NeurIPS 2025 论文列表

Scene text retrieval has made significant progress with the assistance of accurate text localization. However, existing approaches typically require costly bounding box annotations for training. Besides, they mostly adopt a customized retrieval strategy but struggle to unify various types of queries to meet diverse retrieval needs. To address these issues, we introduce Multi-query Scene Text retrieval with Attention Recycling (MSTAR), a box-free approach for scene text retrieval. It incorporates progressive vision embedding to dynamically capture the multi-grained representation of texts and harmonizes free-style text queries with style-aware instructions. Additionally, a multi-instance matching module is integrated to enhance vision-language alignment. Furthermore, we build the Multi-Query Text Retrieval (MQTR) dataset, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-query scene text retrieval capability of models, comprising four query types and $16k$ images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method across seven public datasets and the MQTR dataset. Notably, MSTAR marginally surpasses the previous state-of-the-art model by 6.4\% in MAP on Total-Text while eliminating box annotation costs. Moreover, on the MQTR benchmark, MSTAR significantly outperforms the previous models by an average of 8.5\%. The code and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/yingift/MSTAR}{https://github.com/yingift/MSTAR}.

This paper presents a multimodal framework that attempts to unify visual understanding and generation within a shared discrete semantic representation. At its core is the Text-Aligned Tokenizer (TA-Tok), which converts images into discrete tokens using a text-aligned codebook projected from a large language model's (LLM) vocabulary. By integrating vision and text into a unified space with an expanded vocabulary, our multimodal LLM, **Tar**, enables cross-modal input and output through a shared interface, without the need for modality-specific designs. Additionally, we propose scale-adaptive encoding and decoding to balance efficiency and visual detail, along with a generative de-tokenizer to produce high-fidelity visual outputs. To address diverse decoding needs, we utilize two complementary de-tokenizers: a fast autoregressive model and a diffusion-based model. To enhance modality fusion, we investigate advanced pre-training tasks, demonstrating improvements in both visual understanding and generation. Experiments across benchmarks show that **Tar** matches or surpasses existing multimodal LLM methods, achieving faster convergence and greater training efficiency. All code, models, and data will be made publicly available.

While being disturbed by environmental noises, the acoustic masking technique is a conventional way to reduce the annoyance in audio engineering that seeks to cover up the noises with other dominant yet less intrusive sounds. However, misalignment between the dominant sound and the noise—such as mismatched downbeats—often requires an excessive volume increase to achieve effective masking. Motivated by recent advances in cross-modal generation, in this work, we introduce an alternative method to acoustic masking, aiming to reduce the noticeability of environmental noises by blending them into personalized music generated based on user-provided text prompts. Following the paradigm of music generation using mel-spectrogram representations, we propose a Blending Noises into Personalized Music (BNMusic) framework with two key stages. The first stage synthesizes a complete piece of music in a mel-spectrogram representation that encapsulates the musical essence of the noise. In the second stage, we adaptively amplifying the generated music segment to further reduce noise perception and enhance the blending effectiveness, while preserving auditory quality. Our experiments with comprehensive evaluations on MusicBench, EPIC-SOUNDS, and ESC-50 demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, highlighting the ability to blend environmental noise with rhythmically aligned, adaptively amplified, and enjoyable music segments, minimizing the noticeability of the noise, thereby improving overall acoustic experiences. Project page: https://d-fas.github.io/BNMusic_page/.

