Weizhan Zhang

Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Cheng-Ming Chiang et al.

Video super-resolution is one of the most popular tasks on mobile devices, being widely used for an automatic improvement of low-bitrate and low-resolution video streams. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem, they are usually quite computationally demanding, demonstrating low FPS rates and power efficiency on mobile devices. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an end-to-end real-time video super-resolution solution for mobile NPUs optimized for low energy consumption. The participants were provided with the REDS training dataset containing video sequences for a 4X video upscaling task. The runtime and power efficiency of all models was evaluated on the powerful MediaTek Dimensity 9000 platform with a dedicated AI processing unit capable of accelerating floating-point and quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 500 FPS rate and 0.2 [Watt / 30 FPS] power consumption. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Zepeng Xin, Kaiyu Li, Luodi Chen et al.

Effectively grounding complex language to pixels in remote sensing (RS) images is a critical challenge for applications like disaster response and environmental monitoring. Current models can parse simple, single-target commands but fail when presented with complex geospatial scenarios, e.g., segmenting objects at various granularities, executing multi-target instructions, and interpreting implicit user intent. To drive progress against these failures, we present LaSeRS, the first large-scale dataset built for comprehensive training and evaluation across four critical dimensions of language-guided segmentation: hierarchical granularity, target multiplicity, reasoning requirements, and linguistic variability. By capturing these dimensions, LaSeRS moves beyond simple commands, providing a benchmark for complex geospatial reasoning. This addresses a critical gap: existing datasets oversimplify, leading to sensitivity-prone real-world models. We also propose SegEarth-R2, an MLLM architecture designed for comprehensive language-guided segmentation in RS, which directly confronts these challenges. The model's effectiveness stems from two key improvements: (1) a spatial attention supervision mechanism specifically handles the localization of small objects and their components, and (2) a flexible and efficient segmentation query mechanism that handles both single-target and multi-target scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our SegEarth-R2 achieves outstanding performance on LaSeRS and other benchmarks, establishing a powerful baseline for the next generation of geospatial segmentation. All data and code will be released at https://github.com/earth-insights/SegEarth-R2.

Yingchun Wang, Jingcai Guo, Song Guo et al.

Mixed-precision quantization mostly predetermines the model bit-width settings before actual training due to the non-differential bit-width sampling process, obtaining sub-optimal performance. Worse still, the conventional static quality-consistent training setting, i.e., all data is assumed to be of the same quality across training and inference, overlooks data quality changes in real-world applications which may lead to poor robustness of the quantized models. In this paper, we propose a novel Data Quality-aware Mixed-precision Quantization framework, dubbed DQMQ, to dynamically adapt quantization bit-widths to different data qualities. The adaption is based on a bit-width decision policy that can be learned jointly with the quantization training. Concretely, DQMQ is modeled as a hybrid reinforcement learning (RL) task that combines model-based policy optimization with supervised quantization training. By relaxing the discrete bit-width sampling to a continuous probability distribution that is encoded with few learnable parameters, DQMQ is differentiable and can be directly optimized end-to-end with a hybrid optimization target considering both task performance and quantization benefits. Trained on mixed-quality image datasets, DQMQ can implicitly select the most proper bit-width for each layer when facing uneven input qualities. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets and networks demonstrate the superiority of DQMQ against existing fixed/mixed-precision quantization methods.

Yingchun Wang, Jingcai Guo, Song Guo et al.

Recent studies show that even highly biased dense networks contain an unbiased substructure that can achieve better out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization than the original model. Existing works usually search the invariant subnetwork using modular risk minimization (MRM) with out-domain data. Such a paradigm may bring about two potential weaknesses: 1) Unfairness, due to the insufficient observation of out-domain data during training; and 2) Sub-optimal OOD generalization, due to the feature-untargeted model pruning on the whole data distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel Spurious Feature-targeted model Pruning framework, dubbed SFP, to automatically explore invariant substructures without referring to the above weaknesses. Specifically, SFP identifies in-distribution (ID) features during training using our theoretically verified task loss, upon which, SFP can perform ID targeted-model pruning that removes branches with strong dependencies on ID features. Notably, by attenuating the projections of spurious features into model space, SFP can push the model learning toward invariant features and pull that out of environmental features, devising optimal OOD generalization. Moreover, we also conduct detailed theoretical analysis to provide the rationality guarantee and a proof framework for OOD structures via model sparsity, and for the first time, reveal how a highly biased data distribution affects the model's OOD generalization. Extensive experiments on various OOD datasets show that SFP can significantly outperform both structure-based and non-structure OOD generalization SOTAs, with accuracy improvement up to 4.72% and 23.35%, respectively.

