Autonomous driving (AD) systems are becoming increasingly capable of handling complex tasks, mainly due to recent advances in deep learning and AI. As interactions between autonomous systems and humans increase, the interpretability of decision-making processes in driving systems becomes increasingly crucial for ensuring safe driving operations. Successful human-machine interaction requires understanding the underlying representations of the environment and the driving task, which remains a significant challenge in deep learning-based systems. To address this, we introduce the task of interpretability in maneuver prediction before they occur for driver safety, i.e., driver intent prediction (DIP), which plays a critical role in AD systems. To foster research in interpretable DIP, we curate the eXplainable Driving Action Anticipation Dataset (DAAD-X), a new multimodal, ego-centric video dataset to provide hierarchical, high-level textual explanations as causal reasoning for the driver's decisions. These explanations are derived from both the driver's eye-gaze and the ego-vehicle's perspective. Next, we propose Video Concept Bottleneck Model (VCBM), a framework that generates spatio-temporally coherent explanations inherently, without relying on post-hoc techniques. Finally, through extensive evaluations of the proposed VCBM on the DAAD-X dataset, we demonstrate that transformer-based models exhibit greater interpretability than conventional CNN-based models. Additionally, we introduce a multilabel t-SNE visualization technique to illustrate the disentanglement and causal correlation among multiple explanations.
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Despite significant advancements in image segmentation and object detection, understanding complex scenes remains a significant challenge. Here, we focus on graphical humor as a paradigmatic example of image interpretation that requires elucidating the interaction of different scene elements in the context of prior cognitive knowledge. This paper introduces HumorDB, a novel, controlled, and carefully curated dataset designed to evaluate and advance visual humor understanding by AI systems. The dataset comprises diverse images spanning photos, cartoons, sketches, and AI-generated content, including minimally contrastive pairs where subtle edits differentiate between humorous and non-humorous versions. We evaluate humans, state-of-the-art vision models, and large vision-language models on three tasks: binary humor classification, funniness rating prediction, and pairwise humor comparison. The results reveal a gap between current AI systems and human-level humor understanding. While pretrained vision-language models perform better than vision-only models, they still struggle with abstract sketches and subtle humor cues. Analysis of attention maps shows that even when models correctly classify humorous images, they often fail to focus on the precise regions that make the image funny. Preliminary mechanistic interpretability studies and evaluation of model explanations provide initial insights into how different architectures process humor. Our results identify promising trends and current limitations, suggesting that an effective understanding of visual humor requires sophisticated architectures capable of detecting subtle contextual features and bridging the gap between visual perception and abstract reasoning.All the code and data are available here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HumorDB_-049A
Not all Views are Created Equal: Analyzing Viewpoint Instabilities in Vision Foundation Models
PDF ↗In this paper, we analyze the viewpoint stability of foundational models - specifically, their sensitivity to changes in viewpoint- and define instability as significant feature variations resulting from minor changes in viewing angle, leading to generalization gaps in 3D reasoning tasks. We investigate nine foundational models, focusing on their responses to viewpoint changes, including the often-overlooked accidental viewpoints where specific camera orientations obscure an object's true 3D structure. Our methodology enables recognizing and classifying accidental, stable and other viewpoints using feature representations alone, without accessing the actual images. Our findings indicate that while foundation models consistently encode accidental viewpoints, they vary in their interpretation of other viewpoints due to inherent biases, at times leading to object misclassifications based on geometric resemblance. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations on three downstream tasks - classification, VQA, and 3D reconstruction - we illustrate the impact of viewpoint instability and underscore the importance of feature robustness across diverse viewing conditions.
PS3: A Multimodal Transformer Integrating Pathology Reports with Histology Images and Biological Pathways for Cancer Survival Prediction
PDF ↗Current multimodal fusion approaches in computational oncology primarily focus on integrating multi-gigapixel histology whole slide images (WSIs) with genomic or transcriptomic data, demonstrating improved survival prediction. We hypothesize that incorporating pathology reports can further enhance prognostic performance. Pathology reports, as essential components of clinical workflows, offer readily available complementary information by summarizing histopathological findings and integrating expert interpretations and clinical context. However, fusing these modalities poses challenges due to their heterogeneous nature. WSIs are high-dimensional, each containing several billion pixels, whereas pathology reports consist of concise text summaries of varying lengths, leading to potential modality imbalance. To address this, we propose a prototype-based approach to generate balanced representations, which are then integrated using a Transformer-based fusion model for survival prediction that we term PS3 (Predicting Survival from Three Modalities). Specifically, we present: (1) Diagnostic prototypes from pathology reports, leveraging self-attention to extract diagnostically relevant sections and standardize text representation; (2) Histological prototypes to compactly represent key morphological patterns in WSIs; and (3) Biological pathway prototypes to encode transcriptomic expressions, accurately capturing cellular functions. PS3, the three-modal transformer model, processes the resulting prototype-based multimodal tokens and models intra-modal and cross-modal interactions across pathology reports, WSIs and transcriptomic data. The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods when evaluated against clinical, unimodal and multimodal baselines on six datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The code will be released upon publication.
