Feature Attribution

The proliferation of generative AI has led to hyper-realistic synthetic videos, escalating misuse risks and outstripping binary real/fake detectors. We introduce \texttt SAGA (\underline S ource \underline A ttribution of \underline G enerative \underline A I videos), the first comprehensive framework to address the urgent need for AI-generated video source attribution at a large scale. Unlike traditional detection, \texttt SAGA identifies the specific generative model used. It uniquely provides multi-granular attribution across five levels: authenticity, generation task (e.g., T2V/I2V), model version, development team, and the precise generator, offering far richer forensic insights. Our novel video transformer architecture, leveraging features from a robust vision foundation model, effectively captures spatio-temporal artifacts. Critically, we introduce a data-efficient pretrain-and-attribute strategy, enabling \texttt SAGA to achieve state-of-the-art attribution using only 0.5% of source-labeled data per class, matching fully supervised performance. Furthermore, we propose Temporal Attention Signatures (\texttt T-Sig ), a novel interpretability method that visualizes learned temporal differences, offering the first explanation for why different video generators are distinguishable. Extensive experiments on public datasets, including cross-domain scenarios, demonstrate that \texttt SAGA sets a new benchmark for synthetic video provenance, providing crucial, interpretable insights for forensic and regulatory applications.

Despite the significant advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), their tendency to generate hallucinations undermines reliability and restricts broader practical deployment. Among the hallucination mitigation methods, feature steering emerges as a promising approach that reduces erroneous outputs in LVLMs without increasing inference costs. However, current methods apply uniform feature steering across all layers. This heuristic strategy ignores inter-layer differences, potentially disrupting layers unrelated to hallucinations and ultimately leading to performance degradation on general tasks. In this paper, we propose Locate-Then-Sparsify for Feature Steering (LTS-FS), a plug-and-play framework which controls the steering intensity according to the hallucination relevance of each layer. We first construct a dataset comprising token-level and sentence-level hallucination cases. Based on this dataset, we introduce an attribution method based on causal interventions to quantify the hallucination relevance of each layer. With the attribution scores across layers, we propose a layerwise strategy that converts these scores into feature steering intensities for individual layers, enabling more precise adjustments specifically on hallucination-relevant layers. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that LTS-FS effectively mitigates hallucination while preserving strong performance. Codes are available at https://github.com/huttersadan/LTS-FS.

Visual relocalization is a fundamental task in the field of 3D computer vision, estimating a camera's pose when it revisits a previously known scene. While point-based hierarchical relocalization methods have shown strong scalability and efficiency, they are often limited by sparse image observations and weak feature matching. In this work, we propose SplatHLoc, a novel hierarchical visual relocalization framework that uses Feature Gaussian Splatting as the scene representation. To address the sparsity of database images, we propose an adaptive viewpoint retrieval method that synthesizes virtual candidates with viewpoints more closely aligned with the query, thereby improving the accuracy of initial pose estimation. For feature matching, we observe that Gaussian-rendered features and those extracted directly from images exhibit different strengths across the two-stage matching process: the former performs better in the coarse stage, while the latter proves more effective in the fine stage. Therefore, we introduce a hybrid feature matching strategy, enabling more accurate and efficient pose estimation. Extensive experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets show that SplatHLoc enhances the robustness of visual relocalization, setting a new state-of-the-art.

We present Consistent-Recurrent Feature Flow Transformer (CRFT), a unified coarse-to-fine framework based on feature flow learning for robust cross-modal image registration. CRFT learns a modality-independent feature flow representation within a transformer-based architecture that jointly performs feature alignment and flow estimation. The coarse stage establishes global correspondences through multi-scale feature correlation, while the fine stage refines local details via hierarchical feature fusion and adaptive spatial reasoning. To enhance geometric adaptability, an iterative discrepancy-guided attention mechanism with a Spatial Geometric Transform (SGT) recurrently refines the flow field, progressively capturing subtle spatial inconsistencies and enforcing feature-level consistency. This design enables accurate alignment under large affine and scale variations while maintaining structural coherence across modalities. Extensive experiments on diverse cross-modal datasets demonstrate that CRFT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art registration methods in both accuracy and robustness. Beyond registration, CRFT provides a generalizable paradigm for multimodal spatial correspondence, offering broad applicability to remote sensing, autonomous navigation, and medical imaging. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/NEU-Liuxuecong/CRFT.

