The text-to-video (T2V) generation models, offering convenient visual creation, have recently garnered increasing attention. Despite their substantial potential, the generated videos may present artifacts, including structural implausibility, temporal inconsistency, and a lack of motion, often resulting in near-static video. In this work, we have identified a correlation between the disparity of temporal attention maps across different blocks and the occurrence of temporal inconsistencies. Additionally, we have observed that the energy contained within the temporal attention maps is directly related to the magnitude of motion amplitude in the generated videos. Based on these observations, we present ByTheWay, a training-free method to improve the quality of text-to-video generation without introducing additional parameters, augmenting memory or sampling time. Specifically, ByTheWay is composed of two principal components: 1) Temporal Self-Guidance improves the structural plausibility and temporal consistency of generated videos by reducing the disparity between the temporal attention maps across various decoder blocks. 2) Fourier-based Motion Enhancement enhances the magnitude and richness of motion by amplifying the energy of the map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ByTheWay significantly improves the quality of text-to-video generation with negligible additional cost.
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Predicting diverse object motions from a single static image remains challenging, as current video generation models often entangle object movement with camera motion and other scene changes. While recent methods can predict specific motions from motion arrow input, they rely on synthetic data and predefined motions, limiting their application to complex scenes. We introduce Motion Modes, a training-free approach that explores a pre-trained image-to-video generator's latent distribution to discover various distinct and plausible motions focused on selected objects in static images. We achieve this by employing a flow generator guided by energy functions designed to disentangle object and camera motion. Additionally, we use an energy inspired by particle guidance to diversify the generated motions, without requiring explicit training data. Experimental results demonstrate that Motion Modes generates realistic and varied object animations, surpassing previous methods and even human predictions regarding plausibility and diversity.
Visual representation models leveraging attention mechanisms are challenged by significant computational overhead, particularly when pursuing large receptive fields. In this study, we aim to mitigate this challenge by introducing the Heat Conduction Operator (HCO) built upon the physical heat conduction principle. HCO conceptualizes image patches as heat sources and models their correlations through adaptive thermal energy diffusion, enabling robust visual representations. HCO enjoys a computational complexity of O(N^1.5), as it can be implemented using discrete cosine transformation (DCT) operations. HCO is plug-and-play, combining with deep learning backbones produces visual representation models (termed vHeat) with global receptive fields. Experiments across vision tasks demonstrate that, beyond the stronger performance, vHeat achieves up to a 3x throughput, 80% less GPU memory allocation, and 35% fewer computational FLOPs compared to the Swin-Transformer.
Emerging from the pairwise attention in conventional Transformers, there is a growing interest in sparse attention mechanisms that align more closely with localized, contextual learning in the biological brain. Existing studies such as the Coordination method employ iterative cross-attention mechanisms with a bottleneck to enable the sparse association of inputs. However, these methods are parameter inefficient and fail in more complex relational reasoning tasks. To this end, we propose Associative Transformer (AiT) to enhance the association among sparsely attended input tokens, improving parameter efficiency and performance in various vision tasks such as classification and relational reasoning. AiT leverages a learnable explicit memory comprising specialized priors that guide bottleneck attentions to facilitate the extraction of diverse localized tokens. Moreover, AiT employs an associative memory-based token reconstruction using a Hopfield energy function. The extensive empirical experiments demonstrate that AiT requires significantly fewer parameters and attention layers outperforming a broad range of sparse Transformer models. Additionally, AiT outperforms the SOTA sparse Transformer models including the Coordination method on the Sort-of-CLEVR dataset.
Video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) encodes videos into a low-dimensional latent space, becoming a key component of most Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs) to reduce model training costs. However, as the resolution and duration of generated videos increase, the encoding cost of Video VAEs becomes a limiting bottleneck in training LVDMs. Moreover, the block-wise inference method adopted by most LVDMs can lead to discontinuities of latent space when processing long-duration videos. The key to addressing the computational bottleneck lies in decomposing videos into distinct components and efficiently encoding the critical information. Wavelet transform can decompose videos into multiple frequency-domain components and improve the efficiency significantly, we thus propose Wavelet Flow VAE (WF-VAE), an autoencoder that leverages multi-level wavelet transform to facilitate low-frequency energy flow into latent representation. Furthermore, we introduce a method called Causal Cache, which maintains the integrity of latent space during block-wise inference. Compared to state-of-the-art video VAEs, WF-VAE demonstrates superior performance in both PSNR and LPIPS metrics, achieving 2x higher throughput and 4x lower memory consumption while maintaining competitive reconstruction quality. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/WF-VAE.
