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Search papers from 30+ top conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ACL and AAAI. Filter by keyword, then open any paper for its abstract, authors and links.

arXiv

Do Protective Perturbations Really Protect Portrait Privacy under Real-world Image Transformations?

Ruiqing Sun, Xingshan Yao, Zhijing Wu, Tian Lan, Chenhao Cui, Huiyang Zhao, Jialing Shi, Chen Yang, Xianling Mao

Proactive defense methods protect portrait images from unauthorized editing or talking face generation (TFG) by introducing pixel-level protective perturbations, and have attracted increasing attention for privacy protection. In real-world use, images inevitably undergo sequences of benign operations during display and dissemination, such as resizing and color compression, which directly alter pixel values. Existing studies and robustness defenses mainly examine individual transformations in isolation, while sequentially composed transformations remain underexplored. To address this gap, we systematically evaluate whether representative proactive defenses against unauthorized image editing using GANs and diffusion models, as well as talking face generation, remain effective under sequential image transformations. The evaluated methods span general-purpose and portrait-specific defenses and are assessed qualitatively and quantitatively. Experimental results show that pixel-level perturbation-based defenses struggle to withstand sequences of common image transformations, posing a risk of failure in real-world applications. To further demonstrate that this vulnerability can be exploited at low cost, we introduce Transformation-Induced Purification via Region-wise Super-Resolution (TIP-RSR), a simple training-free framework combining sequential image transformations with off-the-shelf restoration models. TIP-RSR efficiently purifies protective perturbations while preserving image fidelity and requiring substantially less computation than diffusion-based purification methods. These findings expose a practical vulnerability in current proactive portrait defenses and highlight the need to account for sequential real-world transformations when designing future protection mechanisms. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Richen7418/TIP-RSR.

arXiv

PinpointQA: A Benchmark for Small Object-Centric Spatial Understanding in Indoor Videos

Zhiyu Zhou, Peilin Liu, Ruoxuan Zhang, Luyang Zhang, Cheng Zhang, Hongxia Xie, Wen-Huang Cheng

Reliable embodied interaction in indoor environments requires agents to precisely localize small everyday objects from visual observations. Yet this fundamental capability remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly when spatial understanding must be performed from indoor videos. Existing benchmarks study video spatial intelligence and embodied reasoning, but do not directly evaluate whether a model can localize a small target object and express its position with sufficient precision. We introduce PinpointQA, a benchmark built from ScanNet++ and ScanNet200. It contains 1,024 scenes and 10,094 QA pairs across four progressively challenging tasks: Target Presence Verification, Nearest Reference Identification, Fine-Grained Spatial Description, and Structured Spatial Prediction. Ground-truth annotations are constructed from intermediate spatial representations derived from aligned 3D geometry and instance-level annotations, while evaluated models receive only sampled RGB video frames. Evaluations of representative MLLMs reveal a consistent performance decline across the task progression, with structured spatial prediction remaining particularly challenging, while supervised fine-tuning substantially improves performance. By isolating the spatial grounding capabilities that precede downstream embodied interaction, PinpointQA serves as both a diagnostic benchmark and an effective training resource. The project page is available at https://rainchowz.github.io/PinpointQA/.

arXiv

Covert Visual Prompt Injection against Commercial Multimodal Large Language Models

Meiwen Ding, Song Xia, Chenqi Kong, Xudong Jiang

Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, their instruction-following behavior leaves them vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. Existing prompt injection methods predominantly rely on textual prompts or perceptible visual prompts that are observable by human users. In this work, we study imperceptible visual prompt injection against powerful closed-source MLLMs, where adversarial instructions are embedded in the visual modality. Our method adaptively embeds the malicious prompt into the input image via a bounded text overlay to provide semantic guidance. Meanwhile, the imperceptible visual perturbation is iteratively optimized to align the feature representation of the attacked image with those of the malicious visual and textual targets at both coarse- and fine-grained levels. Specifically, the visual target is instantiated as a text-rendered image and progressively refined during optimization to more faithfully represent the desired semantics and improve transferability. Extensive experiments on two multimodal understanding tasks across multiple closed-source MLLMs demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to existing methods.

arXiv

What DINO saw: ALiBi positional encoding reduces positional bias in Vision Transformers

Moritz Pawlowsky, Antonis Vamvakeros, Alexander Weiss, Anja Bielefeld, Samuel J. Cooper, Ronan Docherty

