论文检索

输入标题、作者或关键词,从 14,273 篇学术成果中精准定位

会议来源 已选 1 项

机器学习与综合 AI

自然语言处理

计算机视觉

数据挖掘与 Web

多媒体与图形学

已选择 1 个会议
支持跨会议组合检索,PDF 均跳转至官方来源
已筛选 NeurIPS
14,273篇论文
第 124 / 714 页

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Cheng Shi, Yizhou Yu, Sibei Yang

This study identifies that visual-related functional decoding is distributed across different decoder layers in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Typically, each function, such as counting, grounding, or OCR recognition, narrows down to two or three layers, which we define as Vision Function Layers (VFL). Additionally, the depth and its order of different VFLs exhibits a consistent pattern across different MLLMs, which is well-aligned with human behaviors (e.g., recognition occurs first, followed by counting, and then grounding). These findings are derived from Visual Token Swapping, our novel analytical framework that modifies targeted KV cache entries to precisely elucidate layer-specific functions during decoding. Furthermore, these insights offer substantial utility in tailoring MLLMs for real-world downstream applications. For instance, when LoRA training is selectively applied to VFLs whose functions align with the training data, VFL-LoRA not only outperform full-LoRA but also prevent out-of-domain function forgetting. Moreover, by analyzing the performance differential on training data when particular VFLs are ablated, VFL-select automatically classifies data by function, enabling highly efficient data selection to directly bolster corresponding capabilities. Consequently, VFL-select surpasses human experts in data selection, and achieves 98% of full-data performance with only 20% of the original dataset. This study delivers deeper comprehension of MLLM visual processing, fostering the creation of more efficient, interpretable, and robust models.

Reinforcement Learning · Deep RL

Jiayu Wang, Yifei Ming, Zixuan Ke, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty, Aws Albarghouthi, Frederic Sala

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the performance of language models on complex reasoning tasks. Despite the substantial empirical gains demonstrated by RL-based training methods like GRPO, a granular understanding of why and how RL enhances performance is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we introduce SPARKLE, a fine-grained analytic framework to dissect the effects of RL across three key dimensions: (1) plan following and execution, (2) knowledge integration, and (3) chain of subproblems. Using this framework, we gain insights beyond mere accuracy. For instance, providing models with explicit human-crafted, step-by-step plans can surprisingly degrade performance on the most challenging benchmarks, yet RL-tuned models exhibit greater robustness, experiencing markedly smaller performance drops than base or SFT models. This suggests that RL may not primarily enhance the execution of external plans but rather empower models to formulate and follow internal strategies better suited to their reasoning processes. Conversely, we observe that RL enhances models' ability to integrate provided knowledge into their reasoning process, yielding consistent gains across diverse tasks. Finally, we study whether difficult problems---those yielding no RL signals and mixed-quality reasoning traces---can still be effectively used for training. We introduce SparkleRL-PSS, a multi-stage RL pipeline that reuses hard problems with partial step scaffolding, guiding exploration effectively without additional data generation. Together, our findings provide a principled foundation for understanding how RL shapes model behavior, offering practical insights for building more adaptive, data-efficient, and interpretable RL pipelines for reasoning tasks. Our code, data, and checkpoints are available at: https://sparkle-reasoning.github.io/.

Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Michael Poli, Dan Fu, Dongjun Kim, Lea M. Hadzic, Manling Li, Agrim Gupta, Stefano Massaroli, Azalia Mirhoseini, Juan Carlos Niebles 等

Designing model architectures requires decisions such as selecting operators (e.g., attention, convolution) and configurations (e.g., depth, width). However, evaluating the impact of these decisions on model quality requires costly pretraining, limiting architectural investigation. Inspired by how new software is built on existing code, we ask: can new architecture designs be studied using pretrained models? To this end, we present *grafting*, a simple approach for editing pretrained diffusion transformers (DiTs) to materialize new architectures under small compute budgets. Informed by our analysis of activation behavior and attention locality, we construct a testbed based on the DiT-XL/2 design to study the impact of grafting on model quality. Using this testbed, we develop a family of hybrid designs via grafting: replacing softmax attention with gated convolution, local attention, and linear attention, and replacing MLPs with variable expansion ratio and convolutional variants. Notably, many hybrid designs achieve good quality (FID: 2.38–2.64 vs. 2.27 for DiT-XL/2) using $<2$% pretraining compute. We then graft a text-to-image model (PixArt-$\Sigma$), achieving a 1.43$\times$ speedup with less than a 2% drop in GenEval score. Finally, we present a case study that restructures DiT-XL/2 by converting every pair of sequential transformer blocks into parallel blocks via grafting. This reduces model depth by 2$\times$ and yields better quality (FID: 2.77) than other models of comparable depth. Together, we show that new diffusion model designs can be explored by grafting pretrained DiTs, with edits ranging from operator replacement to architecture restructuring. Code and grafted models: https://grafting.stanford.edu.