Visual localization is a core technology for augmented reality and autonomous navigation. Recent methods combine the efficient rendering of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with feature-based localization. These methods rely on direct matching between 2D query features and the 3D Gaussian feature field, but this often results in mismatches due to an inherent bias in the learned Gaussian feature. We theoretically analyze the feature learning process in 3DGS, revealing that the widely adopted alpha-blending optimization inherently introduces bias into 3D point features. This bias stems from the entanglement between individual Gaussians and their neighboring Gaussians, making the learned features unsuitable for precise matching tasks. Motivated by these findings, we propose ULF-Loc, an unbiased landmark feature framework that replaces biased feature optimization with geometry-weighted feature fusion. We further introduce keypoint-consensus landmark sampling to select reliable Gaussians and local geometric consistency verification to reject mismatches caused by rendering artifacts. On the Cambridge Landmarks dataset, ULF-Loc reduces the mean median translation error by 17% compared to the state-of-the-art, while achieving superior efficiency with only 1/10 the training time and 1/6 the GPU memory of STDLoc. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/Cyril-gyd/ULF-Loc.

As AI generative models evolve at unprecedented speed, image attribution has become a moving target. New diffusion, adversarial and autoregressive generators appear almost monthly, making existing watermark, classifier and inversion methods obsolete upon release. The core problem lies not in model recognition, but in the inability to adapt attribution itself.We introduce IncreFA, a framework that redefines attribution as a structured incremental learning problem, allowing the system to learn continuously as new generative models emerge. IncreFA departs from conventional incremental learning by exploiting the hierarchical relationships among generative architectures and coupling them with continual adaptation. It integrates two mutually reinforcing mechanisms: (1) Hierarchical Constraints, which encode architectural hierarchies through learnable orthogonal priors to disentangle family-level invariants from model-specific idiosyncrasies; and (2) a Latent Memory Bank, which replays compact latent exemplars and mixes them to generate pseudo-unseen samples, stabilising representation drift and enhancing open-set awareness.On the newly constructed Incremental Attribution Benchmark (IABench) covering 28 generative models released between 2022 and 2025, IncreFA achieves state-of-the-art attribution accuracy and 98.9% unseen detection under a temporally ordered open-set protocol.

Pretraining on large-scale data followed by fine-tuning has become a standard paradigm for visual models. However, noise in the pretraining data can be absorbed by the model and carried into downstream tasks, causing catastrophic inheritance. Prior studies mainly link this issue to changes in the feature spectrum, arguing that noise reduces the strength of key feature components. Following this view, they aim to improve transferability by amplifying these components. However, these approaches focus only on spectral energy and implicitly assume that the feature directions remain fixed, which does not hold in practice. In this work, we revisit this view and reveal an overlooked effect: even mild pretraining noise can cause a clear rotation of the dominant feature subspace, despite negligible spectral energy degradation. To quantitatively characterize this phenomenon, we propose using the Principal Directional Angle (PDA) to measure the directional shift between the clean and noisy models. Building on this observation, we introduce the Feature Geometry Stabilization (FGS) framework, which aims to counteract the subspace rotation revealed by PDA by enhancing the geometric stability of the feature space through the synergistic interaction of perturbation consistency, variance-activation regularization, and feature consistency distillation. Experiments across multiple visual benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of FGS and verify the importance of stabilizing feature geometry to mitigate catastrophic inheritance.

Deep learning-based watermarking has made remarkable progress in recent years. To achieve robustness against various distortions, current methods commonly adopt a training strategy where a \underline s ingle \underline r andom \underline d istortion (SRD) is chosen as the noise layer in each training batch. However, the SRD strategy treats distortions independently within each batch, neglecting the inherent relationships among different types of distortions and causing optimization conflicts across batches. To address this issue, we propose a novel training strategy that enhances robustness and generalization via \underline meta -learning with \underline f eature \underline c onsistency (Meta-FC). Specifically, we randomly sample multiple distortions from the noise pool to construct a meta-training task, while holding out one distortion as a simulated "unknown" distortion for the meta-testing phase.Through meta-learning, the model is encouraged to identify and utilize neurons that exhibit stable activations across different types of distortions, mitigating the optimization conflicts caused by the random sampling of diverse distortions in each batch.To further promote the transformation of stable activations into distortion-invariant representations, we introduce a feature consistency loss that constrains the decoded features of the same image subjected to different distortions to remain consistent.Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared to the SRD training strategy, Meta-FC improves the robustness and generalization of various watermarking models by an average of 1.59%, 4.71%, and 2.38% under high-intensity, combined, and unknown distortions. Code has been made \href https://github.com/007-li/Meta-FC open-source .

