propose a simple yet efficient anchor-free instance segmentation, called CenterMask, that adds a novel spatial attention-guided mask (SAG-Mask) branch to anchor-free one stage object detector (FCOS) in the same vein with Mask R-CNN. Plugged into the FCOS object detector, the SAG-Mask branch predicts a segmentation mask on each box with the spatial attention map that helps to focus on informative pixels and suppress noise. We also present an improved backbone networks, VoVNetV2, with two effective strategies: (1) residual connection for alleviating the optimization problem of larger VoVNet lee2019energy and (2) effective Squeeze-Excitation (eSE) dealing with the channel information loss problem of original SE. With SAG-Mask and VoVNetV2, we deign CenterMask and CenterMask-Lite that are targeted to large and small models, respectively. Using the same ResNet-101-FPN backbone, CenterMask achieves 38.3%, surpassing all previous state-of-the-art methods while at a much faster speed. CenterMask-Lite also outperforms the state-of-the-art by large margins at over 35fps on Titan Xp. We hope that CenterMask and VoVNetV2 can serve as a solid baseline of real-time instance segmentation and backbone network for various vision tasks, respectively. The Code is available at https://github.com/youngwanLEE/CenterMask.
Matrix3D: Large Photogrammetry Model All-in-One
We present Matrix3D, a unified model that performs several photogrammetry subtasks, including pose estimation, depth prediction, and novel view synthesis using just the same model. Matrix3D utilizes a multi-modal diffusion transformer (DiT) to integrate transformations across several modalities, such as images, camera parameters, and depth maps. The key to Matrix3D's large-scale multi-modal training lies in the incorporation of a mask learning strategy. This enables full-modality model training even with partially complete data, such as bi-modality data of image-pose and image-depth pairs, thus significantly increases the pool of available training data. Matrix3D demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in pose estimation and novel view synthesis tasks. Additionally, it offers fine-grained control through multi-round interactions, making it an innovative tool for 3D content creation. Project page: https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/matrix3d.