Computer Vision · Everything Else

ZhanFeng Feng, Long Peng, Xin Di, Yong Guo, Wenbo Li, Yulun Zhang, Renjing Pei, Yang Wang, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha

Multi-frame video enhancement tasks aim to improve the spatial and temporal resolution and quality of video sequences by leveraging temporal information from multiple frames, which are widely used in streaming video processing, surveillance, and generation. Although numerous Transformer-based enhancement methods have achieved impressive performance, their computational and memory demands hinder deployment on edge devices. Quantization offers a practical solution by reducing the bit-width of weights and activations to improve efficiency. However, directly applying existing quantization methods to video enhancement tasks often leads to significant performance degradation and loss of fine details. This stems from two limitations: (a) inability to allocate varying representational capacity across frames, which results in suboptimal dynamic range adaptation; (b) over-reliance on full-precision teachers, which limits the learning of low-bit student models. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel quantization method for video enhancement: Progressive Multi-Frame Quantization for Video Enhancement (PMQ-VE). This framework features a coarse-to-fine two-stage process: Backtracking-based Multi-Frame Quantization (BMFQ) and Progressive Multi-Teacher Distillation (PMTD). BMFQ utilizes a percentile-based initialization and iterative search with pruning and backtracking for robust clipping bounds. PMTD employs a progressive distillation strategy with both full-precision and multiple high-bit (INT) teachers to enhance low-bit models' capacity and quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks and benchmarks. The code will be made publicly available.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Kai He, Ruofan Liang, Jacob Munkberg, Jon Hasselgren, Nandita Vijaykumar, Alexander Keller, Sanja Fidler, Igor Gilitschenski, Zan Gojcic, Zian Wang

We address the challenge of relighting a single image or video, a task that demands precise scene intrinsic understanding and high-quality light transport synthesis. Existing end-to-end relighting models are often limited by the scarcity of paired multi-illumination data, restricting their ability to generalize across diverse scenes. Conversely, two-stage pipelines that combine inverse and forward rendering can mitigate data requirements but are susceptible to error accumulation and often fail to produce realistic outputs under complex lighting conditions or with sophisticated materials. In this work, we introduce a general-purpose approach that jointly estimates albedo and synthesizes relit outputs in a single pass, harnessing the generative capabilities of video diffusion models. This joint formulation enhances implicit scene comprehension and facilitates the creation of realistic lighting effects and intricate material interactions, such as shadows, reflections, and transparency. Trained on synthetic multi-illumination data and extensive automatically labeled real-world videos, our model demonstrates strong generalization across diverse domains and surpasses previous methods in both visual fidelity and temporal consistency. Our project page is https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/UniRelight/.

General Machine Learning · Representation Learning

Dongkwan Lee, JunHoo Lee, Nojun Kwak

We introduce the Deep Edge Filter, a novel approach that applies high-pass filtering to deep neural network features to improve model generalizability. Our method is motivated by our hypothesis that neural networks encode task-relevant semantic information in high-frequency components while storing domain-specific biases in low-frequency components of deep features. By subtracting low-pass filtered outputs from original features, our approach isolates generalizable representations while preserving architectural integrity. Experimental results across diverse domains such as Vision, Text, 3D, and Audio demonstrate consistent performance improvements regardless of model architecture and data modality. Analysis reveals that our method induces feature sparsification and effectively isolates high-frequency components, providing empirical validation of our core hypothesis. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/dongkwani/DeepEdgeFilter}.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Xiaojun Jia, Sensen Gao, Simeng Qin, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Yihao Huang, Xinfeng Li, Yiming Li, Bo Li, Yang Liu

