The optimality of using the de facto cross-entropy loss with one-hot target distribution (hard labeling) is questioned when training (Multimodal) Large Language Models (LLMs/MLLMs). Although it is reasonable for language token prediction, which is a typical multi-class classification problem in discrete space, it is suboptimal for task like numerical prediction, which is a typical regression problem in continuous space. However, enabling regression in LLMs/MLLMs will complicate the training and next-token prediction paradigm at inference. Instead, to address this challenge, we propose a novel loss design, called soft labeling, which smooths the target probability distribution, enabling predictions to be penalized according to their distance to the target. This is similar to regression loss, which penalizes more on the further predictions in the continuous space, but will not change the model architecture and the next-token prediction paradigm of LLMs/MLLMs. We demonstrate the efficacy of soft labeling through extensive experiments on visual grounding, object counting, and chart understanding, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks without bells and whistles. Soft labeling can be applied in any LLM/MLLM.
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Group-wise Scaling and Orthogonal Decomposition for Domain-Invariant Feature Extraction in Face Anti-Spoofing
PDF ↗Domain Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing (DG-FAS) methods effectively capture domain-invariant features by aligning the directions (weights) of local decision boundaries across domains. However, the bias terms associated with these boundaries remain misaligned, leading to inconsistent classification thresholds and degraded performance on unseen target domains.To address this issue, we propose a novel DG-FAS framework that jointly aligns weights and biases through Feature Orthogonal Decomposition (FOD) and Group-wise Scaling Risk Minimization (GS-RM).Specifically, GS-RM facilitates bias alignment by balancing group-wise losses across multiple domains. FOD employs the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization process to decompose the feature space explicitly into domain-invariant and domain-specific subspaces. By enforcing orthogonality between domain-specific and domain-invariant features during training using domain labels, FOD ensures effective weight alignment across domains without negatively impacting bias alignment.Additionally, we introduce Expected Calibration Error (ECE) as a novel evaluation metric for quantitatively assessing the effectiveness of our method in aligning bias terms across domains. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently improving accuracy, reducing bias misalignment, and enhancing generalization stability on unseen target domains.
Current visual foundation models (VFMs) face a fundamental limitation in transferring knowledge from vision language models (VLMs): while VLMs excel at modeling cross-modal interactions through unified representation spaces, existing VFMs predominantly adopt result-oriented paradigms that neglect the underlying interaction processes. This representational discrepancy leads to suboptimal knowledge transfer and limited generalization capabilities across vision tasks.We propose Learning from Interactions, a cognitive-inspired framework that bridges this gap by explicitly modeling interactions during visual understanding. Our key insight is that preserving the interaction dynamics captured by VLMs -- rather than just their final representations -- enables more effective knowledge transfer to downstream VFMs. The technical core involves two innovations: (1) Interaction Queries that maintain persistent relationships across network layers, and (2) interaction-based supervision derived from pre-trained VLMs' cross-modal attention patterns.Comprehensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple benchmarks: achieving ~3.3% and +1.6 mAP/+2.4 AP^ mask absolute gains on TinyImageNet classification and COCO detection/segmentation respectively, with minimal parameter overhead and faster convergence (7xspeedup). The framework particularly excels in cross-domain scenarios, delivering ~2.4% and ~9.3% zero-shot improvements on PACS and VLCS. Human evaluations confirm our approach's cognitive alignment, outperforming result-oriented methods by 2.7xin semantic consistency metrics.