Diffusion in transformer is central to advances in high-quality multimodal generation but suffer from high inference latency due to their iterative nature. Inspired by speculative decoding's success in accelerating large language models, we propose Approximate Speculative Diffusion with Speculative Verification (ASDSV), a novel method to enhance the efficiency of diffusion models. Adapting speculative execution to diffusion processes presents unique challenges. First, the substantial computational cost of verifying numerous speculative steps for continuous, high-dimensional outputs makes traditional full verification prohibitively expensive. Second, determining the optimal number of speculative steps $K$ involves a trade-off between potential acceleration and verification success rates. To address these, ASDSV introduces two key innovations: 1) A speculative verification technique, which leverages the observed temporal correlation between draft and target model outputs, efficiently validates $K$ speculative steps by only checking the alignment of the initial and final states, significantly reducing verification overhead. 2) A multi-stage speculative strategy that adjusts $K$ according to the denoising phase—employing smaller $K$ during volatile early stages and larger $K$ during more stable later stages to optimize the balance between speed and quality. We apply ASDSV to state-of-the-art diffusion transformers, including Flux.1-dev for image generation and Wan2.1 for video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ASDSV achieves up to 1.77$\times$-3.01$\times$ speedup in model inference with a minimal 0.3\%-0.4\% drop in VBench score, showcasing its effectiveness in accelerating multimodal diffusion models without significant quality degradation. The code will be publicly available once the acceptance of the paper.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has made remarkable progress, yet existing systems still lack intuitive control over spatial composition, object consistency, and multi-step editing. We present **LayerCraft**, a modular framework that uses large language models (LLMs) as autonomous agents to orchestrate structured, layered image generation and editing. LayerCraft supports two key capabilities: (1) *structured generation* from simple prompts via chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, enabling it to decompose scenes, reason about object placement, and guide composition in a controllable, interpretable manner; and (2) *layered object integration*, allowing users to insert and customize objects---such as characters or props---across diverse images or scenes while preserving identity, context, and style. The system comprises a coordinator agent, the **ChainArchitect** for CoT-driven layout planning, and the **Object Integration Network (OIN)** for seamless image editing using off-the-shelf T2I models without retraining. Through applications like batch collage editing and narrative scene generation, LayerCraft empowers non-experts to iteratively design, customize, and refine visual content with minimal manual effort. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Generative depth estimation methods leverage the rich visual priors stored in pretrained text-to-image diffusion models, demonstrating astonishing zero-shot capability. However, parameter updates during training lead to catastrophic degradation in the image generation capability of the pretrained model. We introduce MERGE, a unified model for image generation and depth estimation, starting from a fixed-parameters pretrained text-to-image model. MERGE demonstrates that the pretrained text-to-image model can do more than image generation but also expand to depth estimation effortlessly. Specifically, MERGE introduces a plug-and-play framework that enables seamless switching between image generation and depth estimation modes through simple and pluggable converters. Meanwhile, we propose a Group Reuse Mechanism to encourage parameter reuse and improve the utilization of the additional learnable parameter. MERGE unleashes the powerful depth estimation capability of the pretrained text-to-image model while preserving its original image generation ability. Compared to other unified models for image generation and depth estimation, MERGE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple depth estimation benchmarks. The code and model will be made available.

Human intelligence effortlessly interprets visual scenes along a rich spectrum of semantic dimensions. However, existing approaches to language-grounded visual concept learning are limited to a few predefined primitive axes, such as color and shape, and are typically explored in synthetic datasets. In this work, we propose a scalable framework that adaptively identifies image-related concept axes and grounds visual concepts along these axes in real-world scenes. Leveraging a pretrained vision-language model and our universal prompting strategy, our framework identifies a diverse image-related axes without any prior knowledge. Our universal concept encoder adaptively binds visual features to the discovered axes without introducing additional model parameters for each concept. To ground visual concepts along the discovered axes, we optimize a compositional anchoring objective, which ensures that each axis can be independently manipulated without affecting others. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on subsets of ImageNet, CelebA-HQ, and AFHQ, showcasing superior editing capabilities across diverse real-world concepts that are too varied to be manually predefined. Our method also exhibits strong compositional generalization, outperforming existing visual concept learning and text-based editing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/whieya/Language-grounded-VCL.