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain vulnerable to transferable adversarial examples. While existing methods typically achieve targeted attacks by aligning global features—such as CLIP’s [CLS] token—between adversarial and target samples, they often overlook the rich local information encoded in patch tokens. This leads to suboptimal alignment and limited transferability, particularly for closed-source models. To address this limitation, we propose a targeted transferable adversarial attack method based on feature optimal alignment, called FOA-Attack, to improve adversarial transfer capability. Specifically, at the global level, we introduce a global feature loss based on cosine similarity to align the coarse-grained features of adversarial samples with those of target samples. At the local level, given the rich local representations within Transformers, we leverage clustering techniques to extract compact local patterns to alleviate redundant local features. We then formulate local feature alignment between adversarial and target samples as an optimal transport (OT) problem and propose a local clustering optimal transport loss to refine fine-grained feature alignment. Additionally, we propose a dynamic ensemble model weighting strategy to adaptively balance the influence of multiple models during adversarial example generation, thereby further improving transferability. Extensive experiments across various models demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, especially in transferring to closed-source MLLMs.

Data-centric AI · Data-centric AI methods and tools

Yuzhou Nie, Zhun Wang, Yu Yang, Ruizhe Jiang, Yuheng Tang, Xander Davies, Yarin Gal, Bo Li, Wenbo Guo, Dawn Song

Existing benchmarks for evaluating the security risks and capabilities (e.g., vulnerability detection) of code-generating large language models (LLMs) face several key limitations:(1) limited coverage of risk and capabilities;(2) reliance on static evaluation metrics such as LLM judgments or rule-based detection, which lack the precision of dynamic analysis; and(3) a trade-off between data quality and benchmark scale.To address these challenges, we introduce a general and scalable benchmark construction framework that begins with manually validated, high-quality seed examples and expands them via targeted mutations.Each mutated sample retains the seed’s security semantics while providing diverse, unseen instances. The resulting benchmark bundles every artifact required for dynamic evaluation, including prompts, vulnerable and patched code, test cases, and ground-truth proofs of concept, enabling rigorous measurement of insecure coding, vulnerability detection, and patch generation. Applying this framework to Python, C/C++, and Java, we build SECODEPLT, a dataset of more than 5.9k samples spanning 44 CWE-based risk categories and three security capabilities. Compared with state-of-the-art benchmarks, SECODEPLT offers broader coverage, higher data fidelity, and substantially greater scale. We use SECODEPLT to evaluate leading code-generation LLMs and agents, revealing their strengths and weaknesses in both generating secure code and identifying or fixing vulnerabilities.We provide our code in \url{https://github.com/ucsb-mlsec/SeCodePLT}, data in \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/UCSB-SURFI/SeCodePLT}

Theory · Learning Theory

Kyeongwon Lee, Lizhen Lin, Jaewoo Park, Seonghyun Jeong

This work establishes that sparse Bayesian neural networks achieve optimal posterior contraction rates over anisotropic Besov spaces and their hierarchical compositions. These structures reflect the intrinsic dimensionality of the underlying function, thereby mitigating the curse of dimensionality. Our analysis shows that Bayesian neural networks equipped with either sparse or continuous shrinkage priors attain the optimal rates which are dependent on the intrinsic dimension of the true structures. Moreover, we show that these priors enable rate adaptation, allowing the posterior to contract at the optimal rate even when the smoothness level of the true function is unknown. The proposed framework accommodates a broad class of functions, including additive and multiplicative Besov functions as special cases. These results advance the theoretical foundations of Bayesian neural networks and provide rigorous justification for their practical effectiveness in high-dimensional, structured estimation problems.

Fuyang Liu, Jiaqi Xu, Xiaowei Hu

Adverse weather severely impairs real-world visual perception, while existing vision models trained on synthetic data with fixed parameters struggle to generalize to complex degradations. To address this, we first construct HFLS-Weather, a physics-driven, high-fidelity dataset that simulates diverse weather phenomena, and then design a dual-level reinforcement learning framework initialized with HFLS-Weather for cold-start training. Within this framework, at the local level, weather-specific restoration models are refined through perturbation-driven image quality optimization, enabling reward-based learning without paired supervision; at the global level, a meta-controller dynamically orchestrates model selection and execution order according to scene degradation. This framework enables continuous adaptation to real-world conditions and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of adverse weather scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/xxclfy/AgentRL-Real-Weather

