Recently, state space models (SSM), particularly Mamba, have attracted significant attention from scholars due to their ability to effectively balance computational efficiency and performance. However, most existing visual Mamba methods flatten images into 1D sequences using predefined scan orders, which results the model being less capable of utilizing the spatial structural information of the image during the feature extraction process. To address this issue, we proposed a novel visual foundation model called DefMamba. This model includes a multi-scale backbone structure and deformable mamba (DM) blocks, which dynamically adjust the scanning path to prioritize important information, thus enhancing the capture and processing of relevant input features. By combining a deformable scanning (DS) strategy, this model significantly improves its ability to learn image structures and detects changes in object details. Numerous experiments have shown that DefMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance in various visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. The code is open source on DefMamba.
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Vision-Language Models (VLMs) learn a shared feature space for text and images, enabling the comparison of inputs of different modalities. While prior works demonstrated that VLMs organize natural language representations into regular structures encoding composite meanings, it remains unclear if compositional patterns also emerge in the visual embedding space. In this work, we investigate compositionality in the image domain, where the analysis of compositional properties is challenged by noise and sparsity of visual data. We address these problems and propose a framework, called Geodesically Decomposable Embeddings (GDE), that approximates image representations with geometry-aware compositional structures in the latent space. We demonstrate that visual embeddings of pre-trained VLMs exhibit a compositional arrangement, and evaluate the effectiveness of this property in the tasks of compositional classification and group robustness. GDE achieves stronger performance in compositional classification compared to its counterpart method that assumes linear geometry of the latent space. Notably, it is particularly effective for group robustness, where we achieve higher results than task-specific solutions. Our results indicate that VLMs can automatically develop a human-like form of compositional reasoning in the visual domain, making their underlying processes more interpretable. Code is available at https://github.com/BerasiDavide/vlm_image_compositionality.
Diffusion prior-based methods have shown impressive results in real-world image super-resolution (SR). However, most existing methods entangle pixel-level and semantic-level SR objectives in the training process, struggling to balance pixel-wise fidelity and perceptual quality. Meanwhile, users have varying preferences on SR results, thus it is demanded to develop an adjustable SR model that can be tailored to different fidelity-perception preferences during inference without re-training. We present Pixel-level and Semantic-level Adjustable SR (PiSA-SR), which learns two LoRA modules upon the pre-trained stable-diffusion (SD) model to achieve improved and adjustable SR results. We first formulate the SD-based SR problem as learning the residual between the low-quality input and the high-quality output, then show that the learning objective can be decoupled into two distinct LoRA weight spaces: one is characterized by the l2-loss for pixel-level regression, and another is characterized by the LPIPS and classifier score distillation losses to extract semantic information from pre-trained classification and SD models. In its default setting, PiSA-SR can be performed in a single diffusion step, achieving leading real-world SR results in both quality and efficiency. By introducing two adjustable guidance scales on the two LoRA modules to control the strengths of pixel-wise fidelity and semantic-level details during inference, PiSA-SR can offer flexible SR results according to user preference without re-training. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/csslc/PiSA-SR.
Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification poses unique challenges due to the vast image size and numerous non-informative regions, which introduce noise and cause data imbalance during feature aggregation. To address these issues, we propose MExD, an Expert-Infused Diffusion Model that combines the strengths of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism with a diffusion model for enhanced classification. MExD balances patch feature distribution through a novel MoE-based aggregator that selectively emphasizes relevant information, effectively filtering noise, addressing data imbalance, and extracting essential features. These features are then integrated via a diffusion-based generative process to directly yield the class distribution for the WSI. Moving beyond conventional discriminative approaches, MExD represents the first generative strategy in WSI classification, capturing fine-grained details for robust and precise results. Our MExD is validated on three widely-used benchmarks--Camelyon16, TCGA-NSCLC, and BRACS--consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance in both binary and multi-class tasks.