The rapid advancement of GAN and Diffusion models makes it more difficult to distinguish AI-generated images from real ones. Recent studies often use image-based reconstruction errors as an important feature for determining whether an image is AI-generated. However, these approaches typically incur high computational costs and also fail to capture intrinsic noisy features present in the raw images. To solve these problems, we innovatively refine error extraction by using bit-plane-based image processing, as lower bit planes indeed represent noise patterns in images. We introduce an effective bit-planes guided noisy image generation and exploit various image normalization strategies, including scaling and thresholding. Then, to amplify the noise signal for easier AI-generated image detection, we design a maximum gradient patch selection that applies multi-directional gradients to compute the noise score and selects the region with the highest score. Finally, we propose a lightweight and effective classification head and explore two different structures: noise-based classifier and noise-guided classifier. Extensive experiments on the GenImage benchmark demonstrate the outstanding performance of our method, which achieves an average accuracy of 98.9% and shows excellent cross-generator generalization capability. Particularly, our method achieves an accuracy of over 98.2% from GAN to Diffusion and over 99.2% from Diffusion to GAN. Moreover, it performs error extraction at the millisecond level, nearly a hundred times faster than existing methods. The code is at https://github.com/hongsong-wang/LOTA.
Local feature matching remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recent Area to Point Matching (A2PM) methods have improved matching accuracy. However, existing research based on this framework relies on inefficient pixel-level comparisons and complex graph matching that limit scalability. In this work, we introduce the Semantic and Geometric-aware Descriptor Network (SGAD), which fundamentally rethinks area-based matching by generating highly discriminative area descriptors that enable direct matching without complex graph optimization. This approach significantly improves both accuracy and efficiency of area matching. We further improve the performance of area matching through a novel supervision strategy that decomposes the area matching task into classification and ranking subtasks. Finally, we introduce the Hierarchical Containment Redundancy Filter (HCRF) to eliminate overlapping areas by analyzing containment graphs. SGAD demonstrates remarkable performance gains, reducing runtime by 60x(0.82s vs. 60.23s) compared to MESA. Extensive evaluations show consistent improvements across multiple point matchers: SGAD+LoFTR reduces runtime compared to DKM, while achieving higher accuracy (0.82s vs. 1.51s, 65.98 vs. 61.11) in outdoor pose estimation, and SGAD+ROMA delivers +7.39% AUC@5^\circ in indoor pose estimation, establishing a new state-of-the-art.
CLIPer: Hierarchically Improving Spatial Representation of CLIP for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
PDF ↗Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) exhibits strong zero-shot classification ability on image-level tasks, leading to the research to adapt CLIP for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation without training. The key is to improve spatial representation of image-level CLIP, such as replacing self-attention map at last layer with self-self attention map or vision foundation model based attention map. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical framework, named CLIPer, that hierarchically improves spatial representation of CLIP. The proposed CLIPer includes an early-layer fusion and a fine-grained compensation. We observe that, the embeddings and attention maps at early layers can preserve spatial structural information. Inspired by this, we design the early-layer fusion module to generate segmentation map with better spatial coherence. Afterwards, we employ a fine-grained compensation module to compensate local details using the self-attention maps of diffusion model. We conduct the experiments on eight segmentation datasets. Our CLIPer achieves the state-of-the-art performance on these datasets. With ViT-L and sliding-window inference, CLIPer has the mIoU of 72.2% and 44.7% on VOC and Object, outperforming ProxyCLIP by 11.6% and 5.5%. Our code is available at https://github.com/linsun449/cliper.code.
We introduce Hierarchical Streaming Video Understanding, a task that combines online temporal action localization with free-form description generation. Given the scarcity of datasets with hierarchical and fine-grained temporal annotations, we demonstrate that LLMs can effectively group atomic actions into higher-level events, enriching existing datasets.We then propose OpenHOUSE (Open-ended Hierarchical Online Understanding System for Events), which extends streaming action perception beyond action classification. OpenHOUSE features a specialized streaming module that accurately detects boundaries between closely adjacent actions, nearly doubling the performance of direct extensions of existing methods.We envision the future of streaming action perception in the integration of powerful generative models, with OpenHOUSE representing a key step in that direction.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has advanced significantly in visual representation learning, yet comprehensive evaluations of its adversarial robustness remain limited. In this study, we evaluate the adversarial robustness of seven discriminative self-supervised models and one supervised model across diverse tasks, including ImageNet classification, transfer learning, segmentation, and detection. Our findings suggest that discriminative SSL models generally exhibit better robustness to adversarial attacks compared to their supervised counterpart on ImageNet, with this advantage extending to transfer learning when using linear evaluation. However, when fine-tuning is applied, the robustness gap between SSL and supervised models narrows considerably. Similarly, this robustness advantage diminishes in segmentation and detection tasks. We also investigate how various factors might influence adversarial robustness, including architectural choices, training duration, data augmentations, and batch sizes. Our analysis contributes to the ongoing exploration of adversarial robustness in visual self-supervised representation systems.
