Daily Papers

Audio-visual event localization aims to localize an event that is both audible and visible in the wild, which is a widespread audio-visual scene analysis task for unconstrained videos. To address this task, we propose a Multimodal Parallel Network (MPN), which can perceive global semantics and unmixed local information parallelly. Specifically, our MPN framework consists of a classification subnetwork to predict event categories and a localization subnetwork to predict event boundaries. The classification subnetwork is constructed by the Multimodal Co-attention Module (MCM) and obtains global contexts. The localization subnetwork consists of Multimodal Bottleneck Attention Module (MBAM), which is designed to extract fine-grained segment-level contents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance both in fully supervised and weakly supervised settings on the Audio-Visual Event (AVE) dataset.

Chromosome classification is critical for karyotyping in abnormality diagnosis. To expedite the diagnosis, we present a novel method named Varifocal-Net for simultaneous classification of chromosome's type and polarity using deep convolutional networks. The approach consists of one global-scale network (G-Net) and one local-scale network (L-Net). It follows three stages. The first stage is to learn both global and local features. We extract global features and detect finer local regions via the G-Net. By proposing a varifocal mechanism, we zoom into local parts and extract local features via the L-Net. Residual learning and multi-task learning strategies are utilized to promote high-level feature extraction. The detection of discriminative local parts is fulfilled by a localization subnet of the G-Net, whose training process involves both supervised and weakly-supervised learning. The second stage is to build two multi-layer perceptron classifiers that exploit features of both two scales to boost classification performance. The third stage is to introduce a dispatch strategy of assigning each chromosome to a type within each patient case, by utilizing the domain knowledge of karyotyping. Evaluation results from 1909 karyotyping cases showed that the proposed Varifocal-Net achieved the highest accuracy per patient case (%) 99.2 for both type and polarity tasks. It outperformed state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our varifocal mechanism, multi-scale feature ensemble, and dispatch strategy. The proposed method has been applied to assist practical karyotype diagnosis.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, significantly reduce the number of trainable parameters by introducing low-rank decomposition matrices. However, existing methods perform extensive matrix multiplications in domain specialization tasks, resulting in computational inefficiency and sub-optimal fine-tuning performance. Hence, we propose LoSiA(Low-Resources Subnet Integration Adaptation), an innovative method that dynamically localizes and optimizes critical parameters during the training process. Specifically, it identifies a sub-network using gradient sparsity analysis and optimizes it as the trainable target. This design enables effective high-rank adaptation by updating only the sub-network parameters, reducing the additional matrix multiplication. We also present LoSiA-Pro, a faster implementation of LoSiA, which reduces the training latency by about 27% compared to LoRA. Extensive evaluations show that our method achieves minimal performance drop compared to full fine-tuning, while requiring the least training time across domain specialization and common-sense reasoning tasks. Further analysis shows that LoSiA also reduces forgetting during continued training.

To promote the developments of object detection, tracking and counting algorithms in drone-captured videos, we construct a benchmark with a new drone-captured largescale dataset, named as DroneCrowd, formed by 112 video clips with 33,600 HD frames in various scenarios. Notably, we annotate 20,800 people trajectories with 4.8 million heads and several video-level attributes. Meanwhile, we design the Space-Time Neighbor-Aware Network (STNNet) as a strong baseline to solve object detection, tracking and counting jointly in dense crowds. STNNet is formed by the feature extraction module, followed by the density map estimation heads, and localization and association subnets. To exploit the context information of neighboring objects, we design the neighboring context loss to guide the association subnet training, which enforces consistent relative position of nearby objects in temporal domain. Extensive experiments on our DroneCrowd dataset demonstrate that STNNet performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts.

