Daily Papers

Understanding how humans perceive visual complexity is a key area of study in visual cognition. Previous approaches to modeling visual complexity assessments have often resulted in intricate, difficult-to-interpret algorithms that employ numerous features or sophisticated deep learning architectures. While these complex models achieve high performance on specific datasets, they often sacrifice interpretability, making it challenging to understand the factors driving human perception of complexity. Recently (Shen, et al. 2024) proposed an interpretable segmentation-based model that accurately predicted complexity across various datasets, supporting the idea that complexity can be explained simply. In this work, we investigate the failure of their model to capture structural, color and surprisal contributions to complexity. To this end, we propose Multi-Scale Sobel Gradient (MSG) which measures spatial intensity variations, Multi-Scale Unique Color (MUC) which quantifies colorfulness across multiple scales, and surprise scores generated using a Large Language Model. We test our features on existing benchmarks and a novel dataset (Surprising Visual Genome) containing surprising images from Visual Genome. Our experiments demonstrate that modeling complexity accurately is not as simple as previously thought, requiring additional perceptual and semantic factors to address dataset biases. Our model improves predictive performance while maintaining interpretability, offering deeper insights into how visual complexity is perceived and assessed. Our code, analysis and data are available at https://github.com/Complexity-Project/Complexity-in-Complexity.

We introduce RegionFocus, a visual test-time scaling approach for Vision Language Model Agents. Understanding webpages is challenging due to the visual complexity of GUI images and the large number of interface elements, making accurate action selection difficult. Our approach dynamically zooms in on relevant regions, reducing background clutter and improving grounding accuracy. To support this process, we propose an image-as-map mechanism that visualizes key landmarks at each step, providing a transparent action record and enables the agent to effectively choose among action candidates. Even with a simple region selection strategy, we observe significant performance gains of 28+\% on Screenspot-pro and 24+\% on WebVoyager benchmarks on top of two state-of-the-art open vision language model agents, UI-TARS and Qwen2.5-VL, highlighting the effectiveness of visual test-time scaling in interactive settings. We achieve a new state-of-the-art grounding performance of 61.6\% on the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark by applying RegionFocus to a Qwen2.5-VL-72B model. Our code will be released publicly at https://github.com/tiangeluo/RegionFocus.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) models often perform poorly on out-of-distribution data and struggle on domain generalization. Due to the multi-modal nature of this task, multiple factors of variation are intertwined, making generalization difficult to analyze. This motivates us to introduce a virtual benchmark, Super-CLEVR, where different factors in VQA domain shifts can be isolated in order that their effects can be studied independently. Four factors are considered: visual complexity, question redundancy, concept distribution and concept compositionality. With controllably generated data, Super-CLEVR enables us to test VQA methods in situations where the test data differs from the training data along each of these axes. We study four existing methods, including two neural symbolic methods NSCL and NSVQA, and two non-symbolic methods FiLM and mDETR; and our proposed method, probabilistic NSVQA (P-NSVQA), which extends NSVQA with uncertainty reasoning. P-NSVQA outperforms other methods on three of the four domain shift factors. Our results suggest that disentangling reasoning and perception, combined with probabilistic uncertainty, form a strong VQA model that is more robust to domain shifts. The dataset and code are released at https://github.com/Lizw14/Super-CLEVR.

We consider concept generalization at a large scale in the diverse and natural visual spectrum. Established computational modes (i.e., rule-based or similarity-based) are primarily studied isolated and focus on confined and abstract problem spaces. In this work, we study these two modes when the problem space scales up, and the complexity of concepts becomes diverse. Specifically, at the representational level, we seek to answer how the complexity varies when a visual concept is mapped to the representation space. Prior psychology literature has shown that two types of complexities (i.e., subjective complexity and visual complexity) (Griffiths and Tenenbaum, 2003) build an inverted-U relation (Donderi, 2006; Sun and Firestone, 2021). Leveraging Representativeness of Attribute (RoA), we computationally confirm the following observation: Models use attributes with high RoA to describe visual concepts, and the description length falls in an inverted-U relation with the increment in visual complexity. At the computational level, we aim to answer how the complexity of representation affects the shift between the rule- and similarity-based generalization. We hypothesize that category-conditioned visual modeling estimates the co-occurrence frequency between visual and categorical attributes, thus potentially serving as the prior for the natural visual world. Experimental results show that representations with relatively high subjective complexity outperform those with relatively low subjective complexity in the rule-based generalization, while the trend is the opposite in the similarity-based generalization.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse visual tasks, yet their performance degrades in complex visual environments. While existing enhancement approaches require additional training, rely on external segmentation tools, or operate at coarse-grained levels, they overlook the innate ability within VLMs. To bridge this gap, we investigate VLMs' attention patterns and discover that: (1) visual complexity strongly correlates with attention entropy, negatively impacting reasoning performance; (2) attention progressively refines from global scanning in shallow layers to focused convergence in deeper layers, with convergence degree determined by visual complexity. (3) Theoretically, we prove that the contrast of attention maps between general queries and task-specific queries enables the decomposition of visual signal into semantic signals and visual noise components. Building on these insights, we propose Contrastive Attention Refinement for Visual Enhancement (CARVE), a training-free method that extracts task-relevant visual signals through attention contrasting at the pixel level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CARVE consistently enhances performance, achieving up to 75% improvement on open-source models. Our work provides critical insights into the interplay between visual complexity and attention mechanisms, offering an efficient pathway for improving visual reasoning with contrasting attention.

Despite the successes of recent developments in visual AI, different shortcomings still exist; from missing exact logical reasoning, to abstract generalization abilities, to understanding complex and noisy scenes. Unfortunately, existing benchmarks, were not designed to capture more than a few of these aspects. Whereas deep learning datasets focus on visually complex data but simple visual reasoning tasks, inductive logic datasets involve complex logical learning tasks, however, lack the visual component. To address this, we propose the visual logical learning dataset, V-LoL, that seamlessly combines visual and logical challenges. Notably, we introduce the first instantiation of V-LoL, V-LoL-Trains, -- a visual rendition of a classic benchmark in symbolic AI, the Michalski train problem. By incorporating intricate visual scenes and flexible logical reasoning tasks within a versatile framework, V-LoL-Trains provides a platform for investigating a wide range of visual logical learning challenges. We evaluate a variety of AI systems including traditional symbolic AI, neural AI, as well as neuro-symbolic AI. Our evaluations demonstrate that even state-of-the-art AI faces difficulties in dealing with visual logical learning challenges, highlighting unique advantages and limitations specific to each methodology. Overall, V-LoL opens up new avenues for understanding and enhancing current abilities in visual logical learning for AI systems.

High-resolution Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) encounter the challenges of excessive visual tokens and quadratic visual complexity. Current high-resolution LMMs address the quadratic complexity while still generating excessive visual tokens. However, the redundancy in visual tokens is the key problem as it leads to more substantial compute. To mitigate this issue, we propose ConvLLaVA, which employs ConvNeXt, a hierarchical backbone, as the visual encoder of LMM to replace Vision Transformer (ViT). ConvLLaVA compresses high-resolution images into information-rich visual features, effectively preventing the generation of excessive visual tokens. To enhance the capabilities of ConvLLaVA, we propose two critical optimizations. Since the low-resolution pretrained ConvNeXt underperforms when directly applied on high resolution, we update it to bridge the gap. Moreover, since ConvNeXt's original compression ratio is inadequate for much higher resolution inputs, we train a successive stage to further compress the visual tokens, thereby reducing redundancy. These optimizations enable ConvLLaVA to support inputs of 1536x1536 resolution generating only 576 visual tokens, capable of handling images of arbitrary aspect ratios. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art models on mainstream benchmarks. The ConvLLaVA model series are publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba/conv-llava.

Chart understanding presents a unique challenge for large vision-language models (LVLMs), as it requires the integration of sophisticated textual and visual reasoning capabilities. However, current LVLMs exhibit a notable imbalance between these skills, falling short on visual reasoning that is difficult to perform in text. We conduct a case study using a synthetic dataset solvable only through visual reasoning and show that model performance degrades significantly with increasing visual complexity, while human performance remains robust. We then introduce ChartMuseum, a new Chart Question Answering (QA) benchmark containing 1,162 expert-annotated questions spanning multiple reasoning types, curated from real-world charts across 184 sources, specifically built to evaluate complex visual and textual reasoning. Unlike prior chart understanding benchmarks -- where frontier models perform similarly and near saturation -- our benchmark exposes a substantial gap between model and human performance, while effectively differentiating model capabilities: although humans achieve 93% accuracy, the best-performing model Gemini-2.5-Pro attains only 63.0%, and the leading open-source LVLM Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct achieves only 38.5%. Moreover, on questions requiring primarily visual reasoning, all models experience a 35%-55% performance drop from text-reasoning-heavy question performance. Lastly, our qualitative error analysis reveals specific categories of visual reasoning that are challenging for current LVLMs.

Robotic manipulation policies often fail to generalize because they must simultaneously learn where to attend, what actions to take, and how to execute them. We argue that high-level reasoning about where and what can be offloaded to vision-language models (VLMs), leaving policies to specialize in how to act. We present PEEK (Policy-agnostic Extraction of Essential Keypoints), which fine-tunes VLMs to predict a unified point-based intermediate representation: 1. end-effector paths specifying what actions to take, and 2. task-relevant masks indicating where to focus. These annotations are directly overlaid onto robot observations, making the representation policy-agnostic and transferable across architectures. To enable scalable training, we introduce an automatic annotation pipeline, generating labeled data across 20+ robot datasets spanning 9 embodiments. In real-world evaluations, PEEK consistently boosts zero-shot generalization, including a 41.4x real-world improvement for a 3D policy trained only in simulation, and 2-3.5x gains for both large VLAs and small manipulation policies. By letting VLMs absorb semantic and visual complexity, PEEK equips manipulation policies with the minimal cues they need--where, what, and how. Website at https://peek-robot.github.io/.

Despite rapid advances in vision-language models (VLMs), current benchmarks for multimodal reasoning fall short in three key dimensions. First, they overwhelmingly rely on static images, failing to capture the temporal complexity of real-world environments. Second, they narrowly focus on mathematical problem-solving, neglecting the broader spectrum of reasoning skills -- including abstract, physical, planning, spatial, and temporal capabilities -- required for robust multimodal intelligence. Third, many benchmarks quickly saturate, offering limited headroom for diagnosing failure modes or measuring continued progress. We introduce MORSE-500 (Multimodal Reasoning Stress-test Environment), a video benchmark composed of 500 fully scripted clips with embedded questions spanning six complementary reasoning categories. Each instance is programmatically generated using deterministic Python scripts (via Manim, Matplotlib, MoviePy), generative video models, and curated real footage. This script-driven design allows fine-grained control over visual complexity, distractor density, and temporal dynamics -- enabling difficulty to be scaled systematically as models improve. Unlike static benchmarks that become obsolete once saturated, MORSE-500 is built to evolve: its controllable generation pipeline supports the creation of arbitrarily challenging new instances, making it ideally suited for stress-testing next-generation models. Initial experiments with state-of-the-art systems -- including various Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI o3 which represent the strongest available at the time, alongside strong open-source models -- reveal substantial performance gaps across all categories, with particularly large deficits in abstract and planning tasks. We release the full dataset, generation scripts, and evaluation harness to support transparent, reproducible, and forward-looking multimodal reasoning research.

We present a comprehensive study of chart visual question-answering(QA) task, to address the challenges faced in comprehending and extracting data from chart visualizations within documents. Despite efforts to tackle this problem using synthetic charts, solutions are limited by the shortage of annotated real-world data. To fill this gap, we introduce a benchmark and dataset for chart visual QA on real-world charts, offering a systematic analysis of the task and a novel taxonomy for template-based chart question creation. Our contribution includes the introduction of a new answer type, 'list', with both ranked and unranked variations. Our study is conducted on a real-world chart dataset from scientific literature, showcasing higher visual complexity compared to other works. Our focus is on template-based QA and how it can serve as a standard for evaluating the first-order logic capabilities of models. The results of our experiments, conducted on a real-world out-of-distribution dataset, provide a robust evaluation of large-scale pre-trained models and advance the field of chart visual QA and formal logic verification for neural networks in general.

Causal Representation Learning (CRL) aims to uncover the data-generating process and identify the underlying causal variables and relations, whose evaluation remains inherently challenging due to the requirement of known ground-truth causal variables and causal structure. Existing evaluations often rely on either simplistic synthetic datasets or downstream performance on real-world tasks, generally suffering a dilemma between realism and evaluative precision. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark for CRL using high-fidelity simulated visual data that retains both realistic visual complexity and, more importantly, access to ground-truth causal generating processes. The dataset comprises around 200 thousand images and 3 million video frames across 24 sub-scenes in four domains: static image generation, dynamic physical simulations, robotic manipulations, and traffic situation analysis. These scenarios range from static to dynamic settings, simple to complex structures, and single to multi-agent interactions, offering a comprehensive testbed that hopefully bridges the gap between rigorous evaluation and real-world applicability. In addition, we provide flexible access to the underlying causal structures, allowing users to modify or configure them to align with the required assumptions in CRL, such as available domain labels, temporal dependencies, or intervention histories. Leveraging this benchmark, we evaluated representative CRL methods across diverse paradigms and offered empirical insights to assist practitioners and newcomers in choosing or extending appropriate CRL frameworks to properly address specific types of real problems that can benefit from the CRL perspective. Welcome to visit our: Project page:https://causal-verse.github.io/, Dataset:https://huggingface.co/CausalVerse.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive problem-solving abilities in various domains, but their visual comprehension and abstract reasoning skills remain under-evaluated. To this end, we present PolyMATH, a challenging benchmark aimed at evaluating the general cognitive reasoning abilities of MLLMs. PolyMATH comprises 5,000 manually collected high-quality images of cognitive textual and visual challenges across 10 distinct categories, including pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and relative reasoning. We conducted a comprehensive, and quantitative evaluation of 15 MLLMs using four diverse prompting strategies, including Chain-of-Thought and Step-Back. The best scores achieved on PolyMATH are ~41%, ~36%, and ~27%, obtained by Claude-3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Pro respectively - highlighting the logical and visual complexity of these questions. A further fine-grained error analysis reveals that these models struggle to understand spatial relations and perform drawn-out, high-level reasoning. This is further strengthened by our ablation study estimating MLLM performance when given textual descriptions in place of diagrams. As evidenced by ~4% improvement over textual descriptions as opposed to actual images, we discover that models do not truly comprehend visual diagrams and the spatial information therein, and are thus prone to logical errors. Finally, we evaluate the OpenAI o1 models and find that their performance only matches the human baseline, highlighting the difficulty of the benchmark. The results on PolyMATH highlight the room for improvement in multi-modal reasoning and provide unique insights to guide the development of future MLLMs.

This paper introduces a novel approach to data analysis designed for the needs of specialists in psychology of religion. We detect developmental and cross-cultural patterns in children's drawings of God(s) and other supernatural agents. We develop methods to objectively evaluate our empirical observations of the drawings with respect to: (1) the gravity center, (2) the average intensities of the colors green and yellow, (3) the use of different colors (palette) and (4) the visual complexity of the drawings. We find statistically significant differences across ages and countries in the gravity centers and in the average intensities of colors. These findings support the hypotheses of the experts and raise new questions for further investigation.

Being able to effectively read scientific plots, or chart understanding, is a central part toward building effective agents for science. However, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially open-source ones, are still falling behind with a typical success rate of 30%-50% on challenging benchmarks. Previous studies on fine-tuning MLLMs with synthetic charts are often restricted by their inadequate similarity to the real charts, which could compromise model training and performance on complex real-world charts. In this study, we show that modularizing chart generation and diversifying visual details improves chart understanding capabilities. In particular, we design a five-step data synthesis pipeline, where we separate data and function creation for single plot generation, condition the generation of later subplots on earlier ones for multi-subplot figures, visually diversify the generated figures, filter out low quality data, and finally generate the question-answer (QA) pairs with GPT-4o. This approach allows us to streamline the generation of fine-tuning datasets and introduce the effective chart dataset (ECD), which contains 10k+ chart images and 300k+ QA pairs, covering 25 topics and featuring 250+ chart type combinations with high visual complexity. We show that ECD consistently improves the performance of various MLLMs on a range of real-world and synthetic test sets. Code, data and models are available at: https://github.com/yuweiyang-anu/ECD.