Image Copy Detection (ICD) aims to identify manipulated content between image pairs through robust feature representation learning. While self-supervised learning (SSL) has advanced ICD systems, existing view-level contrastive methods struggle with sophisticated edits due to insufficient fine-grained correspondence learning. We address this limitation by exploiting the inherent geometric traceability in edited content through two key innovations. First, we propose PixTrace - a pixel coordinate tracking module that maintains explicit spatial mappings across editing transformations. Second, we introduce CopyNCE, a geometrically-guided contrastive loss that regularizes patch affinity using overlap ratios derived from PixTrace's verified mappings. Our method bridges pixel-level traceability with patch-level similarity learning, suppressing supervision noise in SSL training. Extensive experiments demonstrate not only state-of-the-art performance (88.7% mAP / 83.9% RP90 for matcher, 72.6% mAP / 68.4% RP90 for descriptor on DISC21 dataset) but also better interpretability over existing methods. Code is available.
CalliReader: Contextualizing Chinese Calligraphy via an Embedding-Aligned Vision-Language Model
PDF ↗Chinese calligraphy, a UNESCO Heritage, remains computationally challenging due to visual ambiguity and cultural complexity. Existing AI systems fail to contextualize their intricate scripts, because of limited annotated data and poor visual-semantic alignment. We propose CalliReader, a vision-language model (VLM) that solves the Chinese Calligraphy Contextualization (CC^2) problem through three innovations: (1) character-wise slicing for precise character extraction and sorting, (2) CalliAlign for visual-text token compression and alignment, (3) embedding instruction tuning (e-IT) for improving alignment and addressing data scarcity. We also build CalliBench, the first benchmark for full-page calligraphic contextualization, addressing three critical issues in previous OCR and VQA approaches: fragmented context, shallow reasoning, and hallucination. Extensive experiments including user studies have been conducted to verify our CalliReader's superiority to other state-of-the-art methods and even human professionals in page-level calligraphy recognition and interpretation, achieving higher accuracy while reducing hallucination. Comparisons with reasoning models highlight the importance of accurate recognition as a prerequisite for reliable comprehension. Quantitative analyses validate CalliReader's efficiency; evaluations on document and real-world benchmarks confirm its robust generalization ability.
Multi-face deepfake videos are becoming increasingly prevalent, often appearing in natural social settings that challenge existing detection methods. Most current approaches excel at single-face detection but struggle in multi-face scenarios, due to a lack of awareness of crucial contextual cues. In this work, we develop a novel approach that leverages human cognition to analyze and defend against multi-face deepfake videos. Through a series of human studies, we systematically examine how people detect deepfake faces in social settings. Our quantitative analysis reveals four key cues humans rely on: scene-motion coherence, inter-face appearance compatibility, interpersonal gaze alignment, and face-body consistency. Guided by these insights, we introduce \textsf HICOM , a novel framework designed to detect every fake face in multi-face scenarios. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that \textsf HICOM improves average accuracy by 3.3% in in-dataset detection and 2.8% under real-world perturbations. Moreover, it outperforms existing methods by 5.8% on unseen datasets, demonstrating the generalization of human-inspired cues. \textsf HICOM further enhances interpretability by incorporating an LLM to provide human-readable explanations, making detection results more transparent and convincing. Our work sheds light on involving human factors to enhance defense against deepfakes.
The use of CLIP embeddings to assess the fidelity of samples produced by text-to-image generative models has been extensively explored in the literature. While the widely adopted CLIPScore, derived from the cosine similarity of text and image embeddings, effectively measures the alignment of a generated image, it does not quantify the diversity of images generated by a text-to-image model. In this work, we extend the application of CLIP embeddings to quantify and interpret the intrinsic diversity of text-to-image models, which are responsible for generating diverse images from similar text prompts, which we refer to as prompt-aware diversity. To achieve this, we propose a decomposition of the CLIP-based kernel covariance matrix of image data into text-based and non-text-based components. Using the Schur complement of the joint image-text kernel covariance matrix, we perform this decomposition and define the matrix-based entropy of the decomposed component as the Schur Complement ENtopy DIversity (Scendi) score, as a measure of the prompt-aware diversity for prompt-guided generative models. Additionally, we discuss the application of the Schur complement-based decomposition to nullify the influence of a given prompt on the CLIP embedding of an image, enabling focus or defocus of the embedded vectors on specific objects. We present several numerical results that apply our proposed Scendi score to evaluate text-to-image and LLM (text-to-text) models. Our numerical results indicate the success of the Scendi score in capturing the intrinsic diversity of prompt-guided generative models. The codebase is available at https://github.com/aziksh-ospanov/scendi-score.
