Sung‐Kwan Mo

Subin Kim, Sangwoo Mo, Mamshad Nayeem Rizve et al.

Achieving precise alignment between user intent and generated visuals remains a central challenge in text-to-visual generation, as a single attempt often fails to produce the desired output. To handle this, prior approaches mainly scale the visual generation process (e.g., increasing sampling steps or seeds), but this quickly leads to a quality plateau. This limitation arises because the prompt, crucial for guiding generation, is kept fixed. To address this, we propose Prompt Redesign for Inference-time Scaling, coined PRIS, a framework that adaptively revises the prompt during inference in response to the scaled visual generations. The core idea of PRIS is to review the generated visuals, identify recurring failure patterns across visuals, and redesign the prompt accordingly before regenerating the visuals with the revised prompt. To provide precise alignment feedback for prompt revision, we introduce a new verifier, element-level factual correction, which evaluates the alignment between prompt attributes and generated visuals at a fine-grained level, achieving more accurate and interpretable assessments than holistic measures. Extensive experiments on both text-to-image and text-to-video benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, including a 15% gain on VBench 2.0. These results highlight that jointly scaling prompts and visuals is key to fully leveraging scaling laws at inference-time. Visualizations are available at the website: https://subin-kim-cv.github.io/PRIS.

Woomin Song, Jihoon Tack, Sangwoo Mo et al.

State-space models (SSMs) offer a promising architecture for sequence modeling, providing an alternative to Transformers by replacing expensive self-attention with linear recurrences. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective trick to enhance SSMs within given computational budgets by sparsifying them. Our intuition is that tokens in SSMs are highly redundant due to gradual recurrent updates, and dense recurrence operations block the delivery of past information. In particular, we observe that upper layers of SSMs tend to be more redundant as they encode global information, while lower layers encode local information. Motivated by this, we introduce Simba, a hierarchical sparsification method for SSMs based on token pruning. Simba sparsifies upper layers more than lower layers, encouraging the upper layers to behave like highways. To achieve this, we propose a novel token pruning criterion for SSMs, measuring the global impact of tokens on the final output by accumulating local recurrences. We demonstrate that Simba outperforms the baseline model, Mamba, with the same FLOPS in various natural language tasks. Moreover, we illustrate the effect of highways, showing that Simba not only enhances efficiency but also improves the information flow across long sequences. Code is available at https://github.com/woominsong/Simba.

Jiyun Bae, Hyunjong Ok, Sangwoo Mo et al.

How does irrelevant information (i.e., distractors) affect test-time scaling in vision-language models (VLMs)? Prior studies on language models have reported an inverse scaling effect, where textual distractors lead to longer but less effective reasoning. To investigate whether similar phenomena occur in multimodal settings, we introduce Idis (Images with distractors), a visual question-answering dataset that systematically varies distractors along semantic, numerical, and spatial dimensions. Our analyses reveal that visual distractors differ fundamentally from textual ones: although inverse scaling persists, adding visual distractors reduces accuracy without increasing reasoning length. We further show that tracking attribute counts within reasoning traces provides key insights into how distractors, reasoning length, and accuracy interact. Finally, we demonstrate that these trends extend to established visual bias benchmarks such as Waterbirds, and we propose a simple prompting strategy to mitigate bias-driven predictions in reasoning models.