Deep neural networks, while achieving remarkable success across diverse tasks, demand significant resources, including computation, GPU memory, bandwidth, storage, and energy. Network quantization, as a standard compression and acceleration technique, reduces storage costs and enables potential inference acceleration by discretizing network weights and activations into a finite set of integer values. However, current quantization methods are often complex and sensitive, requiring extensive task-specific hyperparameters, where even a single misconfiguration can impair model performance, limiting generality across different models and tasks. In this paper, we propose Quantization without Tears (QwT), a method that simultaneously achieves quantization speed, accuracy, simplicity, and generality. The key insight of QwT is to incorporate a lightweight additional structure into the quantized network to mitigate information loss during quantization. This structure consists solely of a small set of linear layers, keeping the method simple and efficient. More importantly, it provides a closed-form solution, allowing us to improve accuracy effortlessly under 2 minutes. Extensive experiments across various vision, language, and multimodal tasks demonstrate that QwT is both highly effective and versatile. In fact, our approach offers a robust solution for network quantization that combines simplicity, accuracy, and adaptability, which provides new insights for the design of novel quantization paradigms.
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are accurate but compute-intensive, leading to substantial energy consumption during inference. Exploiting temporal redundancy through \Delta-\Sigma convolution in video processing has proven to greatly enhance computation efficiency. However, temporal \Delta-\Sigma DNNs typically require substantial memory for storing neuron states to compute inter-frame differences, hindering their on-chip deployment. To mitigate this memory cost, directly compressing the states can disrupt the linearity of temporal \Delta-\Sigma convolution, causing accumulated errors in long-term \Delta-\Sigma processing. Thus, we propose MEET, an optimization framework for MEmory-Efficient Temporal \Delta-\Sigma DNNs. MEET transfers the state compression challenge to a well-established weight compression problem by trading fewer activations for more weights and introduces a co-design of network architecture and suppression method to optimize for mixed spatial-temporal execution. Evaluations on three vision applications demonstrate a reduction of 5.1~13.3 xin total memory compared to the most computation-efficient temporal DNNs, while preserving the computation efficiency and model accuracy in long-term \Delta-\Sigma processing. MEET facilitates the deployment of temporal \Delta-\Sigma DNNs within on-chip memory of embedded event-driven platforms, empowering low-power edge processing.
Creating hand-drawn animation sequences is labor-intensive and demands professional expertise. We introduce PhysAnimator, a novel approach for generating physically plausible meanwhile anime-stylized animation from static anime illustrations. Our method seamlessly integrates physics-based simulations with data-driven generative models to produce dynamic and visually compelling animations. To capture the fluidity and exaggeration characteristic of anime, we perform image-space deformable body simulations on extracted mesh geometries. We enhance artistic control by introducing customizable energy strokes and incorporating rigging point support, enabling the creation of tailored animation effects such as wind interactions. Finally, we extract and warp sketches from the simulation sequence, generating a texture-agnostic representation, and employ a sketch-guided video diffusion model to synthesize high-quality animation frames. The resulting animations exhibit temporal consistency and visual plausibility, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in creating dynamic anime-style animations.
