Konstantin Sobolev

Ashish Jha, Dimitrii Ermilov, Konstantin Sobolev et al.

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) focuses on identifying various attributes in pedestrian images, with key applications in person retrieval, suspect re-identification, and soft biometrics. However, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for PAR often suffer from over-parameterization and high computational complexity, making them unsuitable for resource-constrained devices. Traditional tensor-based compression methods typically factorize layers without adequately preserving the gradient direction during compression, leading to inefficient compression and a significant accuracy loss. In this work, we propose a novel approach for determining the optimal ranks of low-rank layers, ensuring that the gradient direction of the compressed model closely aligns with that of the original model. This means that the compressed model effectively preserves the update direction of the full model, enabling more efficient compression for PAR tasks. The proposed procedure optimizes the compression ranks for each layer within the ALM model, followed by compression using CPD-EPC or truncated SVD. This results in a reduction in model complexity while maintaining high performance.

Anh-Huy Phan, Konstantin Sobolev, Dmitry Ermilov et al.

A rising problem in the compression of Deep Neural Networks is how to reduce the number of parameters in convolutional kernels and the complexity of these layers by low-rank tensor approximation. Canonical polyadic tensor decomposition (CPD) and Tucker tensor decomposition (TKD) are two solutions to this problem and provide promising results. However, CPD often fails due to degeneracy, making the networks unstable and hard to fine-tune. TKD does not provide much compression if the core tensor is big. This motivates using a hybrid model of CPD and TKD, a decomposition with multiple Tucker models with small core tensor, known as block term decomposition (BTD). This paper proposes a more compact model that further compresses the BTD by enforcing core tensors in BTD identical. We establish a link between the BTD with shared parameters and a looped chain tensor network (TC). Unfortunately, such strongly constrained tensor networks (with loop) encounter severe numerical instability, as proved by y (Landsberg, 2012) and (Handschuh, 2015a). We study perturbation of chain tensor networks, provide interpretation of instability in TC, demonstrate the problem. We propose novel methods to gain the stability of the decomposition results, keep the network robust and attain better approximation. Experimental results will confirm the superiority of the proposed methods in compression of well-known CNNs, and TC decomposition under challenging scenarios

Arsen Kuzhamuratov, Mikhail Zhirnov, Andrey Kuznetsov et al.

Accurate subseasonal weather forecasting remains a major challenge due to the inherently chaotic nature of the atmosphere, which limits the predictive skill of conventional models beyond the mid-range horizon (approximately 15 days). In this work, we present \textit{Marchuk}, a generative latent flow-matching model for global weather forecasting spanning mid-range to subseasonal timescales, with prediction horizons of up to 30 days. Marchuk conditions on current-day weather maps and autoregressively predicts subsequent days' weather maps within the learned latent space. We replace rotary positional encodings (RoPE) with trainable positional embeddings and extend the temporal context window, which together enhance the model's ability to represent and propagate long-range temporal dependencies during latent forecasting. Marchuk offers two key advantages: high computational efficiency and strong predictive performance. Despite its compact architecture of only 276 million parameters, the model achieves performance comparable to LaDCast, a substantially larger model with 1.6 billion parameters, while operating at significantly higher inference speeds. We open-source our inference code and model at: https://v-gen-ai.github.io/Marchuk/

Vera Soboleva, Aibek Alanov, Andrey Kuznetsov et al.

While diffusion model fine-tuning offers a powerful approach for customizing pre-trained models to generate specific objects, it frequently suffers from overfitting when training samples are limited, compromising both generalization capability and output diversity. This paper tackles the challenging yet most impactful task of adapting a diffusion model using just a single concept image, as single-image customization holds the greatest practical potential. We introduce T-LoRA, a Timestep-Dependent Low-Rank Adaptation framework specifically designed for diffusion model personalization. In our work we show that higher diffusion timesteps are more prone to overfitting than lower ones, necessitating a timestep-sensitive fine-tuning strategy. T-LoRA incorporates two key innovations: (1) a dynamic fine-tuning strategy that adjusts rank-constrained updates based on diffusion timesteps, and (2) a weight parametrization technique that ensures independence between adapter components through orthogonal initialization. Extensive experiments show that T-LoRA and its individual components outperform standard LoRA and other diffusion model personalization techniques. They achieve a superior balance between concept fidelity and text alignment, highlighting the potential of T-LoRA in data-limited and resource-constrained scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/ControlGenAI/T-LoRA.

