Daily Papers

Monocular 3D occupancy prediction, aiming to predict the occupancy and semantics within interesting regions of 3D scenes from only 2D images, has garnered increasing attention recently for its vital role in 3D scene understanding. Predicting the 3D occupancy of large-scale outdoor scenes from 2D images is ill-posed and resource-intensive. In this paper, we present DGOcc, a Depth-aware Global query-based network for monocular 3D Occupancy prediction. We first explore prior depth maps to extract depth context features that provide explicit geometric information for the occupancy network. Then, in order to fully exploit the depth context features, we propose a Global Query-based (GQ) Module. The cooperation of attention mechanisms and scale-aware operations facilitates the feature interaction between images and 3D voxels. Moreover, a Hierarchical Supervision Strategy (HSS) is designed to avoid upsampling the high-dimension 3D voxel features to full resolution, which mitigates GPU memory utilization and time cost. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best performance on monocular semantic occupancy prediction while reducing GPU and time overhead.

We propose global context vision transformer (GC ViT), a novel architecture that enhances parameter and compute utilization for computer vision tasks. The core of the novel model are global context self-attention modules, joint with standard local self-attention, to effectively yet efficiently model both long and short-range spatial interactions, as an alternative to complex operations such as an attention masks or local windows shifting. While the local self-attention modules are responsible for modeling short-range information, the global query tokens are shared across all global self-attention modules to interact with local key and values. In addition, we address the lack of inductive bias in ViTs and improve the modeling of inter-channel dependencies by proposing a novel downsampler which leverages a parameter-efficient fused inverted residual block. The proposed GC ViT achieves new state-of-the-art performance across image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. On ImageNet-1K dataset for classification, GC ViT models with 51M, 90M and 201M parameters achieve 84.3%, 84.9% and 85.6% Top-1 accuracy, respectively, surpassing comparably-sized prior art such as CNN-based ConvNeXt and ViT-based Swin Transformer. Pre-trained GC ViT backbones in downstream tasks of object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation on MS COCO and ADE20K datasets outperform prior work consistently, sometimes by large margins.

The application of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to long-form video understanding is constrained by limited context lengths and the computationally prohibitive cost of processing dense video tokens. Consequently, recent research has focused on query-aware frame selection, methods that often incur significant computational overhead. This paper challenges the assumption that such complex search mechanisms are universally necessary. We first identify and validate a query typology distinguishing between global query and localized query. We demonstrate that while uniform sampling is both effective and efficient for global queries, localized queries indeed necessitate query-aware selection for optimal performance. Building on this insight, we propose DIG, a training-free frame selection framework that adapts its strategy based on the query type. Specifically,DIG employs efficient uniform sampling for global queries while activating a specialized pipeline to extract query-relevant frames for localized queries. Experiments on three long-form video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that DIG consistently outperforms existing baselines and robustly improves LMM performance, even when scaling the input frame count to 256.

Recent leading zero-shot video object segmentation (ZVOS) works devote to integrating appearance and motion information by elaborately designing feature fusion modules and identically applying them in multiple feature stages. Our preliminary experiments show that with the strong long-range dependency modeling capacity of Transformer, simply concatenating the two modality features and feeding them to vanilla Transformers for feature fusion can distinctly benefit the performance but at a cost of heavy computation. Through further empirical analysis, we find that attention dependencies learned in Transformer in different stages exhibit completely different properties: global query-independent dependency in the low-level stages and semantic-specific dependency in the high-level stages. Motivated by the observations, we propose two Transformer variants: i) Context-Sharing Transformer (CST) that learns the global-shared contextual information within image frames with a lightweight computation. ii) Semantic Gathering-Scattering Transformer (SGST) that models the semantic correlation separately for the foreground and background and reduces the computation cost with a soft token merging mechanism. We apply CST and SGST for low-level and high-level feature fusions, respectively, formulating a level-isomerous Transformer framework for ZVOS task. Compared with the baseline that uses vanilla Transformers for multi-stage fusion, ours significantly increase the speed by 13 times and achieves new state-of-the-art ZVOS performance. Code is available at https://github.com/DLUT-yyc/Isomer.

The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies within an image, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by the non-local network are almost the same for different query positions. In this paper, we take advantage of this finding to create a simplified network based on a query-independent formulation, which maintains the accuracy of NLNet but with significantly less computation. We further replace the one-layer transformation function of the non-local block by a two-layer bottleneck, which further reduces the parameter number considerably. The resulting network element, called the global context (GC) block, effectively models global context in a lightweight manner, allowing it to be applied at multiple layers of a backbone network to form a global context network (GCNet). Experiments show that GCNet generally outperforms NLNet on major benchmarks for various recognition tasks. The code and network configurations are available at https://github.com/xvjiarui/GCNet.

Similar to facial beautification in real life, 3D virtual avatars require personalized customization to enhance their visual appeal, yet this area remains insufficiently explored. Although current 3D Gaussian editing methods can be adapted for facial makeup purposes, these methods fail to meet the fundamental requirements for achieving realistic makeup effects: 1) ensuring a consistent appearance during drivable expressions, 2) preserving the identity throughout the makeup process, and 3) enabling precise control over fine details. To address these, we propose a specialized 3D makeup method named AvatarMakeup, leveraging a pretrained diffusion model to transfer makeup patterns from a single reference photo of any individual. We adopt a coarse-to-fine idea to first maintain the consistent appearance and identity, and then to refine the details. In particular, the diffusion model is employed to generate makeup images as supervision. Due to the uncertainties in diffusion process, the generated images are inconsistent across different viewpoints and expressions. Therefore, we propose a Coherent Duplication method to coarsely apply makeup to the target while ensuring consistency across dynamic and multiview effects. Coherent Duplication optimizes a global UV map by recoding the averaged facial attributes among the generated makeup images. By querying the global UV map, it easily synthesizes coherent makeup guidance from arbitrary views and expressions to optimize the target avatar. Given the coarse makeup avatar, we further enhance the makeup by incorporating a Refinement Module into the diffusion model to achieve high makeup quality. Experiments demonstrate that AvatarMakeup achieves state-of-the-art makeup transfer quality and consistency throughout animation.

In recent years, transformer-based models have exhibited considerable potential in point cloud instance segmentation. Despite the promising performance achieved by existing methods, they encounter challenges such as instance query initialization problems and excessive reliance on stacked layers, rendering them incompatible with large-scale 3D scenes. This paper introduces a novel method, named SGIFormer, for 3D instance segmentation, which is composed of the Semantic-guided Mix Query (SMQ) initialization and the Geometric-enhanced Interleaving Transformer (GIT) decoder. Specifically, the principle of our SMQ initialization scheme is to leverage the predicted voxel-wise semantic information to implicitly generate the scene-aware query, yielding adequate scene prior and compensating for the learnable query set. Subsequently, we feed the formed overall query into our GIT decoder to alternately refine instance query and global scene features for further capturing fine-grained information and reducing complex design intricacies simultaneously. To emphasize geometric property, we consider bias estimation as an auxiliary task and progressively integrate shifted point coordinates embedding to reinforce instance localization. SGIFormer attains state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet V2, ScanNet200 datasets, and the challenging high-fidelity ScanNet++ benchmark, striking a balance between accuracy and efficiency. The code, weights, and demo videos are publicly available at https://rayyoh.github.io/sgiformer.

The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by non-local network are almost the same for different query positions within an image. In this paper, we take advantage of this finding to create a simplified network based on a query-independent formulation, which maintains the accuracy of NLNet but with significantly less computation. We further observe that this simplified design shares similar structure with Squeeze-Excitation Network (SENet). Hence we unify them into a three-step general framework for global context modeling. Within the general framework, we design a better instantiation, called the global context (GC) block, which is lightweight and can effectively model the global context. The lightweight property allows us to apply it for multiple layers in a backbone network to construct a global context network (GCNet), which generally outperforms both simplified NLNet and SENet on major benchmarks for various recognition tasks. The code and configurations are released at https://github.com/xvjiarui/GCNet.

We present an algorithmic framework for incremental maintenance of first sheaf cohomology H^1(X; F) on dynamically evolving 1-dimensional cellular complexes equipped with finite-dimensional cellular sheaves. The classical computation of H^1 via factorization of the coboundary matrix requires O(n^3) time; when the complex evolves with a stream of m edits, full recomputation after each edit costs O(mn^3). Under a bounded local geometry assumption -- bounded cell size v_{max}, bounded stalk dimension d, and bounded nerve degree D -- each edit (vertex insertion, edge insertion, restriction map update) affects only a bounded set of local coboundary blocks. The algorithm therefore processes lazy streaming edits in O(1) time with respect to the total complex size n (with cost polynomial in the local geometry parameters v_{max}, d, and D, which are treated as constants independent of n), deferring local eigensolves and Mayer-Vietoris global assembly to synchronization points (Flush). At synchronization, the maintained state agrees with the corresponding batch assembly of the partitioned sheaf model; we observe zero measured drift in all batch-verified runs (through V = 10^6). We also give an amortized O(|E|) streaming construction for the cellular decomposition and discuss an adversarial algebraic-RAM barrier arguing that unpartitioned non-trivial sheaves (d geq 2, non-identity restriction maps) do not admit the same locality. Experiments on Barabasi-Albert graphs with up to 5 times 10^6 vertices and 1.7 times 10^7 streaming edits show 35 μs median lazy per-edit update latency (excluding flush); query time (global assembly at synchronization) is O(n) per flush in the implemented full-traversal path. Exact synchronization costs are reported separately.

Effective representation learning from text has been an active area of research in the fields of NLP and text mining. Attention mechanisms have been at the forefront in order to learn contextual sentence representations. Current state-of-the-art approaches for many NLP tasks use large pre-trained language models such as BERT, XLNet and so on for learning representations. These models are based on the Transformer architecture that involves recurrent blocks of computation consisting of multi-head self-attention and feedforward networks. One of the major bottlenecks largely contributing to the computational complexity of the Transformer models is the self-attention layer, that is both computationally expensive and parameter intensive. In this work, we introduce a novel multi-head self-attention mechanism operating on GRUs that is shown to be computationally cheaper and more parameter efficient than self-attention mechanism proposed in Transformers for text classification tasks. The efficiency of our approach mainly stems from two optimizations; 1) we use low-rank matrix factorization of the affinity matrix to efficiently get multiple attention distributions instead of having separate parameters for each head 2) attention scores are obtained by querying a global context vector instead of densely querying all the words in the sentence. We evaluate the performance of the proposed model on tasks such as sentiment analysis from movie reviews, predicting business ratings from reviews and classifying news articles into topics. We find that the proposed approach matches or outperforms a series of strong baselines and is more parameter efficient than comparable multi-head approaches. We also perform qualitative analyses to verify that the proposed approach is interpretable and captures context-dependent word importance.

The use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to retrieve relevant information from an external knowledge source enables large language models (LLMs) to answer questions over private and/or previously unseen document collections. However, RAG fails on global questions directed at an entire text corpus, such as "What are the main themes in the dataset?", since this is inherently a query-focused summarization (QFS) task, rather than an explicit retrieval task. Prior QFS methods, meanwhile, fail to scale to the quantities of text indexed by typical RAG systems. To combine the strengths of these contrasting methods, we propose a Graph RAG approach to question answering over private text corpora that scales with both the generality of user questions and the quantity of source text to be indexed. Our approach uses an LLM to build a graph-based text index in two stages: first to derive an entity knowledge graph from the source documents, then to pregenerate community summaries for all groups of closely-related entities. Given a question, each community summary is used to generate a partial response, before all partial responses are again summarized in a final response to the user. For a class of global sensemaking questions over datasets in the 1 million token range, we show that Graph RAG leads to substantial improvements over a na\"ive RAG baseline for both the comprehensiveness and diversity of generated answers. An open-source, Python-based implementation of both global and local Graph RAG approaches is forthcoming at https://aka.ms/graphrag.

Proving theorems in Lean 4 often requires identifying a scattered set of library lemmas whose joint use enables a concise proof -- a task we call global premise retrieval. Existing tools address adjacent problems: semantic search engines find individual declarations matching a query, while premise-selection systems predict useful lemmas one tactic step at a time. Neither recovers the full premise set an entire theorem requires. We present LeanSearch v2, a two-mode retrieval system for this task. Its standard mode applies a hierarchy-informalized Mathlib corpus with an embedding-reranker pipeline, achieving state-of-the-art single-query retrieval without domain-specific fine-tuning (nDCG@10 of 0.62 vs. 0.53 for the next-best system). Its reasoning mode builds on standard mode as its retrieval substrate, targeting global premise retrieval through iterative sketch-retrieve-reflect cycles. On a 69-query benchmark of research-level Mathlib theorems, reasoning mode recovers 46.1% of ground-truth premise groups within 10 retrieved candidates, outperforming strong reasoning retrieval systems (38.0%) and premise-selection baselines (9.3%) on the same benchmark. In a controlled downstream evaluation with a fixed prover loop, replacing alternative retrievers with LeanSearch v2 yields the highest proof success (20% vs. 16% for the next-best system and 4% without retrieval), confirming that retrieval quality propagates to proof generation. We have open-sourced all code, data, and benchmarks. Code and data: https://github.com/frenzymath/LeanSearch-v2 . The standard mode is publicly available with API access at https://leansearch.net/ .

Reinforcement learning has recently shown promise in improving retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Despite these advances, its effectiveness in multi-hop question answering (QA) remains limited by two fundamental limitations: (i) global planning absence to structure multi-step reasoning, and (ii) unfaithful execution, which hinders effective query formulation and consistent use of retrieved evidence. We propose GlobalRAG, a reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance global reasoning in multi-hop QA. GlobalRAG decomposes questions into subgoals, coordinates retrieval with reasoning, and refines evidence iteratively. To guide this process, we introduce Planning Quality Reward and SubGoal Completion Reward, which encourage coherent planning and reliable subgoal execution. In addition, a progressive weight annealing strategy balances process-oriented and outcome-based objectives. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that GlobalRAG significantly outperforms strong baselines while using only 8k training data (42% of the training data used by strong baselines), achieving average improvements of 14.2% in both EM and F1.

Explaining why a language model produces a particular output requires local, input-level explanations. Existing methods uncover global capability circuits (e.g., indirect object identification), but not why the model answers a specific input query in a particular way. We introduce query circuits, which directly trace the information flow inside a model that maps a specific input to the output. Unlike surrogate-based approaches (e.g., sparse autoencoders), query circuits are identified within the model itself, resulting in more faithful and computationally accessible explanations. To make query circuits practical, we address two challenges. First, we introduce Normalized Deviation Faithfulness (NDF), a robust metric to evaluate how well a discovered circuit recovers the model's decision for a specific input, and is broadly applicable to circuit discovery beyond our setting. Second, we develop sampling-based methods to efficiently identify circuits that are sparse yet faithfully describe the model's behavior. Across benchmarks (IOI, arithmetic, MMLU, and ARC), we find that there exist extremely sparse query circuits within the model that can recover much of its performance on single queries. For example, a circuit covering only 1.3% of model connections can recover about 60% of performance on an MMLU questions. Overall, query circuits provide a step towards faithful, scalable explanations of how language models process individual inputs. The project page is at https://tony10101105.github.io/query-circuit/.