We introduce GausSim, a novel neural network-based simulator designed to capture the dynamic behaviors of real-world elastic objects represented through Gaussian kernels. We leverage continuum mechanics and treat each kernel as a Center of Mass System (CMS) that describes continuous piece of matter, accounting for realistic deformations without idealized assumptions. To improve computational efficiency and fidelity, we employ a hierarchical structure that further organizes kernels into CMSs with explicit formulations, enabling a coarse-to-fine simulation approach. This structure significantly reduces computational overhead while preserving detailed dynamics. In addition, GausSim incorporates explicit physics constraints, such as mass and momentum conservation, ensuring interpretable results and robust, physically plausible simulations. To validate our approach, we present a new dataset, READY, containing multi-view videos of real-world elastic deformations. Experimental results demonstrate that GausSim achieves superior performance compared to existing physics-driven baselines, offering a practical and accurate solution for simulating complex dynamic behaviors. Code and model are available at https://www.mmlab-ntu.com/project/gausim/index.html.
T2I-Copilot: A Training-Free Multi-Agent Text-to-Image System for Enhanced Prompt Interpretation and Interactive Generation
PDF ↗Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models have revolutionized content creation but remain highly sensitive to prompt phrasing, often requiring users to repeatedly refine prompts multiple times without clear feedback. While techniques such as automatic prompt engineering, controlled text embeddings, denoising, and multi-turn generation mitigate these issues, they offer limited controllability, or often necessitate additional training, restricting the generalization abilities. Thus, we introduce T2I-Copilot, a training-free multi-agent system that leverages collaboration between (Multimodal) Large Language Models to automate prompt phrasing, model selection, and iterative refinement. This approach significantly simplifies prompt engineering while enhancing generation quality and text-image alignment compared to direct generation. Specifically, T2I-Copilot consists of three agents: (1) Input Interpreter, which parses the input prompt, resolves ambiguities, and generates a standardized report; (2) Generation Engine, which selects the appropriate model from different types of T2I models and organizes visual and textual prompts to initiate generation; and (3) Quality Evaluator, which assesses aesthetic quality and text-image alignment, providing scores and feedback for potential regeneration. T2I-Copilot can operate fully autonomously while also supporting human-in-the-loop intervention for fine-grained control. On GenAI-Bench, using open-source generation models, T2I-Copilot achieves a VQA score comparable to commercial models RecraftV3 and Imagen 3, surpasses FLUX1.1-pro by 6.17% at only 16.59% of its cost, and outperforms FLUX.1-dev and SD 3.5 Large by 9.11% and 6.36%. Code is released at: https://github.com/SHI-Labs/T2I-Copilot.
3D spatial reasoning is the ability to analyze and interpret the positions, orientations, and spatial relationships of objects within the 3D space. This allows models to develop a comprehensive understanding of the 3D scene, enabling their applicability to a broader range of applications, such as autonomous navigation, robotics, and AR/VR. Despite the remarkable improvements achieved by large multi-modal models (LMMs) in a wide range of image and video understanding tasks, their abilities to perform 3D spatial reasoning are less studied. In this work we present the first comprehensive 3D spatial reasoning benchmark, 3DSRBench, with 3,000 annotated image question answering triplets from 12 question types. We balance the data distribution by collecting complimentary images that lead to opposite answers given the same question. We also adopt a novel FlipEval for robust evaluation of 3D spatial reasoning capabilities. Moreover, to study the robustness of 3D spatial reasoning w.r.t. camera 3D viewpoints, our 3DSRBench involves two subsets with 3D spatial reasoning questions on images from the same scene with common and uncommon viewpoints. We benchmark a wide range of open-sourced and proprietary LMMs, revealing their limitations in different types of 3D awareness, i.e., height, orientation, location, and multi-object reasoning. Our 3DSRBench also allows us to study the design choices of developing LMMs with strong 3D reasoning capabilities, such as the vision encoders, connectors, and training recipes.