The platonic representation hypothesis suggests that vision and language embeddings become more homogeneous as model and dataset sizes increase. In particular, pairwise distances within each modality become more similar. This suggests that as foundation models mature, it may become possible to match vision and language embeddings in a fully unsupervised fashion, i.e. without parallel data. We present the first feasibility study, and investigate conformity of existing vision and language foundation models in the context of unsupervised, or "blind", matching. First, we formulate unsupervised matching as a quadratic assignment problem and introduce a novel heuristic that outperforms previous solvers. We also develop a technique to find optimal matching problems, for which a non-trivial match is very likely. Second, we conduct an extensive study deploying a range of vision and language models on four datasets. Our analysis reveals that for many problem instances, vision and language representations can be indeed matched without supervision. This finding opens up the exciting possibility of embedding semantic knowledge into other modalities virtually annotation-free. As a proof of concept, we showcase an unsupervised classifier, which achieves non-trivial classification accuracy without any image-text annotation.
Your Scale Factors are My Weapon: Targeted Bit-Flip Attacks on Vision Transformers via Scale Factor Manipulation
PDF ↗Vision Transformers (ViTs) have experienced significant progress and are quantized for deployment in resource-constrained applications. Quantized models are vulnerable to targeted bit-flip attacks (BFAs). A targeted BFA prepares a trigger and a corresponding Trojan/backdoor, inserting the latter (with RowHammer bit flipping) into a victim model, to mislead its classification on samples containing the trigger. Existing targeted BFAs on quantized ViTs are limited in that: (1) they require numerous bit-flips, and (2) the separation between flipped bits is below 4 KB, making attacks infeasible with RowHammer in real-world scenarios. We propose a new and practical targeted attack Flip-S against quantized ViTs. The core insight is that in quantized models, a scale factor change ripples through a batch of model weights. Consequently, flipping bits in scale factors, rather than solely in model weights, enables more cost-effective attacks. We design a Scale-Factor-Search (SFS) algorithm to identify critical bits in scale factors for flipping, and adopt a mutual exclusion strategy to guarantee a 4 KB separation between flips. We evaluate Flip-S on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets across five ViT architectures and two quantization levels. Results show that Flip-S achieves attack success rate (ASR) exceeding 90.0% on all models with 50 bits flipped, outperforming baselines with ASR typically below 80.0%. Furthermore, compared to the SOTA, Flip-S reduces the number of required bit-flips by 8x-20xwhile reaching equal or higher ASR. Our source code is publicly available.
The advancement of 3D understanding and representation is a crucial step for the next phase of autonomous driving, robotics, augmented and virtual reality, 3D gaming and 3D e-commerce products. However, existing 3D semantic representation research has primarily focused on point clouds to perceive 3D objects and scenes, overlooking the rich visual details offered by multi-view images, thereby limiting the potential of 3D semantic representation. This paper introduces OpenView, a novel representation method that integrates both point clouds and multi-view images to form a unified 3D representation. OpenView comprises a unique fusion framework, sequence-independent modeling, a cross-modal fusion encoder, and a progressive hard learning strategy. Our experiments demonstrate that OpenView outperforms the state-of-the-art by 11.5% and 5.5% on the R@1 metric for cross-modal retrieval and the Top-1 metric for zero-shot classification tasks, respectively. Furthermore, we showcase some applications of OpenView: 3D retrieval, 3D captioning and hierarchical data clustering, highlighting its generality in the field of 3D representation learning.
Towards Fine-Grained Interpretability: Counterfactual Explanations for Misclassification with Saliency Partition
PDF ↗Attribution-based explanation techniques capture key patterns to enhance visual interpretability. However, these patterns often lack the granularity needed for insight in fine-grained tasks, particularly in cases of model misclassification, where explanations may be insufficiently detailed. To address this limitation, we propose a fine-grained counterfactual explanation framework that generates both object-level and part-level interpretability, addressing two fundamental questions: (1) which fine-grained features contribute to model misclassification, and (2) where dominant local features influence counterfactual adjustments. Our approach yields explainable counterfactuals in a non-generative manner by quantifying similarity and weighting component contributions within regions of interest between correctly classified and misclassified samples. Furthermore, we introduce an importance-isolation module grounded in Shapley value contributions, isolating features with region-specific relevance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in capturing more granular, intuitively meaningful regions, surpassing fine-grained methods.