Recently, linear complexity sequence modeling networks have achieved modeling capabilities similar to Vision Transformers on a variety of computer vision tasks, while using fewer FLOPs and less memory. However, their advantage in terms of actual runtime speed is not significant. To address this issue, we introduce Gated Linear Attention (GLA) for vision, leveraging its superior hardware-awareness and efficiency. We propose direction-wise gating to capture 1D global context through bidirectional modeling and a 2D gating locality injection to adaptively inject 2D local details into 1D global context. Our hardware-aware implementation further merges forward and backward scanning into a single kernel, enhancing parallelism and reducing memory cost and latency. The proposed model, ViG, offers a favorable trade-off in accuracy, parameters, and FLOPs on ImageNet and downstream tasks, outperforming popular Transformer and CNN-based models. Notably, ViG-S matches DeiT-B's accuracy while using only 27% of the parameters and 20% of the FLOPs, running 2times faster on 224times224 images. At 1024times1024 resolution, ViG-T uses 5.2times fewer FLOPs, saves 90% GPU memory, runs 4.8times faster, and achieves 20.7% higher top-1 accuracy than DeiT-T. These results position ViG as an efficient and scalable solution for visual representation learning. Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/ViG.

Recently, large efforts have been made to design efficient linear-complexity visual Transformers. However, current linear attention models are generally unsuitable to be deployed in resource-constrained mobile devices, due to suffering from either few efficiency gains or significant accuracy drops. In this paper, we propose a new deCoupled duAl-interactive lineaR attEntion (CARE) mechanism, revealing that features' decoupling and interaction can fully unleash the power of linear attention. We first propose an asymmetrical feature decoupling strategy that asymmetrically decouples the learning process for local inductive bias and long-range dependencies, thereby preserving sufficient local and global information while effectively enhancing the efficiency of models. Then, a dynamic memory unit is employed to maintain critical information along the network pipeline. Moreover, we design a dual interaction module to effectively facilitate interaction between local inductive bias and long-range information as well as among features at different layers. By adopting a decoupled learning way and fully exploiting complementarity across features, our method can achieve both high efficiency and accuracy. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, COCO, and ADE20K datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, e.g., achieving 78.4/82.1% top-1 accuracy on ImagegNet-1K at the cost of only 0.7/1.9 GMACs. Codes will be released on ..{github}.

Generating images with embedded text is crucial for the automatic production of visual and multimodal documents, such as educational materials and advertisements. However, existing diffusion-based text-to-image models often struggle to accurately embed text within images, facing challenges in spelling accuracy, contextual relevance, and visual coherence. Evaluating the ability of such models to embed text within a generated image is complicated due to the lack of comprehensive benchmarks. In this work, we introduce TextInVision, a large-scale, text and prompt complexity driven benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of diffusion models to effectively integrate visual text into images. We crafted a diverse set of prompts and texts that consider various attributes and text characteristics. Additionally, we prepared an image dataset to test Variational Autoencoder (VAE) models across different character representations, highlighting that VAE architectures can also pose challenges in text generation within diffusion frameworks. Through extensive analysis of multiple models, we identify common errors and highlight issues such as spelling inaccuracies and contextual mismatches. By pinpointing the failure points across different prompts and texts, our research lays the foundation for future advancements in AI-generated multimodal content.

While table understanding increasingly relies on pixel-only settings where tables are processed as visual representations, current benchmarks predominantly use synthetic renderings that lack the complexity and visual diversity of real-world tables. Additionally, existing visual table understanding (VTU) datasets offer fixed examples with single visualizations and pre-defined instructions, providing no access to underlying serialized data for reformulation. We introduce TABLET, a large-scale VTU dataset with 4 million examples across 20 tasks, grounded in 2 million unique tables where 88% preserve original visualizations. Each example includes paired image-HTML representations, comprehensive metadata, and provenance information linking back to the source datasets. Fine-tuning vision-language models like Qwen2.5-VL-7B on TABLET improves performance on seen and unseen VTU tasks while increasing robustness on real-world table visualizations. By preserving original visualizations and maintaining example traceability in a unified large-scale collection, TABLET establishes a foundation for robust training and extensible evaluation of future VTU models.

Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) suggest that higher image resolution enhances the fine-grained understanding of image details, crucial for tasks such as visual commonsense reasoning and analyzing biomedical images. However, increasing input resolution poses two main challenges: 1) It extends the context length required by the language model, leading to inefficiencies and hitting the model's context limit; 2) It increases the complexity of visual features, necessitating more training data or more complex architecture. We introduce Dragonfly, a new LMM architecture that enhances fine-grained visual understanding and reasoning about image regions to address these challenges. Dragonfly employs two key strategies: multi-resolution visual encoding and zoom-in patch selection. These strategies allow the model to process high-resolution images efficiently while maintaining reasonable context length. Our experiments on eight popular benchmarks demonstrate that Dragonfly achieves competitive or better performance compared to other architectures, highlighting the effectiveness of our design. Additionally, we finetuned Dragonfly on biomedical instructions, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple biomedical tasks requiring fine-grained visual understanding, including 92.3% accuracy on the Path-VQA dataset (compared to 83.3% for Med-Gemini) and the highest reported results on biomedical image captioning. To support model training, we curated a visual instruction-tuning dataset with 5.5 million image-instruction samples in the general domain and 1.4 million samples in the biomedical domain. We also conducted ablation studies to characterize the impact of various architectural designs and image resolutions, providing insights for future research on visual instruction alignment. The codebase and model are available at https://github.com/togethercomputer/Dragonfly.

Infographic charts are a powerful medium for communicating abstract data by combining visual elements (e.g., charts, images) with textual information. However, their visual and structural richness poses challenges for large vision-language models (LVLMs), which are typically trained on plain charts. To bridge this gap, we introduce ChartGalaxy, a million-scale dataset designed to advance the understanding and generation of infographic charts. The dataset is constructed through an inductive process that identifies 75 chart types, 330 chart variations, and 68 layout templates from real infographic charts and uses them to create synthetic ones programmatically. We showcase the utility of this dataset through: 1) improving infographic chart understanding via fine-tuning, 2) benchmarking code generation for infographic charts, and 3) enabling example-based infographic chart generation. By capturing the visual and structural complexity of real design, ChartGalaxy provides a useful resource for enhancing multimodal reasoning and generation in LVLMs.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) have become integral in modern image rendering applications due to their infinite scalability in resolution, versatile usability, and editing capabilities. SVGs are particularly popular in the fields of web development and graphic design. Existing approaches for SVG modeling using deep learning often struggle with generating complex SVGs and are restricted to simpler ones that require extensive processing and simplification. This paper introduces StarVector, a multimodal SVG generation model that effectively integrates Code Generation Large Language Models (CodeLLMs) and vision models. Our approach utilizes a CLIP image encoder to extract visual representations from pixel-based images, which are then transformed into visual tokens via an adapter module. These visual tokens are pre-pended to the SVG token embeddings, and the sequence is modeled by the StarCoder model using next-token prediction, effectively learning to align the visual and code tokens. This enables StarVector to generate unrestricted SVGs that accurately represent pixel images. To evaluate StarVector's performance, we present SVG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating SVG methods across multiple datasets and relevant metrics. Within this benchmark, we introduce novel datasets including SVG-Stack, a large-scale dataset of real-world SVG examples, and use it to pre-train StarVector as a large foundation model for SVGs. Our results demonstrate significant enhancements in visual quality and complexity handling over current methods, marking a notable advancement in SVG generation technology. Code and models: https://github.com/joanrod/star-vector

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable progress across various capabilities; however, complex video reasoning in the scientific domain remains a significant and challenging frontier. Current video benchmarks predominantly target general scenarios where perception/recognition is heavily relied on, while with relatively simple reasoning tasks, leading to saturation and thus failing to effectively evaluate advanced multimodal cognitive skills. To address this critical gap, we introduce SciVideoBench, a rigorous benchmark specifically designed to assess advanced video reasoning in scientific contexts. SciVideoBench consists of 1,000 carefully crafted multiple-choice questions derived from cutting-edge scientific experimental videos spanning over 25 specialized academic subjects and verified by a semi-automatic system. Each question demands sophisticated domain-specific knowledge, precise spatiotemporal perception, and intricate logical reasoning, effectively challenging models' higher-order cognitive abilities. Our evaluation highlights significant performance deficits in state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source LMMs, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Qwen2.5-VL, indicating substantial room for advancement in video reasoning capabilities. Detailed analyses of critical factors such as reasoning complexity and visual grounding provide valuable insights and clear direction for future developments in LMMs, driving the evolution of truly capable multimodal AI co-scientists. We hope SciVideoBench could fit the interests of the community and help to push the boundary of cutting-edge AI for border science.

Medical Visual Question Answering (MedVQA) is a promising field for developing clinical decision support systems, yet progress is often limited by the available datasets, which can lack clinical complexity and visual diversity. To address these gaps, we introduce Kvasir-VQA-x1, a new, large-scale dataset for gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy. Our work significantly expands upon the original Kvasir-VQA by incorporating 159,549 new question-answer pairs that are designed to test deeper clinical reasoning. We developed a systematic method using large language models to generate these questions, which are stratified by complexity to better assess a model's inference capabilities. To ensure our dataset prepares models for real-world clinical scenarios, we have also introduced a variety of visual augmentations that mimic common imaging artifacts. The dataset is structured to support two main evaluation tracks: one for standard VQA performance and another to test model robustness against these visual perturbations. By providing a more challenging and clinically relevant benchmark, Kvasir-VQA-x1 aims to accelerate the development of more reliable and effective multimodal AI systems for use in clinical settings. The dataset is fully accessible and adheres to FAIR data principles, making it a valuable resource for the wider research community. Code and data: https://github.com/Simula/Kvasir-VQA-x1 and https://huggingface.co/datasets/SimulaMet/Kvasir-VQA-x1

Advancements in generative models have sparked significant interest in generating images while adhering to specific structural guidelines. Scene graph to image generation is one such task of generating images which are consistent with the given scene graph. However, the complexity of visual scenes poses a challenge in accurately aligning objects based on specified relations within the scene graph. Existing methods approach this task by first predicting a scene layout and generating images from these layouts using adversarial training. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to generate images from scene graphs which eliminates the need of predicting intermediate layouts. We leverage pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models and CLIP guidance to translate graph knowledge into images. Towards this, we first pre-train our graph encoder to align graph features with CLIP features of corresponding images using a GAN based training. Further, we fuse the graph features with CLIP embedding of object labels present in the given scene graph to create a graph consistent CLIP guided conditioning signal. In the conditioning input, object embeddings provide coarse structure of the image and graph features provide structural alignment based on relationships among objects. Finally, we fine tune a pre-trained diffusion model with the graph consistent conditioning signal with reconstruction and CLIP alignment loss. Elaborate experiments reveal that our method outperforms existing methods on standard benchmarks of COCO-stuff and Visual Genome dataset.

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are the primary medium for human-computer interaction, yet automating GUI interactions remains challenging due to the complexity of visual elements, dynamic environments, and the need for multi-step reasoning. Existing methods based on vision-language models (VLMs) often suffer from limited resolution, domain mismatch, and insufficient sequential decisionmaking capability. To address these issues, we propose Mano, a robust GUI agent built upon a multi-modal foundation model pre-trained on extensive web and computer system data. Our approach integrates a novel simulated environment for high-fidelity data generation, a three-stage training pipeline (supervised fine-tuning, offline reinforcement learning, and online reinforcement learning), and a verification module for error recovery. Mano demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on multiple GUI benchmarks, including Mind2Web and OSWorld, achieving significant improvements in success rate and operational accuracy. Our work provides new insights into the effective integration of reinforcement learning with VLMs for practical GUI agent deployment, highlighting the importance of domain-specific data, iterative training, and holistic reward design.

Recent multimodal LLMs have shown promise in chart-based visual question answering, but their performance declines sharply on unannotated charts, those requiring precise visual interpretation rather than relying on textual shortcuts. To address this, we introduce ChartAgent, a novel agentic framework that explicitly performs visual reasoning directly within the chart's spatial domain. Unlike textual chain-of-thought reasoning, ChartAgent iteratively decomposes queries into visual subtasks and actively manipulates and interacts with chart images through specialized actions such as drawing annotations, cropping regions (e.g., segmenting pie slices, isolating bars), and localizing axes, using a library of chart-specific vision tools to fulfill each subtask. This iterative reasoning process closely mirrors human cognitive strategies for chart comprehension. ChartAgent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the ChartBench and ChartX benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by up to 16.07% absolute gain overall and 17.31% on unannotated, numerically intensive queries. Furthermore, our analyses show that ChartAgent is (a) effective across diverse chart types, (b) achieve the highest scores across varying visual and reasoning complexity levels, and (c) serves as a plug-and-play framework that boosts performance across diverse underlying LLMs. Our work is among the first to demonstrate visually grounded reasoning for chart understanding using tool-augmented multimodal agents.

Human intelligence requires correctness and robustness, with the former being foundational for the latter. In video understanding, correctness ensures the accurate interpretation of visual content, and robustness maintains consistent performance in challenging conditions. Despite advances in video large language models (video LLMs), existing benchmarks inadequately reflect the gap between these models and human intelligence in maintaining correctness and robustness in video interpretation. We introduce the Video Thinking Test (Video-TT), to assess if video LLMs can interpret real-world videos as effectively as humans. Video-TT reflects genuine gaps in understanding complex visual narratives, and evaluates robustness against natural adversarial questions. Video-TT comprises 1,000 YouTube Shorts videos, each with one open-ended question and four adversarial questions that probe visual and narrative complexity. Our evaluation shows a significant gap between video LLMs and human performance.

Recent studies suggest that deep learning models inductive bias towards favoring simpler features may be one of the sources of shortcut learning. Yet, there has been limited focus on understanding the complexity of the myriad features that models learn. In this work, we introduce a new metric for quantifying feature complexity, based on V-information and capturing whether a feature requires complex computational transformations to be extracted. Using this V-information metric, we analyze the complexities of 10,000 features, represented as directions in the penultimate layer, that were extracted from a standard ImageNet-trained vision model. Our study addresses four key questions: First, we ask what features look like as a function of complexity and find a spectrum of simple to complex features present within the model. Second, we ask when features are learned during training. We find that simpler features dominate early in training, and more complex features emerge gradually. Third, we investigate where within the network simple and complex features flow, and find that simpler features tend to bypass the visual hierarchy via residual connections. Fourth, we explore the connection between features complexity and their importance in driving the networks decision. We find that complex features tend to be less important. Surprisingly, important features become accessible at earlier layers during training, like a sedimentation process, allowing the model to build upon these foundational elements.

Recently, Visual Autoregressive (VAR) Models introduced a groundbreaking advancement in the field of image generation, offering a scalable approach through a coarse-to-fine "next-scale prediction" paradigm. However, the state-of-the-art algorithm of VAR models in [Tian, Jiang, Yuan, Peng and Wang, NeurIPS 2024] takes O(n^4) time, which is computationally inefficient. In this work, we analyze the computational limits and efficiency criteria of VAR Models through a fine-grained complexity lens. Our key contribution is identifying the conditions under which VAR computations can achieve sub-quadratic time complexity. Specifically, we establish a critical threshold for the norm of input matrices used in VAR attention mechanisms. Above this threshold, assuming the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) from fine-grained complexity theory, a sub-quartic time algorithm for VAR models is impossible. To substantiate our theoretical findings, we present efficient constructions leveraging low-rank approximations that align with the derived criteria. This work initiates the study of the computational efficiency of the VAR model from a theoretical perspective. Our technique will shed light on advancing scalable and efficient image generation in VAR frameworks.