Vision transformers (ViTs) - especially feature foundation models like DINOv2 - learn rich representations useful for many downstream tasks. However, architectural choices (such as positional encoding) can lead to these models displaying positional biases and artefacts independent of semantic content. This makes zero-shot adaption difficult in fields like material science, where images are often cross-sections of homogeneous microstructure (i.e. having no preferred direction). In this work, we investigate the positional bias in ViTs via linear probing, finding it present across a range of objectives and positional encodings, and subsequently reduce it by finetuning models to use ALiBi relative positional encoding. We demonstrate that these models retain desirable general semantics and their unbiased features can be used successfully in trainable segmentation of complex microscopy images.

arXiv

Logit Lens Supervision for Patch-Level Explanations in Vision-Language Models

Parsa Esmaeilkhani, Longin Jan Latecki

Modern autoregressive Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can generate fluent answers while their visual-token representations become weakly tied to the image regions from which they originate. This limits patch-level explainability: a visual token should remain interpretable as the image patch it represents. We study this issue through Logit Lens maps, obtained by projecting each visual-token embedding through the LLM vocabulary head to measure how strongly each image patch is associated with a queried textual concept, such as "cat". We introduce Logit Lens Loss (LLL), a lightweight auxiliary objective that preserves localized visual semantics by directly aligning object-related visual tokens with the vocabulary concepts describing their image regions. LLL requires no architectural modification, mask decoder, or large-scale retraining. We evaluate LLL through both explanation quality and downstream performance. Across LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B, LLL yields sharper object confidence maps, improves grounding and hallucination metrics, transfers to zero-shot pointing, and preserves VQA performance.

arXiv

LaViT: Aligning Latent Visual Thoughts for Multi-modal Reasoning

Linquan Wu, Tianxiang Jiang, Yifei Dong, Haoyu Yang, Fengji Zhang, Shichaang Meng, Ai Xuan, Linqi Song, Jacky Keung

Current multimodal latent reasoning often relies on external supervision (e.g., auxiliary images), ignoring intrinsic visual attention dynamics. In this work, we identify a critical Perception Gap in distillation: student models frequently mimic a teacher's textual output while attending to fundamentally divergent visual regions, effectively relying on language priors rather than grounded perception. To bridge this, we propose LaViT, a framework that aligns latent visual thoughts rather than static embeddings. LaViT compels the student to autoregressively reconstruct the teacher's visual semantics and attention trajectories prior to text generation, employing a curriculum sensory gating mechanism to prevent shortcut learning. Extensive experiments show that LaViT significantly enhances visual grounding, achieving up to +16.9% gains on complex reasoning tasks and enabling a compact 3B model to outperform larger open-source variants and proprietary models like GPT-4o.

arXiv

SceneNAT: Masked Generative Modeling for Language-Guided Indoor Scene Synthesis

Jeongjun Choi, Yeonsoo Park, H. Jin Kim

We present SceneNAT, a masked non-autoregressive Transformer for 3D indoor scene synthesis from natural language instructions. It generates complete scenes in a few parallel decoding passes, improving both quality and efficiency over prior methods. SceneNAT is trained via masked modeling over fully discretized representations of both semantic and spatial attributes. By applying a masking strategy at both the attribute level and the instance level, the model can better capture intra-object and inter-object structure. To boost relational reasoning, SceneNAT employs a relational reasoning module (RRM) that captures implicit spatial constraints. By formulating relation modeling as a set prediction task, it extracts structure-aware features to guide the layout generation without explicit sequential parsing. Extensive experiments on 3D-FRONT show that SceneNAT outperforms state-of-the-art autoregressive and diffusion baselines in both semantic compliance and spatial arrangement accuracy while using substantially lower computational cost, enabling high-throughput generation of diverse scenes at scale.

arXiv

DreamOmni3: Scribble-based Editing and Generation

Bin Xia, Bohao PENG, Jiyang Liu, Sitong Wu, Jingyao Li, Junjia Huang, Xu Zhao, Yitong Wang, Ruihang Chu, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia

Recently unified generation and editing models have achieved remarkable success with their impressive performance. These models rely mainly on text prompts for instruction-based editing and generation, but language often fails to capture users intended edit locations and fine-grained visual details. To this end, we propose two tasks: scribble-based editing and generation, that enables more flexible creation on graphical user interface (GUI) combining user textual, images, and freehand sketches. We introduce DreamOmni3, tackling two challenges: data creation and framework design. Our data synthesis pipeline includes two parts: scribble-based editing and generation. For scribble-based editing, we define four tasks: scribble and instruction-based editing, scribble and multimodal instruction-based editing, image fusion, and doodle editing. Based on DreamOmni2 dataset, we extract editable regions and overlay hand-drawn boxes, circles, doodles or cropped image to construct training data. For scribble-based generation, we define three tasks: scribble and instruction-based generation, scribble and multimodal instruction-based generation, and doodle generation, following similar data creation pipelines. For the framework, instead of using binary masks, which struggle with complex edits involving multiple scribbles, images, and instructions, we propose a joint input scheme that feeds both the original and scribbled source images into the model, using different colors to distinguish regions and simplify processing. By applying the same index and position encodings to both images, the model can precisely localize scribbled regions while maintaining accurate editing. Finally, we establish comprehensive benchmarks for these tasks to promote further research. Experimental results demonstrate that DreamOmni3 achieves outstanding performance, and models and code will be publicly released.

arXiv

Hybrid Token Compression for Vision-Language Models

Jusheng zhang, Xiaoyang Guo, Tongyu Mo, Qinhan Lv, Wenhao Chai, Jian Wang, Keze Wang, Liang Lin

Vision-language models (VLMs) rely on hundreds of visual tokens, leading to high computational and memory costs. Existing compression methods face a trade-off: continuous compression can weaken high-level semantics, while discrete quantization may lose fine-grained appearance details. We introduce HTC-VLM, a hybrid visual token compression framework that disentangles semantics and appearance through two complementary pathways. A continuous pathway preserves detailed ViT patch features, while a discrete pathway provides semantic anchors using MGVQ quantization represented by four tokens. The two pathways are fused into a 580-token hybrid sequence and compressed into a single token using a disentanglement attention mask and a <voco> bottleneck. Under the same one-token output budget, HTC-VLM achieves 87.2% average performance retention across seven benchmarks (GQA, VQAv2, MMBench, MME, POPE, SEED-Bench, and ScienceQA-Image), outperforming the leading continuous baseline at 81.0%. Attention analysis shows that the compressed token prioritizes discrete anchors, supporting their role as semantic guidance. We further study token-budget scaling, cross-architecture generalization, inference efficiency, robustness to codebook and masking variations, and the information-theoretic properties of the hybrid bottleneck. These results show that combining continuous appearance features with discrete semantic anchors enables effective extreme visual token compression for efficient VLMs.

arXiv

HQ-DM: Single Hadamard Transformation-Based Quantization-Aware Training for Low-Bit Diffusion Models

Shizhuo Mao, Hongtao Zou, Qihu Xie, Song Chen, Yi Kang

Diffusion models have demonstrated significant applications in the field of image generation. However, their high computational and memory costs pose challenges for deployment. Model quantization has emerged as a promising solution to reduce storage overhead and accelerate inference. Nevertheless, existing quantization methods for diffusion models struggle to mitigate outliers in activation matrices during inference, leading to substantial performance degradation under low-bit quantization scenarios. To address this, we propose HQ-DM, a novel Quantization-Aware Training framework that applies Single Hadamard Transformation to activation matrices. This approach effectively reduces activation outliers while preserving model performance under quantization. Compared to traditional Double Hadamard Transformation, our proposed scheme offers distinct advantages by seamlessly supporting INT convolution operations while preventing the amplification of weight outliers. For conditional generation on the ImageNet 256x256 dataset using the LDM-4 model, our W4A4 and W4A3 quantization schemes improve the Inception Score by 12.8% and 467.73%, respectively, over the existing state-of-the-art method.

arXiv

VDC-Agent: When Video Detailed Captioners Evolve Themselves via Agentic Self-Reflection

Qiang Wang, Xinyuan Gao, Yuhang He, Jizhou Han, Jiangyang Li, SongLin Dong, Zhiheng Ma, Yihong Gong