The availability of performant pre-trained models has led to a proliferation of fine-tuned expert models that are specialized to particular domains. This has enabled the creation of powerful and adaptive routing-based "Model MoErging" methods with the goal of using expert modules to create an aggregate system with improved performance or generalization. However, existing MoErging methods often prioritize generalization to unseen tasks at the expense of performance on held-in tasks, which limits its practical applicability in real-world deployment scenarios. We observe that current token-level routing mechanisms neglect the global semantic context of the input task. This token-wise independence hinders effective expert selection for held-in tasks, as routing decisions fail to incorporate the semantic properties of the task. To address this, we propose, Global and Local Instruction Driven Expert Router (GLIDER) that integrates a multi-scale routing mechanism, encompassing a semantic global router and a learned local router. The global router leverages LLM's advanced reasoning capabilities for semantic-related contexts to enhance expert selection. Given the input query and LLM, the router generates semantic task instructions that guide the retrieval of the most relevant experts across all layers. This global guidance is complemented by a local router that facilitates token-level routing decisions within each module, enabling finer control and enhanced performance on unseen tasks. Our experiments using T5-based models for T0 and FLAN tasks demonstrate that GLIDER achieves substantially improved held-in performance while maintaining strong generalization on held-out tasks. We also perform ablations experiments to dive deeper into the components of GLIDER. Our experiments highlight the importance of our multi-scale routing that leverages LLM-driven semantic reasoning for MoErging methods.

MLLMs require high-resolution visual inputs for fine-grained tasks like document understanding and dense scene perception. However, current global resolution scaling paradigms indiscriminately flood the quadratic self-attention mechanism with visually redundant tokens, severely bottlenecking inference throughput while ignoring spatial sparsity and query intent. To overcome this, we propose Q-Zoom, a query-aware adaptive high-resolution perception framework that operates in an efficient coarse-to-fine manner. First, a lightweight Dynamic Gating Network safely bypasses high-resolution processing when coarse global features suffice. Second, for queries demanding fine-grained perception, a Self-Distilled Region Proposal Network (SD-RPN) precisely localizes the task-relevant Region-of-Interest (RoI) directly from intermediate feature spaces. To optimize these modules efficiently, the gating network uses a consistency-aware generation strategy to derive deterministic routing labels, while the SD-RPN employs a fully self-supervised distillation paradigm. A continuous spatio-temporal alignment scheme and targeted fine-tuning then seamlessly fuse the dense local RoI with the coarse global layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Zoom establishes a dominant Pareto frontier. Using Qwen2.5-VL-7B as a primary testbed, Q-Zoom accelerates inference by 2.52 times on Document & OCR benchmarks and 4.39 times in High-Resolution scenarios while matching the baseline's peak accuracy. Furthermore, when configured for maximum perceptual fidelity, Q-Zoom surpasses the baseline's peak performance by 1.1% and 8.1% on these respective benchmarks. These robust improvements transfer seamlessly to Qwen3-VL, LLaVA, and emerging RL-based thinking-with-image models. Project page is available at https://yuhengsss.github.io/Q-Zoom/.

Dynamic scene reconstruction from monocular video remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing feed-forward methods predict 3D Gaussians pixel-wise for each frame, suffering from duplicated Gaussians and view-dependent biases that hinder effective learning of scene motion. We present C4G, a feed-forward 4D reconstruction framework built upon a compact set of timestamp-conditioned learnable Gaussian query tokens. Each token aggregates corresponding features across the full temporal context and decodes a 3D Gaussian whose position is modulated by the target timestamp, enabling globally coherent motion modeling without per-scene optimization. To capture fine-grained details, we further introduce a video diffusion model-based rendering enhancement module. Since our framework effectively aggregates features into Gaussians, we extend this capability to feature lifting, producing a 4D feature field that supports point tracking and dynamic scene understanding. C4G achieves strong novel-view synthesis performance using significantly fewer Gaussians and without requiring camera poses, while exhibiting stronger motion modeling and robustness to large temporal gaps.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective approach for large language models to access external knowledge. However, existing methods rely on dense similarity retrieval and face inherent limitations in handling structured constraints and multi-hop reasoning. Incorporating knowledge graphs partially alleviates these issues, but at the cost of semantic fragmentation, high maintenance overhead, and difficult incremental updates. This paper introduces SAG (SQLRetrieval Augmented Generation), a structured architecture for retrieval and agent systems. Instead of pre-building a global static graph, SAG converts each chunk into one semantically complete event and a set of indexing entities, then uses SQL join queries to dynamically link events that share entities into local hyperedges,constructing, at query time, a dynamically instantiated local index structure. This design avoids the need for global graph rebuilding and ongoing maintenance; the system naturally supports incremental writes, concurrent processing, and continuous scaling through its reliance on standard database infrastructure. Across HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue, three standard multi-hop benchmarks,SAG achieves the best results on 8 out of 9 Recall@K metrics, reaching 80.0% Recall@5 on MuSiQue, the benchmark with the highest multi-hop reasoning demands.SAG has also been deployed at a production scale of hundreds of millions of data items, with online retrieval latency kept within seconds. Project site and code are available at https://github.com/Zleap-AI/SAG-Benchmark.

Dense retrieval is a crucial task in Information Retrieval (IR) and is the foundation for downstream tasks such as re-ranking. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown compelling semantic understanding capabilities and are appealing to researchers studying dense retrieval. LLMs, as decoder-style generative models, are competent at language generation while falling short on modeling global information due to the lack of attention to tokens afterward. Inspired by the classical word-based language modeling approach for IR, i.e., the query likelihood (QL) model, we seek to sufficiently utilize LLMs' generative ability by QL maximization. However, instead of ranking documents with QL estimation, we introduce an auxiliary task of QL maximization to yield a better backbone for contrastively learning a discriminative retriever. We name our model as LLM-QL. To condense global document semantics to a single vector during QL modeling, LLM-QL has two major components, Attention Stop (AS) and Input Corruption (IC). AS stops the attention of predictive tokens to previous tokens until the ending token of the document. IC masks a portion of tokens in the input documents during prediction. Experiments on MSMARCO show that LLM-QL can achieve significantly better performance than other LLM-based retrievers and using QL estimated by LLM-QL for ranking outperforms word-based QL by a large margin.

LiDAR-based semantic perception tasks are critical yet challenging for autonomous driving. Due to the motion of objects and static/dynamic occlusion, temporal information plays an essential role in reinforcing perception by enhancing and completing single-frame knowledge. Previous approaches either directly stack historical frames to the current frame or build a 4D spatio-temporal neighborhood using KNN, which duplicates computation and hinders realtime performance. Based on our observation that stacking all the historical points would damage performance due to a large amount of redundant and misleading information, we propose the Sparse Voxel-Adjacent Query Network (SVQNet) for 4D LiDAR semantic segmentation. To take full advantage of the historical frames high-efficiently, we shunt the historical points into two groups with reference to the current points. One is the Voxel-Adjacent Neighborhood carrying local enhancing knowledge. The other is the Historical Context completing the global knowledge. Then we propose new modules to select and extract the instructive features from the two groups. Our SVQNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in LiDAR semantic segmentation of the SemanticKITTI benchmark and the nuScenes dataset.

Image retrieval systems conventionally use a two-stage paradigm, leveraging global features for initial retrieval and local features for reranking. However, the scalability of this method is often limited due to the significant storage and computation cost incurred by local feature matching in the reranking stage. In this paper, we present SuperGlobal, a novel approach that exclusively employs global features for both stages, improving efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. SuperGlobal introduces key enhancements to the retrieval system, specifically focusing on the global feature extraction and reranking processes. For extraction, we identify sub-optimal performance when the widely-used ArcFace loss and Generalized Mean (GeM) pooling methods are combined and propose several new modules to improve GeM pooling. In the reranking stage, we introduce a novel method to update the global features of the query and top-ranked images by only considering feature refinement with a small set of images, thus being very compute and memory efficient. Our experiments demonstrate substantial improvements compared to the state of the art in standard benchmarks. Notably, on the Revisited Oxford+1M Hard dataset, our single-stage results improve by 7.1%, while our two-stage gain reaches 3.7% with a strong 64,865x speedup. Our two-stage system surpasses the current single-stage state-of-the-art by 16.3%, offering a scalable, accurate alternative for high-performing image retrieval systems with minimal time overhead. Code: https://github.com/ShihaoShao-GH/SuperGlobal.

State-of-the-art semantic parsers rely on auto-regressive decoding, emitting one symbol at a time. When tested against complex databases that are unobserved at training time (zero-shot), the parser often struggles to select the correct set of database constants in the new database, due to the local nature of decoding. In this work, we propose a semantic parser that globally reasons about the structure of the output query to make a more contextually-informed selection of database constants. We use message-passing through a graph neural network to softly select a subset of database constants for the output query, conditioned on the question. Moreover, we train a model to rank queries based on the global alignment of database constants to question words. We apply our techniques to the current state-of-the-art model for Spider, a zero-shot semantic parsing dataset with complex databases, increasing accuracy from 39.4% to 47.4%.

The Land Matrix initiative (https://landmatrix.org) and its global observatory aim to provide reliable data on large-scale land acquisitions to inform debates and actions in sectors such as agriculture, extraction, or energy in low- and middle-income countries. Although these data are recognized in the academic world, they remain underutilized in public policy, mainly due to the complexity of access and exploitation, which requires technical expertise and a good understanding of the database schema. The objective of this work is to simplify access to data from different database systems. The methods proposed in this article are evaluated using data from the Land Matrix. This work presents various comparisons of Large Language Models (LLMs) as well as combinations of LLM adaptations (Prompt Engineering, RAG, Agents) to query different database systems (GraphQL and REST queries). The experiments are reproducible, and a demonstration is available online: https://github.com/tetis-nlp/landmatrix-graphql-python.

Persona-driven role-playing (PRP) aims to build AI characters that can respond to user queries by faithfully sticking with all persona statements. Unfortunately, existing faithfulness criteria for PRP are limited to coarse-grained LLM-based scoring without a clear definition or formulation. This paper presents a pioneering exploration to quantify PRP faithfulness as a fine-grained and explainable criterion, which also serves as a reliable reference for optimization. Our criterion first discriminates persona statements into active and passive constraints by identifying the query-statement relevance. Then, we incorporate all constraints following the principle that the AI character's response should be (a) entailed by active (relevant) constraints and (b) not contradicted by passive (irrelevant) constraints. We translate this principle mathematically into a novel Active-Passive-Constraint (APC) score, a constraint-wise sum of natural language inference (NLI) scores weighted by relevance scores. In practice, we build the APC scoring system by symbolically distilling small discriminators from GPT-4 for efficiency. We validate the quality of the APC score against human evaluation based on example personas with tens of statements, and the results show a high correlation. We further leverage it as a reward system in direct preference optimization (DPO) for better AI characters. Our experiments offer a fine-grained and explainable comparison between existing PRP techniques, revealing their advantages and limitations. We further find APC-based DPO to be one of the most competitive techniques for sticking with all constraints and can be well incorporated with other techniques. We then extend the scale of the experiments to real persons with hundreds of statements and reach a consistent conclusion.

Transformer models are revolutionizing machine learning, but their inner workings remain mysterious. In this work, we present a new visualization technique designed to help researchers understand the self-attention mechanism in transformers that allows these models to learn rich, contextual relationships between elements of a sequence. The main idea behind our method is to visualize a joint embedding of the query and key vectors used by transformer models to compute attention. Unlike previous attention visualization techniques, our approach enables the analysis of global patterns across multiple input sequences. We create an interactive visualization tool, AttentionViz, based on these joint query-key embeddings, and use it to study attention mechanisms in both language and vision transformers. We demonstrate the utility of our approach in improving model understanding and offering new insights about query-key interactions through several application scenarios and expert feedback.

Dense retrieval represents queries and documents as high-dimensional embeddings, but these representations can be redundant at the query level: for a given information need, only a subset of dimensions is consistently helpful for ranking. Prior work addresses this via pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) based dimension importance estimation, which can produce query-aware masks without labeled data but often relies on noisy pseudo signals and heuristic test-time procedures. In contrast, supervised adapter methods leverage relevance labels to improve embedding quality, yet they learn global transformations shared across queries and do not explicitly model query-aware dimension importance. We propose a Query-Aware Adaptive Dimension Selection framework that learns to predict per-dimension importance directly from query embedding. We first construct oracle dimension importance distributions over embedding dimensions using supervised relevance labels, and then train a predictor to map a query embedding to these label-distilled importance scores. At inference, the predictor selects a query-aware subset of dimensions for similarity computation based solely on the query embedding, without pseudo-relevance feedback. Experiments across multiple dense retrievers and benchmarks show that our learned dimension selector improves retrieval effectiveness over the full-dimensional baseline as well as PRF-based masking and supervised adapter baselines.

Online video segmentation methods excel at handling long sequences and capturing gradual changes, making them ideal for real-world applications. However, achieving temporally consistent predictions remains a challenge, especially with gradual accumulation of noise or drift in on-line propagation, abrupt occlusions and scene transitions. This paper introduces Local2Global, an online framework, for video instance segmentation, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance with simple baseline and training purely in online fashion. Leveraging the DETR-based query propagation framework, we introduce two novel sets of queries:(1) local queries that capture initial object-specific spatial features from each frame and (2) global queries containing past spatio-temporal representations. We propose the L2G-aligner, a novel lightweight transformer decoder, to facilitate an early alignment between local and global queries. This alignment allows our model to effectively utilize current frame information while maintaining temporal consistency, producing a smooth transition between frames. Furthermore, L2G-aligner is integrated within the segmentation model, without relying on additional complex heuristics, or memory mechanisms. Extensive experiments across various challenging VIS and VPS datasets showcase the superiority of our method with simple online training, surpassing current benchmarks without bells and rings. For instance, we achieve 54.3 and 49.4 AP on Youtube-VIS-19/-21 datasets and 37.0 AP on OVIS dataset respectively withthe ResNet-50 backbone.

Reconstructing 3D clothed human avatars from single images is a challenging task, especially when encountering complex poses and loose clothing. Current methods exhibit limitations in performance, largely attributable to their dependence on insufficient 2D image features and inconsistent query methods. Owing to this, we present the Global-correlated 3D-decoupling Transformer for clothed Avatar reconstruction (GTA), a novel transformer-based architecture that reconstructs clothed human avatars from monocular images. Our approach leverages transformer architectures by utilizing a Vision Transformer model as an encoder for capturing global-correlated image features. Subsequently, our innovative 3D-decoupling decoder employs cross-attention to decouple tri-plane features, using learnable embeddings as queries for cross-plane generation. To effectively enhance feature fusion with the tri-plane 3D feature and human body prior, we propose a hybrid prior fusion strategy combining spatial and prior-enhanced queries, leveraging the benefits of spatial localization and human body prior knowledge. Comprehensive experiments on CAPE and THuman2.0 datasets illustrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both geometry and texture reconstruction, exhibiting high robustness to challenging poses and loose clothing, and producing higher-resolution textures. Codes will be available at https://github.com/River-Zhang/GTA.

The continuous operation of Earth-orbiting satellites generates vast and ever-growing archives of Remote Sensing (RS) images. Natural language presents an intuitive interface for accessing, querying, and interpreting the data from such archives. However, existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are predominantly trained on web-scraped, noisy image-text data, exhibiting limited exposure to the specialized domain of RS. This deficiency results in poor performance on RS-specific tasks, as commonly used datasets often lack detailed, scientifically accurate textual descriptions and instead emphasize solely on attributes like date and location. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce GAIA, a novel dataset designed for multi-scale, multi-sensor, and multi-modal RS image analysis. GAIA comprises of 205,150 meticulously curated RS image-text pairs, representing a diverse range of RS modalities associated to different spatial resolutions. Unlike existing vision-language datasets in RS, GAIA specifically focuses on capturing a diverse range of RS applications, providing unique information about environmental changes, natural disasters, and various other dynamic phenomena. The dataset provides a spatially and temporally balanced distribution, spanning across the globe, covering the last 25 years with a balanced temporal distribution of observations. GAIA's construction involved a two-stage process: (1) targeted web-scraping of images and accompanying text from reputable RS-related sources, and (2) generation of five high-quality, scientifically grounded synthetic captions for each image using carefully crafted prompts that leverage the advanced vision-language capabilities of GPT-4o. Our extensive experiments, including fine-tuning of CLIP and BLIP2 models, demonstrate that GAIA significantly improves performance on RS image classification, cross-modal retrieval and image captioning tasks.