Reinforcement Learning · Multi-agent

Ahmet Onur Akman, Anastasia Psarou, Michał Hoffmann, Łukasz Gorczyca, Lukasz Kowalski, Paweł Gora, Grzegorz Jamróz, Rafal Kucharski

Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) promise to reduce congestion in future urban networks, potentially by optimizing their routing decisions. Unlike for human drivers, these decisions can be made with collective, data-driven policies, developed using machine learning algorithms. Reinforcement learning (RL) can facilitate the development of such collective routing strategies, yet standardized and realistic benchmarks are missing. To that end, we present $\texttt{URB}$: Urban Routing Benchmark for RL-equipped Connected Autonomous Vehicles. $\texttt{URB}$ is a comprehensive benchmarking environment that unifies evaluation across 29 real-world traffic networks paired with realistic demand patterns. $\texttt{URB}$ comes with a catalog of predefined tasks, multi-agent RL (MARL) algorithm implementations, three baseline methods, domain-specific performance metrics, and a modular configuration scheme. Our results show that, despite the lengthy and costly training, state-of-the-art MARL algorithms rarely outperformed humans. The experimental results reported in this paper initiate the first leaderboard for MARL in large-scale urban routing optimization. They reveal that current approaches struggle to scale, emphasizing the urgent need for advancements in this domain.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Shristi Das Biswas, Arani Roy, Kaushik Roy

As Text-to-Image models continue to evolve, so does the risk of generating unsafe, copyrighted, or privacy-violating content. Existing safety interventions - ranging from training data curation and model fine-tuning to inference-time filtering and guidance - often suffer from incomplete concept removal, susceptibility to jail-breaking, computational inefficiency, or collateral damage to unrelated capabilities. In this paper, we introduce CURE, a training-free concept unlearning framework that operates directly in the weight space of pre-trained diffusion models, enabling fast, interpretable, and highly specific suppression of undesired concepts. At the core of our method is the Spectral Eraser, a closed-form, orthogonal projection module that identifies discriminative subspaces using Singular Value Decomposition over token embeddings associated with the concepts to forget and retain. Intuitively, the Spectral Eraser identifies and isolates features unique to the undesired concept while preserving safe attributes. This operator is then applied in a single step update to yield an edited model in which the target concept is effectively unlearned - without retraining, supervision, or iterative optimization. To balance the trade-off between filtering toxicity and preserving unrelated concepts, we further introduce an Expansion Mechanism for spectral regularization which selectively modulates singular vectors based on their relative significance to control the strength of forgetting. All the processes above are in closed-form, guaranteeing extremely efficient erasure in only $2$ seconds. Benchmarking against prior approaches, CURE achieves a more efficient and thorough removal for targeted artistic styles, objects, identities, or explicit content, with minor damage to original generation ability and demonstrates enhanced robustness against red-teaming. Project Page at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/cure-unlearning/home}.

Applications · Chemistry and Drug Discovery

Jonas Elsborg, Luca Thiede, Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Tejs Vegge, Arghya Bhowmik

We present the Electronic Tensor Reconstruction Algorithm (ELECTRA) - an equivariant model for predicting electronic charge densities using floating orbitals. Floating orbitals are a long-standing concept in the quantum chemistry community that promises more compact and accurate representations by placing orbitals freely in space, as opposed to centering all orbitals at the position of atoms. Finding the ideal placement of these orbitals requires extensive domain knowledge, though, which thus far has prevented widespread adoption. We solve this in a data-driven manner by training a Cartesian tensor network to predict the orbital positions along with orbital coefficients. This is made possible through a symmetry-breaking mechanism that is used to learn position displacements with lower symmetry than the input molecule while preserving the rotation equivariance of the charge density itself. Inspired by recent successes of Gaussian Splatting in representing densities in space, we are using Gaussian orbitals and predicting their weights and covariance matrices. Our method achieves a state-of-the-art balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy on established benchmarks. Furthermore, ELECTRA is able to lower the compute time required to arrive at converged DFT solutions - initializing calculations using our predicted densities yields an average 50.72 % reduction in self-consistent field (SCF) iterations on unseen molecules.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Siyu Jiao, Gengwei Zhang, Yinlong Qian, Jiancheng Huang, Yao Zhao, Humphrey Shi, Lin Ma, Yunchao Wei, Zequn Jie