Foundation models are pre-trained on large-scale datasets and subsequently fine-tuned on small-scale datasets using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques like low-rank adapters (LoRA). In most previous works, LoRA weight matrices are randomly initialized with a fixed rank across all attachment points. In this paper, we improve convergence and final performance of LoRA fine-tuning, using our proposed data-driven weight initialization method, ConsNoTrainLoRA (CNTLoRA). We express LoRA initialization as a domain shift problem where we use multiple constraints relating the pre-training and fine-tuning activations. By reformulating these constraints, we obtain a closed-form estimate of LoRA weights that depends on pre-training weights and fine-tuning activation vectors and hence requires no training during initialization. This weight estimate is decomposed to initialize the up and down matrices with proposed flexibility of variable ranks. With the proposed initialization method, we fine-tune on downstream tasks such as image generation, image classification and image understanding. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that CNTLoRA outperforms standard and data-driven weight initialization methods. Extensive analyses and ablations further elucidate the design choices of our framework, providing an optimal recipe for faster convergence and enhanced performance
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.
Adversarial attacks present a significant challenge to the dependable deployment of machine learning models, with patch-based attacks being particularly potent. These attacks introduce adversarial perturbations in localized regions of an image, deceiving even well-trained models. In this paper, we propose Outlier Detection and Dimension Reduction (ODDR), a comprehensive defense strategy engineered to counteract patch-based adversarial attacks through advanced statistical methodologies.Our approach is based on the observation that input features corresponding to adversarial patches--whether naturalistic or synthetic--deviate from the intrinsic distribution of the remaining image data and can thus be identified as outliers. ODDR operates through a robust three-stage pipeline: Fragmentation, Segregation, and Neutralization. This model-agnostic framework is versatile, offering protection across various tasks, including image classification, object detection, and depth estimation, and is proved effective in both CNN-based and Transformer-based architectures.In the Fragmentation stage, image samples are divided into smaller segments, preparing them for the Segregation stage, where advanced outlier detection techniques isolate anomalous features linked to adversarial perturbations. The Neutralization stage then applies dimension reduction techniques to these outliers, effectively neutralizing the adversarial impact while preserving critical information for the machine learning task.Extensive evaluation on benchmark datasets against state-of-the-art adversarial patches underscores the efficacy of ODDR. For example, our proposed method enhances model accuracy from 39.26% to 79.1% under the GoogleAp attack, outperforming leading defenses such as LGS (53.86%), Jujutsu (60%), and Jedi (64.34%).
Deep neural networks for 3D point clouds have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Previous 3D adversarial attack methods often exploit certain information about the target models, such as model parameters or outputs, to generate adversarial point clouds. However, in realistic scenarios, it is challenging to obtain any information about the target models under conditions of absolute security. Therefore, we focus on transfer-based attacks, where generating adversarial point clouds does not require any information about the target models. Based on our observation that the critical features used for point cloud classification are consistent across different DNN architectures, we propose CFG, a novel transfer-based black-box attack method that improves the transferability of adversarial point clouds via the proposed **C**ritical **F**eature **G**uidance. Specifically, our method regularizes the search of adversarial point clouds by computing the importance of the extracted features, prioritizing the corruption of critical features that are likely to be adopted by diverse architectures. Further, we explicitly constrain the maximum deviation extent of the generated adversarial point clouds in the loss function to ensure their imperceptibility. Extensive experiments conducted on the ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed CFG outperforms the state-of-the-art attack methods by a large margin. The code is available at https://github.com/AIASLab/CFG-ICCV2025.