Semantic retrieval is crucial for modern applications yet remains underexplored in current research. Existing datasets are limited to single languages, single images, or singular retrieval conditions, often failing to fully exploit the expressive capacity of visual information as evidenced by maintained performance when images are replaced with captions. However, practical retrieval scenarios frequently involve interleaved multi-condition queries with multiple images. Hence, this paper introduces MERIT, the first multilingual dataset for interleaved multi-condition semantic retrieval, comprising 320,000 queries with 135,000 products in 5 languages, covering 7 distinct product categories. Extensive experiments on MERIT identify existing models's limitation: focusing solely on global semantic information while neglecting specific conditional elements in queries. Consequently, we propose Coral, a novel fine-tuning framework that adapts pre-trained MLLMs by integrating embedding reconstruction to preserve fine-grained conditional elements and contrastive learning to extract comprehensive global semantics. Experiments demonstrate that Coral achieves a 45.9% performance improvement over conventional approaches on MERIT, with strong generalization capabilities validated across 8 established retrieval benchmarks. Collectively, our contributions - a novel dataset, identification of critical limitations in existing approaches, and an innovative fine-tuning framework - establish a foundation for future research in interleaved multi-condition semantic retrieval.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images that preserve the visual content of a reference image while incorporating user-specified textual modifications. Training-free zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) approaches, which require no task-specific training or labeled data, are highly desirable, yet accurately capturing user intent remains challenging. In this paper, we present SQUARE, a novel two-stage training-free framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance ZS-CIR. In the Semantic Query-Augmented Fusion (SQAF) stage, we enrich the query embedding derived from a vision-language model (VLM) such as CLIP with MLLM-generated captions of the target image. These captions provide high-level semantic guidance, enabling the query to better capture the user's intent and improve global retrieval quality. In the Efficient Batch Reranking (EBR) stage, top-ranked candidates are presented as an image grid with visual marks to the MLLM, which performs joint visual-semantic reasoning across all candidates. Our reranking strategy operates in a single pass and yields more accurate rankings. Experiments show that SQUARE, with its simplicity and effectiveness, delivers strong performance on four standard CIR benchmarks. Notably, it maintains high performance even with lightweight pre-trained, demonstrating its potential applicability.

Graph-structured data plays a vital role in numerous domains, such as social networks, citation networks, commonsense reasoning graphs and knowledge graphs. While graph neural networks have been employed for graph processing, recent advancements have explored integrating large language models for graph-based tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Learnable Graph Pooling Token (LGPT), which addresses the limitations of the scalability issues in node-level projection and information loss in graph-level projection. LGPT enables flexible and efficient graph representation by introducing learnable parameters that act as tokens in large language models, balancing fine-grained and global graph information. Additionally, we investigate an Early Query Fusion technique, which fuses query context before constructing the graph representation, leading to more effective graph embeddings. Our method achieves a 4.13\% performance improvement on the GraphQA benchmark without training the large language model, demonstrating significant gains in handling complex textual-attributed graph data.

Long video understanding remains a formidable challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to the prohibitive computational cost of processing dense frame sequences. Prevailing solutions, which select a keyframe subset, typically rely on either a single visual-centric metric (e.g., CLIP similarity) or a static fusion of heuristic scores. This ``one-size-fits-all'' paradigm frequently fails: visual-only metrics are ineffective for plot-driven narrative queries, while indiscriminately incorporating textual scores introduces severe ``modal noise'' for purely visual tasks. To break this bottleneck, we propose Q-Gate, a plug-and-play and training-free framework that treats keyframe selection as a dynamic modality routing problem. We decouple the retrieval process into three lightweight expert streams: Visual Grounding for local details, Global Matching for scene semantics, and Contextual Alignment for subtitle-driven narratives. Crucially, Q-Gate introduces a Query-Modulated Gating Mechanism that leverages the in-context reasoning of an LLM to assess the query's intent and dynamically allocate attention weights across the experts. This mechanism intelligently activates necessary modalities while ``muting'' irrelevant ones, thereby maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio. Extensive experiments on LongVideoBench and Video-MME across multiple MLLM backbones demonstrate that Q-Gate substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. By effectively suppressing modality-specific noise, it provides a robust, highly interpretable solution for scalable video reasoning.

Learning effective feature interactions is central to modern recommender systems, yet remains challenging in industrial settings due to sparse multi-field inputs and ultra-long user behavior sequences. While recent scaling efforts have improved model capacity, they often fail to construct both context-aware and context-independent user intent from the long-term and real-time behavior sequence. Meanwhile, recent work also suffers from inefficient and homogeneous interaction mechanisms, leading to suboptimal prediction performance. To address these limitations, we propose HeMix, a scalable ranking model that unifies adaptive sequence tokenization and heterogeneous interaction structure. Specifically, HeMix introduces a Query-Mixed Interest Extraction module that jointly models context-aware and context-independent user interests via dynamic and fixed queries over global and real-time behavior sequences. For interaction, we replace self-attention with the HeteroMixer block, enabling efficient, multi-granularity cross-feature interactions that adopt the multi-head token fusion, heterogeneous interaction and group-aligned reconstruction pipelines. HeMix demonstrates favorable scaling behavior, driven by the HeteroMixer block, where increasing model scale via parameter expansion leads to steady improvements in recommendation accuracy. Experiments on industrial-scale datasets show that HeMix scales effectively and consistently outperforms strong baselines. Most importantly, HeMix has been deployed on the AMAP platform, delivering significant online gains over DLRM: +3.61\% GMV, +2.78\% PV\_CTR, and +2.12\% UV\_CVR.

This paper proposes a novel framework utilizing multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) for referring video object segmentation (RefVOS). Previous MLLM-based methods commonly struggle with the dilemma between "Ref" and "VOS": they either specialize in understanding a few key frames (global reasoning) or tracking objects on continuous frames (local reasoning), and rely on external VOS or frame selectors to mitigate the other end of the challenge. However, our framework GLUS shows that global and local consistency can be unified into a single video segmentation MLLM: a set of sparse "context frames" provides global information, while a stream of continuous "query frames" conducts local object tracking. This is further supported by jointly training the MLLM with a pre-trained VOS memory bank to simultaneously digest short-range and long-range temporal information. To improve the information efficiency within the limited context window of MLLMs, we introduce object contrastive learning to distinguish hard false-positive objects and a self-refined framework to identify crucial frames and perform propagation. By collectively integrating these insights, our GLUS delivers a simple yet effective baseline, achieving new state-of-the-art for MLLMs on the MeViS and Ref-Youtube-VOS benchmark. Our project page is at https://glus-video.github.io/.

As large language models (LLMs) tackle increasingly complex tasks and longer documents, their computational and memory costs during inference become a major bottleneck. To address this, we propose PromptDistill, a novel, training-free method that improves inference efficiency while preserving generation quality. PromptDistill identifies and retains the most informative tokens by leveraging attention interactions in early layers, preserving their hidden states while reducing the computational burden in later layers. This allows the model to focus on essential contextual information without fully processing all tokens. Unlike previous methods such as H2O and SnapKV, which perform compression only after processing the entire input, or GemFilter, which selects a fixed portion of the initial prompt without considering contextual dependencies, PromptDistill dynamically allocates computational resources to the most relevant tokens while maintaining a global awareness of the input. Experiments using our method and baseline approaches with base models such as LLaMA 3.1 8B Instruct, Phi 3.5 Mini Instruct, and Qwen2 7B Instruct on benchmarks including LongBench, InfBench, and Needle in a Haystack demonstrate that PromptDistill significantly improves efficiency while having minimal impact on output quality compared to the original models. With a single-stage selection strategy, PromptDistill effectively balances performance and efficiency, outperforming prior methods like GemFilter, H2O, and SnapKV due to its superior ability to retain essential information. Specifically, compared to GemFilter, PromptDistill achieves an overall 1% to 5% performance improvement while also offering better time efficiency. Additionally, we explore multi-stage selection, which further improves efficiency while maintaining strong generation performance.

Medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in assisting healthcare professionals with accurate diagnoses and enabling automated diagnostic processes. Traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) often struggle with capturing long-range dependencies, while transformer-based architectures, despite their effectiveness, come with increased computational complexity. Recent efforts have focused on combining CNNs and transformers to balance performance and efficiency, but existing approaches still face challenges in achieving high segmentation accuracy while maintaining low computational costs. Furthermore, many methods underutilize the CNN encoder's capability to capture local spatial information, concentrating primarily on mitigating long-range dependency issues. To address these limitations, we propose QTSeg, a novel architecture for medical image segmentation that effectively integrates local and global information. QTSeg features a dual-mix attention decoder designed to enhance segmentation performance through: (1) a cross-attention mechanism for improved feature alignment, (2) a spatial attention module to capture long-range dependencies, and (3) a channel attention block to learn inter-channel relationships. Additionally, we introduce a multi-level feature distribution module, which adaptively balances feature propagation between the encoder and decoder, further boosting performance. Extensive experiments on five publicly available datasets covering diverse segmentation tasks, including lesion, polyp, breast cancer, cell, and retinal vessel segmentation, demonstrate that QTSeg outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics while maintaining lower computational costs. Our implementation can be found at: https://github.com/tpnam0901/QTSeg (v1.0.0)

Adapting large-scale image-text pre-training models, e.g., CLIP, to the video domain represents the current state-of-the-art for text-video retrieval. The primary approaches involve transferring text-video pairs to a common embedding space and leveraging cross-modal interactions on specific entities for semantic alignment. Though effective, these paradigms entail prohibitive computational costs, leading to inefficient retrieval. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, Global-Local Semantic Consistent Learning (GLSCL), which capitalizes on latent shared semantics across modalities for text-video retrieval. Specifically, we introduce a parameter-free global interaction module to explore coarse-grained alignment. Then, we devise a shared local interaction module that employs several learnable queries to capture latent semantic concepts for learning fine-grained alignment. Furthermore, an Inter-Consistency Loss (ICL) is devised to accomplish the concept alignment between the visual query and corresponding textual query, and an Intra-Diversity Loss (IDL) is developed to repulse the distribution within visual (textual) queries to generate more discriminative concepts. Extensive experiments on five widely used benchmarks (i.e., MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo, LSMDC, and ActivityNet) substantiate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Remarkably, our method achieves comparable performance with SOTA as well as being nearly 220 times faster in terms of computational cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/zchoi/GLSCL.

Modern recommender systems employ various sequential modules such as self-attention to learn dynamic user interests. However, these methods are less effective in capturing collaborative and transitional signals within user interaction sequences. First, the self-attention architecture uses the embedding of a single item as the attention query, making it challenging to capture collaborative signals. Second, these methods typically follow an auto-regressive framework, which is unable to learn global item transition patterns. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new method called Multi-Query Self-Attention with Transition-Aware Embedding Distillation (MQSA-TED). First, we propose an L-query self-attention module that employs flexible window sizes for attention queries to capture collaborative signals. In addition, we introduce a multi-query self-attention method that balances the bias-variance trade-off in modeling user preferences by combining long and short-query self-attentions. Second, we develop a transition-aware embedding distillation module that distills global item-to-item transition patterns into item embeddings, which enables the model to memorize and leverage transitional signals and serves as a calibrator for collaborative signals. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules.

Image Retrieval is a fundamental task of obtaining images similar to the query one from a database. A common image retrieval practice is to firstly retrieve candidate images via similarity search using global image features and then re-rank the candidates by leveraging their local features. Previous learning-based studies mainly focus on either global or local image representation learning to tackle the retrieval task. In this paper, we abandon the two-stage paradigm and seek to design an effective single-stage solution by integrating local and global information inside images into compact image representations. Specifically, we propose a Deep Orthogonal Local and Global (DOLG) information fusion framework for end-to-end image retrieval. It attentively extracts representative local information with multi-atrous convolutions and self-attention at first. Components orthogonal to the global image representation are then extracted from the local information. At last, the orthogonal components are concatenated with the global representation as a complementary, and then aggregation is performed to generate the final representation. The whole framework is end-to-end differentiable and can be trained with image-level labels. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our solution and show that our model achieves state-of-the-art image retrieval performances on Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets.

A growing body of work in cognitive science suggests that reportable conscious access is associated with global ignition over distributed memory systems, while such activation is only partially accessible as individuals cannot directly access or enumerate all activated contents. This tension suggests a plausible mechanism that cognition may rely on a compact representation that approximates the global influence of activation on downstream processing. Inspired by this idea, we introduce the concept of Mindscape Activation Signature (MiA-Signature), a compressed representation of the global activation pattern induced by a query. In LLM systems, this is instantiated via submodular-based selection of high-level concepts that cover the activated context space, optionally refined through lightweight iterative updates using working memory. The resulting MiA-Signature serves as a conditioning signal that approximates the effect of the full activation state while remaining computationally tractable. Integrating MiA-Signatures into both RAG and agentic systems yields consistent performance gains across multiple long-context understanding tasks.

Long video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to limited context windows, which necessitate identifying sparse query-relevant video segments. However, existing methods predominantly localize clues based solely on the query, overlooking the video's intrinsic structure and varying relevance across segments. To address this, we propose VideoDetective, a framework that integrates query-to-segment relevance and inter-segment affinity for effective clue hunting in long-video question answering. Specifically, we divide a video into various segments and represent them as a visual-temporal affinity graph built from visual similarity and temporal proximity. We then perform a Hypothesis-Verification-Refinement loop to estimate relevance scores of observed segments to the query and propagate them to unseen segments, yielding a global relevance distribution that guides the localization of the most critical segments for final answering with sparse observation. Experiments show our method consistently achieves substantial gains across a wide range of mainstream MLLMs on representative benchmarks, with accuracy improvements of up to 7.5% on VideoMME-long. Our code is available at https://videodetective.github.io/

Despite the recent advances in the video understanding ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), long video understanding remains a challenge. One of the main issues is that the number of vision tokens grows linearly with video length, which causes an explosion in attention cost, memory, and latency. To solve this challenge, we present Query-aware Token Selector (QTSplus), a lightweight yet powerful visual token selection module that serves as an information gate between the vision encoder and LLMs. Given a text query and video tokens, QTSplus dynamically selects the most important visual evidence for the input text query by (i) scoring visual tokens via cross-attention, (ii) predicting an instance-specific retention budget based on the complexity of the query, and (iii) selecting Top-n tokens with a differentiable straight-through estimator during training and a hard gate at inference. Furthermore, a small re-encoder preserves temporal order using absolute time information, enabling second-level localization while maintaining global coverage. Integrated into Qwen2.5-VL, QTSplus compresses the vision stream by up to 89\% and reduces end-to-end latency by 28\% on long videos. The evaluation on eight long video understanding benchmarks shows near-parity accuracy overall when compared with the original Qwen models and outperforms the original model by +20.5 and +5.6 points respectively on TempCompass direction and order accuracies. These results show that QTSplus is an effective, general mechanism for scaling MLLMs to real-world long-video scenarios while preserving task-relevant evidence. We will make all code, data, and trained models' weights publicly available.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), ranking as the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, demands urgent improvements in early detection to enhance patient survival. While ultrasound remains the preferred screening modality due to its cost-effectiveness and real-time capabilities, its sensitivity (59%-78%) heavily relies on radiologists' expertise, leading to inconsistent diagnostic outcomes and operational inefficiencies. Recent advancements in AI technology offer promising solutions to bridge this gap. This study introduces the Hierarchical Sparse Query Transformer (HSQformer), a novel hybrid architecture that synergizes CNNs' local feature extraction with Vision Transformers' global contextual awareness through latent space representation and sparse learning. By dynamically activating task-specific experts via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework, HSQformer achieves hierarchical feature integration without structural redundancy. Evaluated across three clinical scenarios: single-center, multi-center, and high-risk patient cohorts, HSQformer outperforms state-of-the-art models (e.g., 95.38% AUC in multi-center testing) and matches senior radiologists' diagnostic accuracy while significantly surpassing junior counterparts. These results highlight the potential of AI-assisted tools to standardize HCC screening, reduce dependency on human expertise, and improve early diagnosis rates. The full code is available at https://github.com/Asunatan/HSQformer.