Visual reasoning -- the ability to interpret the visual world -- is crucial for embodied agents that operate within three-dimensional scenes. Progress in AI has led to vision and language models capable of answering questions from images. However, their performance declines when tasked with 3D spatial reasoning. To tackle the complexity of such reasoning problems, we introduce an agentic program synthesis approach where LLM agents collaboratively generate a Pythonic API with new functions to solve common subproblems. Our method overcomes limitations of prior approaches that rely on a static, human-defined API, allowing it to handle a wider range of queries. To assess AI capabilities for 3D understanding, we introduce a new benchmark of queries involving multiple steps of grounding and inference. We show that our method outperforms prior zero-shot models for visual reasoning in 3D and empirically validate the effectiveness of our agentic framework for 3D spatial reasoning tasks. Project website: https://glab-caltech.github.io/vadar/

While originally designed for natural language processing tasks, the self-attention mechanism has recently taken various computer vision areas by storm. However, the 2D nature of images brings three challenges for applying self-attention in computer vision. (1) Treating images as 1D sequences neglects their 2D structures. (2) The quadratic complexity is too expensive for high-resolution images. (3) It only captures spatial adaptability but ignores channel adaptability. In this paper, we propose a novel linear attention named large kernel attention (LKA) to enable self-adaptive and long-range correlations in self-attention while avoiding its shortcomings. Furthermore, we present a neural network based on LKA, namely Visual Attention Network (VAN). While extremely simple, VAN surpasses similar size vision transformers(ViTs) and convolutional neural networks(CNNs) in various tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, pose estimation, etc. For example, VAN-B6 achieves 87.8% accuracy on ImageNet benchmark and set new state-of-the-art performance (58.2 PQ) for panoptic segmentation. Besides, VAN-B2 surpasses Swin-T 4% mIoU (50.1 vs. 46.1) for semantic segmentation on ADE20K benchmark, 2.6% AP (48.8 vs. 46.2) for object detection on COCO dataset. It provides a novel method and a simple yet strong baseline for the community. Code is available at https://github.com/Visual-Attention-Network.

Visual tokenizers are fundamental to image generation. They convert visual data into discrete tokens, enabling transformer-based models to excel at image generation. Despite their success, VQ-based tokenizers like VQGAN face significant limitations due to constrained vocabulary sizes. Simply expanding the codebook often leads to training instability and diminishing performance gains, making scalability a critical challenge. In this work, we introduce Factorized Quantization (FQ), a novel approach that revitalizes VQ-based tokenizers by decomposing a large codebook into multiple independent sub-codebooks. This factorization reduces the lookup complexity of large codebooks, enabling more efficient and scalable visual tokenization. To ensure each sub-codebook captures distinct and complementary information, we propose a disentanglement regularization that explicitly reduces redundancy, promoting diversity across the sub-codebooks. Furthermore, we integrate representation learning into the training process, leveraging pretrained vision models like CLIP and DINO to infuse semantic richness into the learned representations. This design ensures our tokenizer captures diverse semantic levels, leading to more expressive and disentangled representations. Experiments show that the proposed FQGAN model substantially improves the reconstruction quality of visual tokenizers, achieving state-of-the-art performance. We further demonstrate that this tokenizer can be effectively adapted into auto-regressive image generation. https://showlab.github.io/FQGAN

In autoregressive (AR) image generation, visual tokenizers compress images into compact discrete latent tokens, enabling efficient training of downstream autoregressive models for visual generation via next-token prediction. While scaling visual tokenizers improves image reconstruction quality, it often degrades downstream generation quality -- a challenge not adequately addressed in existing literature. To address this, we introduce GigaTok, the first approach to simultaneously improve image reconstruction, generation, and representation learning when scaling visual tokenizers. We identify the growing complexity of latent space as the key factor behind the reconstruction vs. generation dilemma. To mitigate this, we propose semantic regularization, which aligns tokenizer features with semantically consistent features from a pre-trained visual encoder. This constraint prevents excessive latent space complexity during scaling, yielding consistent improvements in both reconstruction and downstream autoregressive generation. Building on semantic regularization, we explore three key practices for scaling tokenizers:(1) using 1D tokenizers for better scalability, (2) prioritizing decoder scaling when expanding both encoder and decoder, and (3) employing entropy loss to stabilize training for billion-scale tokenizers. By scaling to 3 space billion parameters, GigaTok achieves state-of-the-art performance in reconstruction, downstream AR generation, and downstream AR representation quality.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) stand as the two most popular foundation models for visual representation learning. While CNNs exhibit remarkable scalability with linear complexity w.r.t. image resolution, ViTs surpass them in fitting capabilities despite contending with quadratic complexity. A closer inspection reveals that ViTs achieve superior visual modeling performance through the incorporation of global receptive fields and dynamic weights. This observation motivates us to propose a novel architecture that inherits these components while enhancing computational efficiency. To this end, we draw inspiration from the recently introduced state space model and propose the Visual State Space Model (VMamba), which achieves linear complexity without sacrificing global receptive fields. To address the encountered direction-sensitive issue, we introduce the Cross-Scan Module (CSM) to traverse the spatial domain and convert any non-causal visual image into order patch sequences. Extensive experimental results substantiate that VMamba not only demonstrates promising capabilities across various visual perception tasks, but also exhibits more pronounced advantages over established benchmarks as the image resolution increases. Source code has been available at https://github.com/MzeroMiko/VMamba.

Recent Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating high-quality single-modality content, including images, videos, and audio. However, it is still under-explored whether the transformer-based diffuser can efficiently denoise the Gaussian noises towards superb multimodal content creation. To bridge this gap, we introduce AV-DiT, a novel and efficient audio-visual diffusion transformer designed to generate high-quality, realistic videos with both visual and audio tracks. To minimize model complexity and computational costs, AV-DiT utilizes a shared DiT backbone pre-trained on image-only data, with only lightweight, newly inserted adapters being trainable. This shared backbone facilitates both audio and video generation. Specifically, the video branch incorporates a trainable temporal attention layer into a frozen pre-trained DiT block for temporal consistency. Additionally, a small number of trainable parameters adapt the image-based DiT block for audio generation. An extra shared DiT block, equipped with lightweight parameters, facilitates feature interaction between audio and visual modalities, ensuring alignment. Extensive experiments on the AIST++ and Landscape datasets demonstrate that AV-DiT achieves state-of-the-art performance in joint audio-visual generation with significantly fewer tunable parameters. Furthermore, our results highlight that a single shared image generative backbone with modality-specific adaptations is sufficient for constructing a joint audio-video generator. Our source code and pre-trained models will be released.

We present ViSTA-SLAM as a real-time monocular visual SLAM system that operates without requiring camera intrinsics, making it broadly applicable across diverse camera setups. At its core, the system employs a lightweight symmetric two-view association (STA) model as the frontend, which simultaneously estimates relative camera poses and regresses local pointmaps from only two RGB images. This design reduces model complexity significantly, the size of our frontend is only 35\% that of comparable state-of-the-art methods, while enhancing the quality of two-view constraints used in the pipeline. In the backend, we construct a specially designed Sim(3) pose graph that incorporates loop closures to address accumulated drift. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance in both camera tracking and dense 3D reconstruction quality compared to current methods. Github repository: https://github.com/zhangganlin/vista-slam

Learning from long-horizon demonstrations with complex action sequences presents significant challenges for visual imitation learning, particularly in understanding temporal relationships of actions and spatial relationships between objects. In this paper, we propose a new agent framework that incorporates two dedicated reflection modules to enhance both plan and code generation. The plan generation module produces an initial action sequence, which is then verified by the plan reflection module to ensure temporal coherence and spatial alignment with the demonstration video. The code generation module translates the plan into executable code, while the code reflection module verifies and refines the generated code to ensure correctness and consistency with the generated plan. These two reflection modules jointly enable the agent to detect and correct errors in both the plan generation and code generation, improving performance in tasks with intricate temporal and spatial dependencies. To support systematic evaluation, we introduce LongVILBench, a benchmark comprising 300 human demonstrations with action sequences of up to 18 steps. LongVILBench emphasizes temporal and spatial complexity across multiple task types. Experimental results demonstrate that existing methods perform poorly on this benchmark, whereas our new framework establishes a strong baseline for long-horizon visual imitation learning.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a pivotal paradigm in multimodal understanding, offering a powerful framework for integrating visual and linguistic information. However, the increasing complexity and diversity of tasks present significant challenges in coordinating load balancing across heterogeneous visual experts, where optimizing one specialist's performance often compromises others' capabilities. To address task heterogeneity and expert load imbalance, we propose Astrea, a novel multi-expert collaborative VLM architecture based on progressive pre-alignment. Astrea introduces three key innovations: 1) A heterogeneous expert coordination mechanism that integrates four specialized models (detection, segmentation, classification, captioning) into a comprehensive expert matrix covering essential visual comprehension elements; 2) A dynamic knowledge fusion strategy featuring progressive pre-alignment to harmonize experts within the VLM latent space through contrastive learning, complemented by probabilistically activated stochastic residual connections to preserve knowledge continuity; 3) An enhanced optimization framework utilizing momentum contrastive learning for long-range dependency modeling and adaptive weight allocators for real-time expert contribution calibration. Extensive evaluations across 12 benchmark tasks spanning VQA, image captioning, and cross-modal retrieval demonstrate Astrea's superiority over state-of-the-art models, achieving an average performance gain of +4.7\%. This study provides the first empirical demonstration that progressive pre-alignment strategies enable VLMs to overcome task heterogeneity limitations, establishing new methodological foundations for developing general-purpose multimodal agents.

Under pure textual modality, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler sub-problems. However, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with some seemingly straightforward visual tasks, such as counting and solving jigsaw puzzles. We argue that these tasks challenge the ability of visual-to-textual conversion, where MLLMs convert visual information perceived from the input scene, to textual information for further reasoning and generating the answer. If the complexity of the visual input is beyond the perceptual capability of the MLLMs, without decomposing this conversion process, simply scaling inference-time reasoning cannot solve the task because it repeatedly encounters the same perceptual bottleneck. We propose an approach, autonomous imagination, to enable MLLMs to iteratively modify visual inputs (e.g. isolating objects, rearranging puzzle pieces) into intermediate visual states, decomposing visual-to-textual conversion into closed-loop visual modification steps. We show that, without any retraining, MLLMs can now solve tasks initially beyond their perceptual capability, highlighting that closed-loop visual modification can be an effective way of decomposing the visual reasoning task into solvable substeps. Our code and data are released at https://future-item.github.io/autoimagine-site/.

In this work, we formulate a visual dialog as an information flow in which each piece of information is encoded with the joint visual-linguistic representation of a single dialog round. Based on this formulation, we consider the visual dialog task as a sequence problem consisting of ordered visual-linguistic vectors. For featurization, we use a Dense Symmetric Co-Attention network as a lightweight vison-language joint representation generator to fuse multimodal features (i.e., image and text), yielding better computation and data efficiencies. For inference, we propose two Sequential Dialog Networks (SeqDialN): the first uses LSTM for information propagation (IP) and the second uses a modified Transformer for multi-step reasoning (MR). Our architecture separates the complexity of multimodal feature fusion from that of inference, which allows simpler design of the inference engine. IP based SeqDialN is our baseline with a simple 2-layer LSTM design that achieves decent performance. MR based SeqDialN, on the other hand, recurrently refines the semantic question/history representations through the self-attention stack of Transformer and produces promising results on the visual dialog task. On VisDial v1.0 test-std dataset, our best single generative SeqDialN achieves 62.54% NDCG and 48.63% MRR; our ensemble generative SeqDialN achieves 63.78% NDCG and 49.98% MRR, which set a new state-of-the-art generative visual dialog model. We fine-tune discriminative SeqDialN with dense annotations and boost the performance up to 72.41% NDCG and 55.11% MRR. In this work, we discuss the extensive experiments we have conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model components. We also provide visualization for the reasoning process from the relevant conversation rounds and discuss our fine-tuning methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoxiaoheimei/SeqDialN

Deep learning has recently seen rapid development and received significant attention due to its state-of-the-art performance on previously-thought hard problems. However, because of the internal complexity and nonlinear structure of deep neural networks, the underlying decision making processes for why these models are achieving such performance are challenging and sometimes mystifying to interpret. As deep learning spreads across domains, it is of paramount importance that we equip users of deep learning with tools for understanding when a model works correctly, when it fails, and ultimately how to improve its performance. Standardized toolkits for building neural networks have helped democratize deep learning; visual analytics systems have now been developed to support model explanation, interpretation, debugging, and improvement. We present a survey of the role of visual analytics in deep learning research, which highlights its short yet impactful history and thoroughly summarizes the state-of-the-art using a human-centered interrogative framework, focusing on the Five W's and How (Why, Who, What, How, When, and Where). We conclude by highlighting research directions and open research problems. This survey helps researchers and practitioners in both visual analytics and deep learning to quickly learn key aspects of this young and rapidly growing body of research, whose impact spans a diverse range of domains.

In visual generation, the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms results in high memory and computational costs, especially for longer token sequences required in high-resolution image or multi-frame video generation. To address this, prior research has explored techniques such as sparsification and quantization. However, these techniques face significant challenges under low density and reduced bitwidths. Through systematic analysis, we identify that the core difficulty stems from the dispersed and irregular characteristics of visual attention patterns. Therefore, instead of introducing specialized sparsification and quantization design to accommodate such patterns, we propose an alternative strategy: *reorganizing* the attention pattern to alleviate the challenges. Inspired by the local aggregation nature of visual feature extraction, we design a novel **Pattern-Aware token ReOrdering (PARO)** technique, which unifies the diverse attention patterns into a hardware-friendly block-wise pattern. This unification substantially simplifies and enhances both sparsification and quantization. We evaluate the performance-efficiency trade-offs of various design choices and finalize a methodology tailored for the unified pattern. Our approach, **PAROAttention**, achieves video and image generation with lossless metrics, and nearly identical results from full-precision (FP) baselines, while operating at notably lower density (~20%-30%) and bitwidth (**INT8/INT4**), achieving a **1.9x** to **2.7x** end-to-end latency speedup.

Imagine observing someone scratching their arm; to understand why, additional context would be necessary. However, spotting a mosquito nearby would immediately offer a likely explanation for the person's discomfort, thereby alleviating the need for further information. This example illustrates how subtle visual cues can challenge our cognitive skills and demonstrates the complexity of interpreting visual scenarios. To study these skills, we present Visual Riddles, a benchmark aimed to test vision and language models on visual riddles requiring commonsense and world knowledge. The benchmark comprises 400 visual riddles, each featuring a unique image created by a variety of text-to-image models, question, ground-truth answer, textual hint, and attribution. Human evaluation reveals that existing models lag significantly behind human performance, which is at 82\% accuracy, with Gemini-Pro-1.5 leading with 40\% accuracy. Our benchmark comes with automatic evaluation tasks to make assessment scalable. These findings underscore the potential of Visual Riddles as a valuable resource for enhancing vision and language models' capabilities in interpreting complex visual scenarios.