Yingchun Wang, Song Guo, Jingcai Guo et al.

Network pruning is a promising way to generate light but accurate models and enable their deployment on resource-limited edge devices. However, the current state-of-the-art assumes that the effective sub-network and the other superfluous parameters in the given network share the same distribution, where pruning inevitably involves a distribution truncation operation. They usually eliminate values near zero. While simple, it may not be the most appropriate method, as effective models may naturally have many small values associated with them. Removing near-zero values already embedded in model space may significantly reduce model accuracy. Another line of work has proposed to assign discrete prior over all possible sub-structures that still rely on human-crafted prior hypotheses. Worse still, existing methods use regularized point estimates, namely Hard Pruning, that can not provide error estimations and fail reliability justification for the pruned networks. In this paper, we propose a novel distribution-lossless pruning method, named DLLP, to theoretically find the pruned lottery within Bayesian treatment. Specifically, DLLP remodels the vanilla networks as discrete priors for the latent pruned model and the other redundancy. More importantly, DLLP uses Stein Variational Inference to approach the latent prior and effectively bypasses calculating KL divergence with unknown distribution. Extensive experiments based on small Cifar-10 and large-scaled ImageNet demonstrate that our method can obtain sparser networks with great generalization performance while providing quantified reliability for the pruned model.

Yingchun Wang, Jingcai Guo, Jie Zhang et al.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging technique that trains massive and geographically distributed edge data while maintaining privacy. However, FL has inherent challenges in terms of fairness and computational efficiency due to the rising heterogeneity of edges, and thus usually results in sub-optimal performance in recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) solutions. In this paper, we propose a Customized Federated Learning (CFL) system to eliminate FL heterogeneity from multiple dimensions. Specifically, CFL tailors personalized models from the specially designed global model for each client jointly guided by an online trained model-search helper and a novel aggregation algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFL has full-stack advantages for both FL training and edge reasoning and significantly improves the SOTA performance w.r.t. model accuracy (up to 7.2% in the non-heterogeneous environment and up to 21.8% in the heterogeneous environment), efficiency, and FL fairness.

Zhihao Zhang, Yiwei Chen, Weizhan Zhang et al.

Viewport prediction is a crucial aspect of tile-based 360 video streaming system. However, existing trajectory based methods lack of robustness, also oversimplify the process of information construction and fusion between different modality inputs, leading to the error accumulation problem. In this paper, we propose a tile classification based viewport prediction method with Multi-modal Fusion Transformer, namely MFTR. Specifically, MFTR utilizes transformer-based networks to extract the long-range dependencies within each modality, then mine intra- and inter-modality relations to capture the combined impact of user historical inputs and video contents on future viewport selection. In addition, MFTR categorizes future tiles into two categories: user interested or not, and selects future viewport as the region that contains most user interested tiles. Comparing with predicting head trajectories, choosing future viewport based on tile's binary classification results exhibits better robustness and interpretability. To evaluate our proposed MFTR, we conduct extensive experiments on two widely used PVS-HM and Xu-Gaze dataset. MFTR shows superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in terms of average prediction accuracy and overlap ratio, also presents competitive computation efficiency.

Jiahao Wang, Caixia Yan, Weizhan Zhang et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models significantly enhance the efficiency of artistic creation with high-fidelity image generation. However, in typical application scenarios like comic book production, they can neither place each subject into its expected spot nor maintain the consistent appearance of each subject across images. For these issues, we pioneer a novel task, Layout-to-Consistent-Image (L2CI) generation, which produces consistent and compositional images in accordance with the given layout conditions and text prompts. To accomplish this challenging task, we present a new formalization of dual energy guidance with optimization in a dual semantic-latent space and thus propose a training-free pipeline, SpotActor, which features a layout-conditioned backward update stage and a consistent forward sampling stage. In the backward stage, we innovate a nuanced layout energy function to mimic the attention activations with a sigmoid-like objective. While in the forward stage, we design Regional Interconnection Self-Attention (RISA) and Semantic Fusion Cross-Attention (SFCA) mechanisms that allow mutual interactions across images. To evaluate the performance, we present ActorBench, a specified benchmark with hundreds of reasonable prompt-box pairs stemming from object detection datasets. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The results prove that SpotActor fulfills the expectations of this task and showcases the potential for practical applications with superior layout alignment, subject consistency, prompt conformity and background diversity.