Existing Video Detailed Captioning (VDC) methods predominantly rely on costly human annotations or distillation from powerful proprietary models, creating a dependency on external supervision. In this paper, we propose VDC-Agent, an autonomous self-evolving framework that empowers a single Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to generate and refine high-quality captions through principle-guided self-reflection. To overcome the inference latency inherent in iterative refinement, we further propose to internalize this reflective capability into the model. Specifically, we construct VDC-Agent-19K, a preference dataset derived from the agent's self-scored trajectories, and introduce a Curriculum Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) strategy. This strategy leverages the quality gap between generated candidates to progressively align the model from easy to hard samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VDC-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on VDC and DREAM-1K benchmarks, generating captions with superior detail and faithfulness. Crucially, our internalization strategy retains the inference efficiency of the base model while significantly enhancing its generalization capabilities, as validated by both quantitative metrics and human evaluation.

arXiv

TimePre: Bridging Accuracy, Efficiency, and Stability in Probabilistic Time-Series Forecasting

Lingyu Jiang, Lingyu Xu, Peiran Li, Dengzhe Hou, Qianwen Ge, Dingyi Zhuang, Shuo Xing, Wenjing Chen, Xiangbo Gao, Ting-Hsuan Chen, Xueying Zhan, Xin Zhang, Ziming Zhang, Zhengzhong Tu, Michael Zielewski, Kazunori Yamada, Fangzhou Lin

We propose TimePre, a simple framework that unifies the efficiency of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP)-based models with the distributional flexibility of Multiple Choice Learning (MCL) for Probabilistic Time-Series Forecasting (PTSF). Stabilized Instance Normalization (SIN), the core of TimePre, is a normalization layer that explicitly addresses the trade-off among accuracy, efficiency, and stability. SIN stabilizes the hybrid architecture by correcting channel-wise statistical shifts, thereby resolving the catastrophic hypothesis collapse. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that TimePre achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy on key probabilistic metrics. Critically, TimePre achieves inference speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than sampling-based models, and is more stable than prior MCL approaches.

arXiv

SuperQuadricOcc: Real-Time Self-Supervised Semantic Occupancy Estimation with Superquadric Volume Rendering

Seamie Hayes, Alexandre Boulch, Andrei Bursuc, Reenu Mohandas, Ganesh Sistu, Tim Brophy, Ciaran Eising

Self-supervision for semantic occupancy estimation is appealing as it removes the labour-intensive manual annotation, thus allowing one to scale to larger autonomous driving datasets. Superquadrics offer an expressive shape family very suitable for this task, yet their deployment in a self-supervised setting has been hindered by the lack of efficient rendering methods to bridge the 3D scene representation with 2D training pseudo-labels. To address this, we introduce SuperQuadricOcc, the first self-supervised occupancy model to leverage superquadrics for scene representation. To overcome the rendering limitation, we propose a real-time volume renderer that preserves the fidelity of the superquadric shape during rendering. It relies on spatial superquadric-voxel indexing, restricting each ray sample to query only nearby superquadrics, thereby greatly reducing memory usage and computational cost. Using drastically fewer primitives than prior Gaussian-based methods, SuperQuadricOcc achieves state-of-the-art RayIoU on Occ3D-nuScenes with real-time inference and a substantially reduced memory footprint, while also outperforming Gaussian-based baselines on downstream occupancy forecasting and trajectory estimation.

arXiv

Concept Labels Are Not Enough: Rethinking Concept Bottleneck Models through Representation Integrity

Gaoxiang Huang, Songning Lai, Yutao Yue

Although deep neural networks achieve strong predictive performance, their internal reasoning often remains difficult to inspect and control. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) address this opacity by factoring predictions through human-understandable concepts, thereby enabling concept-level inspection and intervention. However, CBMs remain vulnerable to concept shift and information leakage, while existing evaluations neither reveal how the internal features supporting each concept are organized nor identify the representation-level deficiency associated with these failures. We argue that this missing property is concept integrity: concept support should form a semantically coherent and non-fragmented functional group. To characterize this property, we propose group coherence (GC) and concept coverage (CC) as integrity components and aggregate them into the concept integrity score (CIS). We further introduce Concept Integrity Regularization (CIR) to encourage coherent and separated groups of concept-supporting filters. Our latent decoupled concept bottleneck model (LDCBM) applies CIR without requiring region annotations. Across three datasets, CIS rankings differ from rankings by concept and task accuracy, supporting concept integrity as a complementary representation-level criterion. Moreover, with only 10\% of concept labels, LDCBM retains approximately 93\% of its full-label task performance. Background-masking and concept-intervention further associate stronger integrity profiles with lower sensitivity to nuisance context and more responsive concept correction.