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become the de-facto model for generating high-quality visual content like videos and images. A huge bottleneck is the attention mechanism where complexity scales quadratically with resolution and video length. One logical way to lessen this burden is sparse attention, where only a subset of tokens or patches are included in the calculation. However, existing techniques fail to preserve visual quality at extremely high sparsity levels and might even incur non-negligible compute overheads. % To address this concern, we propose Re-ttention, which implements very high sparse attention for visual generation models by leveraging the temporal redundancy of Diffusion Models to overcome the probabilistic normalization shift within the attention mechanism. Specifically, Re-ttention reshapes attention scores based on the prior softmax distribution history in order to preserve the visual quality of the full quadratic attention at very high sparsity levels. % Experimental results on T2V/T2I models such as CogVideoX and the PixArt DiTs demonstrate that Re-ttention requires as few as 3.1\% of the tokens during inference, outperforming contemporary methods like FastDiTAttn, Sparse VideoGen and MInference. Further, we measure latency to show that our method can attain over 45\% end-to-end % and over 92\% self-attention latency reduction on an H100 GPU at negligible overhead cost. Code available online here: https://github.com/cccrrrccc/Re-ttention{https://github.com/cccrrrccc/Re-ttention}

PlantVillageVQA is a large-scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset derived from the widely used PlantVillage image corpus. It was designed to advance the development and evaluation of vision-language models for agricultural decision-making and analysis. The PlantVillageVQA dataset comprises 193,609 high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs grounded over 55,448 images spanning 14 crop species and 38 disease conditions. Questions are organised into 3 levels of cognitive complexity and 9 distinct categories. Each question category was phrased manually following expert guidance and generated via an automated two-stage pipeline: (1) template-based QA synthesis from image metadata and (2) multi-stage linguistic re-engineering. The dataset was iteratively reviewed by domain experts for scientific accuracy and relevancy. The final dataset was evaluated using three state-of-the-art models for quality assessment. Our objective remains to provide a publicly available, standardised and expert-verified database to enhance diagnostic accuracy for plant disease identifications and advance scientific research in the agricultural domain. Our dataset will be open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SyedNazmusSakib/PlantVillageVQA.

Recent research increasingly focuses on training vision-language models (VLMs) with long, detailed image captions. However, small-scale VLMs often struggle to balance the richness of these captions with the risk of hallucinating content during fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore how well VLMs adapt to such captions. To quantify caption quality, we propose Decomposed NLI (DNLI), an evaluation framework that breaks down generated captions into individual propositions, assessing each in isolation. This fine-grained analysis reveals a critical balance between capturing descriptive details and preventing hallucinations. Our findings show that simply reducing caption complexity or employing standard data curation techniques does not effectively resolve this issue. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Knowledge Adapted (KnowAda) fine-tuning, a data-centric approach that automatically adapts training data with the model's existing knowledge and visual understanding. KnowAda minimizes hallucinations while preserving high descriptiveness. We validate this approach across several small-scale VLMs (up to 7B parameters) and dense caption datasets, demonstrating that KnowAda effectively balances hallucination reduction and descriptiveness. Our results show that KnowAda outperforms various baselines in both automatic metrics and human evaluations. We will release our code and models.

Food classification is the foundation for developing food vision tasks and plays a key role in the burgeoning field of computational nutrition. Due to the complexity of food requiring fine-grained classification, recent academic research mainly modifies Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and/or Vision Transformers (ViTs) to perform food category classification. However, to learn fine-grained features, the CNN backbone needs additional structural design, whereas ViT, containing the self-attention module, has increased computational complexity. In recent months, a new Sequence State Space (S4) model, through a Selection mechanism and computation with a Scan (S6), colloquially termed Mamba, has demonstrated superior performance and computation efficiency compared to the Transformer architecture. The VMamba model, which incorporates the Mamba mechanism into image tasks (such as classification), currently establishes the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the ImageNet dataset. In this research, we introduce an academically underestimated food dataset CNFOOD-241, and pioneer the integration of a residual learning framework within the VMamba model to concurrently harness both global and local state features inherent in the original VMamba architectural design. The research results show that VMamba surpasses current SOTA models in fine-grained and food classification. The proposed Res-VMamba further improves the classification accuracy to 79.54\% without pretrained weight. Our findings elucidate that our proposed methodology establishes a new benchmark for SOTA performance in food recognition on the CNFOOD-241 dataset. The code can be obtained on GitHub: https://github.com/ChiShengChen/ResVMamba.

In this paper, we study the problem of temporal video grounding (TVG), which aims to predict the starting/ending time points of moments described by a text sentence within a long untrimmed video. Benefiting from fine-grained 3D visual features, the TVG techniques have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, the high complexity of 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) makes extracting dense 3D visual features time-consuming, which calls for intensive memory and computing resources. Towards efficient TVG, we propose a novel text-visual prompting (TVP) framework, which incorporates optimized perturbation patterns (that we call 'prompts') into both visual inputs and textual features of a TVG model. In sharp contrast to 3D CNNs, we show that TVP allows us to effectively co-train vision encoder and language encoder in a 2D TVG model and improves the performance of crossmodal feature fusion using only low-complexity sparse 2D visual features. Further, we propose a Temporal-Distance IoU (TDIoU) loss for efficient learning of TVG. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions datasets, empirically show that the proposed TVP significantly boosts the performance of 2D TVG (e.g., 9.79% improvement on Charades-STA and 30.77% improvement on ActivityNet Captions) and achieves 5x inference acceleration over TVG using 3D visual features. Codes are available at Open.Intel.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have emerged as powerful models capable of understanding various data modalities, including text, images, and videos. LMMs encode both text and visual data into tokens that are then combined and processed by an integrated Large Language Model (LLM). Including visual tokens substantially increases the total token count, often by thousands. The increased input length for LLM significantly raises the complexity of inference, resulting in high latency in LMMs. To address this issue, token pruning methods, which remove part of the visual tokens, are proposed. The existing token pruning methods either require extensive calibration and fine-tuning or rely on suboptimal importance metrics which results in increased redundancy among the retained tokens. In this paper, we first formulate token pruning as Max-Min Diversity Problem (MMDP) where the goal is to select a subset such that the diversity among the selected {tokens} is maximized. Then, we solve the MMDP to obtain the selected subset and prune the rest. The proposed method, DivPrune, reduces redundancy and achieves the highest diversity of the selected tokens. By ensuring high diversity, the selected tokens better represent the original tokens, enabling effective performance even at high pruning ratios without requiring fine-tuning. Extensive experiments with various LMMs show that DivPrune achieves state-of-the-art accuracy over 16 image- and video-language datasets. Additionally, DivPrune reduces both the end-to-end latency and GPU memory usage for the tested models. The code is available https://github.com/vbdi/divprune{here}.

Despite decades of progress, a truly input-size agnostic visual encoder-a fundamental characteristic of human vision-has remained elusive. We address this limitation by proposing MambaEye, a novel, causal sequential encoder that leverages the low complexity and causal-process based pure Mamba2 backbone. Unlike previous Mamba-based vision encoders that often employ bidirectional processing, our strictly unidirectional approach preserves the inherent causality of State Space Models, enabling the model to generate a prediction at any point in its input sequence. A core innovation is our use of relative move embedding, which encodes the spatial shift between consecutive patches, providing a strong inductive bias for translation invariance and making the model inherently adaptable to arbitrary image resolutions and scanning patterns. To achieve this, we introduce a novel diffusion-inspired loss function that provides dense, step-wise supervision, training the model to build confidence as it gathers more visual evidence. We demonstrate that MambaEye exhibits robust performance across a wide range of image resolutions, especially at higher resolutions such as 1536^2 on the ImageNet-1K classification task. This feat is achieved while maintaining linear time and memory complexity relative to the number of patches.

Digital agents are increasingly employed to automate tasks in interactive digital environments such as web pages, software applications, and operating systems. While text-based agents built on Large Language Models (LLMs) often require frequent updates due to platform-specific APIs, visual agents leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer enhanced adaptability by interacting directly with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). However, these agents face significant challenges in visual perception, particularly when handling high-resolution, visually complex digital environments. This paper introduces Iris, a foundational visual agent that addresses these challenges through two key innovations: Information-Sensitive Cropping (ISC) and Self-Refining Dual Learning (SRDL). ISC dynamically identifies and prioritizes visually dense regions using a edge detection algorithm, enabling efficient processing by allocating more computational resources to areas with higher information density. SRDL enhances the agent's ability to handle complex tasks by leveraging a dual-learning loop, where improvements in referring (describing UI elements) reinforce grounding (locating elements) and vice versa, all without requiring additional annotated data. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Iris achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks with only 850K GUI annotations, outperforming methods using 10x more training data. These improvements further translate to significant gains in both web and OS agent downstream tasks.

State space models (SSMs) with selection mechanisms and hardware-aware architectures, namely Mamba, have recently demonstrated significant promise in long-sequence modeling. Since the self-attention mechanism in transformers has quadratic complexity with image size and increasing computational demands, the researchers are now exploring how to adapt Mamba for computer vision tasks. This paper is the first comprehensive survey aiming to provide an in-depth analysis of Mamba models in the field of computer vision. It begins by exploring the foundational concepts contributing to Mamba's success, including the state space model framework, selection mechanisms, and hardware-aware design. Next, we review these vision mamba models by categorizing them into foundational ones and enhancing them with techniques such as convolution, recurrence, and attention to improve their sophistication. We further delve into the widespread applications of Mamba in vision tasks, which include their use as a backbone in various levels of vision processing. This encompasses general visual tasks, Medical visual tasks (e.g., 2D / 3D segmentation, classification, and image registration, etc.), and Remote Sensing visual tasks. We specially introduce general visual tasks from two levels: High/Mid-level vision (e.g., Object detection, Segmentation, Video classification, etc.) and Low-level vision (e.g., Image super-resolution, Image restoration, Visual generation, etc.). We hope this endeavor will spark additional interest within the community to address current challenges and further apply Mamba models in computer vision.

Prior efforts in light-weight model development mainly centered on CNN and Transformer-based designs yet faced persistent challenges. CNNs adept at local feature extraction compromise resolution while Transformers offer global reach but escalate computational demands O(N^2). This ongoing trade-off between accuracy and efficiency remains a significant hurdle. Recently, state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, have shown outstanding performance and competitiveness in various tasks such as language modeling and computer vision, while reducing the time complexity of global information extraction to O(N). Inspired by this, this work proposes to explore the potential of visual state space models in light-weight model design and introduce a novel efficient model variant dubbed EfficientVMamba. Concretely, our EfficientVMamba integrates a atrous-based selective scan approach by efficient skip sampling, constituting building blocks designed to harness both global and local representational features. Additionally, we investigate the integration between SSM blocks and convolutions, and introduce an efficient visual state space block combined with an additional convolution branch, which further elevate the model performance. Experimental results show that, EfficientVMamba scales down the computational complexity while yields competitive results across a variety of vision tasks. For example, our EfficientVMamba-S with 1.3G FLOPs improves Vim-Ti with 1.5G FLOPs by a large margin of 5.6% accuracy on ImageNet. Code is available at: https://github.com/TerryPei/EfficientVMamba.

The proliferation of AI techniques for image generation, coupled with their increasing accessibility, has raised significant concerns about the potential misuse of these images to spread misinformation. Recent AI-generated image detection (AGID) methods include CNNDetection, NPR, DM Image Detection, Fake Image Detection, DIRE, LASTED, GAN Image Detection, AIDE, SSP, DRCT, RINE, OCC-CLIP, De-Fake, and Deep Fake Detection. However, we argue that the current state-of-the-art AGID techniques are inadequate for effectively detecting contemporary AI-generated images and advocate for a comprehensive reevaluation of these methods. We introduce the Visual Counter Turing Test (VCT^2), a benchmark comprising ~130K images generated by contemporary text-to-image models (Stable Diffusion 2.1, Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Diffusion 3, DALL-E 3, and Midjourney 6). VCT^2 includes two sets of prompts sourced from tweets by the New York Times Twitter account and captions from the MS COCO dataset. We also evaluate the performance of the aforementioned AGID techniques on the VCT^2 benchmark, highlighting their ineffectiveness in detecting AI-generated images. As image-generative AI models continue to evolve, the need for a quantifiable framework to evaluate these models becomes increasingly critical. To meet this need, we propose the Visual AI Index (V_AI), which assesses generated images from various visual perspectives, including texture complexity and object coherence, setting a new standard for evaluating image-generative AI models. To foster research in this domain, we make our https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous1233/COCO_AI and https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous1233/twitter_AI datasets publicly available.

Images usually convey richer detail than text, but often include redundant information which potentially downgrades multimodal reasoning performance. When faced with lengthy or complex messages, humans tend to employ abstract thinking to convert them into simple and concise abstracts. Inspired by this cognitive strategy, we introduce Visual Abstract Thinking (VAT), a novel thinking paradigm that prompts Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with visual abstract instead of explicit verbal thoughts or elaborate guidance, permitting a more concentrated visual reasoning mechanism. Explicit thinking, such as Chain-of-thought (CoT) or tool-augmented approaches, increases the complexity of reasoning process via inserting verbose intermediate steps, external knowledge or visual information. In contrast, VAT reduces redundant visual information and encourages models to focus their reasoning on more essential visual elements. Experimental results show that VAT consistently empowers different models, and achieves an average gain of 17% over GPT-4o baseline by employing diverse types of visual abstracts, demonstrating that VAT can enhance visual reasoning abilities for MLLMs regarding conceptual, structural and relational reasoning tasks. VAT is also compatible with CoT in knowledge-intensive multimodal reasoning tasks. These findings highlight the effectiveness of visual reasoning via abstract thinking and encourage further exploration of more diverse reasoning paradigms from the perspective of human cognition.

Learning a discriminative model to distinguish a target from its surrounding distractors is essential to generic visual object tracking. Dynamic target representation adaptation against distractors is challenging due to the limited discriminative capabilities of prevailing trackers. We present a new visual Prompting mechanism for generic Visual Object Tracking (PiVOT) to address this issue. PiVOT proposes a prompt generation network with the pre-trained foundation model CLIP to automatically generate and refine visual prompts, enabling the transfer of foundation model knowledge for tracking. While CLIP offers broad category-level knowledge, the tracker, trained on instance-specific data, excels at recognizing unique object instances. Thus, PiVOT first compiles a visual prompt highlighting potential target locations. To transfer the knowledge of CLIP to the tracker, PiVOT leverages CLIP to refine the visual prompt based on the similarities between candidate objects and the reference templates across potential targets. Once the visual prompt is refined, it can better highlight potential target locations, thereby reducing irrelevant prompt information. With the proposed prompting mechanism, the tracker can generate improved instance-aware feature maps through the guidance of the visual prompt, thus effectively reducing distractors. The proposed method does not involve CLIP during training, thereby keeping the same training complexity and preserving the generalization capability of the pretrained foundation model. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks indicate that PiVOT, using the proposed prompting method can suppress distracting objects and enhance the tracker.

Transformers have revolutionized computer vision and natural language processing, but their high computational complexity limits their application in high-resolution image processing and long-context analysis. This paper introduces Vision-RWKV (VRWKV), a model adapted from the RWKV model used in the NLP field with necessary modifications for vision tasks. Similar to the Vision Transformer (ViT), our model is designed to efficiently handle sparse inputs and demonstrate robust global processing capabilities, while also scaling up effectively, accommodating both large-scale parameters and extensive datasets. Its distinctive advantage lies in its reduced spatial aggregation complexity, which renders it exceptionally adept at processing high-resolution images seamlessly, eliminating the necessity for windowing operations. Our evaluations demonstrate that VRWKV surpasses ViT's performance in image classification and has significantly faster speeds and lower memory usage processing high-resolution inputs. In dense prediction tasks, it outperforms window-based models, maintaining comparable speeds. These results highlight VRWKV's potential as a more efficient alternative for visual perception tasks. Code is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Vision-RWKV.

With recent progress in joint modeling of visual and textual representations, Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has achieved impressive performance on many multimodal downstream tasks. However, the requirement for expensive annotations including clean image captions and regional labels limits the scalability of existing approaches, and complicates the pretraining procedure with the introduction of multiple dataset-specific objectives. In this work, we relax these constraints and present a minimalist pretraining framework, named Simple Visual Language Model (SimVLM). Unlike prior work, SimVLM reduces the training complexity by exploiting large-scale weak supervision, and is trained end-to-end with a single prefix language modeling objective. Without utilizing extra data or task-specific customization, the resulting model significantly outperforms previous pretraining methods and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of discriminative and generative vision-language benchmarks, including VQA (+3.74% vqa-score), NLVR2 (+1.17% accuracy), SNLI-VE (+1.37% accuracy) and image captioning tasks (+10.1% average CIDEr score). Furthermore, we demonstrate that SimVLM acquires strong generalization and transfer ability, enabling zero-shot behavior including open-ended visual question answering and cross-modality transfer.