VISTREAM: Improving Computation Efficiency of Visual Streaming Perception via Law-of-Charge-Conservation Inspired Spiking Neural Network
PDF ↗Visual streaming perception (VSP) involves online intelligent processing of sequential frames captured by vision sensors, enabling real-time decision-making in applications such as autonomous driving, UAVs, and AR/VR. However, the computational efficiency of VSP on edge devices remains a challenge due to power constraints and the underutilization of temporal dependencies between frames. While spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer biologically inspired event-driven processing with potential energy benefits, their practical advantage over artificial neural networks (ANNs) for VSP tasks remains unproven.In this work, we introduce a novel framework, VISTREAM, which leverages the Law of Charge Conservation (LoCC) property in ST-BIF neurons and a differential encoding (DiffEncode) scheme to optimize SNN inference for VSP. By encoding temporal differences between neighboring frames and eliminating frequent membrane resets, VISTREAM achieves significant computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy equivalent to its ANN counterpart. We provide theoretical proofs of equivalence and validate VISTREAM across diverse VSP tasks, including object detection, tracking, and segmentation, demonstrating substantial energy savings without compromising performance.
Spike-based Transformer presents a compelling and energy-efficient alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based Transformers, achieving impressive results through sparse binary computations. However, existing spike-based transformers predominantly focus on spatial attention while neglecting crucial temporal dependencies inherent in spike-based processing, leading to suboptimal feature representation and limited performance. To address this limitation, we propose Spiking Transformer with Spatial-Temporal Attention (STAtten), a simple and straightforward architecture that efficiently integrates both spatial and temporal information in the self-attention mechanism. STAtten introduces a block-wise computation strategy that processes information in spatial-temporal chunks, enabling comprehensive feature capture while maintaining the same computational complexity as previous spatial-only approaches. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into existing spike-based transformers without architectural overhaul. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STAtten significantly improves the performance of existing spike-based transformers across both static and neuromorphic datasets, including CIFAR10/100, ImageNet, CIFAR10-DVS, and N-Caltech101.
While deep neural networks have revolutionized image denoising capabilities, their deployment on edge devices remains challenging due to substantial computational and memory requirements. To this end, we present DnLUT, an ultra-efficient lookup table-based framework that achieves high-quality color image denoising with minimal resource consumption. Our key innovation lies in two complementary components: a Pairwise Channel Mixer (PCM) that effectively captures inter-channel correlations and spatial dependencies in parallel, and a novel L-shaped convolution design that maximizes receptive field coverage while minimizing storage overhead. By converting these components into optimized lookup tables post-training, DnLUT achieves remarkable efficiency - requiring only 500KB storage and 0.1% energy consumption compared to its CNN contestant DnCNN, while delivering 20x faster inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DnLUT outperforms all existing LUT-based methods by over 1dB in PSNR, establishing a new state-of-the-art in resource-efficient color image denoising.
Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) have the capability of energy-efficient processing of temporal information. However, leveraging the rich dynamic characteristics of SNNs and prior works in artificial neural networks (ANNs) to construct an effective object detection model for visual tasks remains an open question for further exploration. To develop a directly-trained , low energy consumption and high-performance multi-scale SNN model, we propose a novel interpretable object detection framework Multi-scale Spiking Detector (MSD). Initially, we propose a spiking convolutional neuron as a core component of the Optic Nerve Nucleus Block (ONNB), designed to significantly enhance the deep feature extraction capabilities of SNNs. ONNB enables direct training with improved energy efficiency, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art ANN-to-SNN conversion and SNN techniques. In addition, we propose a Multi-scale Spiking Detection Framework to emulate the biological response and comprehension of stimuli from different objects. Wherein, spiking multi-scale fusion and the spiking detector are employed to integrate features across different depths and to detect response outcomes, respectively. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art ANN detectors, with only 7.8 M parameters and 6.43 mJ energy consumption. MSD obtains the mean average precision (mAP) of 62.0% and 66.3% on COCO and Gen1 datasets, respectively.
Inference-Scale Complexity in ANN-SNN Conversion for High-Performance and Low-Power Applications
PDF ↗Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising substitute for Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their advantages of fast inference and low power consumption. However, the lack of efficient training algorithms has hindered their widespread adoption. Even efficient ANN-SNN conversion methods necessitate quantized training of ANNs to enhance the effectiveness of the conversion, incurring additional training costs. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient ANN-SNN conversion framework with only inference scale complexity. The conversion framework includes a local threshold balancing algorithm, which enables efficient calculation of the optimal thresholds and fine-grained adjustment of the threshold value by channel-wise scaling. We also introduce an effective delayed evaluation strategy to mitigate the influence of the spike propagation delays. We demonstrate the scalability of our framework in typical computer vision tasks: image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and video classification. Our algorithm outperforms existing methods, highlighting its practical applicability and efficiency. Moreover, we have evaluated the energy consumption of the converted SNNs, demonstrating their superior low-power advantage compared to conventional ANNs. This approach simplifies the deployment of SNNs by leveraging open-source pre-trained ANN models, enabling fast, low-power inference with negligible performance reduction.