Recent advances in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) which extract specialized hardware-aware configurations (a.k.a. "sub-networks") from a hardware-agnostic "super-network" have become increasingly popular. While considerable effort has been employed towards improving the first stage, namely, the training of the super-network, the search for derivative high-performing sub-networks is still largely under-explored. For example, some recent network morphism techniques allow a super-network to be trained once and then have hardware-specific networks extracted from it as needed. These methods decouple the super-network training from the sub-network search and thus decrease the computational burden of specializing to different hardware platforms. We propose a comprehensive system that automatically and efficiently finds sub-networks from a pre-trained super-network that are optimized to different performance metrics and hardware configurations. By combining novel search tactics and algorithms with intelligent use of predictors, we significantly decrease the time needed to find optimal sub-networks from a given super-network. Further, our approach does not require the super-network to be refined for the target task a priori, thus allowing it to interface with any super-network. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our system works seamlessly with existing state-of-the-art super-network training methods in multiple domains. Moreover, we show how novel search tactics paired with evolutionary algorithms can accelerate the search process for ResNet50, MobileNetV3 and Transformer while maintaining objective space Pareto front diversity and demonstrate an 8x faster search result than the state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization WeakNAS approach.

Novel diffusion models can synthesize photo-realistic images with integrated high-quality text. Surprisingly, we demonstrate through attention activation patching that only less than 1% of diffusion models' parameters, all contained in attention layers, influence the generation of textual content within the images. Building on this observation, we improve textual generation efficiency and performance by targeting cross and joint attention layers of diffusion models. We introduce several applications that benefit from localizing the layers responsible for textual content generation. We first show that a LoRA-based fine-tuning solely of the localized layers enhances, even more, the general text-generation capabilities of large diffusion models while preserving the quality and diversity of the diffusion models' generations. Then, we demonstrate how we can use the localized layers to edit textual content in generated images. Finally, we extend this idea to the practical use case of preventing the generation of toxic text in a cost-free manner. In contrast to prior work, our localization approach is broadly applicable across various diffusion model architectures, including U-Net (e.g., LDM and SDXL) and transformer-based (e.g., DeepFloyd IF and Stable Diffusion 3), utilizing diverse text encoders (e.g., from CLIP to the large language models like T5). Project page available at https://t2i-text-loc.github.io/.

Cross-view geo-localization is a promising solution for large-scale localization problems, requiring the sequential execution of retrieval and metric localization tasks to achieve fine-grained predictions. However, existing methods typically focus on designing standalone models for these two tasks, resulting in inefficient collaboration and increased training overhead. In this paper, we propose UnifyGeo, a novel unified hierarchical geo-localization framework that integrates retrieval and metric localization tasks into a single network. Specifically, we first employ a unified learning strategy with shared parameters to jointly learn multi-granularity representation, facilitating mutual reinforcement between these two tasks. Subsequently, we design a re-ranking mechanism guided by a dedicated loss function, which enhances geo-localization performance by improving both retrieval accuracy and metric localization references. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UnifyGeo significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts in both task-isolated and task-associated settings. Remarkably, on the challenging VIGOR benchmark, which supports fine-grained localization evaluation, the 1-meter-level localization recall rate improves from 1.53\% to 39.64\% and from 0.43\% to 25.58\% under same-area and cross-area evaluations, respectively. Code will be made publicly available.

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) is a challenging task aiming to localize objects with only image-level supervision. Recent works apply visual transformer to WSOL and achieve significant success by exploiting the long-range feature dependency in self-attention mechanism. However, existing transformer-based methods synthesize the classification feature maps as the localization map, which leads to optimization conflicts between classification and localization tasks. To address this problem, we propose to learn a task-specific spatial-aware token (SAT) to condition localization in a weakly supervised manner. Specifically, a spatial token is first introduced in the input space to aggregate representations for localization task. Then a spatial aware attention module is constructed, which allows spatial token to generate foreground probabilities of different patches by querying and to extract localization knowledge from the classification task. Besides, for the problem of sparse and unbalanced pixel-level supervision obtained from the image-level label, two spatial constraints, including batch area loss and normalization loss, are designed to compensate and enhance this supervision. Experiments show that the proposed SAT achieves state-of-the-art performance on both CUB-200 and ImageNet, with 98.45% and 73.13% GT-known Loc, respectively. Even under the extreme setting of using only 1 image per class from ImageNet for training, SAT already exceeds the SOTA method by 2.1% GT-known Loc. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wpy1999/SAT.