Existing benchmarks for visual document retrieval (VDR) largely overlook non-English languages and the structural complexity of official publications. To address this critical gap, we introduce SDS KoPub VDR, the first large-scale, publicly available benchmark for retrieving and understanding Korean public documents. The benchmark is built upon a corpus of 361 real-world documents (40,781 pages), including 256 files under the KOGL Type 1 license and 105 from official legal portals, capturing complex visual elements like tables, charts, and multi-column layouts. To establish a challenging and reliable evaluation set, we constructed 600 query-page-answer triples. These were initially generated using multimodal models (e.g., GPT-4o) and subsequently underwent a rigorous human verification and refinement process to ensure factual accuracy and contextual relevance. The queries span six major public domains and are systematically categorized by the reasoning modality required: text-based, visual-based (e.g., chart interpretation), and cross-modal. We evaluate SDS KoPub VDR on two complementary tasks that reflect distinct retrieval paradigms: (1) text-only retrieval, which measures a model's ability to locate relevant document pages based solely on textual signals, and (2) multimodal retrieval, which assesses retrieval performance when visual features (e.g., tables, charts, and layouts) are jointly leveraged alongside text. This dual-task evaluation reveals substantial performance gaps, particularly in multimodal scenarios requiring cross-modal reasoning, even for state-of-the-art models. As a foundational resource, SDS KoPub VDR not only enables rigorous and fine-grained evaluation across textual and multimodal retrieval tasks but also provides a clear roadmap for advancing multimodal AI in complex, real-world document intelligence.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show reasoning promise, yet their visual perception is a critical bottleneck. Strikingly, MLLMs can produce correct answers even while misinterpreting crucial visual elements, masking these underlying failures. Our preliminary study on a joint perception-reasoning dataset revealed that for one leading MLLM, 29% of its correct answers to reasoning questions still exhibited visual perception errors. To systematically address this, we introduce "Do You See Me", a scalable benchmark with 1,758 images and 2,612 questions. It spans seven human-psychology inspired subtasks in 2D and 3D, featuring controllable complexity to rigorously evaluate MLLM visual skills. Our findings on 3 leading closed-source and 5 major open-source models reveal a stark deficit: humans achieve 96.49% accuracy, while top MLLMs average below 50%. This performance gap widens rapidly with increased task complexity (e.g., from 12% to 45% in the visual form constancy subtask). Further analysis into the root causes suggests that failures stem from challenges like misallocated visual attention and the instability of internal representations for fine-grained details, especially at or below encoder patch resolution. This underscores an urgent need for MLLMs with truly robust visual perception. The benchmark dataset, source code and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Do-You-See-Me.

Can Visual Language Models (VLMs) effectively capture human visual preferences? This work addresses this question by training VLMs to think about preferences at test time, employing reinforcement learning methods inspired by DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI O1. Using datasets such as ImageReward and Human Preference Score v2 (HPSv2), our models achieve accuracies of 64.9% on the ImageReward test set (trained on ImageReward official split) and 65.4% on HPSv2 (trained on approximately 25% of its data). These results match traditional encoder-based models while providing transparent reasoning and enhanced generalization. This approach allows to use not only rich VLM world knowledge, but also its potential to think, yielding interpretable outcomes that help decision-making processes. By demonstrating that human visual preferences reasonable by current VLMs, we introduce efficient soft-reward strategies for image ranking, outperforming simplistic selection or scoring methods. This reasoning capability enables VLMs to rank arbitrary images-regardless of aspect ratio or complexity-thereby potentially amplifying the effectiveness of visual Preference Optimization. By reducing the need for extensive markup while improving reward generalization and explainability, our findings can be a strong mile-stone that will enhance text-to-vision models even further.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across multimodal tasks such as visual perception and reasoning, leading to good performance on various multimodal evaluation benchmarks. However, these benchmarks keep a static nature and overlap with the pre-training data, resulting in fixed complexity constraints and data contamination issues. This raises the concern regarding the validity of the evaluation. To address these two challenges, we introduce a dynamic multimodal evaluation protocol called Vision-Language Bootstrapping (VLB). VLB provides a robust and comprehensive assessment for LVLMs with reduced data contamination and flexible complexity. To this end, VLB dynamically generates new visual question-answering samples through a multimodal bootstrapping module that modifies both images and language, while ensuring that newly generated samples remain consistent with the original ones by a judge module. By composing various bootstrapping strategies, VLB offers dynamic variants of existing benchmarks with diverse complexities, enabling the evaluation to co-evolve with the ever-evolving capabilities of LVLMs. Extensive experimental results across multiple benchmarks, including SEEDBench, MMBench, and MME, show that VLB significantly reduces data contamination and exposes performance limitations of LVLMs.

In Visual Question Answering (VQA), answers have a great correlation with question meaning and visual contents. Thus, to selectively utilize image, question and answer information, we propose a novel trilinear interaction model which simultaneously learns high level associations between these three inputs. In addition, to overcome the interaction complexity, we introduce a multimodal tensor-based PARALIND decomposition which efficiently parameterizes trilinear interaction between the three inputs. Moreover, knowledge distillation is first time applied in Free-form Opened-ended VQA. It is not only for reducing the computational cost and required memory but also for transferring knowledge from trilinear interaction model to bilinear interaction model. The extensive experiments on benchmarking datasets TDIUC, VQA-2.0, and Visual7W show that the proposed compact trilinear interaction model achieves state-of-the-art results when using a single model on all three datasets.

While deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art accuracies for many prediction tasks, understanding these models remains a challenge. Despite the recent interest in developing visual tools to help users interpret deep learning models, the complexity and wide variety of models deployed in industry, and the large-scale datasets that they used, pose unique design challenges that are inadequately addressed by existing work. Through participatory design sessions with over 15 researchers and engineers at Facebook, we have developed, deployed, and iteratively improved ActiVis, an interactive visualization system for interpreting large-scale deep learning models and results. By tightly integrating multiple coordinated views, such as a computation graph overview of the model architecture, and a neuron activation view for pattern discovery and comparison, users can explore complex deep neural network models at both the instance- and subset-level. ActiVis has been deployed on Facebook's machine learning platform. We present case studies with Facebook researchers and engineers, and usage scenarios of how ActiVis may work with different models.

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled unified understanding across text and images, yet equipping these models with robust image generation capabilities remains challenging. Existing approaches often rely on reconstruction-oriented autoencoders or complex bridging mechanisms, leading to misalignment between understanding and generation representations, or architectural complexity. In this work, we propose VUGEN, a novel framework that explicitly leverages VLM's pretrained visual understanding priors for efficient and high-quality image generation. Our approach first transforms the high-dimensional latent space of the VLM's native vision encoder into a lower-dimensional, tractable distribution that maximally preserves visual information. The VLM is then trained to sample within this reduced latent space, ensuring alignment with its visual understanding capabilities. Finally, a dedicated pixel decoder maps these generated latents back to the image space. We find that a VAE-free pixel diffusion decoder to be on par or better than commonly used complex latent diffusion decoders that internally rely on VAE latents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VUGEN achieves superior image generation performance, improving DPG Bench from 71.17 to 74.32 and FID from 11.86 to 9.06 on COCO, while fully preserving the VLM's original understanding capabilities.

This paper presents a unified multimodal pre-trained model called N\"UWA that can generate new or manipulate existing visual data (i.e., images and videos) for various visual synthesis tasks. To cover language, image, and video at the same time for different scenarios, a 3D transformer encoder-decoder framework is designed, which can not only deal with videos as 3D data but also adapt to texts and images as 1D and 2D data, respectively. A 3D Nearby Attention (3DNA) mechanism is also proposed to consider the nature of the visual data and reduce the computational complexity. We evaluate N\"UWA on 8 downstream tasks. Compared to several strong baselines, N\"UWA achieves state-of-the-art results on text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, video prediction, etc. Furthermore, it also shows surprisingly good zero-shot capabilities on text-guided image and video manipulation tasks. Project repo is https://github.com/microsoft/NUWA.

Visual token compression is critical for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to efficiently process high-resolution inputs. Existing methods that typically adopt fixed compression ratios cannot adapt to scenes of varying complexity, often causing imprecise pruning that discards informative visual tokens and results in degraded model performance. To address this issue, we introduce a dynamic pruning framework, GlimpsePrune, inspired by human cognition. It takes a data-driven ''glimpse'' and prunes irrelevant visual tokens in a single forward pass before answer generation. This approach prunes 92.6% of visual tokens while on average fully retaining the baseline performance on free-form VQA tasks. The reduced computational cost also enables more effective fine-tuning: an enhanced GlimpsePrune+ achieves 110% of the baseline performance while maintaining a similarly high pruning rate. Our work paves a new way for building more powerful and efficient LVLMs.

Although current large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced in multimodal understanding and reasoning, their fundamental perceptual and reasoning abilities remain limited. Specifically, even on simple jigsaw tasks, existing VLMs perform near randomly, revealing deficiencies in core perception and reasoning capabilities. While high-quality vision-language data can enhance these capabilities, its scarcity and limited scalability impose significant constraints. To address this, we propose AGILE, an Agentic jiGsaw Interaction Learning for Enhancing visual perception and reasoning in VLMs. AGILE formulates jigsaw solving as an interactive process, enabling the model to progressively engage with the environment. At each step, the model generates executable code to perform an action based on the current state, while the environment provides fine-grained visual feedback to guide task completion. Through this iterative cycle of observation and interaction, the model incrementally improves its perceptual and reasoning capabilities via exploration and feedback. Experimental results show that AGILE not only substantially boosts performance on jigsaw tasks of varying complexity (e.g., increasing accuracy from 9.5% to 82.8% under the 2 times 2 setting) but also demonstrates strong generalization across 9 general vision tasks, achieving an average improvement of 3.1%. These results indicate notable enhancements in both perceptual and reasoning abilities. This work opens a new avenue for advancing reasoning and generalization in multimodal models and provides an efficient, scalable solution to the scarcity of multimodal reinforcement learning data. The code and datasets is available at https://github.com/yuzeng0-0/AGILE .

3D reconstruction from multi-view images is a core challenge in computer vision. Recently, feed-forward methods have emerged as efficient and robust alternatives to traditional per-scene optimization techniques. Among them, state-of-the-art models like the Visual Geometry Grounding Transformer (VGGT) leverage full self-attention over all image tokens to capture global relationships. However, this approach suffers from poor scalability due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention and the large number of tokens generated in long image sequences. In this work, we introduce FlashVGGT, an efficient alternative that addresses this bottleneck through a descriptor-based attention mechanism. Instead of applying dense global attention across all tokens, FlashVGGT compresses spatial information from each frame into a compact set of descriptor tokens. Global attention is then computed as cross-attention between the full set of image tokens and this smaller descriptor set, significantly reducing computational overhead. Moreover, the compactness of the descriptors enables online inference over long sequences via a chunk-recursive mechanism that reuses cached descriptors from previous chunks. Experimental results show that FlashVGGT achieves reconstruction accuracy competitive with VGGT while reducing inference time to just 9.3% of VGGT for 1,000 images, and scaling efficiently to sequences exceeding 3,000 images. Our project page is available at https://wzpscott.github.io/flashvggt_page/.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in talking head generation, owing to its potential to revolutionize the human-AI interaction from text interfaces into realistic video chats. However, research on text-driven talking heads remains underexplored, with existing methods predominantly adopting a cascaded pipeline that combines TTS systems with audio-driven talking head models. This conventional pipeline not only introduces system complexity and latency overhead but also fundamentally suffers from asynchronous audiovisual output and stylistic discrepancies between generated speech and visual expressions. To address these limitations, we introduce OmniTalker, an end-to-end unified framework that simultaneously generates synchronized speech and talking head videos from text and reference video in real-time zero-shot scenarios, while preserving both speech style and facial styles. The framework employs a dual-branch diffusion transformer architecture: the audio branch synthesizes mel-spectrograms from text, while the visual branch predicts fine-grained head poses and facial dynamics. To bridge modalities, we introduce a novel audio-visual fusion module that integrates cross-modal information to ensure temporal synchronization and stylistic coherence between audio and visual outputs. Furthermore, our in-context reference learning module effectively captures both speech and facial style characteristics from a single reference video without introducing an extra style extracting module. To the best of our knowledge, OmniTalker presents the first unified framework that jointly models speech style and facial style in a zero-shot setting, achieving real-time inference speed of 25 FPS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing approaches in generation quality, particularly excelling in style preservation and audio-video synchronization.

Multimodal retrieval systems are becoming increasingly vital for cutting-edge AI technologies, such as embodied AI and AI-driven digital content industries. However, current multimodal retrieval tasks lack sufficient complexity and demonstrate limited practical application value. It spires us to design Instance-Driven Multimodal Image Retrieval (IDMR), a novel task that requires models to retrieve images containing the same instance as a query image while matching a text-described scenario. Unlike existing retrieval tasks focused on global image similarity or category-level matching, IDMR demands fine-grained instance-level consistency across diverse contexts. To benchmark this capability, we develop IDMR-bench using real-world object tracking and first-person video data. Addressing the scarcity of training data, we propose a cross-domain synthesis method that creates 557K training samples by cropping objects from standard detection datasets. Our Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) based retrieval model, trained on 1.2M samples, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both traditional benchmarks and our zero-shot IDMR-bench. Experimental results demonstrate previous models' limitations in instance-aware retrieval and highlight the potential of MLLM for advanced retrieval applications. The whole training dataset, codes and models, with wide ranges of sizes, are available at https://github.com/BwLiu01/IDMR.

Humans possess multimodal literacy, allowing them to actively integrate information from various modalities to form reasoning. Faced with challenges like lexical ambiguity in text, we supplement this with other modalities, such as thumbnail images or textbook illustrations. Is it possible for machines to achieve a similar multimodal understanding capability? In response, we present Understanding Pun with Image Explanations (UNPIE), a novel benchmark designed to assess the impact of multimodal inputs in resolving lexical ambiguities. Puns serve as the ideal subject for this evaluation due to their intrinsic ambiguity. Our dataset includes 1,000 puns, each accompanied by an image that explains both meanings. We pose three multimodal challenges with the annotations to assess different aspects of multimodal literacy; Pun Grounding, Disambiguation, and Reconstruction. The results indicate that various Socratic Models and Visual-Language Models improve over the text-only models when given visual context, particularly as the complexity of the tasks increases.

Recent advances in language and vision have demonstrated that scaling up model capacity consistently improves performance across diverse tasks. In 3D visual geometry reconstruction, large-scale training has likewise proven effective for learning versatile representations. However, further scaling of 3D models is challenging due to the complexity of geometric supervision and the diversity of 3D data. To overcome these limitations, we propose MoRE, a dense 3D visual foundation model based on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that dynamically routes features to task-specific experts, allowing them to specialize in complementary data aspects and enhance both scalability and adaptability. Aiming to improve robustness under real-world conditions, MoRE incorporates a confidence-based depth refinement module that stabilizes and refines geometric estimation. In addition, it integrates dense semantic features with globally aligned 3D backbone representations for high-fidelity surface normal prediction. MoRE is further optimized with tailored loss functions to ensure robust learning across diverse inputs and multiple geometric tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoRE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks and supports effective downstream applications without extra computation.

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) and State Space Models (SSMs) have challenged the dominance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision. ViTs excel at capturing global context, and SSMs like Mamba offer linear complexity for long sequences, yet they do not capture fine-grained local features as effectively as CNNs. Conversely, CNNs possess strong inductive biases for local features but lack the global reasoning capabilities of transformers and Mamba. To bridge this gap, we introduce VCMamba, a novel vision backbone that integrates the strengths of CNNs and multi-directional Mamba SSMs. VCMamba employs a convolutional stem and a hierarchical structure with convolutional blocks in its early stages to extract rich local features. These convolutional blocks are then processed by later stages incorporating multi-directional Mamba blocks designed to efficiently model long-range dependencies and global context. This hybrid design allows for superior feature representation while maintaining linear complexity with respect to image resolution. We demonstrate VCMamba's effectiveness through extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K classification and ADE20K semantic segmentation. Our VCMamba-B achieves 82.6% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, surpassing PlainMamba-L3 by 0.3% with 37% fewer parameters, and outperforming Vision GNN-B by 0.3% with 64% fewer parameters. Furthermore, VCMamba-B obtains 47.1 mIoU on ADE20K, exceeding EfficientFormer-L7 by 2.0 mIoU while utilizing 62% fewer parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/Wertyuui345/VCMamba.

Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have increasingly emphasized document visual grounding to achieve better human-computer interaction, accessibility, and detailed understanding. However, its application to visualizations such as charts remains under-explored due to the inherent complexity of interleaved visual-numerical relationships in chart images. Existing chart understanding methods primarily focus on answering questions without explicitly identifying the visual elements that support their predictions. To bridge this gap, we introduce RefChartQA, a novel benchmark that integrates Chart Question Answering (ChartQA) with visual grounding, enabling models to refer elements at multiple granularities within chart images. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation by instruction-tuning 5 state-of-the-art VLMs across different categories. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating spatial awareness via grounding improves response accuracy by over 15%, reducing hallucinations, and improving model reliability. Additionally, we identify key factors influencing text-spatial alignment, such as architectural improvements in TinyChart, which leverages a token-merging module for enhanced feature fusion. Our dataset is open-sourced for community development and further advancements. All models and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/moured/RefChartQA.

Lip Reading, or Visual Automatic Speech Recognition (V-ASR), is a complex task requiring the interpretation of spoken language exclusively from visual cues, primarily lip movements and facial expressions. This task is especially challenging due to the absence of auditory information and the inherent ambiguity when visually distinguishing phonemes that have overlapping visemes where different phonemes appear identical on the lips. Current methods typically attempt to predict words or characters directly from these visual cues, but this approach frequently encounters high error rates due to coarticulation effects and viseme ambiguity. We propose a novel two-stage, phoneme-centric framework for Visual Automatic Speech Recognition (V-ASR) that addresses these longstanding challenges. First, our model predicts a compact sequence of phonemes from visual inputs using a Video Transformer with a CTC head, thereby reducing the task complexity and achieving robust speaker invariance. This phoneme output then serves as the input to a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), which reconstructs coherent words and sentences by leveraging broader linguistic context. Unlike existing methods that either predict words directly-often faltering on visually similar phonemes-or rely on large-scale multimodal pre-training, our approach explicitly encodes intermediate linguistic structure while remaining highly data efficient. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on two challenging datasets, LRS2 and LRS3, where our method achieves significant reductions in Word Error Rate (WER) achieving a SOTA WER of 18.7 on LRS3 despite using 99.4% less labelled data than the next best approach.

Existing correspondence datasets for two-dimensional (2D) cartoon suffer from simple frame composition and monotonic movements, making them insufficient to simulate real animations. In this work, we present a new 2D animation visual correspondence dataset, AnimeRun, by converting open source three-dimensional (3D) movies to full scenes in 2D style, including simultaneous moving background and interactions of multiple subjects. Our analyses show that the proposed dataset not only resembles real anime more in image composition, but also possesses richer and more complex motion patterns compared to existing datasets. With this dataset, we establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating several existing optical flow and segment matching methods, and analyze shortcomings of these methods on animation data. Data, code and other supplementary materials are available at https://lisiyao21.github.io/projects/AnimeRun.

Recent advances in visual grounding have largely shifted away from traditional proposal-based two-stage frameworks due to their inefficiency and high computational complexity, favoring end-to-end direct reference paradigms. However, these methods rely exclusively on the referred target for supervision, overlooking the potential benefits of prominent prospective targets. Moreover, existing approaches often fail to incorporate multi-granularity discrimination, which is crucial for robust object identification in complex scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose PropVG, an end-to-end proposal-based framework that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to seamlessly integrate foreground object proposal generation with referential object comprehension without requiring additional detectors. Furthermore, we introduce a Contrastive-based Refer Scoring (CRS) module, which employs contrastive learning at both sentence and word levels to enhance the capability in understanding and distinguishing referred objects. Additionally, we design a Multi-granularity Target Discrimination (MTD) module that fuses object- and semantic-level information to improve the recognition of absent targets. Extensive experiments on gRefCOCO (GREC/GRES), Ref-ZOM, R-RefCOCO, and RefCOCO (REC/RES) benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PropVG. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/Dmmm1997/PropVG.

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced visual reasoning, a key capability for embodied AI agents like robots. However, existing visual reasoning benchmarks often suffer from several limitations: they lack a clear definition of reasoning complexity, offer have no control to generate questions over varying difficulty and task customization, and fail to provide structured, step-by-step reasoning annotations (workflows). To bridge these gaps, we formalize reasoning complexity, introduce an adaptive query engine that generates customizable questions of varying complexity with detailed intermediate annotations, and extend the JRDB dataset with human-object interaction and geometric relationship annotations to create JRDB-Reasoning, a benchmark tailored for visual reasoning in human-crowded environments. Our engine and benchmark enable fine-grained evaluation of visual reasoning frameworks and dynamic assessment of visual-language models across reasoning levels.

We introduce InterChart, a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates how well vision-language models (VLMs) reason across multiple related charts, a task central to real-world applications such as scientific reporting, financial analysis, and public policy dashboards. Unlike prior benchmarks focusing on isolated, visually uniform charts, InterChart challenges models with diverse question types ranging from entity inference and trend correlation to numerical estimation and abstract multi-step reasoning grounded in 2-3 thematically or structurally related charts. We organize the benchmark into three tiers of increasing difficulty: (1) factual reasoning over individual charts, (2) integrative analysis across synthetically aligned chart sets, and (3) semantic inference over visually complex, real-world chart pairs. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art open and closed-source VLMs reveals consistent and steep accuracy declines as chart complexity increases. We find that models perform better when we decompose multi-entity charts into simpler visual units, underscoring their struggles with cross-chart integration. By exposing these systematic limitations, InterChart provides a rigorous framework for advancing multimodal reasoning in complex, multi-visual environments.

Recent advances in text-to-image generative models have enabled numerous practical applications, including subject-driven generation, which fine-tunes pretrained models to capture subject semantics from only a few examples. While diffusion-based models produce high-quality images, their extensive denoising steps result in significant computational overhead, limiting real-world applicability. Visual autoregressive~(VAR) models, which predict next-scale tokens rather than spatially adjacent ones, offer significantly faster inference suitable for practical deployment. In this paper, we propose the first VAR-based approach for subject-driven generation. However, na\"{\i}ve fine-tuning VAR leads to computational overhead, language drift, and reduced diversity. To address these challenges, we introduce selective layer tuning to reduce complexity and prior distillation to mitigate language drift. Additionally, we found that the early stages have a greater influence on the generation of subject than the latter stages, which merely synthesize local details. Based on this finding, we propose scale-wise weighted tuning, which prioritizes coarser resolutions for promoting the model to focus on the subject-relevant information instead of local details. Extensive experiments validate that our method significantly outperforms diffusion-based baselines across various metrics and demonstrates its practical usage.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has emerged as a pivotal task in the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, requiring models to understand and reason about visual content in response to natural language questions. Analyzing VQA datasets is essential for developing robust models that can handle the complexities of multimodal reasoning. Several approaches have been developed to examine these datasets, each offering distinct perspectives on question diversity, answer distribution, and visual-textual correlations. Despite significant progress, existing VQA models face challenges related to dataset bias, limited model complexity, commonsense reasoning gaps, rigid evaluation methods, and generalization to real world scenarios. This paper offers a detailed study of the original VQA dataset, baseline models and methods along with a comparative study of five advanced VQA models, ABC-CNN, KICNLE, Masked Vision and Language Modeling, BLIP-2, and OFA, each employing distinct methods to address these ongoing challenges.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently exhibited impressive general-purpose capabilities by leveraging vision foundation models to encode the core concepts of images into representations. These are then combined with instructions and processed by the language model to generate high-quality responses. Despite significant progress in enhancing the language component, challenges persist in optimally fusing visual encodings within the language model for task-specific adaptability. Recent research has focused on improving this fusion through modality adaptation modules but at the cost of significantly increased model complexity and training data needs. In this paper, we propose EMMA (Efficient Multi-Modal Adaptation), a lightweight cross-modality module designed to efficiently fuse visual and textual encodings, generating instruction-aware visual representations for the language model. Our key contributions include: (1) an efficient early fusion mechanism that integrates vision and language representations with minimal added parameters (less than 0.2% increase in model size), (2) an in-depth interpretability analysis that sheds light on the internal mechanisms of the proposed method; (3) comprehensive experiments that demonstrate notable improvements on both specialized and general benchmarks for MLLMs. Empirical results show that EMMA boosts performance across multiple tasks by up to 9.3% while significantly improving robustness against hallucinations. Our code is available at https://github.com/SaraGhazanfari/EMMA

Recently, the advent of Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) has received increasing attention across various domains, particularly in the field of visual document understanding (VDU). Different from conventional vision-language tasks, VDU is specifically concerned with text-rich scenarios containing abundant document elements. Nevertheless, the importance of fine-grained features remains largely unexplored within the community of LVLMs, leading to suboptimal performance in text-rich scenarios. In this paper, we abbreviate it as the fine-grained feature collapse issue. With the aim of filling this gap, we propose a contrastive learning framework, termed Document Object COntrastive learning (DoCo), specifically tailored for the downstream tasks of VDU. DoCo leverages an auxiliary multimodal encoder to obtain the features of document objects and align them to the visual features generated by the vision encoder of LVLM, which enhances visual representation in text-rich scenarios. It can represent that the contrastive learning between the visual holistic representations and the multimodal fine-grained features of document objects can assist the vision encoder in acquiring more effective visual cues, thereby enhancing the comprehension of text-rich documents in LVLMs. We also demonstrate that the proposed DoCo serves as a plug-and-play pre-training method, which can be employed in the pre-training of various LVLMs without inducing any increase in computational complexity during the inference process. Extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks of VDU reveal that LVLMs equipped with our proposed DoCo can achieve superior performance and mitigate the gap between VDU and generic vision-language tasks.

Visual localization is the task of estimating a 6-DoF camera pose of a query image within a provided 3D reference map. Thanks to recent advances in various 3D sensors, 3D point clouds are becoming a more accurate and affordable option for building the reference map, but research to match the points of 3D point clouds with pixels in 2D images for visual localization remains challenging. Existing approaches that jointly learn 2D-3D feature matching suffer from low inliers due to representational differences between the two modalities, and the methods that bypass this problem into classification have an issue of poor refinement. In this work, we propose EP2P-Loc, a novel large-scale visual localization method that mitigates such appearance discrepancy and enables end-to-end training for pose estimation. To increase the number of inliers, we propose a simple algorithm to remove invisible 3D points in the image, and find all 2D-3D correspondences without keypoint detection. To reduce memory usage and search complexity, we take a coarse-to-fine approach where we extract patch-level features from 2D images, then perform 2D patch classification on each 3D point, and obtain the exact corresponding 2D pixel coordinates through positional encoding. Finally, for the first time in this task, we employ a differentiable PnP for end-to-end training. In the experiments on newly curated large-scale indoor and outdoor benchmarks based on 2D-3D-S and KITTI, we show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing visual localization and image-to-point cloud registration methods.

The success of deep learning solving previously-thought hard problems has inspired many non-experts to learn and understand this exciting technology. However, it is often challenging for learners to take the first steps due to the complexity of deep learning models. We present our ongoing work, CNN 101, an interactive visualization system for explaining and teaching convolutional neural networks. Through tightly integrated interactive views, CNN 101 offers both overview and detailed descriptions of how a model works. Built using modern web technologies, CNN 101 runs locally in users' web browsers without requiring specialized hardware, broadening the public's education access to modern deep learning techniques.

Previous research on lightweight models has primarily focused on CNNs and Transformer-based designs. CNNs, with their local receptive fields, struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Transformers, despite their global modeling capabilities, are limited by quadratic computational complexity in high-resolution scenarios. Recently, state-space models have gained popularity in the visual domain due to their linear computational complexity. Despite their low FLOPs, current lightweight Mamba-based models exhibit suboptimal throughput. In this work, we propose the MobileMamba framework, which balances efficiency and performance. We design a three-stage network to enhance inference speed significantly. At a fine-grained level, we introduce the Multi-Receptive Field Feature Interaction(MRFFI) module, comprising the Long-Range Wavelet Transform-Enhanced Mamba(WTE-Mamba), Efficient Multi-Kernel Depthwise Convolution(MK-DeConv), and Eliminate Redundant Identity components. This module integrates multi-receptive field information and enhances high-frequency detail extraction. Additionally, we employ training and testing strategies to further improve performance and efficiency. MobileMamba achieves up to 83.6% on Top-1, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods which is maximum x21 faster than LocalVim on GPU. Extensive experiments on high-resolution downstream tasks demonstrate that MobileMamba surpasses current efficient models, achieving an optimal balance between speed and accuracy.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown impressive capabilities in generating realistic visuals from natural-language prompts, yet they often struggle with accurately binding attributes to corresponding objects, especially in prompts containing multiple attribute-object pairs. This challenge primarily arises from the limitations of commonly used text encoders, such as CLIP, which can fail to encode complex linguistic relationships and modifiers effectively. Existing approaches have attempted to mitigate these issues through attention map control during inference and the use of layout information or fine-tuning during training, yet they face performance drops with increased prompt complexity. In this work, we introduce a novel compositional generation method that leverages pairwise image embeddings to improve attribute-object binding. Our approach decomposes complex prompts into sub-prompts, generates corresponding images, and computes visual prototypes that fuse with text embeddings to enhance representation. By applying segmentation-based localization training, we address cross-attention misalignment, achieving improved accuracy in binding multiple attributes to objects. Our approaches outperform existing compositional text-to-image diffusion models on the benchmark T2I CompBench, achieving better image quality, evaluated by humans, and emerging robustness under scaling number of binding pairs in the prompt.

VILA-U is a Unified foundation model that integrates Video, Image, Language understanding and generation. Traditional visual language models (VLMs) use separate modules for understanding and generating visual content, which can lead to misalignment and increased complexity. In contrast, VILA-U employs a single autoregressive next-token prediction framework for both tasks, eliminating the need for additional components like diffusion models. This approach not only simplifies the model but also achieves near state-of-the-art performance in visual language understanding and generation. The success of VILA-U is attributed to two main factors: the unified vision tower that aligns discrete visual tokens with textual inputs during pretraining, which enhances visual perception, and autoregressive image generation can achieve similar quality as diffusion models with high-quality dataset. This allows VILA-U to perform comparably to more complex models using a fully token-based autoregressive framework.

Event camera-based visual tracking has drawn more and more attention in recent years due to the unique imaging principle and advantages of low energy consumption, high dynamic range, and dense temporal resolution. Current event-based tracking algorithms are gradually hitting their performance bottlenecks, due to the utilization of vision Transformer and the static template for target object localization. In this paper, we propose a novel Mamba-based visual tracking framework that adopts the state space model with linear complexity as a backbone network. The search regions and target template are fed into the vision Mamba network for simultaneous feature extraction and interaction. The output tokens of search regions will be fed into the tracking head for target localization. More importantly, we consider introducing a dynamic template update strategy into the tracking framework using the Memory Mamba network. By considering the diversity of samples in the target template library and making appropriate adjustments to the template memory module, a more effective dynamic template can be integrated. The effective combination of dynamic and static templates allows our Mamba-based tracking algorithm to achieve a good balance between accuracy and computational cost on multiple large-scale datasets, including EventVOT, VisEvent, and FE240hz. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/MambaEVT

While reinforcement learning (RL) over chains of thought has significantly advanced language models in tasks such as mathematics and coding, visual reasoning introduces added complexity by requiring models to direct visual attention, interpret perceptual inputs, and ground abstract reasoning in spatial evidence. We introduce ViGoRL (Visually Grounded Reinforcement Learning), a vision-language model trained with RL to explicitly anchor each reasoning step to specific visual coordinates. Inspired by human visual decision-making, ViGoRL learns to produce spatially grounded reasoning traces, guiding visual attention to task-relevant regions at each step. When fine-grained exploration is required, our novel multi-turn RL framework enables the model to dynamically zoom into predicted coordinates as reasoning unfolds. Across a diverse set of visual reasoning benchmarks--including SAT-2 and BLINK for spatial reasoning, V*bench for visual search, and ScreenSpot and VisualWebArena for web-based grounding--ViGoRL consistently outperforms both supervised fine-tuning and conventional RL baselines that lack explicit grounding mechanisms. Incorporating multi-turn RL with zoomed-in visual feedback significantly improves ViGoRL's performance on localizing small GUI elements and visual search, achieving 86.4% on V*Bench. Additionally, we find that grounding amplifies other visual behaviors such as region exploration, grounded subgoal setting, and visual verification. Finally, human evaluations show that the model's visual references are not only spatially accurate but also helpful for understanding model reasoning steps. Our results show that visually grounded RL is a strong paradigm for imbuing models with general-purpose visual reasoning.

