Shijia Yang

Jinhyung Park, Chenfeng Xu, Shijia Yang et al. · cmu

While recent camera-only 3D detection methods leverage multiple timesteps, the limited history they use significantly hampers the extent to which temporal fusion can improve object perception. Observing that existing works' fusion of multi-frame images are instances of temporal stereo matching, we find that performance is hindered by the interplay between 1) the low granularity of matching resolution and 2) the sub-optimal multi-view setup produced by limited history usage. Our theoretical and empirical analysis demonstrates that the optimal temporal difference between views varies significantly for different pixels and depths, making it necessary to fuse many timesteps over long-term history. Building on our investigation, we propose to generate a cost volume from a long history of image observations, compensating for the coarse but efficient matching resolution with a more optimal multi-view matching setup. Further, we augment the per-frame monocular depth predictions used for long-term, coarse matching with short-term, fine-grained matching and find that long and short term temporal fusion are highly complementary. While maintaining high efficiency, our framework sets new state-of-the-art on nuScenes, achieving first place on the test set and outperforming previous best art by 5.2% mAP and 3.7% NDS on the validation set. Code will be released $\href{https://github.com/Divadi/SOLOFusion}{here.}$

Sheng Shen, Shijia Yang, Tianjun Zhang et al. · berkeley

Prompt Tuning, conditioning on task-specific learned prompt vectors, has emerged as a data-efficient and parameter-efficient method for adapting large pretrained vision-language models to multiple downstream tasks. However, existing approaches usually consider learning prompt vectors for each task independently from scratch, thereby failing to exploit the rich shareable knowledge across different vision-language tasks. In this paper, we propose multitask vision-language prompt tuning (MVLPT), which incorporates cross-task knowledge into prompt tuning for vision-language models. Specifically, (i) we demonstrate the effectiveness of learning a single transferable prompt from multiple source tasks to initialize the prompt for each target task; (ii) we show many target tasks can benefit each other from sharing prompt vectors and thus can be jointly learned via multitask prompt tuning. We benchmark the proposed MVLPT using three representative prompt tuning methods, namely text prompt tuning, visual prompt tuning, and the unified vision-language prompt tuning. Results in 20 vision tasks demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms all single-task baseline prompt tuning methods, setting the new state-of-the-art on the few-shot ELEVATER benchmarks and cross-task generalization benchmarks. To understand where the cross-task knowledge is most effective, we also conduct a large-scale study on task transferability with 20 vision tasks in 400 combinations for each prompt tuning method. It shows that the most performant MVLPT for each prompt tuning method prefers different task combinations and many tasks can benefit each other, depending on their visual similarity and label similarity. Code is available at https://github.com/sIncerass/MVLPT.

Bohan Zhai, Shijia Yang, Chenfeng Xu et al.

Current Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) achieve remarkable progress, yet there remains significant uncertainty regarding their ability to accurately apprehend visual details, that is, in performing detailed captioning. To address this, we introduce $\textit{CCEval}$, a GPT-4 assisted evaluation method for detailed captioning. Interestingly, while LMMs demonstrate minimal object existence hallucination in existing VQA benchmarks, our proposed evaluation reveals continued susceptibility to such hallucinations. In this paper, we make the first attempt to investigate such hallucination from different aspects, including image resolution, the language decoder size, and instruction data amount, quality, granularity. Our findings underscore the unwarranted inference when the language description includes details at a finer object granularity than what the vision module can ground or verify, thus inducing hallucination. To control such hallucinations, we further attribute the reliability of captioning to contextual knowledge (involving only contextually grounded objects) and parametric knowledge (containing inferred objects by the model). Thus, we introduce $\textit{HallE-Control}$, a controllable LMM in terms of $\textbf{Hall}$ucination in object $\textbf{E}$xistence. HallE-Control can condition the captioning to shift between (i) exclusively depicting contextual knowledge for grounded objects and (ii) blending it with parametric knowledge to imagine inferred objects. Our method reduces hallucination by 44% compared to LLaVA$_{7B}$ and maintains the object coverage.

Shijia Yang, Yunong Liu, Bohan Zhai et al.

Image captions serve as efficient surrogates for visual content in multimodal systems such as retrieval, recommendation, and multi-step agentic inference pipelines. Yet current evaluation practices miss a fundamental question: Can captions stand-in for images in real downstream tasks? We propose a utility-based benchmark, CaptionQA, to evaluate model-generated captions, where caption quality is measured by how well it supports downstream tasks. CaptionQA is an extensible domain-dependent benchmark covering 4 domains--Natural, Document, E-commerce, and Embodied AI--each with fine-grained taxonomies (25 top-level and 69 subcategories) that identify useful information for domain-specific tasks. CaptionQA builds 33,027 densely annotated multiple-choice questions (50.3 per image on average) that explicitly require visual information to answer, providing a comprehensive probe of caption utility. In our evaluation protocol, an LLM answers these questions using captions alone, directly measuring whether captions preserve image-level utility and are utilizable by a downstream LLM. Evaluating state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals substantial gaps between the image and its caption utility. Notably, models nearly identical on traditional image-QA benchmarks lower by up to 32% in caption utility. We release CaptionQA along with an open-source pipeline for extension to new domains. The code is available at https://github.com/bronyayang/CaptionQA.