We present Stable Part Diffusion 4D (SP4D), a framework for generating paired RGB and kinematic part videos from monocular inputs. Unlike conventional part segmentation methods that rely on appearance-based semantic cues, SP4D learns to produce kinematic parts --- structural components aligned with object articulation and consistent across views and time. SP4D adopts a dual-branch diffusion model that jointly synthesizes RGB frames and corresponding part segmentation maps. To simplify architecture and flexibly enable different part counts, we introduce a spatial color encoding scheme that maps part masks to continuous RGB-like images. This encoding allows the segmentation branch to share the latents VAE from the RGB branch, while enabling part segmentation to be recovered via straightforward post-processing. A Bidirectional Diffusion Fusion (BiDiFuse) module enhances cross-branch consistency, supported by a contrastive part consistency loss to promote spatial and temporal alignment of part predictions. We demonstrate that the generated 2D part maps can be lifted to 3D to derive skeletal structures and harmonic skinning weights with few manual adjustments. To train and evaluate SP4D, we construct KinematicParts20K, a curated dataset of over 20K rigged objects selected and processed from Objaverse XL, each paired with multi-view RGB and part video sequences. Experiments show that SP4D generalizes strongly to diverse scenarios, including real-world videos, novel generated objects, and rare articulated poses, producing kinematic-aware outputs suitable for downstream animation and motion-related tasks.

Autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated strong potential in visual generation, offering competitive performance with simple architectures and optimization objectives. However, existing methods are typically limited to single-modality conditions, \eg, text or category labels, restricting their applicability in real-world scenarios that demand image synthesis from diverse forms of controls. In this work, we present \system, the first unified autoregressive framework for Any-to-Image generation. By discretizing various visual conditions through a shared visual tokenizer and text prompts with a text tokenizer, \system supports a broad spectrum of conditional inputs within a single model, including text (text-to-image generation), spatial signals (segmentation-to-image and depth-to-image), and visual context (image editing, frame prediction, and text-to-video generation). To mitigate the risk of information leakage from condition tokens to content tokens, we introduce Disentangled Causal Attention (DCA), which separates the full-sequence causal mask into condition causal attention and content causal attention. It serves as a training-time regularizer without affecting the standard next-token prediction during inference. With this design, \system achieves new state-of-the-art results across a range of benchmark, \eg, 0.63 on GenEval and 80.02 on VBench, demonstrating its effectiveness in flexible and high-fidelity visual generation.

Consistency learning with feature perturbation is a widely used strategy in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. However, many existing perturbation methods rely on dropout, and thus require a careful manual tuning of the dropout rate, which is a sensitive hyperparameter and often difficult to optimize and may lead to suboptimal regularization. To overcome this limitation, we propose VQ-Seg, the first approach to employ vector quantization (VQ) to discretize the feature space and introduce a novel and controllable Quantized Perturbation Module (QPM) that replaces dropout. Our QPM perturbs discrete representations by shuffling the spatial locations of codebook indices, enabling effective and controllable regularization. To mitigate potential information loss caused by quantization, we design a dual-branch architecture where the post-quantization feature space is shared by both image reconstruction and segmentation tasks. Moreover, we introduce a Post-VQ Feature Adapter (PFA) to incorporate guidance from a foundation model (FM), supplementing the high-level semantic information lost during quantization. Furthermore, we collect a large-scale Lung Cancer (LC) dataset comprising 828 CT scans annotated for central-type lung carcinoma. Extensive experiments on the LC dataset and other public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Codes will be released.

Power flow (PF) calculations are the backbone of real-time grid operations, across workflows such as contingency analysis (where repeated PF evaluations assess grid security under outages) and topology optimization (which involves PF-based searches over combinatorially large action spaces). Running these calculations at operational timescales or across large evaluation spaces remains a major computational bottleneck. Additionally, growing uncertainty in power system operations from the integration of renewables and climate-induced extreme weather also calls for tools that can accurately and efficiently simulate a wide range of scenarios and operating conditions. Machine learning methods offer a potential speedup over traditional solvers, but their performance has not been systematically assessed on benchmarks that capture real-world variability. This paper introduces PF∆, a benchmark dataset for power flow that captures diverse variations in load, generation, and topology. PF∆ contains 859,800 solved power flow instances spanning six different bus system sizes, capturing three types of contingency scenarios (N , N –1, and N –2), and including close-to-infeasible cases near steady-state voltage stability limits. We evaluate traditional solvers and GNN-based methods, highlighting key areas where existing approaches struggle, and identifying open problems for future research. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/pfdelta/pfdelta/tree/main and our code with data generation scripts and model implementations is at https: //github.com/MOSSLab-MIT/pfdelta