Making the contents generated by Large Language Model (LLM) such as ChatGPT, accurate, credible and traceable is crucial, especially in complex knowledge-intensive tasks that require multi-step reasoning and each of which needs knowledge to solve. Introducing Information Retrieval (IR) to provide LLM with external knowledge is good potential to solve this problem. However, where and how to introduce IR into LLM is a big challenge. Previous work has the disadvantage that the wrong knowledge retrieved by IR misleads the LLM or breaks the reasoning chain of LLM. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Search-in-the-Chain (SearChain) for the interaction between LLM and IR to solve the challenges. First, LLM generates the global reasoning chain called Chain-of-Query (CoQ) where each node consists of an IR-oriented query and the answer to the query. Second, IR verifies the answer of each node of CoQ, it corrects the answer that is not consistent with the retrieved information when IR gives high confidence, which improves the credibility. Third, LLM can mark its missing knowledge in CoQ and IR can provide this knowledge to LLM. These three operations improve the accuracy of LLM for complex knowledge-intensive tasks in terms of reasoning ability and knowledge. Finally, SearChain generates the reasoning process and marks references to supporting documents for each reasoning step, which improves traceability. SearChain transforms the topology of reasoning from chain to tree, which can modify the reasoning direction. Experiment shows that SearChain outperforms baselines on complex knowledge-intensive tasks including multi-hop question-answering, slot filling, fact checking, and long-form question-answering.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a leading approach to reducing hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). Current RAG evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on what we call local RAG: retrieving relevant chunks from a small subset of documents to answer queries that require only localized understanding within specific text chunks. However, many real-world applications require a fundamentally different capability -- global RAG -- which involves aggregating and analyzing information across entire document collections to derive corpus-level insights (for example, "What are the top 10 most cited papers in 2023?"). In this paper, we introduce GlobalQA -- the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate global RAG capabilities, covering four core task types: counting, extremum queries, sorting, and top-k extraction. Through systematic evaluation across different models and baselines, we find that existing RAG methods perform poorly on global tasks, with the strongest baseline achieving only 1.51 F1 score. To address these challenges, we propose GlobalRAG, a multi-tool collaborative framework that preserves structural coherence through chunk-level retrieval, incorporates LLM-driven intelligent filters to eliminate noisy documents, and integrates aggregation modules for precise symbolic computation. On the Qwen2.5-14B model, GlobalRAG achieves 6.63 F1 compared to the strongest baseline's 1.51 F1, validating the effectiveness of our method.

Text Retrieval (TR) involves finding and retrieving text-based content relevant to a user's query from a large repository, with applications in real-world scenarios such as legal document retrieval. While most existing studies focus on English, limited work addresses Japanese contexts. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset specifically designed for Japanese legal contexts and propose a novel two-phase pipeline tailored to this domain. In the first phase, the model learns a broad understanding of global contexts, enhancing its generalization and adaptability to diverse queries. In the second phase, the model is fine-tuned to address complex queries specific to legal scenarios. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our method, which outperforms existing baselines. Furthermore, our pipeline proves effective in English contexts, surpassing comparable baselines on the MS MARCO dataset. We have made our code publicly available on GitHub, and the model checkpoints are accessible via HuggingFace.

Query expansion, pivotal in search engines, enhances the representation of user information needs with additional terms. While existing methods expand queries using retrieved or generated contextual documents, each approach has notable limitations. Retrieval-based methods often fail to accurately capture search intent, particularly with brief or ambiguous queries. Generation-based methods, utilizing large language models (LLMs), generally lack corpus-specific knowledge and entail high fine-tuning costs. To address these gaps, we propose a novel zero-shot query expansion framework utilizing LLMs for mutual verification. Specifically, we first design a query-query-document generation method, leveraging LLMs' zero-shot reasoning ability to produce diverse sub-queries and corresponding documents. Then, a mutual verification process synergizes generated and retrieved documents for optimal expansion. Our proposed method is fully zero-shot, and extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets are conducted to demonstrate its effectiveness over existing methods. Our code is available online at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/MILL to ease reproduction.

The challenging task of multi-object tracking (MOT) requires simultaneous reasoning about track initialization, identity, and spatio-temporal trajectories. We formulate this task as a frame-to-frame set prediction problem and introduce TrackFormer, an end-to-end trainable MOT approach based on an encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Our model achieves data association between frames via attention by evolving a set of track predictions through a video sequence. The Transformer decoder initializes new tracks from static object queries and autoregressively follows existing tracks in space and time with the conceptually new and identity preserving track queries. Both query types benefit from self- and encoder-decoder attention on global frame-level features, thereby omitting any additional graph optimization or modeling of motion and/or appearance. TrackFormer introduces a new tracking-by-attention paradigm and while simple in its design is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the task of multi-object tracking (MOT17 and MOT20) and segmentation (MOTS20). The code is available at https://github.com/timmeinhardt/trackformer .

In this paper, we present SPVLoc, a global indoor localization method that accurately determines the six-dimensional (6D) camera pose of a query image and requires minimal scene-specific prior knowledge and no scene-specific training. Our approach employs a novel matching procedure to localize the perspective camera's viewport, given as an RGB image, within a set of panoramic semantic layout representations of the indoor environment. The panoramas are rendered from an untextured 3D reference model, which only comprises approximate structural information about room shapes, along with door and window annotations. We demonstrate that a straightforward convolutional network structure can successfully achieve image-to-panorama and ultimately image-to-model matching. Through a viewport classification score, we rank reference panoramas and select the best match for the query image. Then, a 6D relative pose is estimated between the chosen panorama and query image. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach not only efficiently bridges the domain gap but also generalizes well to previously unseen scenes that are not part of the training data. Moreover, it achieves superior localization accuracy compared to the state of the art methods and also estimates more degrees of freedom of the camera pose. Our source code is publicly available at https://fraunhoferhhi.github.io/spvloc .

Multi-agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), wherein each agent takes on a specific role, supports hard queries that require multiple steps and sources, or complex reasoning. Existing approaches, however, rely on static agent behaviors and fixed orchestration strategies, leading to brittle performance on diverse, multi-hop tasks. We identify two key limitations: the lack of continuously adaptive orchestration mechanisms and the absence of behavior-level learning for individual agents. To this end, we propose HERA, a hierarchical framework that jointly evolves multi-agent orchestration and role-specific agent prompts. At the global level, HERA optimizes query-specific agent topologies through reward-guided sampling and experience accumulation. At the local level, Role-Aware Prompt Evolution refines agent behaviors via credit assignment and dual-axes adaptation along operational and behavioral principles, enabling targeted, role-conditioned improvements. On six knowledge-intensive benchmarks, HERA achieves an average improvement of 38.69\% over recent baselines while maintaining robust generalization and token efficiency. Topological analyses reveal emergent self-organization, where sparse exploration yields compact, high-utility multi-agent networks, demonstrating both efficient coordination and robust reasoning.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending complex visual content. However, the mechanisms underlying how VLMs process visual information remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis, focusing on attention modules across layers. We reveal several key insights about how these models process visual data: (i) the internal representation of the query tokens (e.g., representations of "describe the image"), is utilized by VLMs to store global image information; we demonstrate that these models generate surprisingly descriptive responses solely from these tokens, without direct access to image tokens. (ii) Cross-modal information flow is predominantly influenced by the middle layers (approximately 25% of all layers), while early and late layers contribute only marginally.(iii) Fine-grained visual attributes and object details are directly extracted from image tokens in a spatially localized manner, i.e., the generated tokens associated with a specific object or attribute attend strongly to their corresponding regions in the image. We propose novel quantitative evaluation to validate our observations, leveraging real-world complex visual scenes. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our findings in facilitating efficient visual processing in state-of-the-art VLMs.

Vision-language models (VLMs) can couple visual perception with open-ended clinical reasoning, making them attractive for computational histopathology. However, fine-tuning billions of parameters on scarce, expert-annotated pathology data is prohibitive, while in-context learning (ICL), which conditions the VLM on demonstrative image-text pairs without parameter updates, suffers from high sensitivity to which examples are selected and how the query is phrased, producing unreliable diagnostics. Existing selection strategies rely on query-dependent nearest-neighbour retrieval that ignores global data structure, require costly parameter updates, or disregard the joint vision-text embedding geometry of VLMs. We propose GAUC, a training-free coreset selection method operating directly in the pre-trained multimodal embedding space. GAUC jointly optimises three objectives: (1) a Maximum Mean Discrepancy term enforcing distributional fidelity between coreset and full dataset, (2) an Effective Mutual Information Difference regulariser bounding performance degradation under prompt paraphrases by exploiting the VLM's joint vision-text alignment, and (3) a predictive-variance penalty suppressing overconfident, unstable outputs. On CRC-100K and MHIST across multiple open-source VLM architectures, GAUC consistently improves accuracy, calibration, and prompt robustness over recent ICL selection methods and dataset-distillation baselines, all without a single gradient update.

Instruction-tuned language models increasingly rely on large multi-turn dialogue corpora, but these datasets are often noisy and structurally inconsistent, with topic drift, repetitive chitchat, and mismatched answer formats across turns. We address this from a data selection perspective and propose MDS (Multi-turn Dialogue Selection), a dialogue-level framework that scores whole conversations rather than isolated turns. MDS combines a global coverage stage that performs bin-wise selection in the user-query trajectory space to retain representative yet non-redundant dialogues, with a local structural stage that evaluates within-dialogue reliability through entity-grounded topic grounding and information progress, together with query-answer form consistency for functional alignment. MDS outperforms strong single-turn selectors, dialogue-level LLM scorers, and heuristic baselines on three multi-turn benchmarks and an in-domain Banking test set, achieving the best overall rank across reference-free and reference-based metrics, and is more robust on long conversations under the same training budget. Code and resources are included in the supplementary materials.

Adapting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for hour-long videos is bottlenecked by context limits. Dense visual streams saturate token budgets and exacerbate the lost-in-the-middle phenomenon. Existing heuristics, like sparse sampling or uniform pooling, blindly sacrifice fidelity by discarding decisive moments and wasting bandwidth on irrelevant backgrounds. We propose Tempo, an efficient query-aware framework compressing long videos for downstream understanding. Tempo leverages a Small Vision-Language Model (SVLM) as a local temporal compressor, casting token reduction as an early cross-modal distillation process to generate compact, intent-aligned representations in a single forward pass. To enforce strict budgets without breaking causality, we introduce Adaptive Token Allocation (ATA). Exploiting the SVLM's zero-shot relevance prior and semantic front-loading, ATA acts as a training-free O(1) dynamic router. It allocates dense bandwidth to query-critical segments while compressing redundancies into minimal temporal anchors to maintain the global storyline. Extensive experiments show our 6B architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance with aggressive dynamic compression (0.5-16 tokens/frame). On the extreme-long LVBench (4101s), Tempo scores 52.3 under a strict 8K visual budget, outperforming GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Scaling to 2048 frames reaches 53.7. Crucially, Tempo compresses hour-long videos substantially below theoretical limits, proving true long-form video understanding relies on intent-driven efficiency rather than greedily padded context windows.

The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses a critical bottleneck for large language models processing long contexts. While dynamic sparse attention methods offer input-adaptive efficiency, they face fundamental trade-offs: requiring preprocessing, lacking global evaluation, violating query independence, or incurring high computational overhead. We present RRAttention, a novel dynamic sparse attention method that simultaneously achieves all desirable properties through a head round-robin (RR) sampling strategy. By rotating query sampling positions across attention heads within each stride, RRAttention maintains query independence while enabling efficient global pattern discovery with stride-level aggregation. Our method reduces complexity from O(L^2) to O(L^2/S^2) and employs adaptive Top-τ selection for optimal sparsity. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding (HELMET) and multimodal video comprehension (Video-MME) demonstrate that RRAttention recovers over 99\% of full attention performance while computing only half of the attention blocks, achieving 2.4times speedup at 128K context length and outperforming existing dynamic sparse attention methods.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images from a gallery based on a reference image and modification text as a combined query. Recent approaches focus on balancing global information from two modalities and encode the query into a unified feature for retrieval. However, due to insufficient attention to fine-grained details, these coarse fusion methods often struggle with handling subtle visual alterations or intricate textual instructions. In this work, we propose DetailFusion, a novel dual-branch framework that effectively coordinates information across global and detailed granularities, thereby enabling detail-enhanced CIR. Our approach leverages atomic detail variation priors derived from an image editing dataset, supplemented by a detail-oriented optimization strategy to develop a Detail-oriented Inference Branch. Furthermore, we design an Adaptive Feature Compositor that dynamically fuses global and detailed features based on fine-grained information of each unique multimodal query. Extensive experiments and ablation analyses not only demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both CIRR and FashionIQ datasets but also validate the effectiveness and cross-domain adaptability of detail enhancement for CIR.

Pre-trained language models like BERT and its variants have recently achieved impressive performance in various natural language understanding tasks. However, BERT heavily relies on the global self-attention block and thus suffers large memory footprint and computation cost. Although all its attention heads query on the whole input sequence for generating the attention map from a global perspective, we observe some heads only need to learn local dependencies, which means the existence of computation redundancy. We therefore propose a novel span-based dynamic convolution to replace these self-attention heads to directly model local dependencies. The novel convolution heads, together with the rest self-attention heads, form a new mixed attention block that is more efficient at both global and local context learning. We equip BERT with this mixed attention design and build a ConvBERT model. Experiments have shown that ConvBERT significantly outperforms BERT and its variants in various downstream tasks, with lower training cost and fewer model parameters. Remarkably, ConvBERTbase model achieves 86.4 GLUE score, 0.7 higher than ELECTRAbase, while using less than 1/4 training cost. Code and pre-trained models will be released.

Humans understand long and complex texts by relying on a holistic semantic representation of the content. This global view helps organize prior knowledge, interpret new information, and integrate evidence dispersed across a document, as revealed by the Mindscape-Aware Capability of humans in psychology. Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems lack such guidance and therefore struggle with long-context tasks. In this paper, we propose Mindscape-Aware RAG (MiA-RAG), the first approach that equips LLM-based RAG systems with explicit global context awareness. MiA-RAG builds a mindscape through hierarchical summarization and conditions both retrieval and generation on this global semantic representation. This enables the retriever to form enriched query embeddings and the generator to reason over retrieved evidence within a coherent global context. We evaluate MiA-RAG across diverse long-context and bilingual benchmarks for evidence-based understanding and global sense-making. It consistently surpasses baselines, and further analysis shows that it aligns local details with a coherent global representation, enabling more human-like long-context retrieval and reasoning.