Guaranteed Guess: A Language Modeling Approach for CISC-to-RISC Transpilation with Testing Guarantees
PDF ↗The hardware ecosystem is rapidly evolving, with increasing interest in translating low-level programs across different *instruction set architectures* (ISAs) in a quick, flexible, and correct way to enhance the portability and longevity of existing code. A particularly challenging class of this transpilation problem is translating between complex- (CISC) and reduced- (RISC) hardware architectures, due to fundamental differences in instruction complexity, memory models, and execution paradigms. In this work, we introduce GG (**G**uaranteed **G**uess), an ISA-centric transpilation pipeline that combines the translation power of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with the rigor of established software testing constructs. Our method generates candidate translations using an LLM from one ISA to another, and embeds such translations within a software-testing framework to build quantifiable confidence in the translation. We evaluate our GG approach over two diverse datasets, enforce high code coverage (>98%) across unit tests, and achieve functional/semantic correctness of 99% on HumanEval programs and 49% on BringupBench programs, respectively. Further, we compare our approach to the state-of-the-art Rosetta 2 framework on Apple Silicon, showcasing 1.73\times faster runtime performance, 1.47\times better energy efficiency, and 2.41\times better memory usage for our transpiled code, demonstrating the effectiveness of GG for real-world CISC-to-RISC translation tasks. We will open-source our codes, data, models, and benchmarks to establish a common foundation for ISA-level code translation research.
Small Language Models (SLMs) offer computational efficiency and accessibility, yet a systematic evaluation of their performance and environmental impact remains lacking. We introduce SLM-Bench, the first benchmark specifically designed to assess SLMs across multiple dimensions, including accuracy, computational efficiency, and sustainability metrics. SLM-Bench evaluates 15 SLMs on 9 NLP tasks using 23 datasets spanning 14 domains. The evaluation is conducted on 4 hardware configurations, providing a rigorous comparison of their effectiveness. Unlike prior benchmarks, SLM-Bench quantifies 11 metrics across correctness, computation, and consumption, enabling a holistic assessment of efficiency trade-offs. Our evaluation considers controlled hardware conditions, ensuring fair comparisons across models. We develop an open-source benchmarking pipeline with standardized evaluation protocols to facilitate reproducibility and further research. Our findings highlight the diverse trade-offs among SLMs, where some models excel in accuracy while others achieve superior energy efficiency. SLM-Bench sets a new standard for SLM evaluation, bridging the gap between resource efficiency and real-world applicability.
As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) advance, their large-scale architectures pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. In the age of large models, where energy efficiency, computational scalability and environmental sustainability are paramount, the development of lightweight and high-performance models is critical for real-world applications. As such, we propose a lightweight MLLM framework for end-to-end visual question answering. Our proposed approach centres on BreezeCLIP, a compact yet powerful vision-language encoder optimised for efficient multimodal understanding. With only 1.2 billion parameters overall, our model significantly reduces computational cost while achieving performance comparable to standard-size MLLMs. Experiments conducted on multiple datasets further validate its effectiveness in balancing accuracy and efficiency. The modular and extensible design enables generalisation to broader multimodal tasks. The proposed lightweight vision-language framework is denoted as BcQLM (BreezeCLIP-enhanced Q-Gated Multimodal Language Model). It offers a promising path toward deployable MLLMs under practical hardware constraints. The source code is available at https://github.com/thico0224/BcQLM.