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated strong zero-shot performance across diverse downstream text-image tasks. Existing CLIP methods typically optimize a contrastive objective using negative samples drawn from each minibatch. To achieve robust representation learning, these methods require extremely large batch sizes and escalate computational demands to hundreds or even thousands of GPUs. Prior approaches to mitigate this issue often compromise downstream performance, prolong training duration, or face scalability challenges with very large datasets. To overcome these limitations, we propose AmorLIP, an efficient CLIP pretraining framework that amortizes expensive computations involved in contrastive learning through lightweight neural networks, which substantially improves training efficiency and performance. Leveraging insights from a spectral factorization of energy-based models, we introduce novel amortization objectives along with practical techniques to improve training stability. Extensive experiments across 38 downstream tasks demonstrate the superior zero-shot classification and retrieval capabilities of AmorLIP, consistently outperforming standard CLIP baselines with substantial relative improvements of up to 12.24%.

Image generation requires intensive computations and faces challenges due to long latency. Exploiting redundancy in the input images and intermediate representations throughout the neural network pipeline is an effective way to accelerate image generation. Token merging (ToMe) exploits similarities among input tokens by clustering them and merges similar tokens into one, thus significantly reducing the number of tokens that are fed into the transformer block. This work introduces Fourier Token Merging, a new method for understanding and capitalizing frequency domain for efficient image generation. By introducing frequency token merging, we find that transforming the token into the frequency domain representation for clustering can better exert the ability of clustering based on the underlying redundancy after de-correlation. Through analytical and empirical studies, we demonstrate the benefits of using Fourier clustering over the original time domain clustering. We experimented fourier token merging on the stable diffusion model, and the results show up to 25\% reduction in latency without impairing image quality. The code is available at https://github.com/Fred1031/Fourier-Token-Merging.

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become the de-facto model for generating high-quality visual content like videos and images. A huge bottleneck is the attention mechanism where complexity scales quadratically with resolution and video length. One logical way to lessen this burden is sparse attention, where only a subset of tokens or patches are included in the calculation. However, existing techniques fail to preserve visual quality at extremely high sparsity levels and might even incur non-negligible compute overheads. To address this concern, we propose Re-ttention, which implements very high sparse attention for visual generation models by leveraging the temporal redundancy of Diffusion Models to overcome the probabilistic normalization shift within the attention mechanism. Specifically, Re-ttention reshapes attention scores based on the prior softmax distribution history in order to preserve the visual quality of the full quadratic attention at very high sparsity levels. Experimental results on T2V/T2I models such as CogVideoX and the PixArt DiTs demonstrate that Re-ttention requires as few as 3.1% of the tokens during inference, outperforming contemporary methods like FastDiTAttn, Sparse VideoGen and MInference.

In real-world scenarios, providing user queries with visually enhanced responses can considerably benefit understanding and memory, underscoring the great value of interleaved image-text generation. Despite recent progress, like the visual autoregressive model that unifies text and image processing in a single transformer architecture, generating high-quality interleaved content remains challenging. Moreover, evaluations of these interleaved sequences largely remain underexplored, with existing benchmarks often limited by unimodal metrics that inadequately assess the intricacies of combined image-text outputs. To address these issues, we present RAG-IGBench, a thorough benchmark designed specifically to evaluate the task of Interleaved Generation based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG-IG) in open-domain question answering. RAG-IG integrates multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with retrieval mechanisms, enabling the models to access external image-text information for generating coherent multimodal content. Distinct from previous datasets, RAG-IGBench draws on the latest publicly available content from social platforms and introduces innovative evaluation metrics that measure the quality of text and images, as well as their consistency. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art MLLMs (both open-source and proprietary) on RAG-IGBench, we provide an in-depth analysis examining the capabilities and limitations of these models. Additionally, we validate our evaluation metrics by demonstrating their high correlation with human assessments. Models fine-tuned on RAG-IGBench's training set exhibit improved performance across multiple benchmarks, confirming both the quality and practical utility of our dataset. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/zry13/RAG-IGBench.