In this work, we introduce Gemma 2, a new addition to the Gemma family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models, ranging in scale from 2 billion to 27 billion parameters. In this new version, we apply several known technical modifications to the Transformer architecture, such as interleaving local-global attentions (Beltagy et al., 2020a) and group-query attention (Ainslie et al., 2023). We also train the 2B and 9B models with knowledge distillation (Hinton et al., 2015) instead of next token prediction. The resulting models deliver the best performance for their size, and even offer competitive alternatives to models that are 2-3 times bigger. We release all our models to the community.

Inference-time scaling has emerged as a critical avenue for enhancing Large Language Models' performance, yet real-world deployment is constrained by strict computational budgets. In this work, we formulate inference budget allocation as a global constrained optimization problem governed by economic principles. By modeling per-query reasoning utility with a shifted-surge function, we derive an optimal allocation policy based on a global shadow price that equilibrates marginal utility under resource scarcity. Based on this theory, we propose Constrained Latent-utility Equilibrium Allocation for Reasoning (CLEAR). It performs rational abandonment and reallocates resources from insolvent queries to solvable queries near their emergence thresholds. Extensive experiments on several reasoning tasks with different traffic streams demonstrate that CLEAR significantly improves the Pareto frontier of total token cost versus mean accuracy. In resource-scarce regimes, CLEAR achieves up to a 3x improvement in global accuracy compared to uniform allocation.

The quadratic complexity of self-attention limits its applicability and scalability on large unstructured meshes. We introduce Fast Low-rank Attention Routing Engine (FLARE), a linear complexity self-attention mechanism that routes attention through fixed-length latent sequences. Each attention head performs global communication among N tokens by projecting the input sequence onto a fixed length latent sequence of M ll N tokens using learnable query tokens. By routing attention through a bottleneck sequence, FLARE learns a low-rank form of attention that can be applied at O(NM) cost. FLARE not only scales to unprecedented problem sizes, but also delivers superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art neural PDE surrogates across diverse benchmarks. We also release a new additive manufacturing dataset to spur further research. Our code is available at https://github.com/vpuri3/FLARE.py.

Due to the distinctive characteristics of sensors, each modality exhibits unique physical properties. For this reason, in the context of multi-modal action recognition, it is important to consider not only the overall action content but also the complementary nature of different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel network, named Modality Mixer (M-Mixer) network, which effectively leverages and incorporates the complementary information across modalities with the temporal context of actions for action recognition. A key component of our proposed M-Mixer is the Multi-modal Contextualization Unit (MCU), a simple yet effective recurrent unit. Our MCU is responsible for temporally encoding a sequence of one modality (e.g., RGB) with action content features of other modalities (e.g., depth and infrared modalities). This process encourages M-Mixer network to exploit global action content and also to supplement complementary information of other modalities. Furthermore, to extract appropriate complementary information regarding to the given modality settings, we introduce a new module, named Complementary Feature Extraction Module (CFEM). CFEM incorporates sepearte learnable query embeddings for each modality, which guide CFEM to extract complementary information and global action content from the other modalities. As a result, our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA datasets. Moreover, through comprehensive ablation studies, we further validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Parametric imitation learning via behavior cloning can suffer from poor generalization to out-of-distribution states due to compounding errors during deployment. We show that reusing the training data during inference via a semi-parametric retrieval-based imitation learning approach can alleviate this challenge. We present Difference-Aware Retrieval Policies for Imitation Learning (DARP), a semi-parametric retrieval-based imitation learning approach that addresses this limitation by reparameterizing the imitation learning problem in terms of local neighborhood structure rather than direct state-to-action mappings. Instead of learning a global policy, DARP trains a model to predict actions based on k-nearest neighbors from expert demonstrations, their corresponding actions, and the relative distance vectors between neighbor states and query states. DARP requires no additional assumptions beyond those made for standard behavior cloning -- it does not require additional data collection, online expert feedback, or task-specific knowledge. We demonstrate consistent performance improvements of 15-46% over standard behavior cloning across diverse domains, including continuous control and robotic manipulation, and across different representations, including high-dimensional visual features. Code and demos are available at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/darp-site/.

Recent advances in search-augmented large reasoning models (LRMs) enable the retrieval of external knowledge to reduce hallucinations in multistep reasoning. However, their ability to operate on graph-structured data, prevalent in domains such as e-commerce, social networks, and scientific citations, remains underexplored. Unlike plain text corpora, graphs encode rich topological signals that connect related entities and can serve as valuable priors for retrieval, enabling more targeted search and improved reasoning efficiency. Yet, effectively leveraging such structure poses unique challenges, including the difficulty of generating graph-expressive queries and ensuring reliable retrieval that balances structural and semantic relevance. To address this gap, we introduce GraphSearch, the first framework that extends search-augmented reasoning to graph learning, enabling zero-shot graph learning without task-specific fine-tuning. GraphSearch combines a Graph-aware Query Planner, which disentangles search space (e.g., 1-hop, multi-hop, or global neighbors) from semantic queries, with a Graph-aware Retriever, which constructs candidate sets based on topology and ranks them using a hybrid scoring function. We further instantiate two traversal modes: GraphSearch-R, which recursively expands neighborhoods hop by hop, and GraphSearch-F, which flexibly retrieves across local and global neighborhoods without hop constraints. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that GraphSearch achieves competitive or even superior performance compared to supervised graph learning methods, setting state-of-the-art results in zero-shot node classification and link prediction. These findings position GraphSearch as a flexible and generalizable paradigm for agentic reasoning over graphs.

Tool-calling conversational agents querying structured databases often face two linked failures: underspecification (missing constraints needed to run a precise query) and infeasibility (the fully specified query returns an empty set because no item satisfies all constraints). Existing work often responds with "no results" or relaxes constraints using ad hoc rules, which can violate user intent by discarding requirements the user cares about most. We frame infeasibility handling as a preference-aware query repair problem: when a query is unsatisfiable, the agent should relax the least important constraints to the user. We propose three LLM-based methods for inferring relative constraint importance from dialogue: (1) local weighting, (2) global one-shot weighting, and (3) pairwise ranking. Experiments show local weighting achieves the best preference alignment, while global weighting performs best on correct constraint relaxation. We also introduce AWARE-US, a benchmark of persona-grounded queries requiring agents to disambiguate requests via conversation and resolve infeasibility in a way consistent with persona-implied preferences.

Although LiDAR semantic segmentation advances rapidly, state-of-the-art methods often incorporate specifically designed inductive bias derived from benchmarks originating from mechanical spinning LiDAR. This can limit model generalizability to other kinds of LiDAR technologies and make hyperparameter tuning more complex. To tackle these issues, we propose a generalized framework to accommodate various types of LiDAR prevalent in the market by replacing window-attention with our sparse focal point modulation. Our SFPNet is capable of extracting multi-level contexts and dynamically aggregating them using a gate mechanism. By implementing a channel-wise information query, features that incorporate both local and global contexts are encoded. We also introduce a novel large-scale hybrid-solid LiDAR semantic segmentation dataset for robotic applications. SFPNet demonstrates competitive performance on conventional benchmarks derived from mechanical spinning LiDAR, while achieving state-of-the-art results on benchmark derived from solid-state LiDAR. Additionally, it outperforms existing methods on our novel dataset sourced from hybrid-solid LiDAR. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Cavendish518/SFPNet and https://www.semanticindustry.top.

Recent sequential recommendation models rely increasingly on consecutive short-term user-item interaction sequences to model user interests. These approaches have, however, raised concerns about both short- and long-term interests. (1) {\it short-term}: interaction sequences may not result from a monolithic interest, but rather from several intertwined interests, even within a short period of time, resulting in their failures to model skip behaviors; (2) {\it long-term}: interaction sequences are primarily observed sparsely at discrete intervals, other than consecutively over the long run. This renders difficulty in inferring long-term interests, since only discrete interest representations can be derived, without taking into account interest dynamics across sequences. In this study, we address these concerns by learning (1) multi-scale representations of short-term interests; and (2) dynamics-aware representations of long-term interests. To this end, we present an Interest Dynamics modeling framework using generative Neural Processes, coined IDNP, to model user interests from a functional perspective. IDNP learns a global interest function family to define each user's long-term interest as a function instantiation, manifesting interest dynamics through function continuity. Specifically, IDNP first encodes each user's short-term interactions into multi-scale representations, which are then summarized as user context. By combining latent global interest with user context, IDNP then reconstructs long-term user interest functions and predicts interactions at upcoming query timestep. Moreover, IDNP can model such interest functions even when interaction sequences are limited and non-consecutive. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-arts on various evaluation metrics.

Simulating physical systems governed by Lagrangian dynamics often entails solving partial differential equations (PDEs) over high-resolution spatial domains, leading to significant computational expense. Reduced-order modeling (ROM) mitigates this cost by evolving low-dimensional latent representations of the underlying system. While neural ROMs enable querying solutions from latent states at arbitrary spatial points, their latent states typically represent the global domain and struggle to capture localized, highly dynamic behaviors such as fluids. We propose a sampling-based reduction framework that evolves Lagrangian systems directly in physical space over the particles themselves, reducing the number of active degrees of freedom via data-driven neural PDE operators. To enable querying at arbitrary spatial locations, we introduce a learnable kernel parameterization that uses local spatial information from time-evolved sample particles to infer the underlying solution manifold. Empirically, our approach achieves a 6.6x to 32x reduction in input dimensionality while maintaining high-fidelity evaluations across diverse Lagrangian regimes, including fluid flows, granular media, and elastoplastic dynamics. We refer to this framework as GIOROM (Geometry-Informed Reduced-Order Modeling). All code and data are available at: https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/GIOROM

Establishing dense correspondence between two images is a fundamental computer vision problem, which is typically tackled by matching local feature descriptors. However, without global awareness, such local features are often insufficient for disambiguating similar regions. And computing the pairwise feature correlation across images is both computation-expensive and memory-intensive. To make the local features aware of the global context and improve their matching accuracy, we introduce DenseGAP, a new solution for efficient Dense correspondence learning with a Graph-structured neural network conditioned on Anchor Points. Specifically, we first propose a graph structure that utilizes anchor points to provide sparse but reliable prior on inter- and intra-image context and propagates them to all image points via directed edges. We also design a graph-structured network to broadcast multi-level contexts via light-weighted message-passing layers and generate high-resolution feature maps at low memory cost. Finally, based on the predicted feature maps, we introduce a coarse-to-fine framework for accurate correspondence prediction using cycle consistency. Our feature descriptors capture both local and global information, thus enabling a continuous feature field for querying arbitrary points at high resolution. Through comprehensive ablative experiments and evaluations on large-scale indoor and outdoor datasets, we demonstrate that our method advances the state-of-the-art of correspondence learning on most benchmarks.

Inference with Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) on long sequences is both costly and slow due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. We introduce Star Attention, a two-phase block-sparse approximation that improves computational efficiency by sharding attention across multiple hosts while minimizing communication overhead. In the first phase, the context is processed using blockwise-local attention across hosts, in parallel. In the second phase, query and response tokens attend to all prior cached tokens through sequence-global attention. Star Attention integrates seamlessly with most Transformer-based LLMs trained with global attention, reducing memory requirements and inference time by up to 11x while preserving 95-100% of accuracy.

Answering navigation-relevant questions over long egocentric videos requires retrieving and organizing evidence distributed across distant temporal moments while maintaining spatial and contextual consistency. Although long-context vision--language models can achieve strong answer quality, they are computationally expensive for long trajectories and inefficient for repeated querying. Recent graph-based approaches such as VL-KnG address this challenge through persistent spatio-temporal knowledge graphs, but graph-centric retrieval alone may underrepresent broader temporal continuity and contextual cues. We present VL-MemKnG, a hybrid memory framework that extends VL-KnG by combining a spatio-temporal knowledge graph with persistent segment-level contextual memory. The knowledge graph captures structured relational information and long-range object associations, while segment-level memory preserves broader temporal context for long-horizon evidence retrieval. A hybrid retrieval-and-reasoning module jointly operates over both memory representations to produce evidence-grounded answers and temporally organized supporting evidence. We also introduce WalkieKnowledgeT+, an extension of WalkieKnowledge for long-horizon navigation-oriented video question answering. The benchmark includes temporally distributed reasoning tasks requiring evidence aggregation across multiple non-cooccurring moments. On WalkieKnowledgeT+, VL-MemKnG improves Top-1 retrieval accuracy from 58% to 67% and Recall@1 from 34.50% to 40.55%, outperforming all compared methods, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Qwen 3.5+. The gains are particularly pronounced on temporal-global and temporally scattered aggregation questions, demonstrating the benefits of combining structured relational memory with segment-level contextual memory while maintaining efficient query-time inference.

The standard approach for visual place recognition is to use global image descriptors to retrieve the most similar database images for a given query image. The results can then be further improved with re-ranking methods that re-order the top scoring images. However, existing methods focus on re-ranking based on the same image descriptors that were used for the initial retrieval, which we argue provides limited additional signal. In this work we propose Generalized Contextual Similarity Aggregation (GCSA), which is a graph neural network-based re-ranking method that, in addition to the visual descriptors, can leverage other types of available side information. This can for example be other sensor data (such as signal strength of nearby WiFi or BlueTooth endpoints) or geometric properties such as camera poses for database images. In many applications this information is already present or can be acquired with low effort. Our architecture leverages the concept of affinity vectors to allow for a shared encoding of the heterogeneous multi-modal input. Two large-scale datasets, covering both outdoor and indoor localization scenarios, are utilized for training and evaluation. In experiments we show significant improvement not only on image retrieval metrics, but also for the downstream visual localization task.

We present an Encoder-Decoder Attention Transformer, EDAFormer, which consists of the Embedding-Free Transformer (EFT) encoder and the all-attention decoder leveraging our Embedding-Free Attention (EFA) structure. The proposed EFA is a novel global context modeling mechanism that focuses on functioning the global non-linearity, not the specific roles of the query, key and value. For the decoder, we explore the optimized structure for considering the globality, which can improve the semantic segmentation performance. In addition, we propose a novel Inference Spatial Reduction (ISR) method for the computational efficiency. Different from the previous spatial reduction attention methods, our ISR method further reduces the key-value resolution at the inference phase, which can mitigate the computation-performance trade-off gap for the efficient semantic segmentation. Our EDAFormer shows the state-of-the-art performance with the efficient computation compared to the existing transformer-based semantic segmentation models in three public benchmarks, including ADE20K, Cityscapes and COCO-Stuff. Furthermore, our ISR method reduces the computational cost by up to 61% with minimal mIoU performance degradation on Cityscapes dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/hyunwoo137/EDAFormer.

Converting raster floorplans into engineering-grade vector graphics is challenging due to complex topology and strict geometric constraints. To address this, we present FloorplanVLM, a unified framework that reformulates floorplan vectorization as an image-conditioned sequence modeling task. Unlike pixel-based methods that rely on fragile heuristics or query-based transformers that generate fragmented rooms, our model directly outputs structured JSON sequences representing the global topology. This 'pixels-to-sequence' paradigm enables the precise and holistic constraint satisfaction of complex geometries, such as slanted walls and curved arcs. To support this data-hungry approach, we introduce a scalable data engine: we construct a large-scale dataset (Floorplan-2M) and a high-fidelity subset (Floorplan-HQ-300K) to balance geometric diversity and pixel-level precision. We then employ a progressive training strategy, using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for structural grounding and quality annealing, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for strict geometric alignment. To standardize evaluation on complex layouts, we establish and open-source FPBench-2K. Evaluated on this rigorous benchmark, FloorplanVLM demonstrates exceptional structural validity, achieving 92.52% external-wall IoU and robust generalization across non-Manhattan architectures.