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) extract spatially downsampled representations, posing challenges for pixel-level tasks. Existing upsampling approaches face a fundamental trade-off: classical filters are fast and broadly applicable but rely on fixed forms, while modern upsamplers achieve superior accuracy through learnable, VFM-specific forms at the cost of retraining for each VFM. We introduce Neighborhood Attention Filtering (NAF), which bridges this gap by learning adaptive spatial-and-content weights through Cross-Scale Neighborhood Attention and Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE), guided solely by the high-resolution input image. NAF operates zero-shot: it upsamples features from any VFM without retraining, making it the first VFM-agnostic architecture to outperform VFM-specific upsamplers and achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream tasks. It maintains high efficiency, scaling to 2K feature maps and reconstructing intermediate-resolution maps at 18 FPS. Beyond feature upsampling, NAF demonstrates strong performance on image restoration, highlighting its versatility. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/valeoai/NAF.

In hematoxylin-eosin (H&E) to virtual immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining, paired images enable supervised learning but suffer from inherent spatial dislocation, limiting pixel-level constraints. Thus, auxiliary tasks have been increasingly employed with paired data to provide complementary supervision. However, existing methods largely overlook the rich semantic information embedded in auxiliary task models. This paper proposes a novel framework for virtual IHC staining guided by dual-aligned multi-task features, which fully explores semantic cues from auxiliary tasks. To realize effective guidance, we address two obstacles: (1) the spatial mismatch between paired H&E and IHC feature representations; (2) the task gap between auxiliary task features and virtual staining features. To resolve the spatial mismatch, we generate an alignment matrix that aligns H&E and IHC features. Specifically, we first introduce structure-enhanced learning to restore semantic consistency in regions affected by inaccurate staining in virtual IHC images. Then, we separately cluster features from virtual IHC and real IHC images, and establish semantic correspondences using an active-passive matching mechanism. This ensures that only semantically aligned regions are matched, reducing the impact of staining variability on the alignment matrix. To bridge the task gap, we introduce a task-gap alignment module trained under the principle that auxiliary features are considered aligned if they improve the performance of the virtual IHC staining model. Extensive experiments on two public datasets with four biomarkers demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Code is available at https://github.com/U-RBook/VSMT.

We introduce Mistake Attribution (MATT), a new task for fine-grained understanding of human mistakes in egocentric videos. While prior work detects whether a mistake occurs, MATT attributes the mistake to what part of the instruction is violated (semantic role), when in the video the deviation becomes irreversible (the Point-of-No-Return, PNR), and where the mistake appears in the PNR frame. We develop MisEngine, a data engine that automatically constructs mistake samples from existing datasets with attribution-rich annotations. Applied to large egocentric corpora, MisEngine yields EPIC-KITCHENS-M and Ego4D-M---two datasets up to two orders of magnitude larger than prior mistake datasets.We then present MisFormer, a unified attention-based model for mistake attribution across semantic, temporal, and spatial dimensions, trained with MisEngine supervision. A human study demonstrates the ecological validity of our MisEngine-constructed mistake samples, confirming that EPIC-KITCHENS-M and Ego4D-M can serve as reliable benchmarks for mistake understanding. Experiments on both our datasets and prior benchmarks show that MisFormer, as a single unified model, outperforms task-specific SOTA methods by at least 6.66%, 21.81%, 18.7%, and 3.00% in video-language understanding, temporal localization, hand-object interaction, and mistake detection, respectively. Project page: https://yayuanli.github.io/MATT/

Single-view RGB model-based object pose estimation methods achieve strong generalization but are fundamentally limited by depth ambiguity, clutter, and occlusions. Multi-view pose estimation methods have the potential to solve these issues, but existing works rely on precise single-view pose estimates or lack generalization to unseen objects. We address these challenges via the following three contributions. First, we introduce AlignPose, a 6D object pose estimation method that aggregates information from multiple extrinsically calibrated RGB views and does not require any object-specific training or symmetry annotation. Second, the key component of this approach is a new multi-view feature-metric refinement specifically designed for object pose. It optimizes a single, consistent world-frame object pose by minimizing the feature discrepancy between on-the-fly rendered object features and observed image features across all views simultaneously. Third, we report extensive experiments on six datasets (YCB-V, T-LESS, HouseCat6D, ITODD-MV, IPD, XYZ-IBD) using the BOP benchmark evaluation and show that AlignPose outperforms other published methods, especially on challenging industrial datasets where multiple views are readily available in practice.