Xirui Hu, Jiahao Wang, Hao Chen et al.

Recent advances in text-to-image generation have driven interest in generating personalized human images that depict specific identities from reference images. Although existing methods achieve high-fidelity identity preservation, they are generally limited to single-ID scenarios and offer insufficient facial editability. We present DynamicID, a tuning-free framework that inherently facilitates both single-ID and multi-ID personalized generation with high fidelity and flexible facial editability. Our key innovations include: 1) Semantic-Activated Attention (SAA), which employs query-level activation gating to minimize disruption to the base model when injecting ID features and achieve multi-ID personalization without requiring multi-ID samples during training. 2) Identity-Motion Reconfigurator (IMR), which applies feature-space manipulation to effectively disentangle and reconfigure facial motion and identity features, supporting flexible facial editing. 3) a task-decoupled training paradigm that reduces data dependency, together with VariFace-10k, a curated dataset of 10k unique individuals, each represented by 35 distinct facial images. Experimental results demonstrate that DynamicID outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity fidelity, facial editability, and multi-ID personalization capability. Our code will be released at https://github.com/ByteCat-bot/DynamicID.

King-Siong Si, Lu Sun, Weizhan Zhang et al.

Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is an indispensable post-processing step in object detection. With the continuous optimization of network models, NMS has become the ``last mile'' to enhance the efficiency of object detection. This paper systematically analyzes NMS from a graph theory perspective for the first time, revealing its intrinsic structure. Consequently, we propose two optimization methods, namely QSI-NMS and BOE-NMS. The former is a fast recursive divide-and-conquer algorithm with negligible mAP loss, and its extended version (eQSI-NMS) achieves optimal complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$. The latter, concentrating on the locality of NMS, achieves an optimization at a constant level without an mAP loss penalty. Moreover, to facilitate rapid evaluation of NMS methods for researchers, we introduce NMS-Bench, the first benchmark designed to comprehensively assess various NMS methods. Taking the YOLOv8-N model on MS COCO 2017 as the benchmark setup, our method QSI-NMS provides $6.2\times$ speed of original NMS on the benchmark, with a $0.1\%$ decrease in mAP. The optimal eQSI-NMS, with only a $0.3\%$ mAP decrease, achieves $10.7\times$ speed. Meanwhile, BOE-NMS exhibits $5.1\times$ speed with no compromise in mAP.

Ruixun Liu, Bowen Fu, Jiayi Song et al.

Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) images offer rich fine-grained information but also present challenges in effective processing. Existing dynamic resolution and token pruning methods are constrained by a passive perception paradigm, suffering from increased redundancy when obtaining finer visual inputs. In this work, we explore a new active perception paradigm that enables models to revisit information-rich regions. First, we present LRS-GRO, a large-scale benchmark dataset tailored for active perception in UHR RS processing, encompassing 17 question types across global, region, and object levels, annotated via a semi-automatic pipeline. Building on LRS-GRO, we propose ZoomEarth, an adaptive cropping-zooming framework with a novel Region-Guided reward that provides fine-grained guidance. Trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), ZoomEarth achieves state-of-the-art performance on LRS-GRO and, in the zero-shot setting, on three public UHR remote sensing benchmarks. Furthermore, ZoomEarth can be seamlessly integrated with downstream models for tasks such as cloud removal, denoising, segmentation, and image editing through simple tool interfaces, demonstrating strong versatility and extensibility.

Kaizhe Zhang, Yijie Zhou, Weizhan Zhang et al.