Transformers have achieved significant success across various domains, relying on self-attention to capture dependencies. However, the standard first-order attention mechanism is often limited by a low-rank bottleneck, struggling to capture intricate, multi-hop relationships within a single layer. In this paper, we propose the Nexus, a novel architecture designed to enhance representational power through a recursive framework. Unlike standard approaches that use static linear projections for Queries and Keys, Nexus dynamically refines these representations via nested self-attention mechanisms. Specifically, the Query and Key vectors are themselves outputs of inner attention loops, allowing tokens to aggregate global context and model high-order correlations prior to the final attention computation. We enforce a parameter-efficient weight-sharing strategy across recursive steps, ensuring that this enhanced expressivity incurs O(1) additional parameters. We provide theoretical analysis demonstrating that our method breaks the linear bottleneck of standard attention. Empirically, Nexus outperforms standard Transformers on multiple benchmarks.

This paper expands the cascaded network branch of the autoencoder-based multi-task learning (MTL) framework for dynamic facial expression recognition, namely Multi-Task Cascaded Autoencoder for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (MTCAE-DFER). MTCAE-DFER builds a plug-and-play cascaded decoder module, which is based on the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture and employs the decoder concept of Transformer to reconstruct the multi-head attention module. The decoder output from the previous task serves as the query (Q), representing local dynamic features, while the Video Masked Autoencoder (VideoMAE) shared encoder output acts as both the key (K) and value (V), representing global dynamic features. This setup facilitates interaction between global and local dynamic features across related tasks. Additionally, this proposal aims to alleviate overfitting of complex large model. We utilize autoencoder-based multi-task cascaded learning approach to explore the impact of dynamic face detection and dynamic face landmark on dynamic facial expression recognition, which enhances the model's generalization ability. After we conduct extensive ablation experiments and comparison with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on various public datasets for dynamic facial expression recognition, the robustness of the MTCAE-DFER model and the effectiveness of global-local dynamic feature interaction among related tasks have been proven.

Existing federated learning (FL) studies usually assume the training label space and test label space are identical. However, in real-world applications, this assumption is too ideal to be true. A new user could come up with queries that involve data from unseen classes, and such open-vocabulary queries would directly defect such FL systems. Therefore, in this work, we explicitly focus on the under-explored open-vocabulary challenge in FL. That is, for a new user, the global server shall understand her/his query that involves arbitrary unknown classes. To address this problem, we leverage the pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). In particular, we present a novel adaptation framework tailored for VLMs in the context of FL, named as Federated Multimodal Prototyping (Fed-MP). Fed-MP adaptively aggregates the local model weights based on light-weight client residuals, and makes predictions based on a novel multimodal prototyping mechanism. Fed-MP exploits the knowledge learned from the seen classes, and robustifies the adapted VLM to unseen categories. Our empirical evaluation on various datasets validates the effectiveness of Fed-MP.

Federated optimization, an emerging paradigm which finds wide real-world applications such as federated learning, enables multiple clients (e.g., edge devices) to collaboratively optimize a global function. The clients do not share their local datasets and typically only share their local gradients. However, the gradient information is not available in many applications of federated optimization, which hence gives rise to the paradigm of federated zeroth-order optimization (ZOO). Existing federated ZOO algorithms suffer from the limitations of query and communication inefficiency, which can be attributed to (a) their reliance on a substantial number of function queries for gradient estimation and (b) the significant disparity between their realized local updates and the intended global updates. To this end, we (a) introduce trajectory-informed gradient surrogates which is able to use the history of function queries during optimization for accurate and query-efficient gradient estimation, and (b) develop the technique of adaptive gradient correction using these gradient surrogates to mitigate the aforementioned disparity. Based on these, we propose the federated zeroth-order optimization using trajectory-informed surrogate gradients (FZooS) algorithm for query- and communication-efficient federated ZOO. Our FZooS achieves theoretical improvements over the existing approaches, which is supported by our real-world experiments such as federated black-box adversarial attack and federated non-differentiable metric optimization.

Large-scale visual localization systems continue to rely on 3D point clouds built from image collections using structure-from-motion. While the 3D points in these models are represented using local image features, directly matching a query image's local features against the point cloud is challenging due to the scale of the nearest-neighbor search problem. Many recent approaches to visual localization have thus proposed a hybrid method, where first a global (per image) embedding is used to retrieve a small subset of database images, and local features of the query are matched only against those. It seems to have become common belief that global embeddings are critical for said image-retrieval in visual localization, despite the significant downside of having to compute two feature types for each query image. In this paper, we take a step back from this assumption and propose Constrained Approximate Nearest Neighbors (CANN), a joint solution of k-nearest-neighbors across both the geometry and appearance space using only local features. We first derive the theoretical foundation for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval across multiple metrics and then showcase how CANN improves visual localization. Our experiments on public localization benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art global feature-based retrieval and approaches using local feature aggregation schemes. Moreover, it is an order of magnitude faster in both index and query time than feature aggregation schemes for these datasets. Code will be released.

We show that the way inference is performed in few-shot segmentation tasks has a substantial effect on performances -- an aspect often overlooked in the literature in favor of the meta-learning paradigm. We introduce a transductive inference for a given query image, leveraging the statistics of its unlabeled pixels, by optimizing a new loss containing three complementary terms: i) the cross-entropy on the labeled support pixels; ii) the Shannon entropy of the posteriors on the unlabeled query-image pixels; and iii) a global KL-divergence regularizer based on the proportion of the predicted foreground. As our inference uses a simple linear classifier of the extracted features, its computational load is comparable to inductive inference and can be used on top of any base training. Foregoing episodic training and using only standard cross-entropy training on the base classes, our inference yields competitive performances on standard benchmarks in the 1-shot scenarios. As the number of available shots increases, the gap in performances widens: on PASCAL-5i, our method brings about 5% and 6% improvements over the state-of-the-art, in the 5- and 10-shot scenarios, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a new setting that includes domain shifts, where the base and novel classes are drawn from different datasets. Our method achieves the best performances in this more realistic setting. Our code is freely available online: https://github.com/mboudiaf/RePRI-for-Few-Shot-Segmentation.

Document retrieval techniques form the foundation for the development of large-scale information systems. The prevailing methodology is to construct a bi-encoder and compute the semantic similarity. However, such scalar similarity is difficult to reflect enough information and impedes our comprehension of the retrieval results. In addition, this computational process mainly emphasizes the global semantics and ignores the fine-grained semantic relationship between the query and the complex text in the document. In this paper, we propose a new method called Generation Augmented Retrieval (GeAR) that incorporates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. This enables GeAR to generate the relevant text from documents based on the fused representation of the query and the document, thus learning to "focus on" the fine-grained information. Also when used as a retriever, GeAR does not add any computational burden over bi-encoders. To support the training of the new framework, we have introduced a pipeline to efficiently synthesize high-quality data by utilizing large language models. GeAR exhibits competitive retrieval and localization performance across diverse scenarios and datasets. Moreover, the qualitative analysis and the results generated by GeAR provide novel insights into the interpretation of retrieval results. The code, data, and models will be released after completing technical review to facilitate future research.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for ranking by capturing semantic relevance and adapting across diverse domains, yet existing methods remain constrained by limited context length and high computational costs, restricting their applicability to real-world scenarios where candidate pools often scale to millions. To address this challenge, we propose LRanker, a framework tailored for large-candidate ranking. LRanker incorporates a candidate aggregation encoder that leverages K-means clustering to explicitly model global candidate information, and a graph-based test-time scaling mechanism that partitions candidates into subsets, generates multiple query embeddings, and integrates them through an ensemble procedure. By aggregating diverse embeddings instead of relying on a single representation, this mechanism enhances robustness and expressiveness, leading to more accurate ranking over massive candidate pools. We evaluate LRanker on seven tasks across three scenarios in RBench with different candidate scales. Experimental results show that LRanker achieves over 30% gains in the RBench-Small scenario, improves by 3-9% in MRR in the RBench-Large scenario, and sustains scalability with 20-30% improvements in the RBench-Ultra scenario with more than 6.8M candidates. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of its key components. Together, these findings demonstrate the robustness, scalability, and effectiveness of LRanker for massive-candidate ranking.

Existing tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) encounter significant challenges when processing complex queries. Current frameworks such as ReAct are prone to local optimization traps due to their reliance on incremental decision-making processes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Planner-centric Plan-Execute paradigm that fundamentally resolves local optimization bottlenecks through architectural innovation. Central to our approach is a novel Planner model that performs global Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) planning for complex queries, enabling optimized execution beyond conventional tool coordination. We also introduce ComplexTool-Plan, a large-scale benchmark dataset featuring complex queries that demand sophisticated multi-tool composition and coordination capabilities. Additionally, we develop a two-stage training methodology that integrates Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), systematically enhancing the Planner's tool selection accuracy and global planning awareness through structured DAG-based planning. When integrated with a capable executor, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the StableToolBench benchmark for complex user queries, demonstrating superior end-to-end execution capabilities and robust handling of intricate multi-tool workflows.

Recent self-supervised image segmentation models have achieved promising performance on semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance segmentation. However, their pretraining schedule is multi-stage, requiring a time-consuming pseudo-masks generation process between each training epoch. This time-consuming offline process not only makes it difficult to scale with training dataset size, but also leads to sub-optimal solutions due to its discontinuous optimization routine. To solve these, we first present a novel pseudo-mask algorithm, Fast Universal Agglomerative Pooling (UniAP). Each layer of UniAP can identify groups of similar nodes in parallel, allowing to generate both semantic-level and instance-level and multi-granular pseudo-masks within ens of milliseconds for one image. Based on the fast UniAP, we propose the Scalable Self-Supervised Universal Segmentation (S2-UniSeg), which employs a student and a momentum teacher for continuous pretraining. A novel segmentation-oriented pretext task, Query-wise Self-Distillation (QuerySD), is proposed to pretrain S2-UniSeg to learn the local-to-global correspondences. Under the same setting, S2-UniSeg outperforms the SOTA UnSAM model, achieving notable improvements of AP+6.9 on COCO, AR+11.1 on UVO, PixelAcc+4.5 on COCOStuff-27, RQ+8.0 on Cityscapes. After scaling up to a larger 2M-image subset of SA-1B, S2-UniSeg further achieves performance gains on all four benchmarks. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/bio-mlhui/S2-UniSeg

Topology reasoning, which unifies perception and structured reasoning, plays a vital role in understanding intersections for autonomous driving. However, its performance heavily relies on the accuracy of lane detection, particularly at connected lane endpoints. Existing methods often suffer from lane endpoints deviation, leading to incorrect topology construction. To address this issue, we propose TopoPoint, a novel framework that explicitly detects lane endpoints and jointly reasons over endpoints and lanes for robust topology reasoning. During training, we independently initialize point and lane query, and proposed Point-Lane Merge Self-Attention to enhance global context sharing through incorporating geometric distances between points and lanes as an attention mask . We further design Point-Lane Graph Convolutional Network to enable mutual feature aggregation between point and lane query. During inference, we introduce Point-Lane Geometry Matching algorithm that computes distances between detected points and lanes to refine lane endpoints, effectively mitigating endpoint deviation. Extensive experiments on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark demonstrate that TopoPoint achieves state-of-the-art performance in topology reasoning (48.8 on OLS). Additionally, we propose DET_p to evaluate endpoint detection, under which our method significantly outperforms existing approaches (52.6 v.s. 45.2 on DET_p). The code is released at https://github.com/Franpin/TopoPoint.

Text-driven 3D scene generation techniques have made rapid progress in recent years. Their success is mainly attributed to using existing generative models to iteratively perform image warping and inpainting to generate 3D scenes. However, these methods heavily rely on the outputs of existing models, leading to error accumulation in geometry and appearance that prevent the models from being used in various scenarios (e.g., outdoor and unreal scenarios). To address this limitation, we generatively refine the newly generated local views by querying and aggregating global 3D information, and then progressively generate the 3D scene. Specifically, we employ a tri-plane features-based NeRF as a unified representation of the 3D scene to constrain global 3D consistency, and propose a generative refinement network to synthesize new contents with higher quality by exploiting the natural image prior from 2D diffusion model as well as the global 3D information of the current scene. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that, in comparison to previous methods, our approach supports wide variety of scene generation and arbitrary camera trajectories with improved visual quality and 3D consistency.

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel attention paradigm, Agent Attention, to strike a favorable balance between computational efficiency and representation power. Specifically, the Agent Attention, denoted as a quadruple (Q, A, K, V), introduces an additional set of agent tokens A into the conventional attention module. The agent tokens first act as the agent for the query tokens Q to aggregate information from K and V, and then broadcast the information back to Q. Given the number of agent tokens can be designed to be much smaller than the number of query tokens, the agent attention is significantly more efficient than the widely adopted Softmax attention, while preserving global context modelling capability. Interestingly, we show that the proposed agent attention is equivalent to a generalized form of linear attention. Therefore, agent attention seamlessly integrates the powerful Softmax attention and the highly efficient linear attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of agent attention with various vision Transformers and across diverse vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation and image generation. Notably, agent attention has shown remarkable performance in high-resolution scenarios, owning to its linear attention nature. For instance, when applied to Stable Diffusion, our agent attention accelerates generation and substantially enhances image generation quality without any additional training. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Agent-Attention.

Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing imagery couples kilometer-scale context with query-critical evidence that may occupy only a few pixels. Such vast spatial scale leads to a quadratic explosion of visual tokens and hinders the extraction of information from small objects. Previous works utilize direct downsampling, dense tiling, or global top-k pruning, which either compromise query-critical image details or incur unpredictable compute. In this paper, we propose UHR-BAT, a query-guided and region-faithful token compression framework to efficiently select visual tokens under a strict context budget. Specifically, we leverage text-guided, multi-scale importance estimation for visual tokens, effectively tackling the challenge of achieving precise yet low-cost feature extraction. Furthermore, by introducing region-wise preserve and merge strategies, we mitigate visual token redundancy, further driving down the computational budget. Experimental results show that UHR-BAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/Yunkaidang/UHR.

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding their responses in structured knowledge graphs. Leveraging community detection and relation filtering techniques, GraphRAG systems demonstrate inherent resistance to traditional RAG attacks, such as text poisoning and prompt injection. However, in this paper, we find that the security of GraphRAG systems fundamentally relies on the topological integrity of the underlying graph, which can be undermined by implicitly corrupting the logical connections, without altering surface-level text semantics. To exploit this vulnerability, we propose LogicPoison, a novel attack framework that targets logical reasoning rather than injecting false contents. Specifically, LogicPoison employs a type-preserving entity swapping mechanism to perturb both global logic hubs for disrupting overall graph connectivity and query-specific reasoning bridges for severing essential multi-hop inference paths. This approach effectively reroutes valid reasoning into dead ends while maintaining surface-level textual plausibility. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that LogicPoison successfully bypasses GraphRAG's defenses, significantly degrading performance and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in both effectiveness and stealth. Our code is available at bluehttps://github.com/Jord8061/logicPoison.