Intelligent agents must autonomously interact with the environments to perform daily tasks based on human-level instructions. They need a foundational understanding of the world to accurately interpret these instructions, along with precise low-level movement and interaction skills to execute the derived actions. In this work, we propose the first complete system for synthesizing physically plausible, long-horizon human-object interactions for object manipulation in contextual environments, driven by human-level instructions. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to interpret the input instructions into detailed execution plans. Unlike prior work, our system is capable of generating detailed finger-object interactions, in seamless coordination with full-body movements. We also train a policy to track generated motions in physics simulation via reinforcement learning (RL) to ensure physical plausibility of the motion. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in synthesizing realistic interactions with diverse objects in complex environments, highlighting its significant potential for real-world applications.
MiDSummer: Multi-Guidance Diffusion for Controllable Zero-Shot Immersive Gaussian Splatting Scene Generation
PDF ↗We present MiDSummer, a two-stage framework for generating immersive Gaussian Splatting scenes that leverages multiple diffusion guidance signals to enable structured layout control, enhanced physical realism, and improved visual quality.While 3D scene generation has seen significant recent advances, current approaches could benefit from: (1) achieving precise, reliable layout control while preserving open-world generalization and physical plausibility, (2) balancing high-level semantic reasoning with low-level, directly controllable geometric constraints, and (3) effectively utilizing layout knowledge for visual refinement. Our work addresses these challenges through a structured two-stage planning-assembly framework. For planning, we introduce a dual layout diffusion guidance approach to bridge semantic reasoning and geometric controllability. Our approach uniquely integrates LLMs' open-vocabulary reasoning with Graph Diffusion Models' (GDM) geometric precision by incorporating multi-level self-consistency scores over scene graph structures and layout bounding box parameters. This fusion enables fine-grained control over scene composition while ensuring physical plausibility and faithful prompt interpretation. For assembly, we propose a layout-guided optimization technique for scene refinement. We effectively incorporate layout priors obtained during the planning stage into a Stable Diffusion (SD)-based refinement process that jointly optimizes camera trajectories and scene splats. This layout-aware joint optimization, constrained by multi-view consistency, produces visually compelling immersive scenes that are structurally coherent and controllable.
Visual grounding (VG) is the capability to identify the specific regions in an image associated with a particular text description. In medical imaging, VG enhances interpretability by highlighting relevant pathological features corresponding to textual descriptions, improving model transparency and trustworthiness for wider adoption of deep learning models in clinical practice. Current models struggle to associate textual descriptions with disease regions due to inefficient attention mechanisms and a lack of fine-grained token representations. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate two key observations. First, current VLMs assign high norms to background tokens, diverting the model's attention from regions of disease. Second, the global tokens used for cross-modal learning are not representative of local disease tokens. This hampers identifying correlations between the text and disease tokens. To address this, we introduce simple, yet effective Disease-Aware Prompting (DAP) process, which uses the explainability map of a VLM to identify the appropriate image features. This simple strategy amplifies disease-relevant regions while suppressing background interference. Without any additional pixel-level annotations, DAP improves visual grounding accuracy by 20.74% compared to state-of-the-art methods across three major chest X-ray datasets.
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) is a popular method for learning multimodal latent spaces with well-organized semantics. Despite its wide range of applications, CLIP's latent space is known to fail at handling complex visual-textual interactions. Recent works attempt to address its shortcomings with data-centric or algorithmic approaches. But what if the problem is more fundamental, and lies in the geometry of CLIP? Toward this end, we rigorously analyze CLIP's latent space properties, and prove that no CLIP-like joint embedding space exists which can correctly do any two of the following at the same time: 1. represent basic descriptions and image content, 2. represent attribute binding, 3. represent spatial location and relationships, 4. represent negation. Informed by this analysis, we propose Dense Cosine Similarity Maps (DCSMs) as a principled and interpretable scoring method for CLIP-like models, which solves the fundamental limitations of CLIP by retaining the semantic topology of the image patches and text tokens. This method improves upon the performance of classical CLIP-like joint encoder models on a wide array of benchmarks. We share our code and data here: https://github.com/Raphoo/DCSM_Ideal_CLIP
Humans recognize objects after observing only a few examples, a remarkable capability enabled by their inherent language understanding of the real-world environment. Developing verbalized and interpretable representation can significantly improve model generalization in low-data settings. In this work, we propose Verbalized Representation Learning (VRL), a novel approach for automatically extracting human-interpretable features for object recognition using few-shot data. Our method uniquely captures inter-class differences and intra-class commonalities in the form of natural language by employing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to identify key discriminative features between different classes and shared characteristics within the same class. These verbalized features are then mapped to numeric vectors through the VLM. The resulting feature vectors can be further utilized to train and infer with downstream classifiers. Experimental results show that, at the same model scale, VRL achieves a 24% absolute improvement over prior state-of-the-art methods while using 95% less data and a smaller model. Furthermore, compared to human-labeled attributes, the features learned by VRL exhibit a 20% absolute gain when used for downstream classification tasks.