Designing polymers for targeted applications and accurately predicting their properties is a key challenge in materials science owing to the vast and complex polymer chemical space. While molecular language models have proven effective in solving analogous problems for molecular discovery, similar advancements for polymers are limited. To address this gap, we propose polyBART, a language model-driven polymer discovery capability that enables rapid and accurate exploration of the polymer design space. Central to our approach is Pseudo-polymer SELFIES (PSELFIES), a novel representation that allows for the transfer of molecular language models to the polymer space. polyBART is, to the best of our knowledge, the first language model capable of bidirectional translation between polymer structures and properties, achieving state-of-the-art results in property prediction and design of novel polymers for electrostatic energy storage. Further, polyBART is validated through a combination of both computational and laboratory experiments. We report what we believe is the first successful synthesis and validation of a polymer designed by a language model, predicted to exhibit high thermal degradation temperature and confirmed by our laboratory measurements. Our work presents a generalizable strategy for adapting molecular language models to the polymer space and introduces a polymer foundation model, advancing generative polymer design that may be adapted for a variety of applications.
The Green KNIGHT: Green Machine Translation with Knowledge-Distilled, Narrow, Inexpensive, Greedy, Hybrid Transformers
PDF ↗State-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) models deliver high-quality translations at the expense of high inference latency and energy consumption, requiring vast GPU fleets and contributing significantly to carbon emissions. To democratize and “green” NMT, we introduce the Green KNIGHT, a hardware-agnostic collection of recipes to optimize translation speed and energy consumption, with only a moderate trade-off in quality. On high-resource En→De and En→Ko benchmarks, we achieve up to 117× CPU speedup and 98.2% energy savings with 9% relative BLEU decrease. On WMT 2014 En→De and En→Fr benchmarks, we obtain up to 140× speedup with 98.7% energy savings, while staying within 10–12% relative BLEU decrease. Our results demonstrate that efficient and environmentally conscious NMT can be realized through optimizations built on well-understood, off-the-shelf techniques with no custom low-level code required, making our approach immediately deployable in real-world translation pipelines.
Enhancing Hate Speech Classifiers through a Gradient-assisted Counterfactual Text Generation Strategy
PDF ↗Counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) is a promising strategy for improving hate speech classification, but automating counterfactual text generation remains a challenge. Strong attribute control can distort meaning, while prioritizing semantic preservation may weaken attribute alignment. We propose **Gradient-assisted Energy-based Sampling (GENES)** for counterfactual text generation, which restricts accepted samples to text meeting a minimum BERTScore threshold and applies gradient-assisted proposal generation to improve attribute alignment. Compared to other methods that solely rely on either prompting, gradient-based steering, or energy-based sampling, GENES is more likely to jointly satisfy attribute alignment and semantic preservation under the same base model. When applied to data augmentation, GENES achieved the best macro F1-score in two of three test sets, and it improved robustness in detecting targeted abusive language. In some cases, GENES exceeded the performance of prompt-based methods using a GPT-4o-mini, despite relying on a smaller model (Flan-T5-Large). Based on our cross-dataset evaluation, the average performance of models aided by GENES is the best among those methods that rely on a smaller model (Flan-T5-L). These results position GENES as a possible lightweight and open-source alternative.
Spectral Scaling Laws in Language Models: emphHow Effectively Do Feed-Forward Networks Use Their Latent Space?
PDF ↗As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale, the question is not just how large they become, but how much of their capacity is effectively utilized. Existing scaling laws relate model size to loss, yet overlook how components exploit their latent space. In this work, we focus on Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) and recast width selection as a spectral utilization optimization problem. Using a lightweight diagnostic suite: Hard Rank (participation ratio), Soft Rank (Shannon Rank), Spectral Concentration, and the composite Spectral Utilization Index (SUI), we quantify how many latent directions are meaningfully activated across LLaMA, GPT-2, and nGPT families. Our key finding is an Asymmetric Spectral Scaling Law: soft rank follows an almost perfect power law with FFN width, while hard rank grows only sublinearly, with high variance. This asymmetry suggests that widening FFNs mostly adds low-energy tail directions, while dominant-mode subspaces saturate early. Moreover, at larger widths, variance further collapses into a narrow subspace, leaving much of the latent space under-utilized. These results recast FFN width selection as a principled trade-off between tail capacity and dominant-mode capacity, offering concrete guidance for inference-efficient LLM design.