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation aims to assign semantic labels to each pixel without being constrained by a predefined set of categories. While Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) excels in zero-shot classification, it struggles to align image patches with category embeddings because of its incoherent patch correlations. This study reveals that inter-class correlations are the main reason for impairing CLIP's segmentation performance. Accordingly, we propose CorrCLIP, which reconstructs the scope and value of patch correlations. Specifically, CorrCLIP leverages the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to define the scope of patch interactions, reducing inter-class correlations. To mitigate the problem that SAM-generated masks may contain patches belonging to different classes, CorrCLIP incorporates self-supervised models to compute coherent similarity values, suppressing the weight of inter-class correlations. Additionally, we introduce two additional branches to strengthen patch features' spatial details and semantic representation. Finally, we update segmentation maps with SAM-generated masks to improve spatial consistency. Based on the improvement across patch correlations, feature representations, and segmentation maps, CorrCLIP achieves superior performance across eight benchmarks. Codes are available at: https://github.com/zdk258/CorrCLIP.
To ensure the reliability of deep models in real-world applications, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods aim to distinguish samples close to the training distribution (in-distribution, ID) from those farther away (OOD). In this work, we propose a novel OOD detection method that utilizes singular value decomposition of the weight matrix of the classification head to decompose the model's activations into decisive and insignificant components, which contribute maximally, respectively minimally, to the final classifier output. We find that the subspace of insignificant components more effectively distinguishes ID from OOD data than raw activations in regimes of large distribution shifts (Far-OOD). This occurs because the classification objective leaves the insignificant subspace largely unaffected, yielding features that are "untainted" by the target classification task. Conversely, in regimes of smaller distribution shifts (Near-OOD), we find that activation shaping methods profit from only considering the decisive subspace, as the insignificant component can cause interference in the activation space. By combining two findings into a single approach, termed ActSub, we achieve state-of-the-art results in various standard OOD benchmarks.
More Reliable Pseudo-labels, Better Performance: A Generalized Approach to Single Positive Multi-label Learning
PDF ↗Multi-label learning is a challenging computer vision task that requires assigning multiple categories to each image. However, fully annotating large-scale datasets is often impractical due to high costs and effort, motivating the study of learning from partially annotated data. In the extreme case of Single Positive Multi-Label Learning (SPML), each image is provided with only one positive label, while all other labels remain unannotated. Traditional SPML methods that treat missing labels as unknown or negative tend to yield inaccuracies and false negatives, and integrating various pseudo-labeling strategies can introduce additional noise. To address these challenges, we propose the Generalized Pseudo-Label Robust Loss (GPR Loss), a novel loss function that effectively learns from diverse pseudo-labels while mitigating noise. Complementing this, we introduce a simple yet effective Dynamic Augmented Multi-focus Pseudo-labeling (DAMP) technique. Together, these contributions form the Adaptive and Efficient Vision-Language Pseudo-Labeling (AEVLP) framework. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly advances multi-label classification, achieving state-of-the-art results.
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a standard for adapting large pre-trained models. While low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has achieved notable success, recent studies highlight its limitations when compared to full-rank variants, particularly when scaling to demanding tasks such as vision-language classification or common-sense reasoning.We propose to quantitavely compare full and rank-restricted PEFT methods using a spectrum-controlled matrix approximation benchmark. Our results validate LoRA's rank limitations when approximating matrix presenting highly decorrelated or high frequency features. We further show that full-rank methods can reduce LoRA's approximation error on these matrix types for an equal parameter count.Our evaluation then extends beyond synthetic tasks where we observe that LoRA's restricted work subspace can produce high norm updates, leading to over-fitting and poor out-of-distribution generalization. We address these limits by introducing KRAdapter, a novel PEFT algorithms that uses properties of the Kathri-Rao matrix product to produce weight matrices of higher effective rank and lower norm than related PEFT algorithms.We show the performance improvements of KRAdapter on vision-language models up to 1B parameters and 8B %32Bfor LLMs where we report from 20 to 25 points of accuracy improvements over LoRA when reasoning on commonsense tasks unseen during training. Crucially, KRAdapter maintains the favorable training speed and memory efficiency of LoRA, making it a practical and robust alternative to fine-tune billion-scale parameter models. Code for reproducing toy experiments is available in the supplementary and will be released upon acceptance.
