Yaser Souri

Yaser Souri, Yazan Abu Farha, Emad Bahrami et al.

Action segmentation is the task of predicting an action label for each frame of an untrimmed video. As obtaining annotations to train an approach for action segmentation in a fully supervised way is expensive, various approaches have been proposed to train action segmentation models using different forms of weak supervision, e.g., action transcripts, action sets, or more recently timestamps. Timestamp supervision is a promising type of weak supervision as obtaining one timestamp per action is less expensive than annotating all frames, but it provides more information than other forms of weak supervision. However, previous works assume that every action instance is annotated with a timestamp, which is a restrictive assumption since it assumes that annotators do not miss any action. In this work, we relax this restrictive assumption and take missing annotations for some action instances into account. We show that our approach is more robust to missing annotations compared to other approaches and various baselines.

Yifei He, Pranit Chawla, Yaser Souri et al.

Computer use agents (CUAs) can operate real-world digital interfaces but remain difficult to train due to the high cost of graphical user interface (GUI) interaction and the scarcity of high-quality trajectory data. Existing datasets rely on human demonstrations, limiting scalability. A natural alternative is to synthesize data from strong CUAs, yet their rollouts are highly noisy, with incorrect or suboptimal actions consisting a large proportion of the steps, making naive imitation ineffective. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a scalable data synthesis pipeline that transforms noisy rollouts into reliable supervision without human annotation. The core idea is step-level filtering, which evaluates actions individually to retain only correct steps, complemented by reasoning augmentation for improved planning. Using this pipeline, we construct WebSTAR, a dataset of 13.3K trajectories and 267K graded, reasoning-rich steps synthesized from OpenAI's computer-use-preview model. We train Qwen-2.5-VL-Instruct models (7B and 32B) on WebSTAR. On WebVoyager, our 7B model surpasses SoTA open-source CUA model UI-TARS-1.5-7B by more than 15% with only supervised finetuning. Building on step-level grading, we further create WebSCORE, a dataset of graded step-level actions, and train StepRM, a 7B multimodal process reward model distilled from o4-mini, which matches its grading quality while being far more efficient to deploy at scale. Our results establish step-level filtering as a key principle for scalable CUA training and construct two new datasets (WebSTAR, WebSCORE) and a lightweight process reward model (StepRM) as practical tools to advance robust and efficient CUAs.

Yaser Souri, Erfan Noury, Ehsan Adeli

Visual attributes are great means of describing images or scenes, in a way both humans and computers understand. In order to establish a correspondence between images and to be able to compare the strength of each property between images, relative attributes were introduced. However, since their introduction, hand-crafted and engineered features were used to learn increasingly complex models for the problem of relative attributes. This limits the applicability of those methods for more realistic cases. We introduce a deep neural network architecture for the task of relative attribute prediction. A convolutional neural network (ConvNet) is adopted to learn the features by including an additional layer (ranking layer) that learns to rank the images based on these features. We adopt an appropriate ranking loss to train the whole network in an end-to-end fashion. Our proposed method outperforms the baseline and state-of-the-art methods in relative attribute prediction on various coarse and fine-grained datasets. Our qualitative results along with the visualization of the saliency maps show that the network is able to learn effective features for each specific attribute. Source code of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/yassersouri/ghiaseddin.

Hasan Amin, Yuan Gao, Yaser Souri et al.

Diffusion language models (DLMs) are an attractive alternative to autoregressive models because they promise sublinear-time, parallel generation, yet practical gains remain elusive as high-quality samples still demand hundreds of refinement steps. In continuous domains, consistency training along the probability-flow ODE is a popular recipe to accelerate diffusion. For discrete diffusion, no analogous sample-space ODE exists, making direct adaptation ill-defined. We argue that the natural discrete substitute is not a deterministic trajectory but its stochastic counterpart: the exact posterior bridge, available in closed form for broad corruption families including masked and uniform diffusion. Building on this observation, we introduce Multi-Path Discrete Consistency (MPDC), a new principle that trains a denoiser to be path-invariant in expectation across these stochastic bridges, and instantiate it as the Consistent Diffusion Language Model (CDLM), a single-stage, teacher-free training framework. A single CDLM objective unifies masked diffusion, continuous consistency models, and progressive/discrete distillation as analytic limits or empirical approximations of one common view. Empirically, CDLM establishes a new state of the art on both conditional and unconditional text-generation, consistently outperforming strong base discrete diffusion models and often even multi-stage distilled baselines across sampling budgets, with the largest gains in the few-step regime. Together, these results position CDLM as a principled and scalable foundation for the next generation of fast, high-fidelity discrete generative modeling.