RAEncoder: A Label-Free Reversible Adversarial Examples Encoder for Dataset Intellectual Property Protection
PDF ↗Reversible Adversarial Examples (RAE) are designed to protect the intellectual property of datasets. Such examples can function as imperceptible adversarial examples to erode the model performance of unauthorized users while allowing authorized users to remove the adversarial perturbations and recover the original samples for normal model training. With the rise of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), an increasing number of unlabeled datasets and pre-trained encoders are available in the community. However, existing RAE methods not only rely on well-labeled datasets for training Supervised Learning (SL) models but also exhibit poor adversarial transferability when attacking SSL pre-trained encoders. To address these challenges, we propose RAEncoder, the first framework for RAEs without the need for labeled samples. RAEncoder aims to generate universal adversarial perturbations by targeting SSL pre-trained encoders. Unlike traditional RAE approaches, the pre-trained encoder outputs the feature distribution of the protected dataset rather than classification labels, enhancing both the attack success rate and transferability of RAEs. Extensive experiments are conducted on six pre-trained encoders and four SL models, covering aspects such as imperceptibility and transferability. Our results demonstrate that RAEncoder effectively protects unlabeled datasets from malicious infringements. Additional robustness experiments further confirm the security of RAEncoder in practical application scenarios.
Training-free Neural Architecture Search through Variance of Knowledge of Deep Network Weights
PDF ↗Deep learning has revolutionized computer vision, but it achieved its tremendous success using deep network architectures which are mostly hand-crafted and therefore likely suboptimal. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to bridge this gap by following a well-defined optimization paradigm which systematically looks for the best architecture, given objective criterion such as maximal classification accuracy. The main limitation of NAS is however its astronomical computational cost, as it typically requires training each candidate network architecture from scratch.In this paper, we aim to alleviate this limitation by proposing a novel training-free proxy for image classification accuracy based on Fisher Information. The proposed proxy has a strong theoretical background in statistics and it allows estimating expected image classification accuracy of a given deep network without training the network, thus significantly reducing computational cost of standard NAS algorithms. Our training-free proxy achieves state-of-the-art results on three public datasets and in two search spaces, both when evaluated using previously proposed metrics, as well as using a new metric that we propose which we demonstrate is more informative for practical NAS applications. The source code is publicly available.
Q-PART: Quasi-Periodic Adaptive Regression with Test-time Training for Pediatric Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction Regression
PDF ↗In this work, we address the challenge of adaptive pediatric Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction (LVEF) assessment. While Test-time Training (TTT) approaches show promise for this task, they suffer from two significant limitations. Existing TTT works are primarily designed for classification tasks rather than continuous value regression, and they lack mechanisms to handle the quasi-periodic nature of cardiac signals. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Quasi-Periodic Adaptive Regression with Test-time Training (Q-PART) framework. In the training stage, the proposed Quasi-Period Network decomposes the echocardiogram into periodic and aperiodic components within latent space by combining parameterized helix trajectories with Neural Controlled Differential Equations. During inference, our framework further employs a variance minimization strategy across image augmentations that simulate common quality issues in echocardiogram acquisition, along with differential adaptation rates for periodic and aperiodic components. Theoretical analysis is provided to demonstrate that our variance minimization objective effectively bounds the regression error under mild conditions. Furthermore, extensive experiments across three pediatric age groups demonstrate that Q-PART not only significantly outperforms existing approaches in pediatric LVEF prediction, but also exhibits strong clinical screening capability with high mAUROC scores (up to 0.9747) and maintains gender-fair performance across all metrics, validating its robustness and practical utility in pediatric echocardiography analysis.
'Pre-training + fine-tuning' has been widely used in various downstream tasks. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has demonstrated higher efficiency and promising performance comapred to traditional full-tuning. The widely used adapter-based and prompt-based methods in PEFT can be uniformly represented as adding an MLP structure to the pre-trained model. These methods are prone to over-fitting in downstream tasks, due to the difference in data scale and distribution. To address this issue, we propose a new adapter-based PEFT module, i.e., LoKi, which consists of an encoder, a learnable activation layer, and a decoder. To maintain the simplicity of LoKi, we use single-layer linear networks for the encoder and decoder, and for the learnable activation layer, we use a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) with the minimal number of layers (only 2 KAN linear layers). With a bottleneck rate much lower than that of Adapter, LoKi is equipped with fewer parameters (only half of Adapter) and eliminates slow training speed and high memory usage of KAN. We conduct extensive experiments on LoKi under image classification and video action recognition across 9 datasets. LoKi demonstrates highly competitive generalization performance compared to other PEFT methods with fewer tunable parameters, ensuring both effectiveness and efficiency.