This work challenges the residual prediction paradigm in visual autoregressive modeling and presents FlexVAR, a new Flexible Visual AutoRegressive image generation paradigm. FlexVAR facilitates autoregressive learning with ground-truth prediction, enabling each step to independently produce plausible images. This simple, intuitive approach swiftly learns visual distributions and makes the generation process more flexible and adaptable. Trained solely on low-resolution images (< 256px), FlexVAR can: (1) Generate images of various resolutions and aspect ratios, even exceeding the resolution of the training images. (2) Support various image-to-image tasks, including image refinement, in/out-painting, and image expansion. (3) Adapt to various autoregressive steps, allowing for faster inference with fewer steps or enhancing image quality with more steps. Our 1.0B model outperforms its VAR counterpart on the ImageNet 256 × 256 benchmark. Moreover, when zero-shot transfer the image generation process with 13 steps, the performance further improves to 2.08 FID, outperforming state-of-the-art autoregressive models AiM/VAR by 0.25/0.28 FID and popular diffusion models LDM/DiT by 1.52/0.19 FID, respectively. When transferring our 1.0B model to the ImageNet 512 × 512 benchmark in a zero-shot manner, FlexVAR achieves competitive results compared to the VAR 2.3B model, which is a fully supervised model trained at 512 × 512 resolution.

Probabilistic Methods · Bayesian Models and Methods

Ben Adcock, Zi Yuan (Nick) Huang

We study the sample complexity of Bayesian recovery for solving inverse problems with general prior, forward operator and noise distributions. We consider posterior sampling according to an approximate prior $\mathcal{P}$, and establish sufficient conditions for stable and accurate recovery with high probability. Our main result is a non-asymptotic bound that shows that the sample complexity depends on (i) the intrinsic complexity of $\mathcal{P}$, quantified by its *approximate covering number*, and (ii) concentration bounds for the forward operator and noise distributions. As a key application, we specialize to generative priors, where $\mathcal{P}$ is the pushforward of a latent distribution via a Deep Neural Network (DNN). We show that the sample complexity scales log-linearly with the latent dimension $k$, thus establishing the efficacy of DNN-based priors. Generalizing existing results on deterministic (i.e., non-Bayesian) recovery for the important problem of random sampling with an orthogonal matrix $U$, we show how the sample complexity is determined by the *coherence* of $U$ with respect to the support of $\mathcal{P}$. Hence, we establish that coherence plays a fundamental role in Bayesian recovery as well. Overall, our framework unifies and extends prior work, providing rigorous guarantees for the sample complexity of solving Bayesian inverse problems with arbitrary distributions.

Optimization · Neural Network Optimization

Steffen Schotthöfer, Timon Klein, Jonas Kusch

Low-rank pre-training and fine-tuning have recently emerged as promising techniques for reducing the computational and storage costs of large neural networks. Training low-rank parameterizations typically relies on conventional optimizers such as heavy ball momentum methods or Adam. In this work, we identify and analyze potential difficulties that these training methods encounter when used to train low-rank parameterizations of weights. In particular, we show that classical momentum methods can struggle to converge to a local optimum due to the geometry of the underlying optimization landscape. To address this, we introduce novel training strategies derived from dynamical low-rank approximation, which explicitly account for the underlying geometric structure. Our approach leverages and combines tools from dynamical low-rank approximation and momentum-based optimization to design optimizers that respect the intrinsic geometry of the parameter space. We validate our methods through numerical experiments, demonstrating faster convergence, and stronger validation metrics at given parameter budgets.

Optimization · Neural Network Optimization

Haochen Zhang, Junze Yin, Guanchu Wang, Zirui Liu, Lin Yang, Tianyi Zhang, Anshumali Shrivastava, Vladimir Braverman

Low-rank optimization has emerged as a promising approach to enabling memory-efficient training of large language models (LLMs). Existing low-rank optimization methods typically project gradients onto a low-rank subspace, reducing the memory cost of storing optimizer states. A key challenge in these methods is selecting suitable subspaces to ensure an effective optimization trajectory. Most existing approaches select the dominant subspace to preserve gradient information, as this intuitively provides the best approximation. However, we find that in practice, the dominant subspace stops changing during pretraining, thereby constraining weight updates to similar subspaces. In this paper, we propose importance sampling for low-rank optimization in LLM pretraining with a provable convergence guarantee, which the dominant subspace approach does not have. Empirically, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous methods in LLM pretraining tasks.