Dynamic novel view synthesis (NVS) is essential for creating immersive experiences. Existing approaches have advanced dynamic NVS by introducing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with implicit deformation fields or indiscriminately assigned time-varying parameters, surpassing NeRF-based methods. However, due to excessive model complexity and parameter redundancy, they incur large model sizes and slow rendering speeds, making them inefficient for real-time applications, particularly on resource-constrained devices. To obtain a more efficient model with fewer redundant parameters, in this paper, we propose Hybrid Gaussian Splatting (HGS), a compact and efficient framework explicitly designed to disentangle static and dynamic regions of a scene within a unified representation. The core innovation of HGS lies in our Static-Dynamic Decomposition (SDD) strategy, which leverages Radial Basis Function (RBF) modeling for Gaussian primitives. Specifically, for dynamic regions, we employ time-dependent RBFs to effectively capture temporal variations and handle abrupt scene changes, while for static regions, we reduce redundancy by sharing temporally invariant parameters. Additionally, we introduce a two-stage training strategy tailored for explicit models to enhance temporal coherence at static-dynamic boundaries. Experimental results demonstrate that our method reduces model size by up to 98% and achieves real-time rendering at up to 125 FPS at 4K resolution on a single RTX 3090 GPU. It further sustains 160 FPS at 1352 * 1014 on an RTX 3050 and has been integrated into the VR system. Moreover, HGS achieves comparable rendering quality to state-of-the-art methods while providing significantly improved visual fidelity for high-frequency details and abrupt scene changes.

Hongjin Niu, Jiahao Wang, Xirui Hu et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models frequently exhibit deficiencies in synthesizing accurate occlusion relationships of multiple objects, particularly within dense overlapping regions. Existing training-free layout-guided methods predominantly rely on rigid spatial priors that remain agnostic to depth order, often resulting in concept mixing or illogical occlusion. To address these limitations, we propose DepthArb, a training-free framework that resolves occlusion ambiguities by arbitrating attention competition between interacting objects. Specifically, DepthArb employs two core mechanisms: Attention Arbitration Modulation (AAM), which enforces depth-ordered visibility by suppressing background activations in overlapping regions, and Spatial Compactness Control (SCC), which preserves structural integrity by curbing attention divergence. These mechanisms enable robust occlusion generation without model retraining. To systematically evaluate this capability, we propose OcclBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate diverse occlusion scenarios. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that DepthArb consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both occlusion accuracy and visual fidelity. As a plug-and-play method, DepthArb seamlessly enhances the compositional capabilities of diffusion backbones, offering a novel perspective on spatial layering within generative models.

Jiahao Wang, Hualian Sheng, Sijia Cai et al.

Identity-preserving video generation offers powerful tools for creative expression, allowing users to customize videos featuring their beloved characters. However, prevailing methods are typically designed and optimized for a single identity reference. This underlying assumption restricts creative flexibility by inadequately accommodating diverse real-world input formats. Relying on a single source also constitutes an ill-posed scenario, causing an inherently ambiguous setting that makes it difficult for the model to faithfully reproduce an identity across novel contexts. To address these issues, we present AnyID, an ultra-fidelity identity-preservation video generation framework that features two core contributions. First, we introduce a scalable omni-referenced architecture that effectively unifies heterogeneous identity inputs (e.g., faces, portraits, and videos) into a cohesive representation. Second, we propose a primary-referenced generation paradigm, which designates one reference as a canonical anchor and uses a novel differential prompt to enable precise, attribute-level controllability. We conduct training on a large-scale, meticulously curated dataset to ensure robustness and high fidelity, and then perform a final fine-tuning stage using reinforcement learning. This process leverages a preference dataset constructed from human evaluations, where annotators performed pairwise comparisons of videos based on two key criteria: identity fidelity and prompt controllability. Extensive evaluations validate that AnyID achieves ultra-high identity fidelity as well as superior attribute-level controllability across different task settings.

Kaizhe Zhang, Shinan Chen, Qian Zhao et al.

Scenes reconstructed by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) trained on low-resolution (LR) images are unsuitable for high-resolution (HR) rendering. Consequently, a 3DGS super-resolution (SR) method is needed to bridge LR inputs and HR rendering. Early 3DGS SR methods rely on single-image SR networks, which lack cross-view consistency and fail to fuse complementary information across views. More recent video-based SR approaches attempt to address this limitation but require strictly sequential frames, limiting their applicability to unstructured multi-view datasets. In this work, we introduce Multi-View Consistent 3D Gaussian Splatting Super-Resolution (MVGSR), a framework that focuses on integrating multi-view information for 3DGS rendering with high-frequency details and enhanced consistency. We first propose an Auxiliary View Selection Method based on camera poses, making our method adaptable for arbitrarily organized multi-view datasets without the need of temporal continuity or data reordering. Furthermore, we introduce, for the first time, an epipolar-constrained multi-view attention mechanism into 3DGS SR, which serves as the core of our proposed multi-view SR network. This design enables the model to selectively aggregate consistent information from auxiliary views, enhancing the geometric consistency and detail fidelity of 3DGS representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both object-centric and scene-level 3DGS SR benchmarks.