Monishwaran Maheswaran, Leon Lakhani, Zhongzhu Zhou et al.

We show that verifier-free evolution is bottlenecked by both diversity and efficiency: without external correction, repeated evolution accelerates collapse toward narrow modes, while the uniform use of a high-cost model wastes compute and quickly becomes economically impractical. We introduce Squeeze Evolve, a unified multi-model orchestration framework for verifier-free evolutionary inference. Our approach is guided by a simple principle: allocate model capability where it has the highest marginal utility. Stronger models are reserved for high-impact stages, while cheaper models handle the other stages at much lower costs. This principle addresses diversity and cost-efficiency jointly while remaining lightweight. Squeeze Evolve naturally supports open-source, closed-source, and mixed-model deployments. Across AIME 2025, HMMT 2025, LiveCodeBench V6, GPQA-Diamond, ARC-AGI-V2, and multimodal vision benchmarks, such as MMMU-Pro and BabyVision, Squeeze Evolve consistently improves the cost-capability frontier over single-model evolution and achieves new state-of-the-art results on several tasks. Empirically, Squeeze Evolve reduces API cost by up to $\sim$3$\times$ and increases fixed-budget serving throughput by up to $\sim$10$\times$. Moreover, on discovery tasks, Squeeze Evolve is the first verifier-free evolutionary method to match, and in some cases exceed, the performance of verifier-based evolutionary methods.

Shijia Yang, Bohan Zhai, Quanzeng You et al.

We present the "Law of Vision Representation" in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). It reveals a strong correlation between the combination of cross-modal alignment, correspondence in vision representation, and MLLM performance. We quantify the two factors using the cross-modal Alignment and Correspondence score (AC score). Through extensive experiments involving thirteen different vision representation settings and evaluations across eight benchmarks, we find that the AC score is linearly correlated to model performance. By leveraging this relationship, we are able to identify and train the optimal vision representation only, which does not require finetuning the language model every time, resulting in a 99.7% reduction in computational cost.

Kaixiong Gong, Kaituo Feng, Bohao Li et al.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Reka Core, have expanded their capabilities to include vision and audio modalities. While these models demonstrate impressive performance across a wide range of audio-visual applications, our proposed DeafTest reveals that MLLMs often struggle with simple tasks humans find trivial: 1) determining which of two sounds is louder, and 2) determining which of two sounds has a higher pitch. Motivated by these observations, we introduce AV-Odyssey Bench, a comprehensive audio-visual benchmark designed to assess whether those MLLMs can truly understand the audio-visual information. This benchmark encompasses 4,555 carefully crafted problems, each incorporating text, visual, and audio components. To successfully infer answers, models must effectively leverage clues from both visual and audio inputs. To ensure precise and objective evaluation of MLLM responses, we have structured the questions as multiple-choice, eliminating the need for human evaluation or LLM-assisted assessment. We benchmark a series of closed-source and open-source models and summarize the observations. By revealing the limitations of current models, we aim to provide useful insight for future dataset collection and model development.

Chenfeng Xu, Shijia Yang, Tomer Galanti et al.

3D point-clouds and 2D images are different visual representations of the physical world. While human vision can understand both representations, computer vision models designed for 2D image and 3D point-cloud understanding are quite different. Our paper explores the potential of transferring 2D model architectures and weights to understand 3D point-clouds, by empirically investigating the feasibility of the transfer, the benefits of the transfer, and shedding light on why the transfer works. We discover that we can indeed use the same architecture and pretrained weights of a neural net model to understand both images and point-clouds. Specifically, we transfer the image-pretrained model to a point-cloud model by copying or inflating the weights. We find that finetuning the transformed image-pretrained models (FIP) with minimal efforts -- only on input, output, and normalization layers -- can achieve competitive performance on 3D point-cloud classification, beating a wide range of point-cloud models that adopt task-specific architectures and use a variety of tricks. When finetuning the whole model, the performance improves even further. Meanwhile, FIP improves data efficiency, reaching up to 10.0 top-1 accuracy percent on few-shot classification. It also speeds up the training of point-cloud models by up to 11.1x for a target accuracy (e.g., 90 % accuracy). Lastly, we provide an explanation of the image to point-cloud transfer from the aspect of neural collapse. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/chenfengxu714/image2point}.