Humans can orient themselves in their 3D environments using simple 2D maps. Differently, algorithms for visual localization mostly rely on complex 3D point clouds that are expensive to build, store, and maintain over time. We bridge this gap by introducing OrienterNet, the first deep neural network that can localize an image with sub-meter accuracy using the same 2D semantic maps that humans use. OrienterNet estimates the location and orientation of a query image by matching a neural Bird's-Eye View with open and globally available maps from OpenStreetMap, enabling anyone to localize anywhere such maps are available. OrienterNet is supervised only by camera poses but learns to perform semantic matching with a wide range of map elements in an end-to-end manner. To enable this, we introduce a large crowd-sourced dataset of images captured across 12 cities from the diverse viewpoints of cars, bikes, and pedestrians. OrienterNet generalizes to new datasets and pushes the state of the art in both robotics and AR scenarios. The code and trained model will be released publicly.

Image geolocalization, inferring the geographic location of an image, is a challenging computer vision problem with many potential applications. The recent state-of-the-art approach to this problem is a deep image classification approach in which the world is spatially divided into cells and a deep network is trained to predict the correct cell for a given image. We propose to combine this approach with the original Im2GPS approach in which a query image is matched against a database of geotagged images and the location is inferred from the retrieved set. We estimate the geographic location of a query image by applying kernel density estimation to the locations of its nearest neighbors in the reference database. Interestingly, we find that the best features for our retrieval task are derived from networks trained with classification loss even though we do not use a classification approach at test time. Training with classification loss outperforms several deep feature learning methods (e.g. Siamese networks with contrastive of triplet loss) more typical for retrieval applications. Our simple approach achieves state-of-the-art geolocalization accuracy while also requiring significantly less training data.

Visual localization aims to determine the camera pose of a query image relative to a database of posed images. In recent years, deep neural networks that directly regress camera poses have gained popularity due to their fast inference capabilities. However, existing methods struggle to either generalize well to new scenes or provide accurate camera pose estimates. To address these issues, we present Reloc3r, a simple yet effective visual localization framework. It consists of an elegantly designed relative pose regression network, and a minimalist motion averaging module for absolute pose estimation. Trained on approximately 8 million posed image pairs, Reloc3r achieves surprisingly good performance and generalization ability. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 public datasets, consistently demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. It provides high-quality camera pose estimates in real time and generalizes to novel scenes. Code, weights, and data at: https://github.com/ffrivera0/reloc3r.

Planet-scale image geolocalization remains a challenging problem due to the diversity of images originating from anywhere in the world. Although approaches based on vision transformers have made significant progress in geolocalization accuracy, success in prior literature is constrained to narrow distributions of images of landmarks, and performance has not generalized to unseen places. We present a new geolocalization system that combines semantic geocell creation, multi-task contrastive pretraining, and a novel loss function. Additionally, our work is the first to perform retrieval over location clusters for guess refinements. We train two models for evaluations on street-level data and general-purpose image geolocalization; the first model, PIGEON, is trained on data from the game of Geoguessr and is capable of placing over 40% of its guesses within 25 kilometers of the target location globally. We also develop a bot and deploy PIGEON in a blind experiment against humans, ranking in the top 0.01% of players. We further challenge one of the world's foremost professional Geoguessr players to a series of six matches with millions of viewers, winning all six games. Our second model, PIGEOTTO, differs in that it is trained on a dataset of images from Flickr and Wikipedia, achieving state-of-the-art results on a wide range of image geolocalization benchmarks, outperforming the previous SOTA by up to 7.7 percentage points on the city accuracy level and up to 38.8 percentage points on the country level. Our findings suggest that PIGEOTTO is the first image geolocalization model that effectively generalizes to unseen places and that our approach can pave the way for highly accurate, planet-scale image geolocalization systems. Our code is available on GitHub.

