Bulat Ibragimov

Reza Karimzadeh, Albert Alonso, Frans Zdyb et al.

Faithful yet compact explanations for vision models remain a challenge, as commonly used dense perturbation masks are often fragmented and overfitted, needing careful post-processing. Here, we present a training-free explanation method that replaces dense masks with smooth tunable contours. A star-convex region is parameterized by a truncated Fourier series and optimized under an extremal preserve/delete objective using the classifier gradients. The approach guarantees a single, simply connected mask, cuts the number of free parameters by orders of magnitude, and yields stable boundary updates without cleanup. Restricting solutions to low-dimensional, smooth contours makes the method robust to adversarial masking artifacts. On ImageNet classifiers, it matches the extremal fidelity of dense masks while producing compact, interpretable regions with improved run-to-run consistency. Explicit area control also enables importance contour maps, yielding a transparent fidelity-area profiles. Finally, we extend the approach to multi-contour and show how it can localize multiple objects within the same framework. Across benchmarks, the method achieves higher relevance mass and lower complexity than gradient and perturbation based baselines, with especially strong gains on self-supervised DINO models where it improves relevance mass by over 15% and maintains positive faithfulness correlations.

Shengyuan Liu, Zanting Ye, Yunrui Lin et al.

While specialized Medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in interpreting 2D and 3D medical modalities, their deployment for 3D volumetric data remains constrained by significant computational inefficiencies. Current architectures typically suffer from massive anatomical redundancy due to the direct concatenation of consecutive 2D slices and lack the flexibility to handle heterogeneous information densities across different slices using fixed pruning ratios. To address these challenges, we propose MedPruner, a training-free and model-agnostic hierarchical token pruning framework specifically designed for efficient 3D medical image understanding. MedPruner introduces a two-stage mechanism: an Inter-slice Anchor-based Filtering module to eliminate slice-level temporal redundancy, followed by a Dynamic Information Nucleus Selection strategy that achieves adaptive token-level compression by quantifying cumulative attention weights. Extensive experiments on three 3D medical benchmarks and across three diverse medical VLMs reveal massive token redundancy in existing architectures. Notably, MedPruner enables models such as MedGemma to maintain or even exceed their original performance while retaining fewer than 5% of visual tokens, thereby drastically reducing computational overhead and validating the necessity of dynamic token selection for practical clinical deployment. Our code will be released.

Ehsan Yousefzadeh-Asl-Miandoab, Reza Karimzadeh, Danyal Yorulmaz et al.

Collocating deep learning training tasks improves GPU utilization but risks resource contention, severe slowdowns, and out-of-memory (OOM) failures. Accurate memory estimation is essential for robust collocation, and GPU utilization estimation -- a key proxy for contention -- enables interference-aware scheduling. Existing GPU memory estimators span three paradigms -- analytical models, CPU-side libraries, and ML-based estimators -- each with distinct limitations: dependence on detailed model specifications, intrusive integration, poor generalization, and varying latency overhead. GPU heterogeneity further complicates estimation, as identical tasks can exhibit different memory footprints across hardware generations. GPU utilization remains comparatively understudied, further complicated by non-additive utilization metrics and GPU heterogeneity. We conduct a systematic analysis of representative estimators from each paradigm -- Horus, PyTorch FakeTensor, and our lightweight ML-based estimator -- evaluating accuracy, generalizability, and overhead. We construct a synthetic dataset spanning MLPs, CNNs, and Transformers with controlled architectural variations, and train MLP- and Transformer-based estimators for memory prediction, and experiment with utilization estimation. Our evaluation reveals key tradeoffs and validates estimators against real-world unseen models. Significant challenges remain: analytical models lack generalization and cannot easily be extended to new GPU architectures or accurately reflect memory optimization savings; CPU-side libraries impose intrusive integration overhead; and both analytical and ML-based estimators rely on model specifications or computation graphs, limiting generalization across diverse architectures and hardware variants. We release all datasets, tools, and artifacts to support further research.