Alexander Gambashidze, Li Pengyi, Matvey Skripkin et al.

Training robust and generalizable reward models for human visual preferences is essential for aligning text-to-image and text-to-video generative models with human intent. However, current reward models often fail to generalize, and supervised fine-tuning leads to memorization, demanding complex annotation pipelines. While reinforcement learning (RL), specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), improves generalization, we uncover a key failure mode: a significant drop in reasoning accuracy occurs when a model's reasoning trace contradicts that of an independent, frozen vision-language model ("listener") evaluating the same output. To address this, we introduce a listener-augmented GRPO framework. Here, the listener re-evaluates the reasoner's chain-of-thought to provide a dense, calibrated confidence score, shaping the RL reward signal. This encourages the reasoner not only to answer correctly, but to produce explanations that are persuasive to an independent model. Our listener-shaped reward scheme achieves best accuracy on the ImageReward benchmark (67.4%), significantly improves out-of-distribution (OOD) performance on a large-scale human preference dataset (1.2M votes, up to +6% over naive reasoner), and reduces reasoning contradictions compared to strong GRPO and SFT baselines. These results demonstrate that listener-based rewards provide a scalable, data-efficient path to aligning vision-language models with nuanced human preferences. We will release our reasoning model here: https://huggingface.co/alexgambashidze/qwen2.5vl_image_preference_reasoner.

Danil Tokhchukov, Aysel Mirzoeva, Andrey Kuznetsov et al.

In this paper, we uncover the hidden potential of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) to significantly enhance generative tasks. Through an in-depth analysis of the denoising process, we demonstrate that introducing a single learned scaling parameter can significantly improve the performance of DiT blocks. Building on this insight, we propose Calibri, a parameter-efficient approach that optimally calibrates DiT components to elevate generative quality. Calibri frames DiT calibration as a black-box reward optimization problem, which is efficiently solved using an evolutionary algorithm and modifies just ~100 parameters. Experimental results reveal that despite its lightweight design, Calibri consistently improves performance across various text-to-image models. Notably, Calibri also reduces the inference steps required for image generation, all while maintaining high-quality outputs.

Alexander Gambashidze, Konstantin Sobolev, Andrey Kuznetsov et al.

Can Visual Language Models (VLMs) effectively capture human visual preferences? This work addresses this question by training VLMs to think about preferences at test time, employing reinforcement learning methods inspired by DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI O1. Using datasets such as ImageReward and Human Preference Score v2 (HPSv2), our models achieve accuracies of 64.9% on the ImageReward test set (trained on ImageReward official split) and 65.4% on HPSv2 (trained on approximately 25% of its data). These results match traditional encoder-based models while providing transparent reasoning and enhanced generalization. This approach allows to use not only rich VLM world knowledge, but also its potential to think, yielding interpretable outcomes that help decision-making processes. By demonstrating that human visual preferences reasonable by current VLMs, we introduce efficient soft-reward strategies for image ranking, outperforming simplistic selection or scoring methods. This reasoning capability enables VLMs to rank arbitrary images-regardless of aspect ratio or complexity-thereby potentially amplifying the effectiveness of visual Preference Optimization. By reducing the need for extensive markup while improving reward generalization and explainability, our findings can be a strong mile-stone that will enhance text-to-vision models even further.

Anh-Huy Phan, Konstantin Sobolev, Konstantin Sozykin et al.

Most state of the art deep neural networks are overparameterized and exhibit a high computational cost. A straightforward approach to this problem is to replace convolutional kernels with its low-rank tensor approximations, whereas the Canonical Polyadic tensor Decomposition is one of the most suited models. However, fitting the convolutional tensors by numerical optimization algorithms often encounters diverging components, i.e., extremely large rank-one tensors but canceling each other. Such degeneracy often causes the non-interpretable result and numerical instability for the neural network fine-tuning. This paper is the first study on degeneracy in the tensor decomposition of convolutional kernels. We present a novel method, which can stabilize the low-rank approximation of convolutional kernels and ensure efficient compression while preserving the high-quality performance of the neural networks. We evaluate our approach on popular CNN architectures for image classification and show that our method results in much lower accuracy degradation and provides consistent performance.