Ming Li, Yong-Jin Liu, Fang Liu et al.

Emotion recognition from multi-modal physiological and behavioral signals plays a pivotal role in affective computing, yet most existing models remain constrained to the prediction of singular emotions in controlled laboratory settings. Real-world human emotional experiences, by contrast, are often characterized by the simultaneous presence of multiple affective states, spurring recent interest in mixed emotion recognition as an emotion distribution learning problem. Current approaches, however, often neglect the valence consistency and structured correlations inherent among coexisting emotions. To address this limitation, we propose a Memory-guided Prototypical Co-occurrence Learning (MPCL) framework that explicitly models emotion co-occurrence patterns. Specifically, we first fuse multi-modal signals via a multi-scale associative memory mechanism. To capture cross-modal semantic relationships, we construct emotion-specific prototype memory banks, yielding rich physiological and behavioral representations, and employ prototype relation distillation to ensure cross-modal alignment in the latent prototype space. Furthermore, inspired by human cognitive memory systems, we introduce a memory retrieval strategy to extract semantic-level co-occurrence associations across emotion categories. Through this bottom-up hierarchical abstraction process, our model learns affectively informative representations for accurate emotion distribution prediction. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that MPCL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in mixed emotion recognition, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Jiahao Wang, Caixia Yan, Haonan Lin et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models benefit artists with high-quality image generation. Yet their stochastic nature hinders artists from creating consistent images of the same subject. Existing methods try to tackle this challenge and generate consistent content in various ways. However, they either depend on external restricted data or require expensive tuning of the diffusion model. For this issue, we propose a novel one-shot tuning paradigm, termed OneActor. It efficiently performs consistent subject generation solely driven by prompts via a learned semantic guidance to bypass the laborious backbone tuning. We lead the way to formalize the objective of consistent subject generation from a clustering perspective, and thus design a cluster-conditioned model. To mitigate the overfitting challenge shared by one-shot tuning pipelines, we augment the tuning with auxiliary samples and devise two inference strategies: semantic interpolation and cluster guidance. These techniques are later verified to significantly improve the generation quality. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms a variety of baselines with satisfactory subject consistency, superior prompt conformity as well as high image quality. Our method is capable of multi-subject generation and compatible with popular diffusion extensions. Besides, we achieve a 4 times faster tuning speed than tuning-based baselines and, if desired, avoid increasing the inference time. Furthermore, our method can be naturally utilized to pre-train a consistent subject generation network from scratch, which will implement this research task into more practical applications. (Project page: https://johnneywang.github.io/OneActor-webpage/)

Jiahao Wang, Hualian Sheng, Sijia Cai et al.

Video diffusion models substantially boost the productivity of artistic workflows with high-quality portrait video generative capacity. However, prevailing pipelines are primarily constrained to single-shot creation, while real-world applications urge for multiple shots with identity consistency and flexible content controllability. In this work, we propose EchoShot, a native and scalable multi-shot framework for portrait customization built upon a foundation video diffusion model. To start with, we propose shot-aware position embedding mechanisms within video diffusion transformer architecture to model inter-shot variations and establish intricate correspondence between multi-shot visual content and their textual descriptions. This simple yet effective design enables direct training on multi-shot video data without introducing additional computational overhead. To facilitate model training within multi-shot scenario, we construct PortraitGala, a large-scale and high-fidelity human-centric video dataset featuring cross-shot identity consistency and fine-grained captions such as facial attributes, outfits, and dynamic motions. To further enhance applicability, we extend EchoShot to perform reference image-based personalized multi-shot generation and long video synthesis with infinite shot counts. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that EchoShot achieves superior identity consistency as well as attribute-level controllability in multi-shot portrait video generation. Notably, the proposed framework demonstrates potential as a foundational paradigm for general multi-shot video modeling.