Weight-sharing supernet has become a vital component for performance estimation in the state-of-the-art (SOTA) neural architecture search (NAS) frameworks. Although supernet can directly generate different subnetworks without retraining, there is no guarantee for the quality of these subnetworks because of weight sharing. In NLP tasks such as machine translation and pre-trained language modeling, we observe that given the same model architecture, there is a large performance gap between supernet and training from scratch. Hence, supernet cannot be directly used and retraining is necessary after finding the optimal architectures. In this work, we propose mixture-of-supernets, a generalized supernet formulation where mixture-of-experts (MoE) is adopted to enhance the expressive power of the supernet model, with negligible training overhead. In this way, different subnetworks do not share the model weights directly, but through an architecture-based routing mechanism. As a result, model weights of different subnetworks are customized towards their specific architectures and the weight generation is learned by gradient descent. Compared to existing weight-sharing supernet for NLP, our method can minimize the retraining time, greatly improving training efficiency. In addition, the proposed method achieves the SOTA performance in NAS for building fast machine translation models, yielding better latency-BLEU tradeoff compared to HAT, state-of-the-art NAS for MT. We also achieve the SOTA performance in NAS for building memory-efficient task-agnostic BERT models, outperforming NAS-BERT and AutoDistil in various model sizes.

State-of-the-art visual localization approaches generally rely on a first image retrieval step whose role is crucial. Yet, retrieval often struggles when facing varying conditions, due to e.g. weather or time of day, with dramatic consequences on the visual localization accuracy. In this paper, we improve this retrieval step and tailor it to the final localization task. Among the several changes we advocate for, we propose to synthesize variants of the training set images, obtained from generative text-to-image models, in order to automatically expand the training set towards a number of nameable variations that particularly hurt visual localization. After expanding the training set, we propose a training approach that leverages the specificities and the underlying geometry of this mix of real and synthetic images. We experimentally show that those changes translate into large improvements for the most challenging visual localization datasets. Project page: https://europe.naverlabs.com/ret4loc

We tackle the challenging task of unsupervised object localization in this work. Recently, transformers trained with self-supervised learning have been shown to exhibit object localization properties without being trained for this task. In this work, we present Multiple Object localization with Self-supervised Transformers (MOST) that uses features of transformers trained using self-supervised learning to localize multiple objects in real world images. MOST analyzes the similarity maps of the features using box counting; a fractal analysis tool to identify tokens lying on foreground patches. The identified tokens are then clustered together, and tokens of each cluster are used to generate bounding boxes on foreground regions. Unlike recent state-of-the-art object localization methods, MOST can localize multiple objects per image and outperforms SOTA algorithms on several object localization and discovery benchmarks on PASCAL-VOC 07, 12 and COCO20k datasets. Additionally, we show that MOST can be used for self-supervised pre-training of object detectors, and yields consistent improvements on fully, semi-supervised object detection and unsupervised region proposal generation.

Action localization networks are often structured as a feature encoder sub-network and a localization sub-network, where the feature encoder learns to transform an input video to features that are useful for the localization sub-network to generate reliable action proposals. While some of the encoded features may be more useful for generating action proposals, prior action localization approaches do not include any attention mechanism that enables the localization sub-network to attend more to the more important features. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism, the Class Semantics-based Attention (CSA), that learns from the temporal distribution of semantics of action classes present in an input video to find the importance scores of the encoded features, which are used to provide attention to the more useful encoded features. We demonstrate on two popular action detection datasets that incorporating our novel attention mechanism provides considerable performance gains on competitive action detection models (e.g., around 6.2% improvement over BMN action detection baseline to obtain 47.5% mAP on the THUMOS-14 dataset), and a new state-of-the-art of 36.25% mAP on the ActivityNet v1.3 dataset. Further, the CSA localization model family which includes BMN-CSA, was part of the second-placed submission at the 2021 ActivityNet action localization challenge. Our attention mechanism outperforms prior self-attention modules such as the squeeze-and-excitation in action detection task. We also observe that our attention mechanism is complementary to such self-attention modules in that performance improvements are seen when both are used together.

Subword tokenization is a common method for vocabulary building in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. However, increasingly complex tasks have revealed its disadvantages. First, a vocabulary cannot be modified once it is learned, making it hard to adapt to new words. Second, in multilingual translation, the imbalance in data volumes across different languages spreads to the vocabulary, exacerbating translations involving low-resource languages. While byte-based tokenization addresses these issues, byte-based models struggle with the low information density inherent in UTF-8 byte sequences. Previous works enhance token semantics through local contextualization but fail to select an appropriate contextualizing scope based on the input. Consequently, we propose the Multi-Scale Contextualization (MSC) method, which learns contextualized information of varying scales across different hidden state dimensions. It then leverages the attention module to dynamically integrate the multi-scale contextualized information. Experiments show that MSC significantly outperforms subword-based and other byte-based methods in both multilingual and out-of-domain scenarios. Code can be found in https://github.com/ictnlp/Multiscale-Contextualization.