BioX-CPath: Biologically-driven Explainable Diagnostics for Multistain IHC Computational Pathology
PDF ↗The development of biologically interpretable and explainable models remains a key challenge in computational pathology, particularly for multistain immunohistochemistry (IHC) analysis. We present BioX-CPath, an explainable graph neural network architecture for whole slide image (WSI) classification that leverages both spatial and semantic features across multiple stains. At its core, BioXCPath introduces a novel Stain-Aware Attention Pooling (SAAP) module that generates biologically meaningful, stain-aware patient embeddings. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Rheumatoid Arthritis and Sjogren's Disease multistain datasets. Beyond performance metrics, BioX-CPath provides interpretable insights through stain attention scores, entropy measures, and stain interaction scores, that permit measuring model alignment with known pathological mechanisms. This biological grounding, combined with strong classification performance, makes BioX-CPath particularly suitable for clinical applications where interpretability is key. Source code and documentation can be found at: https://github.com/AmayaGS/BioX-CPath.
Accurately modeling multi-class cell topology is crucial in digital pathology, as it provides critical insights into tissue structure and pathology. The synthetic generation of cell topology enables realistic simulations of complex tissue environments, enhances downstream tasks by augmenting training data, aligns more closely with pathologists' domain knowledge, and offers new opportunities for controlling and generalizing the tumor microenvironment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that integrates topological constraints into a diffusion model to improve the generation of realistic, contextually accurate cell topologies. Our method refines the simulation of cell distributions and interactions, increasing the precision and interpretability of results in downstream tasks such as cell detection and classification. To assess the topological fidelity of generated layouts, we introduce a new metric, Topological Frechet Distance (TopoFD), which overcomes the limitations of traditional metrics like FID in evaluating topological structure. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating multi-class cell layouts that capture intricate topological relationships. Code is available at https://github.com/Melon-Xu/TopoCellGen.
Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL) involves the progressive adaptation of a model to new concepts across different domains. While recent advances in pre-trained models provide a solid foundation for DIL, learning new concepts often results in the catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Specifically, sequential model updates can overwrite both the representation and the classifier with knowledge from the latest domain. Thus, it is crucial to develop a representation and corresponding classifier that accommodate all seen domains throughout the learning process. To this end, we propose DUal ConsolidaTion (Duct) to unify and consolidate historical knowledge at both the representation and classifier levels. By merging the backbone of different stages, we create a representation space suitable for multiple domains incrementally. The merged representation serves as a balanced intermediary that captures task-specific features from all seen domains. Additionally, to address the mismatch between consolidated embeddings and the classifier, we introduce an extra classifier consolidation process. Leveraging class-wise semantic information, we estimate the classifier weights of old domains within the latest embedding space. By merging historical and estimated classifiers, we align them with the consolidated embedding space, facilitating incremental classification. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate Duct's state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/Estrella-fugaz/CVPR25-Duct.
Retrieval augmentation, the practice of retrieving additional data from large auxiliary pools, has emerged as an effective technique for enhancing model performance in the low-data regime. Prior approaches have employed only nearest-neighbor based strategies for data selection, which retrieve auxiliary samples with high similarity to instances in the target task. However, these approaches are prone to selecting highly redundant samples, since they fail to incorporate any notion of diversity. In our work, we first demonstrate that data selection strategies used in prior retrieval-augmented few-shot adaptation settings can be generalized using a class of functions known as Combinatorial Mutual Information (CMI) measures. We then propose COBRA (COmBinatorial Retrieval Augmentation), which employs an alternative CMI measure that considers both diversity and similarity to a target dataset. COBRA consistently outperforms previous retrieval approaches across image classification tasks and few-shot learning techniques when used to retrieve samples from LAION-2B. COBRA introduces negligible computational overhead to the cost of retrieval while providing significant gains in downstream model performance.