Yuanhong Zhang, Zhaoyang Wang, Xin Zhang et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success across cross-modal tasks but remain hindered by hallucinations, producing textual outputs inconsistent with visual content. Existing methods mitigate hallucinations but often alter generation behavior, resulting in shorter outputs and shifted token distributions, especially in latent space steering approaches. We identify that this issue stems from entangled steering signals, where suppressing hallucinations inadvertently disrupts the model's intrinsic generation behavior. To address this, we propose MESA, an effective plug-and-play framework that performs controlled and selective latent intervention for hallucination mitigation. Specifically, MESA targets hallucination-relevant responses while preserving the model's original token distribution, enabling effective hallucination reduction without compromising generation behavior. Extensive experiments across diverse generative and discriminative benchmarks demonstrate that MESA consistently reduces hallucinations while better preserving generation behavior, outperforming prior methods across multiple LVLM families.

Wen Wen, Tieliang Gong, Yunjiao Zhang et al.

Continual learning (CL) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for acquiring knowledge from sequential tasks while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Although many CL methods have been proposed to show impressive empirical performance, the theoretical understanding of their generalization behavior remains limited, particularly for replay-based approaches. In this paper, we establish a unified theoretical framework for replay-based CL, deriving a series of information-theoretic bounds that explicitly characterize how the memory buffer interacts with the current task to affect generalization. Specifically, our hypothesis-based bounds reveal that utilizing the limited exemplars of previous tasks alongside the current task data, rather than exhaustive replay, facilitates improved generalization while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, our prediction-based bounds yield tighter and computationally tractable upper bounds of the generalization gap through the use of low-dimensional variables. Our analysis is general and broadly applicable to a wide range of learning algorithms, exemplified by stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) as a representative method. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our derived bounds in capturing the generalization dynamics in replay-based CL settings.

Muyao Yuan, Yuanhong Zhang, Weizhan Zhang et al.

Recently, the strong generalization ability of CLIP has facilitated open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, which labels pixels using arbitrary text. However, existing methods that fine-tune CLIP for segmentation on limited seen categories often lead to overfitting and degrade the pretrained vision-language alignment. To stabilize modality alignment during fine-tuning, we propose InfoCLIP, which leverages an information-theoretic perspective to transfer alignment knowledge from pretrained CLIP to the segmentation task. Specifically, this transfer is guided by two novel objectives grounded in mutual information. First, we compress the pixel-text modality alignment from pretrained CLIP to reduce noise arising from its coarse-grained local semantic representations learned under image-text supervision. Second, we maximize the mutual information between the alignment knowledge of pretrained CLIP and the fine-tuned model to transfer compact local semantic relations suited for the segmentation task. Extensive evaluations across various benchmarks validate the effectiveness of InfoCLIP in enhancing CLIP fine-tuning for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, demonstrating its adaptability and superiority in asymmetric transfer.

Kaiyu Li, Jiayu Wang, Zhi Wang et al.

LLM-driven agents, particularly those using general frameworks like ReAct or human-inspired role-playing, often struggle in specialized domains that necessitate rigorously structured workflows. Fields such as remote sensing, requiring specialized tools (e.g., correction, spectral indices calculation), and multi-step procedures (e.g., numerous intermediate products and optional steps), significantly challenge generalized approaches. To address this gap, we introduce a novel agent design framework centered on a Hierarchical Task Abstraction Mechanism (HTAM). Specifically, HTAM moves beyond emulating social roles, instead structuring multi-agent systems into a logical hierarchy that mirrors the intrinsic task-dependency graph of a given domain. This task-centric architecture thus enforces procedural correctness and decomposes complex problems into sequential layers, where each layer's sub-agents operate on the outputs of the preceding layers. We instantiate this framework as EarthAgent, a multi-agent system tailored for complex geospatial analysis. To evaluate such complex planning capabilities, we build GeoPlan-bench, a comprehensive benchmark of realistic, multi-step geospatial planning tasks. It is accompanied by a suite of carefully designed metrics to evaluate tool selection, path similarity, and logical completeness. Experiments show that EarthAgent substantially outperforms a range of established single- and multi-agent systems. Our work demonstrates that aligning agent architecture with a domain's intrinsic task structure is a critical step toward building robust and reliable specialized autonomous systems.