Image geo-localization is the task of predicting the specific location of an image and requires complex reasoning across visual, geographical, and cultural contexts. While prior Vision Language Models (VLMs) have the best accuracy at this task, there is a dearth of high-quality datasets and models for analytical reasoning. We first create NaviClues, a high-quality dataset derived from GeoGuessr, a popular geography game, to supply examples of expert reasoning from language. Using this dataset, we present Navig, a comprehensive image geo-localization framework integrating global and fine-grained image information. By reasoning with language, Navig reduces the average distance error by 14% compared to previous state-of-the-art models while requiring fewer than 1000 training samples. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/SparrowZheyuan18/Navig/.

One-Shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms often rely on training a hardware agnostic super-network for a domain specific task. Optimal sub-networks are then extracted from the trained super-network for different hardware platforms. However, training super-networks from scratch can be extremely time consuming and compute intensive especially for large models that rely on a two-stage training process of pre-training and fine-tuning. State of the art pre-trained models are available for a wide range of tasks, but their large sizes significantly limits their applicability on various hardware platforms. We propose InstaTune, a method that leverages off-the-shelf pre-trained weights for large models and generates a super-network during the fine-tuning stage. InstaTune has multiple benefits. Firstly, since the process happens during fine-tuning, it minimizes the overall time and compute resources required for NAS. Secondly, the sub-networks extracted are optimized for the target task, unlike prior work that optimizes on the pre-training objective. Finally, InstaTune is easy to "plug and play" in existing frameworks. By using multi-objective evolutionary search algorithms along with lightly trained predictors, we find Pareto-optimal sub-networks that outperform their respective baselines across different performance objectives such as accuracy and MACs. Specifically, we demonstrate that our approach performs well across both unimodal (ViT and BERT) and multi-modal (BEiT-3) transformer based architectures.

The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies within an image, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by the non-local network are almost the same for different query positions. In this paper, we take advantage of this finding to create a simplified network based on a query-independent formulation, which maintains the accuracy of NLNet but with significantly less computation. We further replace the one-layer transformation function of the non-local block by a two-layer bottleneck, which further reduces the parameter number considerably. The resulting network element, called the global context (GC) block, effectively models global context in a lightweight manner, allowing it to be applied at multiple layers of a backbone network to form a global context network (GCNet). Experiments show that GCNet generally outperforms NLNet on major benchmarks for various recognition tasks. The code and network configurations are available at https://github.com/xvjiarui/GCNet.

Detecting the translation direction of parallel text has applications for machine translation training and evaluation, but also has forensic applications such as resolving plagiarism or forgery allegations. In this work, we explore an unsupervised approach to translation direction detection based on the simple hypothesis that p(translation|original)>p(original|translation), motivated by the well-known simplification effect in translationese or machine-translationese. In experiments with massively multilingual machine translation models across 20 translation directions, we confirm the effectiveness of the approach for high-resource language pairs, achieving document-level accuracies of 82-96% for NMT-produced translations, and 60-81% for human translations, depending on the model used. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/translation-direction-detection

The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by non-local network are almost the same for different query positions within an image. In this paper, we take advantage of this finding to create a simplified network based on a query-independent formulation, which maintains the accuracy of NLNet but with significantly less computation. We further observe that this simplified design shares similar structure with Squeeze-Excitation Network (SENet). Hence we unify them into a three-step general framework for global context modeling. Within the general framework, we design a better instantiation, called the global context (GC) block, which is lightweight and can effectively model the global context. The lightweight property allows us to apply it for multiple layers in a backbone network to construct a global context network (GCNet), which generally outperforms both simplified NLNet and SENet on major benchmarks for various recognition tasks. The code and configurations are released at https://github.com/xvjiarui/GCNet.