Foundational vision models have become the de facto standard for many vision tasks due to their strong performance. However, they are notoriously opaque and remain hard to interpret. We present ALOE (ALign Once to Explain), a one-time, label-free feature alignment based approach that efficiently converts foundational vision models into inherently interpretable B-cos variants. Once aligned, the B-cos backbone is used as a drop-in replacement across several downstream tasks--amortizing the cost of interpretability. ALOE is robust across pre-training paradigms (supervised, self-supervised, vision-language) and is 100-1000x more data-efficient than training from scratch. On classification, it outperforms fully-supervised B-cos models (e.g., +9.2 p.p. top-1 on ImageNet for ViT-B/16), retains strong linear probing, k-NN, and zero-shot transfer performance competitive with foundational backbones (DINOv3, SigLIP2) across diverse datasets. It also preserves spatially structured features useful for dense prediction, while yielding well-localized and highly human-interpretable explanations by design. Code link https://github.com/rmaser/aloe.

Camera recapture introduces complex optical degradations, such as perspective warping, illumination shifts, and Moire interference, that remain challenging for deep watermarking systems. We present TIACam, a text-anchored invariant feature learning framework with auto-augmentation for camera-robust zero-watermarking. The method integrates three key innovations: (1) a learnable auto-augmentor that discovers camera-like distortions through differentiable geometric, photometric, and Moire operators; (2) a text-anchored invariant feature learner that enforces semantic consistency via cross-modal adversarial alignment between image and text; and (3) a zero-watermarking head that binds binary messages in the invariant feature space without modifying image pixels. This unified formulation jointly optimizes invariance, semantic alignment, and watermark recoverability. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world camera captures demonstrate that TIACam achieves state-of-the-art feature stability and watermark extraction accuracy, establishing a principled bridge between multimodal invariance learning and physically robust zero-watermarking.

Split DNNs enable edge devices by offloading intensive computation to a cloud server, but this paradigm exposes privacy vulnerabilities, as the intermediate features can be exploited to reconstruct the private inputs via Feature Inversion Attack (FIA). Existing FIA methods often produce limited reconstruction quality, making it difficult to assess the true extent of privacy leakage. To reveal the privacy risk of the leaked features, we introduce FIA-Flow, a black-box FIA framework that achieves high-fidelity image reconstruction from intermediate features. To exploit the semantic information within intermediate features, we design a Latent Feature Space Alignment Module (LFSAM) to bridge the semantic gap between the intermediate feature space and the latent space. Furthermore, to rectify distributional mismatch, we develop Deterministic Inversion Flow Matching (DIFM), which projects off-manifold features onto the target manifold with one-step inference. This decoupled design simplifies learning and enables effective training with few image-feature pairs. To quantify privacy leakage from a human perspective, we also propose two metrics based on a large vision-language model. Experiments show that FIA-Flow achieves more faithful and semantically aligned feature inversion across various models (AlexNet, ResNet, Swin Transformer, DINO, and YOLO11) and layers, revealing a more severe privacy threat in Split DNNs than previously recognized.

Novel View Synthesis (NVS) has traditionally relied on models with explicit 3D inductive biases combined with known camera parameters from Structure-from-Motion (SfM) beforehand. Recent vision foundation models like VGGT take an orthogonal approach -- 3D knowledge is gained implicitly through training data and loss objectives, enabling feed-forward prediction of both camera parameters and 3D representations directly from a set of uncalibrated images. While flexible, VGGT features lack explicit multi-view geometric consistency, and we find that improving such 3D feature consistency benefits both NVS and pose estimation tasks. We introduce Selfi, a self-improving 3D reconstruction pipeline via feature alignment, transforming a VGGT backbone into a high-fidelity 3D reconstruction engine by leveraging its own outputs as pseudo-ground-truth. Specifically, we train a lightweight feature adapter using a reprojection-based consistency loss, which distills VGGT outputs into a new geometrically-aligned feature space that captures spatial proximity in 3D. This enables state-of-the-art performance in both NVS and camera pose estimation, demonstrating that feature alignment is a highly beneficial step for downstream 3D reasoning. More details on our project page: https://denghilbert.github.io/selfi