Machine unlearning enables the removal of specific data from ML models to uphold the *right to be forgotten*. While approximate unlearning algorithms offer efficient alternatives to full retraining, this work reveals that they fail to adequately protect the privacy of unlearned data. In particular, these algorithms introduce implicit residuals which facilitate privacy attacks targeting at unlearned data. We observe that these residuals persist regardless of model architectures, parameters, and unlearning algorithms, exposing a new attack surface beyond conventional output-based leakage. Based on this insight, we propose the *Reminiscence Attack (ReA)*, which amplifies the correlation between residuals and membership privacy through targeted fine-tuning processes. ReA achieves up to 1.90x and 1.12x higher accuracy than prior attacks when inferring class-wise and sample-wise membership, respectively. To mitigate such residual-induced privacy risk, we develop a dual-phase approximate unlearning framework that first eliminates deep-layer unlearned data traces and then enforces convergence stability to prevent models from "pseudo-convergence", where their outputs are similar to retrained models but still preserve unlearned residuals. Our framework works for both classification and generation tasks. Experimental evaluations confirm that our approach maintains high unlearning efficacy, while reducing the adaptive privacy attack accuracy to nearly random guess, at the computational cost of 2-12% of full retraining.
The Vision Transformer (ViT) has gained prominence for its superior relational modeling prowess. However, its global attention mechanism's quadratic complexity poses substantial computational burdens. A common remedy spatially groups tokens for self-attention, reducing computational requirements. Nonetheless, this strategy neglects semantic information in tokens, possibly scattering semantically-linked tokens across distinct groups, thus compromising the efficacy of self-attention intended for modeling inter-token dependencies. Motivated by these insights, we introduce a fast and balanced clustering method, named Semantic Equitable Clustering (SEC). SEC clusters tokens based on their global semantic relevance in an efficient, straightforward manner. In contrast to traditional clustering methods requiring multiple iterations, our method achieves token clustering in a single pass. Additionally, SEC regulates the number of tokens per cluster, ensuring a balanced distribution for effective parallel processing on current computational platforms without necessitating further optimization. Capitalizing on SEC, we propose a versatile vision backbone, SECViT. Comprehensive experiments in image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation validate to the effectiveness of SECViT. Remarkably, SECViT attains an impressive 84.3% image classification accuracy with only 27M parameters and 4.6G FLOPs, without the need for for additional supervision or data. Moreover, SEC can be conveniently and swiftly applied to multimodal large language models (MLLM), such as LLaVA, to serve as a vision language connector, effectively accelerating the model's efficiency while maintaining unchanged or better performance.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become one of the most promising 3D reconstruction technologies. However, label noise in real-world scenarios--such as moving objects, non-Lambertian surfaces, and shadows--often leads to reconstruction errors. Existing 3DGS-Bsed anti-noise reconstruction methods either fail to separate noise effectively or require scene-specific fine-tuning of hyperparameters, making them difficult to apply in practice. This paper re-examines the problem of anti-noise reconstruction from the perspective of epistemic uncertainty, proposing a novel framework, OCSplats. By combining key technologies such as hybrid noise assessment and observation-based cognitive correction, the accuracy of noise classification in areas with cognitive differences has been significantly improved. Moreover, to address the issue of varying noise proportions in different scenarios, we have designed a label noise classification pipeline based on dynamic anchor points. This pipeline enables OCSplats to be applied simultaneously to scenarios with vastly different noise proportions without adjusting parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OCSplats always achieve leading reconstruction performance and precise label noise classification in scenes of different complexity levels. Code is available.