Applications · Chemistry and Drug Discovery

Tara Akhound-Sadegh, Jungyoon Lee, Joey Bose, Valentin De Bortoli, Arnaud Doucet, Michael Bronstein, Dominique Beaini, Siamak Ravanbakhsh, Kirill Neklyudov, Alexander Tong

Sampling efficiently from a target unnormalized probability density remains a core challenge, with relevance across countless high-impact scientific applications. A promising approach towards this challenge is the design of amortized samplers that borrow key ideas, such as probability path design, from state-of-the-art generative diffusion models. However, all existing diffusion-based samplers remain unable to draw samples from distributions at the scale of even simple molecular systems. In this paper, we propose Progressive Inference-Time Annealing (PITA) a novel framework to learn diffusion-based samplers that combines two complementary interpolation techniques: I.) Annealing of the Boltzmann distribution and II.) Diffusion smoothing. PITA trains a sequence of diffusion models from high to low temperatures by sequentially training each model at progressively higher temperatures, leveraging engineered easy access to samples of the temperature-annealed target density. In the subsequent step, PITA enables simulating the trained diffusion model to *procure training samples at a lower temperature* for the next diffusion model through inference-time annealing using a novel Feynman-Kac PDE combined with Sequential Monte Carlo. Empirically, PITA enables, for the first time, equilibrium sampling of $N$-body particle systems, Alanine Dipeptide, and tripeptides in Cartesian coordinates with dramatically lower energy function evaluations.

Deep Learning · Attention Mechanisms

Xiaomin Li, Zhou Yu, Zhiwei Zhang, Xupeng Chen, Ziji Zhang, Yingying Zhuang, Narayanan Sadagopan, Anurag Beniwal

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising and previously overlooked phenomenon: explicit CoT reasoning can significantly degrade instruction-following accuracy. Evaluating 20+ models on two benchmarks: IFEval (with simple, rule-verifiable constraints) and ComplexBench (with complex, compositional constraints), we consistently observe performance drops when CoT prompting is applied. Through large-scale case studies and an attention-based analysis, we identify common patterns where reasoning either helps (e.g., with formatting or lexical precision) or hurts (e.g., by neglecting simple constraints or introducing unnecessary content). We propose a metric, constraint attention, to quantify model focus during generation and show that CoT reasoning often diverts attention away from instruction-relevant tokens. To mitigate these effects, we introduce and evaluate four strategies: in-context learning, self-reflection, self-selective reasoning, and classifier-selective reasoning. Our results demonstrate that selective reasoning strategies, particularly classifier-selective reasoning, can substantially recover lost performance. To our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically expose reasoning-induced failures in instruction-following and offer practical mitigation strategies.

Computer Vision · 3D Rendering & Reconstruction

jingfeng Guo, Jian Liu, Jinnan Chen, Shiwei Mao, Changrong Hu, Puhua Jiang, Junlin Yu, Jing Xu, Qi Liu, LiXin Xu 等

We introduce Auto-Connect, a novel approach for automatic rigging that explicitly preserves skeletal connectivity through a connectivity-preserving tokenization scheme. Unlike previous methods that predict bone positions represented as two joints or first predict points before determining connectivity, our method employs special tokens to define endpoints for each joint's children and for each hierarchical layer, effectively automating connectivity relationships. This approach significantly enhances topological accuracy by integrating connectivity information directly into the prediction framework. To further guarantee high-quality topology, we implement a topology-aware reward function that quantifies topological correctness, which is then utilized in a post-training phase through reward-guided Direct Preference Optimization. Additionally, we incorporate implicit geodesic features for latent top-$k$ bone selection, which substantially improves skinning quality. By leveraging geodesic distance information within the model's latent space, our approach intelligently determines the most influential bones for each vertex, effectively mitigating common skinning artifacts. This combination of connectivity-preserving tokenization, reward-guided fine-tuning, and geodesic-aware bone selection enables our model to consistently generate more anatomically plausible skeletal structures with superior deformation properties.