Feature attribution methods explain the predictions of deep neural networks by assigning importance scores to individual input features. However, most existing methods focus solely on marginal effects, overlooking feature interactions, where groups of features jointly influence model output. Such interactions are especially important in image classification tasks, where semantic meaning often arises from pixel interdependencies rather than isolated features. Existing interaction-based methods for images are either coarse (e.g., superpixel-only) or, fail to satisfy core interpretability axioms. In this work, we introduce H-Sets, a novel two-stage framework for discovering and attributing higher-order feature interactions in image classifiers. First, we detect locally interacting pairs via input Hessians and recursively merge them into semantically coherent sets; segmentation from Segment Anything (SAM) is used as a spatial grouping prior but can be replaced by other segmentations. Second, we attribute each set with IDG-Vis, a set-level extension of Integrated Directional Gradients that integrates directional gradients along pixel-space paths and aggregates them with Harsanyi dividends. While Hessians introduce additional compute at the detection stage, this targeted cost consistently yields saliency maps that are sparser and more faithful. Evaluations across VGG, ResNet, DenseNet and MobileNet models on ImageNet and CUB datasets show that H-Sets generate more interpretable and faithful saliency maps compared to existing methods.

In this work, we observe that for indoor 3D object detection, fundamental geometric cues induce homogeneous spatial responses across scenes, whereas scene-specific structure yields heterogeneous signatures. However, existing detectors lack effective mechanisms to jointly extract and exploit such dual properties, which imposes inherent limitations on detection performance. Guided by this insight, we propose H^2A^2, a homogeneity-aware and heterogeneity-aware feature perception network for unified indoor 3D object detection under cross-scene training paradigms.Technically, we introduce a structural-feature-aware kernel selection (SF-KS) method, which encompasses three core components:(i) task-aware linear modulation, a channel-wise affine transformation that strengthens scene-structural feature representation; (ii) kernel weight selection strategy that integrates an offset validity prior to suppress non-informative cross-scene transfer while utilizing a structural consistency posterior to capture scene-homogeneous cues. and (iii) task-aware channel gating that suppresses scene-irrelevant feature responses. Overall, SF-KS enables the precise optimization of homogeneous features while specializing in scene-specific heterogeneous ones. In addition, to stabilize cross-scene optimization, we further introduce norm-based gradient homogenization (NGH) algorithm, which normalizes and dynamically reweights per-task gradient norms to mitigate conflicts and promote consistent updates. Extensive experiments on diverse indoor benchmarks show that H^2A^2 delivers consistent gains over strong baselines and improves cross-scene generalization.

Accurately capturing and aggregating spatiotemporal information has become crucial for video object detection. Previous methods mainly perform feature aggregation in the spatiotemporal domain, treating all regions indiscriminately and overlooking both their relative importance and the frequency characteristics that capture periodic motion patterns. This limits the capability of these methods to capture dynamic interactions and adapt to complex scene variations. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Domain Feature Aggregation Network (D2FANet) for video object detection, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first work to introduce the frequency-domain feature aggregation into the video object detection task. By collaboratively modeling spatiotemporal and frequency information, our D2FANet enhances motion awareness and temporal consistency, thereby improving detection accuracy. First, we develop a frequency-domain feature aggregation module that decomposes frame features into high- and low-frequency distributions and reinforces object query representations through aggregating multi-scale frequency features. Second, we design a spatiotemporal-domain feature aggregation module that leverages an importance guidance mechanism to dynamically emphasize regions of different importance and reinforces object query representations via guiding the aggregation of spatiotemporal features. Experiments on the ImageNet VID and EPIC-KITCHENS datasets demonstrate that D2FANet achieves state-of-the-art performance.

The performance of neural network models deteriorates due to their unreliable behavior on non-robust features of corrupted samples. Owing to their opaque nature, rectifying models to address this problem often necessitates arduous data cleaning and model retraining, resulting in huge computational and manual overhead. In this work, we leverage rank-one model editing to establish an attribution-guided model rectification framework that effectively locates and corrects model unreliable behaviors. We first distinguish our rectification setting from existing model editing, yielding a formulation that corrects unreliable behavior while preserving model performance and reducing reliance on large budgets of cleansed samples. We further reveal a bottleneck of model rectifying arising from heterogeneous editability across layers. To target the primary source of misbehavior, we introduce an attribution-guided layer localization method that quantifies layer-wise editability and identifies the layer most responsible for unreliabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in correcting unreliabilities observed for neural Trojans, spurious correlations and feature leakage. Our method shows remarkable performance by achieving its editing objective with as few as a single cleansed sample, which makes it appealing for practice.