Deep neural networks trained with gradient descent exhibit varying rates of learning for different patterns. However, the complexity of fitting models to data makes direct elucidation of the dynamics of learned patterns challenging. To circumvent this, many works have opted to characterize phases of learning through summary statistics known as order parameters. In this work, we propose a unifying framework for constructing order parameters based on the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), in which the relationship with the data set is more transparent. In particular, we derive a local approximation of the NTK for a class of deep regression models (SIRENs) trained to reconstruct natural images. In so doing, we analytically connect three seemingly distinct phase transitions: the emergence of wave patterns in residuals (a novel observation), loss rate collapse, and NTK alignment. Our results provide a dynamical perspective on the observed biases of SIRENs, and deep image regression models more generally.

The remarkable success of the autoregressive paradigm has made significant advancement in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), with powerful models like Show-o, Transfusion and Emu3 made notable strides in unified image understanding and generation. For the first time, we uncover a common phenomenon: the understanding capability of MLLMs is usually stronger than their generative capability, with a significant gap between them. Building on this insight, we propose HermesFlow, a simple and general framework designed to seamlessly bridge the gap between understanding and generation in MLLMs. Specifically, we take the homologous data as input to curate homologous preference data of both understanding and generation. Through Pair-DPO and self-play iterative optimization, HermesFlow effectively aligns multimodal understanding and generation using homologous preference data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significant superiority of our approach over prior methods, particularly in narrowing the gap between multimodal understanding and generation. These findings highlight the potential of HermesFlow as a general alignment framework for next-generation multimodal foundation models.

We introduce a framework for Thompson sampling (TS) contextual bandit algorithms, in which the algorithm's ability to quantify uncertainty and make decisions depends on the quality of a generative model that is learned offline. Instead of viewing uncertainty in the environment as arising from unobservable latent parameters, our algorithm treats uncertainty as stemming from missing, but potentially observable outcomes (including both future and counterfactual outcomes). If these outcomes were all observed, one could simply make decisions using an "oracle" policy fit on the complete dataset. Inspired by this conceptualization, at each decision-time, our algorithm uses a generative model to probabilistically impute missing outcomes, fits a policy using the imputed complete dataset, and uses that policy to select the next action. We formally show that this algorithm is a generative formulation of TS and establish a state-of-the-art regret bound. Notably, our regret bound depends on the generative model only through the quality of its offline prediction loss, and applies to any method of fitting the "oracle" policy.

We have recently witnessed that ''Intelligence" and `''Compression" are the two sides of the same coin, where the language large model (LLM) with unprecedented intelligence is a general-purpose lossless compressor for various data modalities. This attribute is particularly appealing to the lossless image compression community, given the increasing need to compress high-resolution images in the current streaming media era. Consequently, a spontaneous envision emerges: Can the compression performance of the LLM elevate lossless image compression to new heights? However, our findings indicate that the naive application of LLM-based lossless image compressors suffers from a considerable performance gap compared with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) codecs on common benchmark datasets. In light of this, we are dedicated to fulfilling the unprecedented intelligence (compression) capacity of the LLM for lossless image compression tasks, thereby bridging the gap between theoretical and practical compression performance. Specifically, we propose P -LLM, a next-pixel prediction-based LLM, which integrates various elaborated insights and methodologies, \textit{e.g.,} pixel-level priors, the in-context ability of LLM, and a pixel-level semantic preservation strategy, to enhance the understanding capacity of pixel sequences for better next-pixel predictions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that P-LLM can beat SOTA classical and learned codecs.