Neural networks have achieved tremendous success in a large variety of applications. However, their memory footprint and computational demand can render them impractical in application settings with limited hardware or energy resources. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm to find efficient low-rank subnetworks. Remarkably, these subnetworks are determined and adapted already during the training phase and the overall time and memory resources required by both training and evaluating them are significantly reduced. The main idea is to restrict the weight matrices to a low-rank manifold and to update the low-rank factors rather than the full matrix during training. To derive training updates that are restricted to the prescribed manifold, we employ techniques from dynamic model order reduction for matrix differential equations. This allows us to provide approximation, stability, and descent guarantees. Moreover, our method automatically and dynamically adapts the ranks during training to achieve the desired approximation accuracy. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated through a variety of numerical experiments on fully-connected and convolutional networks.

Pretrained language models (LMs) encode implicit representations of knowledge in their parameters. However, localizing these representations and disentangling them from each other remains an open problem. In this work, we investigate whether pretrained language models contain various knowledge-critical subnetworks: particular sparse computational subgraphs responsible for encoding specific knowledge the model has memorized. We propose a multi-objective differentiable weight masking scheme to discover these subnetworks and show that we can use them to precisely remove specific knowledge from models while minimizing adverse effects on the behavior of the original language model. We demonstrate our method on multiple GPT2 variants, uncovering highly sparse subnetworks (98%+) that are solely responsible for specific collections of relational knowledge. When these subnetworks are removed, the remaining network maintains most of its initial capacity (modeling language and other memorized relational knowledge) but struggles to express the removed knowledge, and suffers performance drops on examples needing this removed knowledge on downstream tasks after finetuning.

Weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) has gained popularity over the last years for its promise to train localization models with only image-level labels. Since the seminal WSOL work of class activation mapping (CAM), the field has focused on how to expand the attention regions to cover objects more broadly and localize them better. However, these strategies rely on full localization supervision for validating hyperparameters and model selection, which is in principle prohibited under the WSOL setup. In this paper, we argue that WSOL task is ill-posed with only image-level labels, and propose a new evaluation protocol where full supervision is limited to only a small held-out set not overlapping with the test set. We observe that, under our protocol, the five most recent WSOL methods have not made a major improvement over the CAM baseline. Moreover, we report that existing WSOL methods have not reached the few-shot learning baseline, where the full-supervision at validation time is used for model training instead. Based on our findings, we discuss some future directions for WSOL.

We propose a novel unsupervised object localization method that allows us to explain the predictions of the model by utilizing self-supervised pre-trained models without additional finetuning. Existing unsupervised and self-supervised object localization methods often utilize class-agnostic activation maps or self-similarity maps of a pre-trained model. Although these maps can offer valuable information for localization, their limited ability to explain how the model makes predictions remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised object localization method based on representer point selection, where the predictions of the model can be represented as a linear combination of representer values of training points. By selecting representer points, which are the most important examples for the model predictions, our model can provide insights into how the model predicts the foreground object by providing relevant examples as well as their importance. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised and self-supervised object localization methods on various datasets with significant margins and even outperforms recent weakly supervised and few-shot methods.

Weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) has gained popularity over the last years for its promise to train localization models with only image-level labels. Since the seminal WSOL work of class activation mapping (CAM), the field has focused on how to expand the attention regions to cover objects more broadly and localize them better. However, these strategies rely on full localization supervision to validate hyperparameters and for model selection, which is in principle prohibited under the WSOL setup. In this paper, we argue that WSOL task is ill-posed with only image-level labels, and propose a new evaluation protocol where full supervision is limited to only a small held-out set not overlapping with the test set. We observe that, under our protocol, the five most recent WSOL methods have not made a major improvement over the CAM baseline. Moreover, we report that existing WSOL methods have not reached the few-shot learning baseline, where the full-supervision at validation time is used for model training instead. Based on our findings, we discuss some future directions for WSOL.