Yuanhong Zhang, Muyao Yuan, Weizhan Zhang et al.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a vision foundation model, exhibits impressive zero-shot capabilities in general tasks but struggles in specialized domains. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is a promising approach to unleash the potential of SAM in novel scenarios. However, existing PEFT methods for SAM neglect the domain-invariant relations encoded in the pre-trained model. To bridge this gap, we propose InfoSAM, an information-theoretic approach that enhances SAM fine-tuning by distilling and preserving its pre-trained segmentation knowledge. Specifically, we formulate the knowledge transfer process as two novel mutual information-based objectives: (i) to compress the domain-invariant relation extracted from pre-trained SAM, excluding pseudo-invariant information as possible, and (ii) to maximize mutual information between the relational knowledge learned by the teacher (pre-trained SAM) and the student (fine-tuned model). The proposed InfoSAM establishes a robust distillation framework for PEFT of SAM. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks validate InfoSAM's effectiveness in improving SAM family's performance on real-world tasks, demonstrating its adaptability and superiority in handling specialized scenarios.

Wen Wen, Tieliang Gong, Yuxin Dong et al.

Multiview learning has drawn widespread attention for its efficacy in leveraging cross-view consensus and complementarity information to achieve a comprehensive representation of data. While multi-view learning has undergone vigorous development and achieved remarkable success, the theoretical understanding of its generalization behavior remains elusive. This paper aims to bridge this gap by developing information-theoretic generalization bounds for multi-view learning, with a particular focus on multi-view reconstruction and classification tasks. Our bounds underscore the importance of capturing both consensus and complementary information from multiple different views to achieve maximally disentangled representations. These results also indicate that applying the multi-view information bottleneck regularizer is beneficial for satisfactory generalization performance. Additionally, we derive novel data-dependent bounds under both leave-one-out and supersample settings, yielding computational tractable and tighter bounds. In the interpolating regime, we further establish the fast-rate bound for multi-view learning, exhibiting a faster convergence rate compared to conventional square-root bounds. Numerical results indicate a strong correlation between the true generalization gap and the derived bounds across various learning scenarios.

Yuxin Dong, Tieliang Gong, Hong Chen et al.

Domain generalization aims to learn invariance across multiple training domains, thereby enhancing generalization against out-of-distribution data. While gradient or representation matching algorithms have achieved remarkable success, these methods generally lack generalization guarantees or depend on strong assumptions, leaving a gap in understanding the underlying mechanism of distribution matching. In this work, we formulate domain generalization from a novel probabilistic perspective, ensuring robustness while avoiding overly conservative solutions. Through comprehensive information-theoretic analysis, we provide key insights into the roles of gradient and representation matching in promoting generalization. Our results reveal the complementary relationship between these two components, indicating that existing works focusing solely on either gradient or representation alignment are insufficient to solve the domain generalization problem. In light of these theoretical findings, we introduce IDM to simultaneously align the inter-domain gradients and representations. Integrated with the proposed PDM method for complex distribution matching, IDM achieves superior performance over various baseline methods.

Yingchun Wang, Jingcai Guo, Yi Liu et al.

Model substructure learning aims to find an invariant network substructure that can have better out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization than the original full structure. Existing works usually search the invariant substructure using modular risk minimization (MRM) with fully exposed out-domain data, which may bring about two drawbacks: 1) Unfairness, due to the dependence of the full exposure of out-domain data; and 2) Sub-optimal OOD generalization, due to the equally feature-untargeted pruning on the whole data distribution. Based on the idea that in-distribution (ID) data with spurious features may have a lower experience risk, in this paper, we propose a novel Spurious Feature-targeted model Pruning framework, dubbed SFP, to automatically explore invariant substructures without referring to the above drawbacks. Specifically, SFP identifies spurious features within ID instances during training using our theoretically verified task loss, upon which, SFP attenuates the corresponding feature projections in model space to achieve the so-called spurious feature-targeted pruning. This is typically done by removing network branches with strong dependencies on identified spurious features, thus SFP can push the model learning toward invariant features and pull that out of spurious features and devise optimal OOD generalization. Moreover, we also conduct detailed theoretical analysis to provide the rationality guarantee and a proof framework for OOD structures via model sparsity, and for the first time, reveal how a highly biased data distribution affects the model's OOD generalization. Experiments on various OOD datasets show that SFP can significantly outperform both structure-based and non-structure-based OOD generalization SOTAs, with accuracy improvement up to 4.72% and 23.35%, respectively