Recent advances in audio-visual learning have shown promising results in learning representations across modalities. However, most approaches rely on global audio representations that fail to capture fine-grained temporal correspondences with visual frames.Additionally, existing methods often struggle with conflicting optimization objectives when trying to jointly learn reconstruction and cross-modal alignment. In this work, we propose CAV-MAE Sync as a simple yet effective extension of the original CAV-MAE framework for self-supervised audio-visual learning. We address three key challenges: First, we tackle the granularity mismatch between modalities by treating audio as a temporal sequence aligned with video frames, rather than using global representations. Second, we resolve conflicting optimization goals by separating contrastive and reconstruction objectives through dedicated global tokens. Third, we improve spatial localization by introducing learnable register tokens that reduce semantic load on patch tokens. We evaluate the proposed approach on AudioSet, VGG Sound, and the ADE20K Sound dataset on zero-shot retrieval, classification and localization tasks demonstrating state-of-the-art performance and outperforming more complex architectures. Code available at https://github.com/edsonroteia/cav-mae-sync.
VL2Lite: Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation from Large Vision-Language Models to Lightweight Networks
PDF ↗Deploying high-performing neural networks in resource-constrained environments poses a significant challenge due to the computational demands of large-scale models. We introduce VL2Lite, a knowledge distillation framework designed to enhance the performance of lightweight neural networks in image classification tasks by leveraging the rich representational knowledge from Vision-Language Models (VLMs). VL2Lite directly integrates multi-modal knowledge from VLMs into compact models during training, effectively compensating for the limited computational and modeling capabilities of smaller networks. By transferring high-level features and complex data representations, our approach improves the accuracy and efficiency of image classification tasks without increasing computational overhead during inference. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that VL2Lite achieves up to a 7% improvement in classification performance across various datasets. This method addresses the challenge of deploying accurate models in environments with constrained computational resources, offering a balanced solution between model complexity and operational efficiency.
Domain Generalization (DG) research has gained considerable traction as of late, since the ability to generalize to unseen data distributions is a requirement that eludes even state-of-the-art training algorithms. In this paper we observe that the initial iterations of model training play a key role in domain generalization effectiveness, since the loss landscape may be significantly different across the training and test distributions, contrary to the case of i.i.d. data. Conflicts between gradients of the loss components of each domain lead the optimization procedure to undesirable local minima that do not capture the domain-invariant features of the target classes. We propose alleviating domain conflicts in model optimization, by iteratively annealing the parameters of a model in the early stages of training and searching for points where gradients align between domains. By discovering a set of parameter values where gradients are updated towards the same direction for each data distribution present in the training set, the proposed Gradient-Guided Annealing (GGA) algorithm encourages models to seek out minima that exhibit improved robustness against domain shifts. The efficacy of GGA is evaluated on five widely accepted and challenging image classification domain generalization benchmarks, where its use alone is able to establish highly competitive or even state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, when combined with previously proposed domain-generalization algorithms it is able to consistently improve their effectiveness by significant margins.
Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in image classification by training with large-scale paired image-text data. Their performances largely depend on the prompt quality. While recent methods show that visual descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs) enhance the generalization of VLMs, class-specific prompts may be inaccurate or lack discrimination due to the hallucination in LLMs. In this paper, we aim to find visually discriminative prompts for fine-grained categories with minimal supervision and no human-in-the-loop. An evolution-based algorithm is proposed to progressively optimize language prompts from task-specific templates to class-specific descriptions. Unlike optimizing templates, the search space shows an explosion in class-specific candidate prompts. This increases prompt generation costs, iterative times, and the overfitting problem. To this end, we first introduce several simple yet effective edit-based and evolution-based operations to generate diverse candidate prompts by one-time query of LLMs. Then, two sampling strategies are proposed to find a better initial search point and reduce traversed categories, saving iteration costs. Moreover, we apply a novel fitness score with entropy constraints to mitigate overfitting. In a challenging one-shot image classification setting, our method outperforms existing textual prompt-based methods and improves LLM-generated description methods across 13 datasets. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that our optimal prompts improve adapter-based methods and transfer effectively across different backbones.