Daily Papers

Large language models (LLMs) with instruction following capabilities have demonstrated impressive problem-solving abilities. While synthesizing instructional data from unsupervised text has become a common approach for training such models, conventional methods rely heavily on human effort for data annotation. Although existing automated synthesis paradigms have alleviated this constraint, they still exhibit significant limitations in ensuring adequate diversity and difficulty of synthesized instructions. To address these challenges, we propose Self-Foveate, an innovative LLM-driven method for instruction synthesis. This approach introduces a "Micro-Scatter-Macro" multi-level foveation methodology that effectively guides the LLM to deeply excavate fine-grained information embedded in unsupervised text, thereby enhancing both the diversity and difficulty of synthesized instructions. Comprehensive experiments across multiple unsupervised corpora and diverse model architectures validate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. We publicly release our data and codes: https://github.com/Mubuky/Self-Foveate

The goal of this work is to characterize the representational impact that foveation operations have for machine vision systems, inspired by the foveated human visual system, which has higher acuity at the center of gaze and texture-like encoding in the periphery. To do so, we introduce models consisting of a first-stage fixed image transform followed by a second-stage learnable convolutional neural network, and we varied the first stage component. The primary model has a foveated-textural input stage, which we compare to a model with foveated-blurred input and a model with spatially-uniform blurred input (both matched for perceptual compression), and a final reference model with minimal input-based compression. We find that: 1) the foveated-texture model shows similar scene classification accuracy as the reference model despite its compressed input, with greater i.i.d. generalization than the other models; 2) the foveated-texture model has greater sensitivity to high-spatial frequency information and greater robustness to occlusion, w.r.t the comparison models; 3) both the foveated systems, show a stronger center image-bias relative to the spatially-uniform systems even with a weight sharing constraint. Critically, these results are preserved over different classical CNN architectures throughout their learning dynamics. Altogether, this suggests that foveation with peripheral texture-based computations yields an efficient, distinct, and robust representational format of scene information, and provides symbiotic computational insight into the representational consequences that texture-based peripheral encoding may have for processing in the human visual system, while also potentially inspiring the next generation of computer vision models via spatially-adaptive computation. Code + Data available here: https://github.com/ArturoDeza/EmergentProperties

We present Double-Helix Vision (DH), a geometry-based visual sampler that compresses 2D images into compact 1D signals using paired golden-ratio-inspired spiral trajectories. Rather than processing every pixel uniformly, DH employs two phase-shifted helices (Alpha and Beta, offset by 180 degrees) to sample the image with biologically-inspired foveation: high density at the center, sparse coverage at the periphery. At 4K resolution, DH achieves a 1,433x compression ratio (99.93% reduction) while preserving the geometric structure of the scene. The full perception pipeline -- including spatial mapping, temporal collision detection, and intra-frame structural disparity estimation -- runs in 0.52 ms at 1080p on CPU-only hardware, with no neural network dependencies. On CIFAR-10 at extreme sampling budgets (K=128 points per helix), DH achieves a +6.03% accuracy gain over uniform random sampling. A JSON-serializable Robotics API is provided, delivering sub-millisecond spatial perception reports in 2.7 KB packets. Code and benchmarks are available under the MIT License.

Diffusion and flow matching models have unlocked unprecedented capabilities for creative content creation, such as interactive image and streaming video generation. The growing demand for higher resolutions, frame rates, and context lengths, however, makes efficient generation increasingly challenging, as computational complexity grows quadratically with the number of generated tokens. Our work seeks to optimize the efficiency of the generation process in settings where the user's gaze location is known or can be estimated, for example, by using eye tracking. In these settings, we leverage the eccentricity-dependent acuity of human vision: while a user perceives very high-resolution visual information in a small region around their gaze location (the foveal region), the ability to resolve detail quickly degrades in the periphery of the visual field. Our approach starts with a mask modeling the foveated resolution to allocate tokens non-uniformly, assigning higher token density to foveal regions and lower density to peripheral regions. An image or video is generated in a mixed-resolution token setting, yielding results perceptually indistinguishable from full-resolution generation, while drastically reducing the token count and generation time. To this end, we develop a principled mechanism for constructing mixed-resolution tokens directly from high-resolution data, allowing a foveated diffusion model to be post-trained from an existing base model while maintaining content consistency across resolutions. We validate our approach through extensive analysis and a carefully designed user study, demonstrating the efficacy of foveation as a practical and scalable axis for efficient generation.