3.6CVDec 2, 2025
Hierarchical Process Reward Models are Symbolic Vision LearnersShan Zhang, Aotian Chen, Kai Zou et al.
Symbolic computer vision represents diagrams through explicit logical rules and structured representations, enabling interpretable understanding in machine vision. This requires fundamentally different learning paradigms from pixel-based visual models. Symbolic visual learners parse diagrams into geometric primitives-points, lines, and shapes-whereas pixel-based learners operate on textures and colors. We propose a novel self-supervised symbolic auto-encoder that encodes diagrams into structured primitives and their interrelationships within the latent space, and decodes them through our executable engine to reconstruct the input diagrams. Central to this architecture is Symbolic Hierarchical Process Reward Modeling, which applies hierarchical step-level parsing rewards to enforce point-on-line, line-on-shape, and shape-on-relation consistency. Since vanilla reinforcement learning exhibits poor exploration in the policy space during diagram reconstruction; we thus introduce stabilization mechanisms to balance exploration and exploitation. We fine-tune our symbolic encoder on downstream tasks, developing a neuro-symbolic system that integrates the reasoning capabilities of neural networks with the interpretability of symbolic models through reasoning-grounded visual rewards. Evaluations across reconstruction, perception, and reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: achieving a 98.2% reduction in MSE for geometric diagram reconstruction, surpassing GPT-4o by 0.6% with a 7B model on chart reconstruction, and improving by +13% on the MathGlance perception benchmark, and by +3% on MathVerse and GeoQA reasoning benchmarks.
DD-Ranking: Rethinking the Evaluation of Dataset DistillationZekai Li, Xinhao Zhong, Samir Khaki et al.
In recent years, dataset distillation has provided a reliable solution for data compression, where models trained on the resulting smaller synthetic datasets achieve performance comparable to those trained on the original datasets. To further improve the performance of synthetic datasets, various training pipelines and optimization objectives have been proposed, greatly advancing the field of dataset distillation. Recent decoupled dataset distillation methods introduce soft labels and stronger data augmentation during the post-evaluation phase and scale dataset distillation up to larger datasets (e.g., ImageNet-1K). However, this raises a question: Is accuracy still a reliable metric to fairly evaluate dataset distillation methods? Our empirical findings suggest that the performance improvements of these methods often stem from additional techniques rather than the inherent quality of the images themselves, with even randomly sampled images achieving superior results. Such misaligned evaluation settings severely hinder the development of DD. Therefore, we propose DD-Ranking, a unified evaluation framework, along with new general evaluation metrics to uncover the true performance improvements achieved by different methods. By refocusing on the actual information enhancement of distilled datasets, DD-Ranking provides a more comprehensive and fair evaluation standard for future research advancements.
3.7CVNov 25, 2024
UVCG: Leveraging Temporal Consistency for Universal Video ProtectionKaiZhou Li, Jindong Gu, Xinchun Yu et al.
The security risks of AI-driven video editing have garnered significant attention. Although recent studies indicate that adding perturbations to images can protect them from malicious edits, directly applying image-based methods to perturb each frame in a video becomes ineffective, as video editing techniques leverage the consistency of inter-frame information to restore individually perturbed content. To address this challenge, we leverage the temporal consistency of video content to propose a straightforward and efficient, yet highly effective and broadly applicable approach, Universal Video Consistency Guard (UVCG). UVCG embeds the content of another video(target video) within a protected video by introducing continuous, imperceptible perturbations which has the ability to force the encoder of editing models to map continuous inputs to misaligned continuous outputs, thereby inhibiting the generation of videos consistent with the intended textual prompts. Additionally leveraging similarity in perturbations between adjacent frames, we improve the computational efficiency of perturbation generation by employing a perturbation-reuse strategy. We applied UVCG across various versions of Latent Diffusion Models (LDM) and assessed its effectiveness and generalizability across multiple LDM-based editing pipelines. The results confirm the effectiveness, transferability, and efficiency of our approach in safeguarding video content from unauthorized modifications.
11.1AIOct 18, 2025
Can Knowledge-Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation Really Retrieve What You Need?Junchi Yu, Yujie Liu, Jindong Gu et al.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based on knowledge graphs (KGs) enhances large language models (LLMs) by providing structured and interpretable external knowledge. However, existing KG-based RAG methods struggle to retrieve accurate and diverse information from text-rich KGs for complex real-world queries. Process Reward Models (PRMs) offer a way to align the retrieval process of KG-based RAG with query-specific knowledge requirements, but they heavily rely on process-level supervision signals that are expensive and hard to obtain on KGs. To address this challenge, we propose GraphFlow, a framework that efficiently retrieves accurate and diverse knowledge required for real-world queries from text-rich KGs. GraphFlow employs a transition-based flow matching objective to jointly optimize a retrieval policy and a flow estimator. The flow estimator factorizes the reward of the retrieval outcome into the intermediate retrieval states. Such reward factorization guides the retrieval policy to retrieve candidates from KGs in proportion to their reward. This allows GraphFlow to explore high-quality regions of KGs that yield diverse and relevant results. We evaluate GraphFlow on the STaRK benchmark, which includes real-world queries from multiple domains over text-rich KGs. GraphFlow outperforms strong KG-RAG baselines, including GPT-4o, by 10% on average in hit rate and recall. It also shows strong generalization to unseen KGs, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.