GaRe: Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting for Outdoor Scenes from Unconstrained Photo Collections
PDF ↗We propose a 3D Gaussian splatting-based framework for outdoor relighting that leverages intrinsic image decomposition to precisely integrate sunlight, sky radiance, and indirect lighting from unconstrained photo collections. Unlike prior methods that compress the per-image global illumination into a single latent vector, our approach enables simultaneously diverse shading manipulation and the generation of dynamic shadow effects. This is achieved through three key innovations: (1) a residual-based sun visibility extraction method to accurately separate direct sunlight effects, (2) a region-based supervision framework with a structural consistency loss for physically interpretable and coherent illumination decomposition, and (3) a ray-tracing-based technique for realistic shadow simulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework synthesizes novel views with competitive fidelity against state-of-the-art relighting solutions and produces more natural and multifaceted illumination and shadow effects.
Bridging the Gap between Brain and Machine in Interpreting Visual Semantics: Towards Self-adaptive Brain-to-Text Decoding
PDF ↗Neural decoding has recently made significant progress in reconstructing images and text from brain activity, yet seeking biologically valid semantic alignment between artificial models and the brain remains challenging. Large pre-trained foundation models such as CLIP excel at capturing rich semantic details in complex visual scenes. In contrast, due to selective attention, only part of the visual semantics in the stimulus may be preferentially represented in the neural patterns when subjects view images. Past studies have generally assumed that stimulus images and their evoked brain recordings are strictly semantically equivalent, potentially leading to semantic misalignment between supervision signals and neural recordings. In order to address this, we propose a novel self-adaptive semantic decoding method (Mind-SA), designed to dynamically detect the regions within stimulus images that the brain actually focuses on and use them as supervision to guide brain-to-text reconstruction. We find that the proposed Mind-SA can be used to reduce the semantic gap between supervision signals (i.e., stimulus images) and neural representations, thus enabling the reconstruction model to focus on the parts that the brain actually perceives. Experiments demonstrate that Mind-SA improves the quality of neural representations and achieves the state-of-the-art brain-to-text performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/JxuanC/MindSA.
Multimodal large models have made significant progress, yet fine-grained understanding of complex scenes remains a challenge. High-quality, large-scale vision-language datasets are essential for addressing this issue. However, existing methods often rely on labor-intensive manual annotations or closed-source models with optimal performance, making large-scale data collection costly. To overcome these limitations, we propose a self-bootstrapped training pipeline that leverages the model's own multimodal capabilities to recursively refine its understanding. By decomposing existing multimodal data into localized sub-regions and generating hierarchical scene descriptions and multi-faceted question-answer pairs, we construct a dataset based on 1.4M image-task instances. We further utilize this dataset to train the base model, significantly enhancing its ability to interpret complex visual scenes and perform various vision-related tasks. Our OURO model, fine-tuned on Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct using LoRA, achieves substantial improvements over both the base model and similarly-sized counterparts across multiple multimodal benchmarks. Our self-bootstrapped training pipeline offers a novel paradigm for the continuous improvement of multimodal models. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/tinnel123666888/OURO.git.
Can Knowledge be Transferred from Unimodal to Multimodal? Investigating the Transitivity of Multimodal Knowledge Editing
PDF ↗Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) contain a substantial amount of factual knowledge, which may become outdated or inaccurate over time. Consequently, various knowledge editing techniques have been proposed to update the knowledge encoded within these models. Previous approaches maintain modality consistency during both the editing and testing phases. However, in practical applications, it is desirable for knowledge to be transferable across different modalities, which can enhance the robustness of knowledge editing and potentially allow for cost-effective editing of multimodal knowledge using textual information. To address this, we introduce the concept of Transitivity of Multimodal Knowledge Editing (TMKE) and design corresponding evaluation criteria. Subsequently, we construct a corresponding TMKE Benchmark through an automated pipeline. We evaluate three MLLMs and five knowledge editing methods, uncovering limitations in the current models and methods concerning transitivity. Additionally, we analyze the intrinsic representations of the model during the editing process based on Knowledge Neurons to interpret the experimental phenomena.