LLM routing has become a popular approach to improve the cost-quality trade-off of LLM services by dynamically selecting a model for each query. Recent work has explored a broad range of routing methods, including clustering-based routers, learned classifiers, pairwise ranking, and confidence-based approaches. Our extensive study of 21 routing methods across five benchmarks reveals a consistent phenomenon that we call the routing plateau: many methods, including kNN, achieve very similar accuracy and converge to a narrow performance range that remains far below the oracle router. Our investigation shows that the plateau is largely caused by a predictability bottleneck: current routers mainly learn global averaged model-performance trends rather than fine-grained query-specific routing signals. As a result, they solve overlapping easy queries but collectively fail on hard queries that require instance-specific routing decisions. We further study how to move beyond the plateau and find that larger training datasets, stronger encoders, and end-to-end fine-tuning can further improve routing accuracy. These findings characterize the common limits of current routing methods and provide insights and actionable directions for the community to build more effective routing systems.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the response quality and domain-specific performance of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge to combat hallucinations. In recent research, graph structures have been integrated into RAG to enhance the capture of semantic relations between entities. However, it primarily focuses on low-order pairwise entity relations, limiting the high-order associations among multiple entities. Hypergraph-enhanced approaches address this limitation by modeling multi-entity interactions via hyperedges, but they are typically constrained to inter-chunk entity-level representations, overlooking the global thematic organization and alignment across chunks. Drawing inspiration from the top-down cognitive process of human reasoning, we propose a theme-aligned dual-hypergraph RAG framework (Cog-RAG) that uses a theme hypergraph to capture inter-chunk thematic structure and an entity hypergraph to model high-order semantic relations. Furthermore, we design a cognitive-inspired two-stage retrieval strategy that first activates query-relevant thematic content from the theme hypergraph, and then guides fine-grained recall and diffusion in the entity hypergraph, achieving semantic alignment and consistent generation from global themes to local details. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Cog-RAG significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline approaches.

Visual Place Recognition is a task that aims to predict the place of an image (called query) based solely on its visual features. This is typically done through image retrieval, where the query is matched to the most similar images from a large database of geotagged photos, using learned global descriptors. A major challenge in this task is recognizing places seen from different viewpoints. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new method, called EigenPlaces, to train our neural network on images from different point of views, which embeds viewpoint robustness into the learned global descriptors. The underlying idea is to cluster the training data so as to explicitly present the model with different views of the same points of interest. The selection of this points of interest is done without the need for extra supervision. We then present experiments on the most comprehensive set of datasets in literature, finding that EigenPlaces is able to outperform previous state of the art on the majority of datasets, while requiring 60\% less GPU memory for training and using 50\% smaller descriptors. The code and trained models for EigenPlaces are available at {\url{https://github.com/gmberton/EigenPlaces}}, while results with any other baseline can be computed with the codebase at {\url{https://github.com/gmberton/auto_VPR}}.

Current metric learning approaches for image retrieval are usually based on learning a space of informative latent representations where simple approaches such as the cosine distance will work well. Recent state of the art methods such as HypViT move to more complex embedding spaces that may yield better results but are harder to scale to production environments. In this work, we first construct a simpler model based on triplet loss with hard negatives mining that performs at the state of the art level but does not have these drawbacks. Second, we introduce a novel approach for image retrieval postprocessing called Siamese Transformer for Image Retrieval (STIR) that reranks several top outputs in a single forward pass. Unlike previously proposed Reranking Transformers, STIR does not rely on global/local feature extraction and directly compares a query image and a retrieved candidate on pixel level with the usage of attention mechanism. The resulting approach defines a new state of the art on standard image retrieval datasets: Stanford Online Products and DeepFashion In-shop. We also release the source code at https://github.com/OML-Team/open-metric-learning/tree/main/pipelines/postprocessing/ and an interactive demo of our approach at https://dapladoc-oml-postprocessing-demo-srcappmain-pfh2g0.streamlit.app/

Visual Place Recognition is a task that aims to predict the coordinates of an image (called query) based solely on visual clues. Most commonly, a retrieval approach is adopted, where the query is matched to the most similar images from a large database of geotagged photos, using learned global descriptors. Despite recent advances, recognizing the same place when the query comes from a significantly different distribution is still a major hurdle for state of the art retrieval methods. Examples are heavy illumination changes (e.g. night-time images) or substantial occlusions (e.g. transient objects). In this work we explore whether re-ranking methods based on spatial verification can tackle these challenges, following the intuition that local descriptors are inherently more robust than global features to domain shifts. To this end, we provide a new, comprehensive benchmark on current state of the art models. We also introduce two new demanding datasets with night and occluded queries, to be matched against a city-wide database. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/gbarbarani/re-ranking-for-VPR.

Modern IR systems are increasingly tasked with answering complex, multi-faceted queries that require deep reasoning rather than simple keyword or semantic matching. While LLM-based IR has shown great promise, the prevailing retrieve-then-rerank paradigm inherits the limitations of embedding-based retrieval; parametric generative approaches are difficult to update with new information; and long-context methods that place the entire corpus in context are computationally infeasible for large document collections. To address these challenges, we introduce LATTICE, a hierarchical retrieval framework that enables an LLM to reason over and navigate large corpora with logarithmic search complexity by imposing a semantic tree structure on the corpus. Our approach consists of two stages: (1) an offline phase that organizes the corpus into a semantic hierarchy via either a bottom-up agglomerative strategy or a top-down divisive strategy using multi-level summaries and (2) an online traversal phase where a search LLM navigates this tree. A central challenge in such LLM-guided search is that the model's relevance judgments are noisy, context-dependent, and unaware of the hierarchy, making cross-branch and cross-level comparisons difficult. To overcome this, we propose a traversal algorithm that estimates calibrated latent relevance scores from local LLM outputs and aggregates them into a global path relevance metric. Our training-free framework achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, demonstrating up to 9% improvement in Recall@100 and 5% in nDCG@10 over the next best zero-shot baseline. Furthermore, compared to the fine-tuned SOTA method DIVER-v2, LATTICE attains comparable results on BRIGHT subsets that use a static corpus for evaluation.

Narrative comprehension on long stories and novels has been a challenging domain attributed to their intricate plotlines and entangled, often evolving relations among characters and entities. Given the LLM's diminished reasoning over extended context and high computational cost, retrieval-based approaches remain a pivotal role in practice. However, traditional RAG methods can fall short due to their stateless, single-step retrieval process, which often overlooks the dynamic nature of capturing interconnected relations within long-range context. In this work, we propose ComoRAG, holding the principle that narrative reasoning is not a one-shot process, but a dynamic, evolving interplay between new evidence acquisition and past knowledge consolidation, analogous to human cognition when reasoning with memory-related signals in the brain. Specifically, when encountering a reasoning impasse, ComoRAG undergoes iterative reasoning cycles while interacting with a dynamic memory workspace. In each cycle, it generates probing queries to devise new exploratory paths, then integrates the retrieved evidence of new aspects into a global memory pool, thereby supporting the emergence of a coherent context for the query resolution. Across four challenging long-context narrative benchmarks (200K+ tokens), ComoRAG outperforms strong RAG baselines with consistent relative gains up to 11% compared to the strongest baseline. Further analysis reveals that ComoRAG is particularly advantageous for complex queries requiring global comprehension, offering a principled, cognitively motivated paradigm for retrieval-based long context comprehension towards stateful reasoning. Our code is publicly released at https://github.com/EternityJune25/ComoRAG

While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales capacity via conditional computation, Transformers lack a native primitive for knowledge lookup, forcing them to inefficiently simulate retrieval through computation. To address this, we introduce conditional memory as a complementary sparsity axis, instantiated via Engram, a module that modernizes classic N-gram embedding for O(1) lookup. By formulating the Sparsity Allocation problem, we uncover a U-shaped scaling law that optimizes the trade-off between neural computation (MoE) and static memory (Engram). Guided by this law, we scale Engram to 27B parameters, achieving superior performance over a strictly iso-parameter and iso-FLOPs MoE baseline. Most notably, while the memory module is expected to aid knowledge retrieval (e.g., MMLU +3.4; CMMLU +4.0), we observe even larger gains in general reasoning (e.g., BBH +5.0; ARC-Challenge +3.7) and code/math domains~(HumanEval +3.0; MATH +2.4). Mechanistic analyses reveal that Engram relieves the backbone's early layers from static reconstruction, effectively deepening the network for complex reasoning. Furthermore, by delegating local dependencies to lookups, it frees up attention capacity for global context, substantially boosting long-context retrieval (e.g., Multi-Query NIAH: 84.2 to 97.0). Finally, Engram establishes infrastructure-aware efficiency: its deterministic addressing enables runtime prefetching from host memory, incurring negligible overhead. We envision conditional memory as an indispensable modeling primitive for next-generation sparse models.

Current multi-view indoor 3D object detectors rely on sensor geometry that is costly to obtain (i.e., precisely calibrated multi-view camera poses) to fuse multi-view information into a global scene representation, limiting deployment in real-world scenes. We target a more practical setting: Sensor-Geometry-Free (SG-Free) multi-view indoor 3D object detection, where there are no sensor-provided geometric inputs (multi-view poses or depth). Recent Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) shows that strong 3D cues can be inferred directly from images. Building on this insight, we present VGGT-Det, the first framework tailored for SG-Free multi-view indoor 3D object detection. Rather than merely consuming VGGT predictions, our method integrates VGGT encoder into a transformer-based pipeline. To effectively leverage both the semantic and geometric priors from inside VGGT, we introduce two novel key components: (i) Attention-Guided Query Generation (AG): exploits VGGT attention maps as semantic priors to initialize object queries, improving localization by focusing on object regions while preserving global spatial structure; (ii) Query-Driven Feature Aggregation (QD): a learnable See-Query interacts with object queries to 'see' what they need, and then dynamically aggregates multi-level geometric features across VGGT layers that progressively lift 2D features into 3D. Experiments show that VGGT-Det significantly surpasses the best-performing method in the SG-Free setting by 4.4 and 8.6 mAP@0.25 on ScanNet and ARKitScenes, respectively. Ablation study shows that VGGT's internally learned semantic and geometric priors can be effectively leveraged by our AG and QD.

Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains largely underexplored. Existing search agents typically rely on similarity-based retrievers, while similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation. In this paper, we propose a novel retriever training framework tailored for agentic search. Unlike retrievers designed for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that only rely on local passage utility, we propose to use both local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility in a multi-turn agentic search. We further introduce an iterative training strategy, where the search agent and the retriever are optimized bidirectionally and iteratively. Different from RAG retrievers that are only trained once with fixed questions, our retriever is continuously improved using evolving and higher-quality queries from the agent. Extensive experiments on seven single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that our retriever, termed , consistently outperforms strong baselines across different search agents. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/8421BCD/Agentic-R.

Visual geometry transformers have become powerful architectures for multi-view 3D reconstruction, enabling joint prediction of multiple 3D attributes in a feed-forward manner. However, their computational cost grows quadratically with the input sequence length due to the global attention layers inside these models. This limits both their scalability and efficiency. In this work, we address this challenge with a simple yet general strategy: restricting the number of key/value tokens that each query interacts with during global attention. To achieve effective token selection, we introduce a two-stage framework. First, an inter-frame selection step operates at the frame level to identify frames that should be preserved. Second, an intra-frame selection step further discards more redundant tokens within the selected frames. Our analysis highlights the advantage of a diversity-based strategy for inter-frame selection, which ensures broad coverage of the scene. For intra-frame selection, we show that layer-aware sparsification is necessary, with the selection process guided by the entropy of the global attention pattern. Our approach offers a superior speed-accuracy trade-off compared to existing solutions. Extensive experiments show that it accelerates visual geometry transformers by over 85% for scenes with 500 images while maintaining, or even improving, baseline performance, which hints that how our token selection strategy can play a crucial role in future applications of visual geometry transformers. Our project website is available at https://zsh2000.github.io/good-token-hunting.github.io.

This paper presents a powerful framework to customize video creations by incorporating multiple specific identity (ID) photos, with video diffusion Transformers, referred to as Ingredients. Generally, our method consists of three primary modules: (i) a facial extractor that captures versatile and precise facial features for each human ID from both global and local perspectives; (ii) a multi-scale projector that maps face embeddings into the contextual space of image query in video diffusion transformers; (iii) an ID router that dynamically combines and allocates multiple ID embedding to the corresponding space-time regions. Leveraging a meticulously curated text-video dataset and a multi-stage training protocol, Ingredients demonstrates superior performance in turning custom photos into dynamic and personalized video content. Qualitative evaluations highlight the advantages of proposed method, positioning it as a significant advancement toward more effective generative video control tools in Transformer-based architecture, compared to existing methods. The data, code, and model weights are publicly available at: https://github.com/feizc/Ingredients.

Dialect translation plays a key role in enabling seamless interaction across heterogeneous database systems. However, translating SQL queries between different dialects (e.g., from PostgreSQL to MySQL) remains a challenging task due to syntactic discrepancies and subtle semantic variations. Existing approaches including manual rewriting, rule-based systems, and large language model (LLM)-based techniques often involve high maintenance effort (e.g., crafting custom translation rules) or produce unreliable results (e.g., LLM generates non-existent functions), especially when handling complex queries. In this demonstration, we present CrackSQL, the first hybrid SQL dialect translation system that combines rule and LLM-based methods to overcome these limitations. CrackSQL leverages the adaptability of LLMs to minimize manual intervention, while enhancing translation accuracy by segmenting lengthy complex SQL via functionality-based query processing. To further improve robustness, it incorporates a novel cross-dialect syntax embedding model for precise syntax alignment, as well as an adaptive local-to-global translation strategy that effectively resolves interdependent query operations. CrackSQL supports three translation modes and offers multiple deployment and access options including a web console interface, a PyPI package, and a command-line prompt, facilitating adoption across a variety of real-world use cases

Memory systems are crucial to personalized LLMs by mitigating the context window limitation in capturing long-term user-LLM conversations. Typically, such systems leverage multiple agents to handle multi-granular memory construction and personalized memory retrieval tasks. To optimize the system, existing methods focus on specializing agents on their local tasks independently via prompt engineering or fine-tuning. However, they overlook cross-agent collaboration, where independent optimization on local agents hardly guarantees the global system performance. To address this issue, we propose a Collaborative Reinforcement Learning Framework for Multi-Agent Memory Systems (CoMAM), jointly optimizing local agents to facilitate collaboration. Specifically, we regularize agents' execution as a sequential Markov decision process (MDP) to embed inter-agent dependencies into the state transition, yielding both local task rewards (e.g., information coverage for memory construction) and global rewards (i.e., query-answer accuracy). Then, we quantify each agent's contribution via group-level ranking consistency between local and global rewards, treating them as adaptive weights to assign global credit and integrate local-global rewards. Each agent is optimized by these integrated rewards, aligning local improvements with the global performance. Experiments show CoMAM outperforms leading memory systems, validating the efficacy of our proposed collaborative reinforcement learning for joint optimization.

This paper proposes the Real-Time Fast Marching Tree (RT-FMT), a real-time planning algorithm that features local and global path generation, multiple-query planning, and dynamic obstacle avoidance. During the search, RT-FMT quickly looks for the global solution and, in the meantime, generates local paths that can be used by the robot to start execution faster. In addition, our algorithm constantly rewires the tree to keep branches from forming inside the dynamic obstacles and to maintain the tree root near the robot, which allows the tree to be reused multiple times for different goals. Our algorithm is based on the planners Fast Marching Tree (FMT*) and Real-time Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RT-RRT*). We show via simulations that RT-FMT outperforms RT- RRT* in both execution cost and arrival time, in most cases. Moreover, we also demonstrate via simulation that it is worthwhile taking the local path before the global path is available in order to reduce arrival time, even though there is a small possibility of taking an inferior path.