arXiv

Easy3D-Labels: Supervising Semantic Occupancy Estimation with 3D Pseudo-Labels for Automotive Perception

Seamie Hayes, Ganesh Sistu, Tim Brophy, Ciaran Eising

In perception for automated vehicles, safety is critical not only for the driver but also for other agents in the scene, particularly vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists. Previous representation methods, such as Bird's Eye View, collapse vertical information, leading to ambiguity in 3D object localisation and limiting accurate understanding of the environment for downstream tasks such as motion planning and scene forecasting. In contrast, semantic occupancy provides a full 3D representation of the surroundings, addressing these limitations. Unlike supervised methods that rely on manually annotated data, self-supervised approaches use 2D pseudo-labels, improving scalability by reducing the need for labour-intensive annotation. Consequently, such models employ techniques such as novel view synthesis, cross-view rendering, and depth estimation to allow for model supervision against the 2D labels. However, such approaches often incur high computational and memory costs during training, especially for novel view synthesis. To address these issues, we propose Easy3D-Labels, which are 3D pseudo-ground-truth labels generated using Grounded-SAM and Metric3Dv2, with temporal aggregation for densification, permitting supervision directly in 3D space. Easy3D-Labels can be readily integrated into existing models to provide model supervision, yielding substantial performance gains, with mIoU increasing by 45% and RayIoU by 49% when applied to OccNeRF on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset. Additionally, we introduce EasyOcc, a streamlined model trained solely on these 3D pseudo-labels, avoiding the need for complex rendering strategies and achieving 15.7 mIoU on Occ3D-nuScenes. Easy3D-Labels improve scene understanding by reducing object duplication and enhancing depth estimation accuracy, as reflected by improvements in the RayIoU metric.

arXiv

Towards Geometry-Grounded Dense Semantic Matching with VGGT Priors

Songlin Yang, Tianyi Wei, Yushi Lan, Zeqi Xiao, Anyi Rao, Xingang Pan

Semantic matching aims to establish pixel-level correspondences between instances of the same category and represents a fundamental task in computer vision. Existing approaches suffer from two limitations: (i) Geometric Ambiguity: Their reliance on 2D foundation model features (e.g., Stable Diffusion, DINO) often fails to disambiguate symmetric structures, requiring extra fine-tuning yet lacking generalization; (ii) Nearest-Neighbor Rule: Their pixel-wise matching ignores cross-image invisibility and neglects manifold preservation. These challenges call for geometry-aware pixel descriptors and holistic dense correspondence mechanisms. Inspired by recent advances in 3D geometric foundation models, we turn to VGGT, which provides geometry-grounded features and holistic dense matching capabilities well aligned with these needs. However, directly transferring VGGT is challenging, as it was originally designed for geometry matching within cross views of a single instance, misaligned with cross-instance semantic matching, and further hindered by the scarcity of dense semantic annotations. To address this, we propose an approach that (i) retains VGGT's intrinsic strengths by reusing early feature stages, fine-tuning later ones, and adding a semantic head for bidirectional correspondences; and (ii) adapts VGGT to the semantic matching scenario under data scarcity through cycle-consistent training strategy, synthetic data augmentation, and progressive training recipe with aliasing artifact mitigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior geometry awareness, matching reliability, and manifold preservation, outperforming previous baselines.

arXiv

Learning in ImaginationLand: Omnidirectional Policies through 3D Generative Models (OP-Gen)

Yifei Ren, Edward Johns

Recent 3D generative models, which are capable of generating full object shapes from just a few images, now open up new opportunities in robotics. In this work, we show that 3D generative models can be used to augment a dataset from a single real-world demonstration, after which an omnidirectional policy can be learned within this imagined dataset. We found that this enables a robot to perform a task when initialised from states very far from those observed during the demonstration, including starting from the opposite side of the object relative to the real-world demonstration, significantly reducing the number of demonstrations required for policy learning. Through several real-world experiments across tasks such as grasping objects, opening a drawer, and placing trash into a bin, we study these omnidirectional policies by investigating the effect of various design choices on policy behaviour, and we show superior performance to recent baselines which use alternative methods for data augmentation.

arXiv

Token-Based Detection of Spurious Correlations in Vision Transformers

Solha Kang, Esla Timothy Anzaku, Wesley De Neve, Arnout Van Messem, Joris Vankerschaver, Francois Rameau, Utku Ozbulak