Yaser Souri, Yazan Abu Farha, Fabien Despinoy et al.

We introduce FIFA, a fast approximate inference method for action segmentation and alignment. Unlike previous approaches, FIFA does not rely on expensive dynamic programming for inference. Instead, it uses an approximate differentiable energy function that can be minimized using gradient-descent. FIFA is a general approach that can replace exact inference improving its speed by more than 5 times while maintaining its performance. FIFA is an anytime inference algorithm that provides a better speed vs. accuracy trade-off compared to exact inference. We apply FIFA on top of state-of-the-art approaches for weakly supervised action segmentation and alignment as well as fully supervised action segmentation. FIFA achieves state-of-the-art results on most metrics on two action segmentation datasets.

Sovan Biswas, Yaser Souri, Juergen Gall

In this paper, we propose an approach that spatially localizes the activities in a video frame where each person can perform multiple activities at the same time. Our approach takes the temporal scene context as well as the relations of the actions of detected persons into account. While the temporal context is modeled by a temporal recurrent neural network (RNN), the relations of the actions are modeled by a graph RNN. Both networks are trained together and the proposed approach achieves state of the art results on the AVA dataset.

Yaser Souri, Alexander Richard, Luca Minciullo et al.

Action segmentation is the task of temporally segmenting every frame of an untrimmed video. Weakly supervised approaches to action segmentation, especially from transcripts have been of considerable interest to the computer vision community. In this work, we focus on two aspects of the use and evaluation of weakly supervised action segmentation approaches that are often overlooked: the performance variance over multiple training runs and the impact of selecting feature extractors for this task. To tackle the first problem, we train each method on the Breakfast dataset 5 times and provide average and standard deviation of the results. Our experiments show that the standard deviation over these repetitions is between 1 and 2.5% and significantly affects the comparison between different approaches. Furthermore, our investigation on feature extraction shows that, for the studied weakly-supervised action segmentation methods, higher-level I3D features perform worse than classical IDT features.

Yaser Souri, Mohsen Fayyaz, Luca Minciullo et al.

Action segmentation is the task of predicting the actions for each frame of a video. As obtaining the full annotation of videos for action segmentation is expensive, weakly supervised approaches that can learn only from transcripts are appealing. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end approach for weakly supervised action segmentation based on a two-branch neural network. The two branches of our network predict two redundant but different representations for action segmentation and we propose a novel mutual consistency (MuCon) loss that enforces the consistency of the two redundant representations. Using the MuCon loss together with a loss for transcript prediction, our proposed approach achieves the accuracy of state-of-the-art approaches while being $14$ times faster to train and $20$ times faster during inference. The MuCon loss proves beneficial even in the fully supervised setting.

Johann Sawatzky, Yaser Souri, Christian Grund et al.

When humans have to solve everyday tasks, they simply pick the objects that are most suitable. While the question which object should one use for a specific task sounds trivial for humans, it is very difficult to answer for robots or other autonomous systems. This issue, however, is not addressed by current benchmarks for object detection that focus on detecting object categories. We therefore introduce the COCO-Tasks dataset which comprises about 40,000 images where the most suitable objects for 14 tasks have been annotated. We furthermore propose an approach that detects the most suitable objects for a given task. The approach builds on a Gated Graph Neural Network to exploit the appearance of each object as well as the global context of all present objects in the scene. In our experiments, we show that the proposed approach outperforms other approaches that are evaluated on the dataset like classification or ranking approaches.