Vision-language models (VLMs) typically process images at a native high-resolution, forcing a trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency: high-resolution inputs capture fine details but incur significant computational costs, while low-resolution inputs advocate for efficiency, they potentially miss critical visual information, like small text. We present AwaRes, a spatial-on-demand framework that resolves this accuracy-efficiency trade-off by operating on a low-resolution global view and using tool-calling to retrieve only high-resolution segments needed for a given query. We construct supervised data automatically: a judge compares low- vs.\ high-resolution answers to label whether cropping is needed, and an oracle grounding model localizes the evidence for the correct answer, which we map to a discrete crop set to form multi-turn tool-use trajectories. We train our framework with cold-start SFT followed by multi-turn GRPO with a composite reward that combines semantic answer correctness with explicit crop-cost penalties. Project page: https://nimrodshabtay.github.io/AwaRes

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled image-based question-answering capabilities. However, a key limitation is the use of CLIP as the visual encoder; while it can capture coarse global information, it often can miss fine-grained details that are relevant to the input query. To address these shortcomings, this work studies whether pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models can serve as instruction-aware visual encoders. Through an analysis of their internal representations, we find diffusion features are both rich in semantics and can encode strong image-text alignment. Moreover, we find that we can leverage text conditioning to focus the model on regions relevant to the input question. We then investigate how to align these features with large language models and uncover a leakage phenomenon, where the LLM can inadvertently recover information from the original diffusion prompt. We analyze the causes of this leakage and propose a mitigation strategy. Based on these insights, we explore a simple fusion strategy that utilizes both CLIP and conditional diffusion features. We evaluate our approach on both general VQA and specialized MLLM benchmarks, demonstrating the promise of diffusion models for visual understanding, particularly in vision-centric tasks that require spatial and compositional reasoning. Our project page can be found https://vatsalag99.github.io/mustafar/.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-expert-level capabilities, driving significant interest in their potential for achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). In particular, there is growing momentum in adapting LLMs to various modalities, including vision, video, and speech, through the development of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). However, existing speech-language model (SLM) research has largely overlooked cost-effective adaptation strategies for leveraging LLMs in the speech domain. In this paper, we propose FastSLM, a lightweight yet efficient SLM designed for effective understanding and reasoning over long-form speech. To address the challenge of aligning high-frame-rate speech features with LLMs, we introduce the Hierarchical Frame Querying Transformer (HFQ-Former), which compresses frame-level speech features while capturing both local and global context. Furthermore, we present a novel three-stage training strategy that enhances generalization across a wide range of speech-related tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that FastSLM achieves competitive performance compared to existing state-of-the-art models, despite operating with significantly lower FLOPs and parameter counts, while representing speech with only 1.67 tokens per second. The source code and model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/okestro-ai-lab/FastSLM.

Embodied outdoor scene understanding forms the foundation for autonomous agents to perceive, analyze, and react to dynamic driving environments. However, existing 3D understanding is predominantly based on 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which collect and process limited scene-aware contexts. In contrast, compared to the 2D planar visual information, point cloud sensors such as LiDAR provide rich depth and fine-grained 3D representations of objects. Even better the emerging 4D millimeter-wave radar detects the motion trend, velocity, and reflection intensity of each object. The integration of these two modalities provides more flexible querying conditions for natural language, thereby supporting more accurate 3D visual grounding. To this end, we propose a novel method called TPCNet, the first outdoor 3D visual grounding model upon the paradigm of prompt-guided point cloud sensor combination, including both LiDAR and radar sensors. To optimally combine the features of these two sensors required by the prompt, we design a multi-fusion paradigm called Two-Stage Heterogeneous Modal Adaptive Fusion. Specifically, this paradigm initially employs Bidirectional Agent Cross-Attention (BACA), which feeds both-sensor features, characterized by global receptive fields, to the text features for querying. Moreover, we design a Dynamic Gated Graph Fusion (DGGF) module to locate the regions of interest identified by the queries. To further enhance accuracy, we devise an C3D-RECHead, based on the nearest object edge to the ego-vehicle. Experimental results demonstrate that our TPCNet, along with its individual modules, achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both the Talk2Radar and Talk2Car datasets. We release the code at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/TPCNet.

The quadratic complexity of full attention mechanisms poses a significant bottleneck for Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) aiming to generate long-duration, high-resolution videos. While various sparse attention methods have been proposed, many are designed as training-free inference accelerators or do not optimally capture the unique spatio-temporal characteristics inherent in video data when trained natively. This paper introduces Video Mixture of Block Attention (VMoBA), a novel sparse attention mechanism specifically adapted for VDMs. Motivated by an in-depth analysis of attention patterns within pre-trained video transformers, which revealed strong spatio-temporal locality, varying query importance, and head-specific concentration levels, VMoBA enhances the original MoBA framework with three key modifications: (1) a layer-wise recurrent block partition scheme (1D-2D-3D) to dynamically adapt to diverse spatio-temporal attention patterns and improve efficiency; (2) global block selection to prioritize the most salient query-key block interactions across an entire attention head; and (3) threshold-based block selection to dynamically determine the number of attended blocks based on their cumulative similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VMoBA significantly accelerates the training of VDMs on longer sequences, achieving 2.92x FLOPs and 1.48x latency speedup, while attaining comparable or even superior generation quality to full attention. Furthermore, VMoBA exhibits competitive performance in training-free inference, offering 2.40x FLOPs and 1.35x latency speedup for high-res video generation.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) aim to solve diverse and complex problems through structured reasoning. Recent advances in group-based policy optimization methods have shown promise in enabling stable advantage estimation without reliance on process-level annotations. However, these methods rely on advantage gaps induced by high-quality samples within the same batch, which makes the training process fragile and inefficient when intra-group advantages collapse under challenging tasks. To address these problems, we propose a reinforcement learning mechanism named \textbf{R^3} that along three directions: (1) a cross-context \underline{\textbf{R}eplay} strategy that maintains the intra-group advantage by recalling valuable examples from historical trajectories of the same query, (2) an in-context self-\underline{\textbf{R}eflection} mechanism enabling models to refine outputs by leveraging past failures, and (3) a structural entropy \underline{\textbf{R}anking reward}, which assigns relative rewards to truncated or failed samples by ranking responses based on token-level entropy patterns, capturing both local exploration and global stability. We implement our method on Deepseek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B and train it on the DeepscaleR-40k in the math domain. Experiments demonstrate our method achieves SoTA performance on several math benchmarks, representing significant improvements and fewer reasoning tokens over the base models. Code and model will be released.

Diffusion-based video generation has advanced substantially in visual fidelity and temporal coherence, but practical deployment remains limited by the quadratic complexity of full attention. Training-free sparse attention is attractive because it accelerates pretrained models without retraining, yet existing online top-p sparse attention still spends non-negligible cost on mask prediction and applies shared thresholds despite strong head-level heterogeneity. We show that these two overlooked factors limit the practical speed-quality trade-off of training-free sparse attention in Video DiTs. To address them, we introduce a head-wise adaptive framework with two plug-in components: Temporal Mask Reuse, which skips unnecessary mask prediction based on query-key drift, and Error-guided Budgeted Calibration, which assigns per-head top-p thresholds by minimizing measured model-output error under a global sparsity budget. On Wan2.1-1.3B and Wan2.1-14B, our method consistently improves XAttention and SVG2, achieving up to 1.93 times speedup at 720P while maintaining competitive video quality and similarity metrics.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have triggered the most recent and significant breakthroughs in computer vision. Their efficient designs are mostly guided by the indirect metric of computational complexity, i.e., FLOPs, which however has a clear gap with the direct metric such as throughput. Thus, we propose to use the direct speed evaluation on the target platform as the design principle for efficient ViTs. Particularly, we introduce LITv2, a simple and effective ViT which performs favourably against the existing state-of-the-art methods across a spectrum of different model sizes with faster speed. At the core of LITv2 is a novel self-attention mechanism, which we dub HiLo. HiLo is inspired by the insight that high frequencies in an image capture local fine details and low frequencies focus on global structures, whereas a multi-head self-attention layer neglects the characteristic of different frequencies. Therefore, we propose to disentangle the high/low frequency patterns in an attention layer by separating the heads into two groups, where one group encodes high frequencies via self-attention within each local window, and another group encodes low frequencies by performing global attention between the average-pooled low-frequency keys and values from each window and each query position in the input feature map. Benefiting from the efficient design for both groups, we show that HiLo is superior to the existing attention mechanisms by comprehensively benchmarking FLOPs, speed and memory consumption on GPUs and CPUs. For example, HiLo is 1.4x faster than spatial reduction attention and 1.6x faster than local window attention on CPUs. Powered by HiLo, LITv2 serves as a strong backbone for mainstream vision tasks including image classification, dense detection and segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/LITv2.

We present a central-peripheral vision-inspired framework (CVP), a simple yet effective multimodal model for spatial reasoning that draws inspiration from the two types of human visual fields -- central vision and peripheral vision. Existing approaches primarily rely on unstructured representations, such as point clouds, voxels, or patch features, and inject scene context implicitly via coordinate embeddings. However, this often results in limited spatial reasoning capabilities due to the lack of explicit, high-level structural understanding. To address this limitation, we introduce two complementary components into a Large Multimodal Model-based architecture: target-affinity token, analogous to central vision, that guides the model's attention toward query-relevant objects; and allocentric grid, akin to peripheral vision, that captures global scene context and spatial arrangements. These components work in tandem to enable structured, context-aware understanding of complex 3D environments. Experiments show that CVP achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of 3D scene understanding benchmarks.

Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) has emerged as a crucial yet challenging task in industrial inspection, where normal distribution modeling must be accomplished with only a few normal images. While existing approaches typically employ multi-modal foundation models combining language and vision modalities for prompt-guided anomaly detection, these methods often demand sophisticated prompt engineering and extensive manual tuning. In this paper, we demonstrate that a straightforward nearest-neighbor search framework can surpass state-of-the-art performance in both single-class and multi-class FSAD scenarios. Our proposed method, VisionAD, consists of four simple yet essential components: (1) scalable vision foundation models that extract universal and discriminative features; (2) dual augmentation strategies - support augmentation to enhance feature matching adaptability and query augmentation to address the oversights of single-view prediction; (3) multi-layer feature integration that captures both low-frequency global context and high-frequency local details with minimal computational overhead; and (4) a class-aware visual memory bank enabling efficient one-for-all multi-class detection. Extensive evaluations across MVTec-AD, VisA, and Real-IAD benchmarks demonstrate VisionAD's exceptional performance. Using only 1 normal images as support, our method achieves remarkable image-level AUROC scores of 97.4%, 94.8%, and 70.8% respectively, outperforming current state-of-the-art approaches by significant margins (+1.6%, +3.2%, and +1.4%). The training-free nature and superior few-shot capabilities of VisionAD make it particularly appealing for real-world applications where samples are scarce or expensive to obtain. Code is available at https://github.com/Qiqigeww/VisionAD.

We introduce Sketch-based Video Object Localization (SVOL), a new task aimed at localizing spatio-temporal object boxes in video queried by the input sketch. We first outline the challenges in the SVOL task and build the Sketch-Video Attention Network (SVANet) with the following design principles: (i) to consider temporal information of video and bridge the domain gap between sketch and video; (ii) to accurately identify and localize multiple objects simultaneously; (iii) to handle various styles of sketches; (iv) to be classification-free. In particular, SVANet is equipped with a Cross-modal Transformer that models the interaction between learnable object tokens, query sketch, and video through attention operations, and learns upon a per-frame set matching strategy that enables frame-wise prediction while utilizing global video context. We evaluate SVANet on a newly curated SVOL dataset. By design, SVANet successfully learns the mapping between the query sketches and video objects, achieving state-of-the-art results on the SVOL benchmark. We further confirm the effectiveness of SVANet via extensive ablation studies and visualizations. Lastly, we demonstrate its transfer capability on unseen datasets and novel categories, suggesting its high scalability in real-world applications.

3D spatial reasoning in dynamic, audio-visual environments is a cornerstone of human cognition yet remains largely unexplored by existing Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) and benchmarks, which predominantly focus on static or 2D scenes. We introduce SAVVY-Bench, the first benchmark for 3D spatial reasoning in dynamic scenes with synchronized spatial audio. SAVVY-Bench is comprised of thousands of relationships involving static and moving objects, and requires fine-grained temporal grounding, consistent 3D localization, and multi-modal annotation. To tackle this challenge, we propose SAVVY, a novel training-free reasoning pipeline that consists of two stages: (i) Egocentric Spatial Tracks Estimation, which leverages AV-LLMs as well as other audio-visual methods to track the trajectories of key objects related to the query using both visual and spatial audio cues, and (ii) Dynamic Global Map Construction, which aggregates multi-modal queried object trajectories and converts them into a unified global dynamic map. Using the constructed map, a final QA answer is obtained through a coordinate transformation that aligns the global map with the queried viewpoint. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that SAVVY substantially enhances performance of state-of-the-art AV-LLMs, setting a new standard and stage for approaching dynamic 3D spatial reasoning in AV-LLMs.

Recent advances in question answering have led to substantial progress in tasks such as multi-hop reasoning. However, global sensemaking-answering questions by synthesizing information from an entire corpus remains a significant challenge. A prior graph-based approach to global sensemaking lacks retrieval mechanisms, topic specificity, and incurs high inference costs. To address these limitations, we propose ReTAG, a Retrieval-Enhanced, Topic-Augmented Graph framework that constructs topic-specific subgraphs and retrieves the relevant summaries for response generation. Experiments show that ReTAG improves response quality while significantly reducing inference time compared to the baseline. Our code is available at https://github.com/bykimby/retag.

Knowledge Graph-based Question Answering (KGQA) plays a pivotal role in complex reasoning tasks but remains constrained by two persistent challenges: the structural heterogeneity of Knowledge Graphs(KGs) often leads to semantic mismatch during retrieval, while existing reasoning path retrieval methods lack a global structural perspective. To address these issues, we propose Structure-Tracing Evidence Mining (STEM), a novel framework that reframes multi-hop reasoning as a schema-guided graph search task. First, we design a Semantic-to-Structural Projection pipeline that leverages KG structural priors to decompose queries into atomic relational assertions and construct an adaptive query schema graph. Subsequently, we execute globally-aware node anchoring and subgraph retrieval to obtain the final evidence reasoning graph from KG. To more effectively integrate global structural information during the graph construction process, we design a Triple-Dependent GNN (Triple-GNN) to generate a Global Guidance Subgraph (Guidance Graph) that guides the construction. STEM significantly improves both the accuracy and evidence completeness of multi-hop reasoning graph retrieval, and achieves State-of-the-Art performance on multiple multi-hop benchmarks.

MIRACL (Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages) is a multilingual dataset we have built for the WSDM 2023 Cup challenge that focuses on ad hoc retrieval across 18 different languages, which collectively encompass over three billion native speakers around the world. These languages have diverse typologies, originate from many different language families, and are associated with varying amounts of available resources -- including what researchers typically characterize as high-resource as well as low-resource languages. Our dataset is designed to support the creation and evaluation of models for monolingual retrieval, where the queries and the corpora are in the same language. In total, we have gathered over 700k high-quality relevance judgments for around 77k queries over Wikipedia in these 18 languages, where all assessments have been performed by native speakers hired by our team. Our goal is to spur research that will improve retrieval across a continuum of languages, thus enhancing information access capabilities for diverse populations around the world, particularly those that have been traditionally underserved. This overview paper describes the dataset and baselines that we share with the community. The MIRACL website is live at http://miracl.ai/.