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling has gained popularity for its shift towards next-scale prediction. However, existing VAR paradigms process the entire token map at each scale step, leading to the complexity and runtime scaling dramatically with image resolution. To address this challenge, we propose FastVAR, a post-training acceleration method for efficient resolution scaling with VARs. Our key finding is that the majority of latency arises from the large-scale step where most tokens have already converged. Leveraging this observation, we develop the cached token pruning strategy that only forwards pivotal tokens for scale-specific modeling while using cached tokens from previous scale steps to restore the pruned slots. This significantly reduces the number of forwarded tokens and improves the efficiency at larger resolutions. Experiments show the proposed FastVAR can further speedup FlashAttention-accelerated VAR by 2.7times with negligible performance drop of <1%. We further extend FastVAR to zero-shot generation of higher resolution images. In particular, FastVAR can generate one 2K image with 15GB memory footprints in 1.5s on a single NVIDIA 3090 GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/csguoh/FastVAR.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to adapt models from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains. When adapting to adverse scenes, existing UDA methods fail to perform well due to the lack of instructions, leading their models to overlook discrepancies within all adverse scenes. To tackle this, we propose CoDA which instructs models to distinguish, focus, and learn from these discrepancies at scene and image levels. Specifically, CoDA consists of a Chain-of-Domain (CoD) strategy and a Severity-Aware Visual Prompt Tuning (SAVPT) mechanism. CoD focuses on scene-level instructions to divide all adverse scenes into easy and hard scenes, guiding models to adapt from source to easy domains with easy scene images, and then to hard domains with hard scene images, thereby laying a solid foundation for whole adaptations. Building upon this foundation, we employ SAVPT to dive into more detailed image-level instructions to boost performance. SAVPT features a novel metric Severity that divides all adverse scene images into low-severity and high-severity images. Then Severity directs visual prompts and adapters, instructing models to concentrate on unified severity features instead of scene-specific features, without adding complexity to the model architecture. CoDA achieves SOTA performances on widely-used benchmarks under all adverse scenes. Notably, CoDA outperforms the existing ones by 4.6%, and 10.3% mIoU on the Foggy Driving, and Foggy Zurich benchmarks, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/Cuzyoung/CoDA

Face inpainting is important in various applications, such as photo restoration, image editing, and virtual reality. Despite the significant advances in face generative models, ensuring that a person's unique facial identity is maintained during the inpainting process is still an elusive goal. Current state-of-the-art techniques, exemplified by MyStyle, necessitate resource-intensive fine-tuning and a substantial number of images for each new identity. Furthermore, existing methods often fall short in accommodating user-specified semantic attributes, such as beard or expression. To improve inpainting results, and reduce the computational complexity during inference, this paper proposes the use of Parallel Visual Attention (PVA) in conjunction with diffusion models. Specifically, we insert parallel attention matrices to each cross-attention module in the denoising network, which attends to features extracted from reference images by an identity encoder. We train the added attention modules and identity encoder on CelebAHQ-IDI, a dataset proposed for identity-preserving face inpainting. Experiments demonstrate that PVA attains unparalleled identity resemblance in both face inpainting and face inpainting with language guidance tasks, in comparison to various benchmarks, including MyStyle, Paint by Example, and Custom Diffusion. Our findings reveal that PVA ensures good identity preservation while offering effective language-controllability. Additionally, in contrast to Custom Diffusion, PVA requires just 40 fine-tuning steps for each new identity, which translates to a significant speed increase of over 20 times.

Automated reverse engineering of HTML/CSS code from UI screenshots is an important yet challenging problem with broad applications in website development and design. In this paper, we propose a novel vision-code transformer (ViCT) composed of a vision encoder processing the screenshots and a language decoder to generate the code. They are initialized by pre-trained models such as ViT/DiT and GPT-2/LLaMA but aligning the two modalities requires end-to-end finetuning, which aims to minimize the visual discrepancy between the code-rendered webpage and the original screenshot. However, the rendering is non-differentiable and causes costly overhead. We address this problem by actor-critic fine-tuning where a visual critic without rendering (ViCR) is developed to predict visual discrepancy given the original and generated code. To train and evaluate our models, we created two synthetic datasets of varying complexity, with over 75,000 unique (code, screenshot) pairs. We evaluate the UI-to-Code performance using a combination of automated metrics such as MSE, BLEU, IoU, and a novel htmlBLEU score. ViCT outperforms a strong baseline model DiT-GPT2, improving IoU from 0.64 to 0.79 and lowering MSE from 12.25 to 9.02. With much lower computational cost, it can achieve comparable performance as when using a larger decoder such as LLaMA.

In recent years, vision-language research has shifted to study tasks which require more complex reasoning, such as interactive question answering, visual common sense reasoning, and question-answer plausibility prediction. However, the datasets used for these problems fail to capture the complexity of real inputs and multimodal environments, such as ambiguous natural language requests and diverse digital domains. We introduce Mobile app Tasks with Iterative Feedback (MoTIF), a dataset with natural language commands for the greatest number of interactive environments to date. MoTIF is the first to contain natural language requests for interactive environments that are not satisfiable, and we obtain follow-up questions on this subset to enable research on task uncertainty resolution. We perform initial feasibility classification experiments and only reach an F1 score of 37.3, verifying the need for richer vision-language representations and improved architectures to reason about task feasibility.

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into autonomous driving motion planning has recently emerged as a promising direction, offering enhanced interpretability, better controllability, and improved generalization in rare and long-tail scenarios. However, existing methods often rely on abstracted perception or map-based inputs, missing crucial visual context, such as fine-grained road cues, accident aftermath, or unexpected obstacles, which are essential for robust decision-making in complex driving environments. To bridge this gap, we propose VLMPlanner, a hybrid framework that combines a learning-based real-time planner with a vision-language model (VLM) capable of reasoning over raw images. The VLM processes multi-view images to capture rich, detailed visual information and leverages its common-sense reasoning capabilities to guide the real-time planner in generating robust and safe trajectories. Furthermore, we develop the Context-Adaptive Inference Gate (CAI-Gate) mechanism that enables the VLM to mimic human driving behavior by dynamically adjusting its inference frequency based on scene complexity, thereby achieving an optimal balance between planning performance and computational efficiency. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale, challenging nuPlan benchmark, with comprehensive experimental results demonstrating superior planning performance in scenarios with intricate road conditions and dynamic elements. Code will be available.

Recent efforts on image restoration have focused on developing "all-in-one" models that can handle different degradation types and levels within single model. However, most of mainstream Transformer-based ones confronted with dilemma between model capabilities and computation burdens, since self-attention mechanism quadratically increase in computational complexity with respect to image size, and has inadequacies in capturing long-range dependencies. Most of Mamba-related ones solely scanned feature map in spatial dimension for global modeling, failing to fully utilize information in channel dimension. To address aforementioned problems, this paper has proposed to fully utilize complementary advantages from Mamba and Transformer without sacrificing computation efficiency. Specifically, the selective scanning mechanism of Mamba is employed to focus on spatial modeling, enabling capture long-range spatial dependencies under linear complexity. The self-attention mechanism of Transformer is applied to focus on channel modeling, avoiding high computation burdens that are in quadratic growth with image's spatial dimensions. Moreover, to enrich informative prompts for effective image restoration, multi-dimensional prompt learning modules are proposed to learn prompt-flows from multi-scale encoder/decoder layers, benefiting for revealing underlying characteristic of various degradations from both spatial and channel perspectives, therefore, enhancing the capabilities of "all-in-one" model to solve various restoration tasks. Extensive experiment results on several image restoration benchmark tasks such as image denoising, dehazing, and deraining, have demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve new state-of-the-art performance, compared with many popular mainstream methods. Related source codes and pre-trained parameters will be public on github https://github.com/12138-chr/MTAIR.

Recently, State Space Models (SSMs) with efficient hardware-aware designs, i.e., Mamba, have demonstrated significant potential in computer vision tasks due to their linear computational complexity with respect to token length and their global receptive field. However, Mamba's performance on dense prediction tasks, including human pose estimation and semantic segmentation, has been constrained by three key challenges: insufficient inductive bias, long-range forgetting, and low-resolution output representation. To address these challenges, we introduce the Dynamic Visual State Space (DVSS) block, which utilizes multi-scale convolutional kernels to extract local features across different scales and enhance inductive bias, and employs deformable convolution to mitigate the long-range forgetting problem while enabling adaptive spatial aggregation based on input and task-specific information. By leveraging the multi-resolution parallel design proposed in HRNet, we introduce High-Resolution Visual State Space Model (HRVMamba) based on the DVSS block, which preserves high-resolution representations throughout the entire process while promoting effective multi-scale feature learning. Extensive experiments highlight HRVMamba's impressive performance on dense prediction tasks, achieving competitive results against existing benchmark models without bells and whistles. Code is available at https://github.com/zhanghao5201/HRVMamba.

Vision Transformers (ViT) have emerged as the de-facto choice for numerous industry grade vision solutions. But their inference cost can be prohibitive for many settings, as they compute self-attention in each layer which suffers from quadratic computational complexity in the number of tokens. On the other hand, spatial information in images and spatio-temporal information in videos is usually sparse and redundant. In this work, we introduce LookupViT, that aims to exploit this information sparsity to reduce ViT inference cost. LookupViT provides a novel general purpose vision transformer block that operates by compressing information from higher resolution tokens to a fixed number of tokens. These few compressed tokens undergo meticulous processing, while the higher-resolution tokens are passed through computationally cheaper layers. Information sharing between these two token sets is enabled through a bidirectional cross-attention mechanism. The approach offers multiple advantages - (a) easy to implement on standard ML accelerators (GPUs/TPUs) via standard high-level operators, (b) applicable to standard ViT and its variants, thus generalizes to various tasks, (c) can handle different tokenization and attention approaches. LookupViT also offers flexibility for the compressed tokens, enabling performance-computation trade-offs in a single trained model. We show LookupViT's effectiveness on multiple domains - (a) for image-classification (ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-21K), (b) video classification (Kinetics400 and Something-Something V2), (c) image captioning (COCO-Captions) with a frozen encoder. LookupViT provides 2times reduction in FLOPs while upholding or improving accuracy across these domains. In addition, LookupViT also demonstrates out-of-the-box robustness and generalization on image classification (ImageNet-C,R,A,O), improving by up to 4% over ViT.

Text-guided 3D visual grounding (T-3DVG), which aims to locate a specific object that semantically corresponds to a language query from a complicated 3D scene, has drawn increasing attention in the 3D research community over the past few years. Compared to 2D visual grounding, this task presents great potential and challenges due to its closer proximity to the real world and the complexity of data collection and 3D point cloud source processing. In this survey, we attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of the T-3DVG progress, including its fundamental elements, recent research advances, and future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic survey on the T-3DVG task. Specifically, we first provide a general structure of the T-3DVG pipeline with detailed components in a tutorial style, presenting a complete background overview. Then, we summarize the existing T-3DVG approaches into different categories and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. We also present the benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics to assess their performances. Finally, we discuss the potential limitations of existing T-3DVG and share some insights on several promising research directions. The latest papers are continually collected at https://github.com/liudaizong/Awesome-3D-Visual-Grounding.

Autoregressive next-token prediction is a standard pretraining method for large-scale language models, but its application to vision tasks is hindered by the non-sequential nature of image data, leading to cumulative errors. Most vision models employ masked autoencoder (MAE) based pretraining, which faces scalability issues. To address these challenges, we introduce TokenUnify, a novel pretraining method that integrates random token prediction, next-token prediction, and next-all token prediction. We provide theoretical evidence demonstrating that TokenUnify mitigates cumulative errors in visual autoregression. Cooperated with TokenUnify, we have assembled a large-scale electron microscopy (EM) image dataset with ultra-high resolution, ideal for creating spatially correlated long sequences. This dataset includes over 120 million annotated voxels, making it the largest neuron segmentation dataset to date and providing a unified benchmark for experimental validation. Leveraging the Mamba network inherently suited for long-sequence modeling on this dataset, TokenUnify not only reduces the computational complexity but also leads to a significant 45\% improvement in segmentation performance on downstream EM neuron segmentation tasks compared to existing methods. Furthermore, TokenUnify demonstrates superior scalability over MAE and traditional autoregressive methods, effectively bridging the gap between pretraining strategies for language and vision models. Code is available at https://github.com/ydchen0806/TokenUnify.

The ability of deep neural networks to generalise well even when they interpolate their training data has been explained using various "simplicity biases". These theories postulate that neural networks avoid overfitting by first learning simple functions, say a linear classifier, before learning more complex, non-linear functions. Meanwhile, data structure is also recognised as a key ingredient for good generalisation, yet its role in simplicity biases is not yet understood. Here, we show that neural networks trained using stochastic gradient descent initially classify their inputs using lower-order input statistics, like mean and covariance, and exploit higher-order statistics only later during training. We first demonstrate this distributional simplicity bias (DSB) in a solvable model of a neural network trained on synthetic data. We empirically demonstrate DSB in a range of deep convolutional networks and visual transformers trained on CIFAR10, and show that it even holds in networks pre-trained on ImageNet. We discuss the relation of DSB to other simplicity biases and consider its implications for the principle of Gaussian universality in learning.

Weakly-supervised audio-visual violence detection aims to distinguish snippets containing multimodal violence events with video-level labels. Many prior works perform audio-visual integration and interaction in an early or intermediate manner, yet overlooking the modality heterogeneousness over the weakly-supervised setting. In this paper, we analyze the modality asynchrony and undifferentiated instances phenomena of the multiple instance learning (MIL) procedure, and further investigate its negative impact on weakly-supervised audio-visual learning. To address these issues, we propose a modality-aware contrastive instance learning with self-distillation (MACIL-SD) strategy. Specifically, we leverage a lightweight two-stream network to generate audio and visual bags, in which unimodal background, violent, and normal instances are clustered into semi-bags in an unsupervised way. Then audio and visual violent semi-bag representations are assembled as positive pairs, and violent semi-bags are combined with background and normal instances in the opposite modality as contrastive negative pairs. Furthermore, a self-distillation module is applied to transfer unimodal visual knowledge to the audio-visual model, which alleviates noises and closes the semantic gap between unimodal and multimodal features. Experiments show that our framework outperforms previous methods with lower complexity on the large-scale XD-Violence dataset. Results also demonstrate that our proposed approach can be used as plug-in modules to enhance other networks. Codes are available at https://github.com/JustinYuu/MACIL_SD.

This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person; (3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips; (4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the dataset publicly. AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories. While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results on AVA are low at 15.6% mAP, underscoring the need for developing new approaches for video understanding.