Due to their powerful feature association capabilities, neural network-based computer vision models have the ability to detect and exploit unintended patterns within the data, potentially leading to correct predictions based on incorrect or unintended but statistically relevant signals. These clues may vary from simple color aberrations to small pieces of text within the image. In situations where these unintended signals align with the predictive task, models can mistakenly link these features with the task and rely on them for making predictions. This phenomenon is referred to as spurious correlations, where patterns appear to be associated with the task but are actually coincidental. As a result, detection and mitigation of spurious correlations have become crucial tasks for building trustworthy, reliable, and generalizable machine learning models. In this work, we present a token-based diagnostic pipeline that applies leave-one-out token removal to detect spurious correlations in vision transformers. The proposed approach quantifies a model's reliance on non-core visual cues through complementary measures that capture both aggregate and localized spurious effects at the token level. Using both supervised and self-supervised trained models, we present large-scale experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrating the ability of the proposed method to identify spurious correlations. We also find that, even if the same architecture is used, the training methodology has a substantial impact on the model's reliance on spurious correlations. Furthermore, we show that for certain ImageNet classes, many images exhibit strong reliance on non-core visual cues across multiple models, and we discuss common sources of such signals (e.g., watermarks and background artifacts). Lastly, we present a case study investigating spurious signals in invasive breast mass classification.

arXiv

Exploring Decoupled Spatio-Temporal Consistency Learning and Self-Prompting Evolution for Self-Supervised Tracking

Yaozong Zheng, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang, Ning Li, Haiying Xia, Shuxiang Song, Rongrong Ji

The success of visual tracking has been largely driven by datasets with manual box annotations. However, these box annotations require tremendous human effort, limiting the scale and diversity of existing tracking datasets. In this work, we present a novel high-performance Self-Supervised Tracking model named SSTrack++, designed to eliminate the need of box annotations. Specifically, we design an effective weak-to-strong self-supervised training framework that aims to narrow the feature distribution gap between labeled and unlabeled frames. Building upon this framework, a decoupled spatio-temporal consistency training strategy is introduced to capture rich target information across timestamps by leveraging global spatial localization and local temporal association. Then, a self-prompting evolution module is designed to jointly mine the target appearance evolution at both the feature and decision levels, enabling more robust adaptation to complex and diverse unlabeled tracking scenarios. Furthermore, an instance contrastive loss is formulated to learn instance-level correspondences from a multi-view perspective, providing robust instance-level supervision without any additional annotations. This new design paradigm enables SSTrack++ to not only learn a generalizable tracking representation in a low-annotation self-supervised manner, but also makes it possible to simulate realistic appearance and motion variations of target instances in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that SSTrack++ surpasses SOTA self-supervised tracking methods, achieving an improvement of more than 25.8%, 21.4%, and 15.8% in AUC (AO) score on the GOT10K, LaSOT, TrackingNet datasets, respectively, thereby significantly narrowing the performance gap with fully supervised trackers. Code is available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/SSTrack.

arXiv

SynBoost: A Synergistic Framework for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models

Hu Yu, Hao Luo, Xueyang Fu, Jie Huang, Fan Wang, Feng Zhao

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in visual generation. However, their iterative sampling mechanism results in slow inference speeds. While reducing sampling steps offers an intuitive acceleration strategy, it introduces significant discretization error. Existing fast samplers have made substantial progress in mitigating this error through high-order solvers, yet further optimization appears constrained. This limitation prompts a critical question: can sampling efficiency be advanced beyond current paradigms? In this work, we re-examine the composition of sampling errors and identify two distinct components: the well-studied discretization error and the under-explored approximation error. By implementing a dual-error disentanglement strategy, we elucidate the dynamic interplay between these error types across sampling steps. Building on this empirical analysis, we propose SynBoost, a unified and training-free acceleration framework that simultaneously addresses both error sources to minimize total sampling error. Concretely, it mitigates approximation error by blending the current noise estimation with a more accurate prediction from a larger timestep. SynBoost seamlessly integrates with existing samplers, substantially enhancing their speed and output quality, particularly in regimes with extremely few steps. We validate our framework through extensive experiments across unconditional and conditional generation tasks, encompassing both pixel-space and latent-space DPMs.

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