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been driven largely by undisclosed datasets and proprietary data synthesis recipes, leaving open questions about how to systematically build large-scale, vision-centric reasoning datasets, particularly for tasks that go beyond visual math. In this work, we introduce a new reasoning data generation framework spanning diverse skills and levels of complexity with over 1M high-quality synthetic vision-centric questions. The dataset also includes preference data and instruction prompts supporting both offline and online RL. Our synthesis framework proceeds in two stages: (1) scale; and (2) complexity. Reasoning traces are then synthesized through a two-stage process that leverages VLMs and reasoning LLMs, producing CoT traces for VLMs that capture the richness and diverse cognitive behaviors found in frontier reasoning models. Remarkably, we show that finetuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on our data outperforms all open-data baselines across all evaluated vision-centric benchmarks, and even surpasses strong closed-data models such as MiMo-VL-7B-RL on V* Bench, CV-Bench and MMStar-V. Perhaps most surprising, despite being entirely vision-centric, our data transfers positively to text-only reasoning (MMLU-Pro) and audio reasoning (MMAU), demonstrating its effectiveness. Similarly, despite not containing videos or embodied visual data, we observe notable gains when evaluating on a single-evidence embodied QA benchmark (NiEH). Finally, we use our data to analyze the entire VLM post-training pipeline. Our empirical analysis highlights that (i) SFT on high-quality data with non-linear reasoning traces is essential for effective online RL, (ii) staged offline RL matches online RL's performance while reducing compute demands, and (iii) careful SFT on high quality data can substantially improve out-of-domain, cross-modality transfer.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) struggle with puzzles, which require precise perception, rule comprehension, and logical reasoning. Assessing and enhancing their performance in this domain is crucial, as it reflects their ability to engage in structured reasoning - an essential skill for real-world problem-solving. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate pre-trained models without additional training or fine-tuning, often lack a dedicated focus on reasoning, and fail to establish a systematic evaluation framework. To address these limitations, we introduce VGRP-Bench, a Visual Grid Reasoning Puzzle Benchmark featuring 20 diverse puzzles. VGRP-Bench spans multiple difficulty levels, and includes extensive experiments not only on existing chat LVLMs (e.g., GPT-4o), but also on reasoning LVLMs (e.g., Gemini-Thinking). Our results reveal that even the state-of-the-art LVLMs struggle with these puzzles, highlighting fundamental limitations in their puzzle-solving capabilities. Most importantly, through systematic experiments, we identify and analyze key factors influencing LVLMs' puzzle-solving performance, including the number of clues, grid size, and rule complexity. Furthermore, we explore two Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) strategies that can be used in post-training: SFT on solutions (S-SFT) and SFT on synthetic reasoning processes (R-SFT). While both methods significantly improve performance on trained puzzles, they exhibit limited generalization to unseen ones. We will release VGRP-Bench to facilitate further research on LVLMs for complex, real-world problem-solving. Project page: https://yufan-ren.com/subpage/VGRP-Bench/.

Recently, MLP-based vision backbones have achieved promising performance in several visual recognition tasks. However, the existing MLP-based methods directly aggregate tokens with static weights, leaving the adaptability to different images untouched. Moreover, Recent research demonstrates that MLP-Transformer is great at creating long-range dependencies but ineffective at catching high frequencies that primarily transmit local information, which prevents it from applying to the downstream dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation. To address these challenges, we propose a content-adaptive yet computationally efficient structure, dubbed Dynamic Spectrum Mixer (DSM). The DSM represents token interactions in the frequency domain by employing the Discrete Cosine Transform, which can learn long-term spatial dependencies with log-linear complexity. Furthermore, a dynamic spectrum weight generation layer is proposed as the spectrum bands selector, which could emphasize the informative frequency bands while diminishing others. To this end, the technique can efficiently learn detailed features from visual input that contains both high- and low-frequency information. Extensive experiments show that DSM is a powerful and adaptable backbone for a range of visual recognition tasks. Particularly, DSM outperforms previous transformer-based and MLP-based models, on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks, such as 83.8 \% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, and 49.9 \% mIoU on ADE20K.

Conventional Vision-Language Models(VLMs) typically utilize a fixed number of vision tokens, regardless of task complexity. This one-size-fits-all strategy introduces notable inefficiencies: using excessive tokens leads to unnecessary computational overhead in simpler tasks, whereas insufficient tokens compromise fine-grained visual comprehension in more complex contexts. To overcome these limitations, we present TokenFLEX, an innovative and adaptable vision-language framework that encodes images into a variable number of tokens for efficient integration with a Large Language Model (LLM). Our approach is underpinned by two pivotal innovations. Firstly, we present a novel training paradigm that enhances performance across varying numbers of vision tokens by stochastically modulating token counts during training. Secondly, we design a lightweight vision token projector incorporating an adaptive pooling layer and SwiGLU, allowing for flexible downsampling of vision tokens and adaptive selection of features tailored to specific token counts. Comprehensive experiments reveal that TokenFLEX consistently outperforms its fixed-token counterparts, achieving notable performance gains across various token counts enhancements of 1.6%, 1.0%, and 0.4% with 64, 144, and 256 tokens, respectively averaged over eight vision-language benchmarks. These results underscore TokenFLEX's remarkable flexibility while maintaining high-performance vision-language understanding.

Recent advancements in state-space models (SSMs) have showcased effective performance in modeling long-range dependencies with subquadratic complexity. However, pure SSM-based models still face challenges related to stability and achieving optimal performance on computer vision tasks. Our paper addresses the challenges of scaling SSM-based models for computer vision, particularly the instability and inefficiency of large model sizes. To address this, we introduce a Modulated Group Mamba layer which divides the input channels into four groups and applies our proposed SSM-based efficient Visual Single Selective Scanning (VSSS) block independently to each group, with each VSSS block scanning in one of the four spatial directions. The Modulated Group Mamba layer also wraps the four VSSS blocks into a channel modulation operator to improve cross-channel communication. Furthermore, we introduce a distillation-based training objective to stabilize the training of large models, leading to consistent performance gains. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the merits of the proposed contributions, leading to superior performance over existing methods for image classification on ImageNet-1K, object detection, instance segmentation on MS-COCO, and semantic segmentation on ADE20K. Our tiny variant with 23M parameters achieves state-of-the-art performance with a classification top-1 accuracy of 83.3% on ImageNet-1K, while being 26% efficient in terms of parameters, compared to the best existing Mamba design of same model size. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/Amshaker/GroupMamba.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at simple vision-language tasks but struggle when faced with complex tasks that require multiple capabilities, such as simultaneously recognizing objects, counting them, and understanding their spatial relationships. This might be partially the result of the fact that Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT), a critical training step for MLLMs, has traditionally focused on scaling data volume, but not the compositional complexity of training examples. We propose COMPACT (COMPositional Atomic-to-complex visual Capability Tuning), which generates a training dataset explicitly controlling for the compositional complexity of the training examples. The data from COMPACT allows MLLMs to train on combinations of atomic capabilities to learn complex capabilities more efficiently. Across all benchmarks, COMPACT achieves comparable performance to the LLaVA-665k VIT while using less than 10% of its data budget, and even outperforms it on several, especially those involving complex multi-capability tasks. For example, COMPACT achieves substantial 83.3% improvement on MMStar and 94.0% improvement on MM-Vet compared to the full-scale VIT on particularly complex questions that require four or more atomic capabilities. COMPACT offers a scalable, data-efficient, visual compositional tuning recipe to improve on complex visual-language tasks.

Comprehending text-rich visual content is paramount for the practical application of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), since text-rich scenarios are ubiquitous in the real world, which are characterized by the presence of extensive texts embedded within images. Recently, the advent of MLLMs with impressive versatility has raised the bar for what we can expect from MLLMs. However, their proficiency in text-rich scenarios has yet to be comprehensively and objectively assessed, since current MLLM benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating general visual comprehension. In this work, we introduce SEED-Bench-2-Plus, a benchmark specifically designed for evaluating text-rich visual comprehension of MLLMs. Our benchmark comprises 2.3K multiple-choice questions with precise human annotations, spanning three broad categories: Charts, Maps, and Webs, each of which covers a wide spectrum of text-rich scenarios in the real world. These categories, due to their inherent complexity and diversity, effectively simulate real-world text-rich environments. We further conduct a thorough evaluation involving 34 prominent MLLMs (including GPT-4V, Gemini-Pro-Vision and Claude-3-Opus) and emphasize the current limitations of MLLMs in text-rich visual comprehension. We hope that our work can serve as a valuable addition to existing MLLM benchmarks, providing insightful observations and inspiring further research in the area of text-rich visual comprehension with MLLMs. The dataset and evaluation code can be accessed at https://github.com/AILab-CVC/SEED-Bench.

Remote sensing (RS) visual tasks have gained significant academic and practical importance. However, they encounter numerous challenges that hinder effective feature extraction, including the detection and recognition of multiple objects exhibiting substantial variations in scale within a single image. While prior dual-branch or multi-branch architectural strategies have been effective in managing these object variances, they have concurrently resulted in considerable increases in computational demands and parameter counts. Consequently, these architectures are rendered less viable for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Contemporary lightweight backbone networks, designed primarily for natural images, frequently encounter difficulties in effectively extracting features from multi-scale objects, which compromises their efficacy in RS visual tasks. This article introduces LWGANet, a specialized lightweight backbone network tailored for RS visual tasks, incorporating a novel lightweight group attention (LWGA) module designed to address these specific challenges. LWGA module, tailored for RS imagery, adeptly harnesses redundant features to extract a wide range of spatial information, from local to global scales, without introducing additional complexity or computational overhead. This facilitates precise feature extraction across multiple scales within an efficient framework.LWGANet was rigorously evaluated across twelve datasets, which span four crucial RS visual tasks: scene classification, oriented object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. The results confirm LWGANet's widespread applicability and its ability to maintain an optimal balance between high performance and low complexity, achieving SOTA results across diverse datasets. LWGANet emerged as a novel solution for resource-limited scenarios requiring robust RS image processing capabilities.

Visual transformation reasoning (VTR) is a vital cognitive capability that empowers intelligent agents to understand dynamic scenes, model causal relationships, and predict future states, and thereby guiding actions and laying the foundation for advanced intelligent systems. However, existing benchmarks suffer from a sim-to-real gap, limited task complexity, and incomplete reasoning coverage, limiting their practical use in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce VisualTrans, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for VTR in real-world human-object interaction scenarios. VisualTrans encompasses 12 semantically diverse manipulation tasks and systematically evaluates three essential reasoning dimensions - spatial, procedural, and quantitative - through 6 well-defined subtask types. The benchmark features 472 high-quality question-answer pairs in various formats, including multiple-choice, open-ended counting, and target enumeration. We introduce a scalable data construction pipeline built upon first-person manipulation videos, which integrates task selection, image pair extraction, automated metadata annotation with large multimodal models, and structured question generation. Human verification ensures the final benchmark is both high-quality and interpretable. Evaluations of various state-of-the-art vision-language models show strong performance in static spatial tasks. However, they reveal notable shortcomings in dynamic, multi-step reasoning scenarios, particularly in areas like intermediate state recognition and transformation sequence planning. These findings highlight fundamental weaknesses in temporal modeling and causal reasoning, providing clear directions for future research aimed at developing more capable and generalizable VTR systems. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/WangYipu2002/VisualTrans.

Recently, a novel visual state space (VSS) model, referred to as Mamba, has demonstrated significant progress in modeling long sequences with linear complexity, comparable to Transformer models, thereby enhancing its adaptability for processing visual data. Although most methods aim to enhance the global receptive field by directly modifying Mamba's scanning mechanism, they tend to overlook the critical importance of local information in dense prediction tasks. Additionally, whether Mamba can effectively extract local features as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) do remains an open question that merits further investigation. In this paper, We propose a novel model, AtrousMamba, which effectively balances the extraction of fine-grained local details with the integration of global contextual information. Specifically, our method incorporates an atrous-window selective scan mechanism, enabling a gradual expansion of the scanning range with adjustable rates. This design shortens the distance between adjacent tokens, enabling the model to effectively capture fine-grained local features and global context. By leveraging the atrous window scan visual state space (AWVSS) module, we design dedicated end-to-end Mamba-based frameworks for binary change detection (BCD) and semantic change detection (SCD), referred to as AWMambaBCD and AWMambaSCD, respectively. Experimental results on six benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms existing CNN-based, Transformer-based, and Mamba-based methods. These findings clearly demonstrate that Mamba not only captures long-range dependencies in visual data but also effectively preserves fine-grained local details.

Semantic future prediction is important for autonomous systems navigating dynamic environments. This paper introduces FUTURIST, a method for multimodal future semantic prediction that uses a unified and efficient visual sequence transformer architecture. Our approach incorporates a multimodal masked visual modeling objective and a novel masking mechanism designed for multimodal training. This allows the model to effectively integrate visible information from various modalities, improving prediction accuracy. Additionally, we propose a VAE-free hierarchical tokenization process, which reduces computational complexity, streamlines the training pipeline, and enables end-to-end training with high-resolution, multimodal inputs. We validate FUTURIST on the Cityscapes dataset, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in future semantic segmentation for both short- and mid-term forecasting. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/Sta8is/FUTURIST .

Vision-language large models have achieved remarkable success in various multi-modal tasks, yet applying them to video understanding remains challenging due to the inherent complexity and computational demands of video data. While training-based video-LLMs deliver high performance, they often require substantial resources for training and inference. Conversely, training-free approaches offer a more efficient alternative by adapting pre-trained image-LLMs models for video tasks without additional training, but they face inference efficiency bottlenecks due to the large number of visual tokens generated from video frames. In this work, we present a novel prompt-guided visual perception framework (abbreviated as Free Video-LLM) for efficient inference of training-free video LLMs. The proposed framework decouples spatial-temporal dimension and performs temporal frame sampling and spatial RoI cropping respectively based on task-specific prompts. Our method effectively reduces the number of visual tokens while maintaining high performance across multiple video question-answering benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive results with significantly fewer tokens, offering an optimal trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art video LLMs. The code will be available at https://github.com/contrastive/FreeVideoLLM.

Despite the significant achievements of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in various vision tasks, they are constrained by the quadratic complexity. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their global receptive field and linear complexity with respect to the input length, demonstrating substantial potential across fields including natural language processing and computer vision. To improve the performance of SSMs in vision tasks, a multi-scan strategy is widely adopted, which leads to significant redundancy of SSMs. For a better trade-off between efficiency and performance, we analyze the underlying reasons behind the success of the multi-scan strategy, where long-range dependency plays an important role. Based on the analysis, we introduce Multi-Scale Vision Mamba (MSVMamba) to preserve the superiority of SSMs in vision tasks with limited parameters. It employs a multi-scale 2D scanning technique on both original and downsampled feature maps, which not only benefits long-range dependency learning but also reduces computational costs. Additionally, we integrate a Convolutional Feed-Forward Network (ConvFFN) to address the lack of channel mixing. Our experiments demonstrate that MSVMamba is highly competitive, with the MSVMamba-Tiny model achieving 82.8% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, 46.9% box mAP, and 42.2% instance mAP with the Mask R-CNN framework, 1x training schedule on COCO, and 47.6% mIoU with single-scale testing on ADE20K.Code is available at https://github.com/YuHengsss/MSVMamba.

In production, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are expected to support multi-turn queries of interchanging image and text modalities. However, the current MLLMs trained with visual-question-answering (VQA) datasets could suffer from degradation, as VQA datasets lack the diversity and complexity of the original text instruction datasets which the underlying language model had been trained with. To address this challenging degradation, we first collect a lightweight (6k entries) VQA preference dataset where answers were annotated by Gemini for 5 quality metrics in a granular fashion, and investigate standard Supervised Fine-tuning, rejection sampling, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and SteerLM. Our findings indicate that the with DPO we are able to surpass instruction-following capabilities of the language model, achieving a 6.73 score on MT-Bench, compared to Vicuna's 6.57 and LLaVA's 5.99 despite small data scale. This enhancement in textual instruction proficiency correlates with boosted visual instruction performance (+4.9\% on MM-Vet, +6\% on LLaVA-Bench), with minimal alignment tax on visual knowledge benchmarks compared to previous RLHF approach. In conclusion, we propose a distillation-based multi-modal alignment model with fine-grained annotations on a small dataset that reconciles the textual and visual performance of MLLMs, restoring and boosting language capability after visual instruction tuning.