Localizing objects in an unsupervised manner poses significant challenges due to the absence of key visual information such as the appearance, type and number of objects, as well as the lack of labeled object classes typically available in supervised settings. While recent approaches to unsupervised object localization have demonstrated significant progress by leveraging self-supervised visual representations, they often require computationally intensive training processes, resulting in high resource demands in terms of computation, learnable parameters, and data. They also lack explicit modeling of visual context, potentially limiting their accuracy in object localization. To tackle these challenges, we propose a single-stage learning framework, dubbed PEEKABOO, for unsupervised object localization by learning context-based representations at both the pixel- and shape-level of the localized objects through image masking. The key idea is to selectively hide parts of an image and leverage the remaining image information to infer the location of objects without explicit supervision. The experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, across various benchmark datasets, demonstrate the simplicity, effectiveness and competitive performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods in both single object discovery and unsupervised salient object detection tasks. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/hasibzunair/peekaboo

Subword tokenization schemes are the dominant technique used in current NLP models. However, such schemes can be rigid and tokenizers built on one corpus do not adapt well to other parallel corpora. It has also been observed that in multilingual corpora, subword tokenization schemes over-segment low-resource languages leading to a drop in translation performance. A simple alternative to subword tokenizers is byte-based methods i.e. tokenization into byte sequences using encoding schemes such as UTF-8. Byte tokens often represent inputs at a sub-character granularity i.e. one character can be represented by a sequence of multiple byte tokens. This results in byte sequences that are significantly longer than character sequences. Enforcing aggregation of local information in the lower layers can guide the model to build higher-level semantic information. We propose a Local Byte Fusion (LOBEF) method for byte-based machine translation -- utilizing byte n-gram and word boundaries -- to aggregate local semantic information. Extensive experiments on multilingual translation, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, and domain adaptation reveal a consistent improvement over traditional byte-based models and even over subword techniques. Further analysis also indicates that our byte-based models are parameter-efficient and can be trained faster than subword models.

Image geolocalization, in which, traditionally, an AI model predicts the precise GPS coordinates of an image is a challenging task with many downstream applications. However, the user cannot utilize the model to further their knowledge other than the GPS coordinate; the model lacks an understanding of the location and the conversational ability to communicate with the user. In recent days, with tremendous progress of large multimodal models (LMMs) proprietary and open-source researchers have attempted to geolocalize images via LMMs. However, the issues remain unaddressed; beyond general tasks, for more specialized downstream tasks, one of which is geolocalization, LMMs struggle. In this work, we propose to solve this problem by introducing a conversational model GAEA that can provide information regarding the location of an image, as required by a user. No large-scale dataset enabling the training of such a model exists. Thus we propose a comprehensive dataset GAEA with 800K images and around 1.6M question answer pairs constructed by leveraging OpenStreetMap (OSM) attributes and geographical context clues. For quantitative evaluation, we propose a diverse benchmark comprising 4K image-text pairs to evaluate conversational capabilities equipped with diverse question types. We consider 11 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LMMs and demonstrate that GAEA significantly outperforms the best open-source model, LLaVA-OneVision by 25.69% and the best proprietary model, GPT-4o by 8.28%. Our dataset, model and codes are available

Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown potential for learning compact models in dense object detection. However, the commonly used softmax-based distillation ignores the absolute classification scores for individual categories. Thus, the optimum of the distillation loss does not necessarily lead to the optimal student classification scores for dense object detectors. This cross-task protocol inconsistency is critical, especially for dense object detectors, since the foreground categories are extremely imbalanced. To address the issue of protocol differences between distillation and classification, we propose a novel distillation method with cross-task consistent protocols, tailored for the dense object detection. For classification distillation, we address the cross-task protocol inconsistency problem by formulating the classification logit maps in both teacher and student models as multiple binary-classification maps and applying a binary-classification distillation loss to each map. For localization distillation, we design an IoU-based Localization Distillation Loss that is free from specific network structures and can be compared with existing localization distillation losses. Our proposed method is simple but effective, and experimental results demonstrate its superiority over existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/TinyTigerPan/BCKD.

One-shot Neural architecture search (One-shot NAS) has been proposed as a time-efficient approach to obtain optimal subnet architectures and weights under different complexity cases by training only once. However, the subnet performance obtained by weight sharing is often inferior to the performance achieved by retraining. In this paper, we investigate the performance gap and attribute it to the use of uniform sampling, which is a common approach in supernet training. Uniform sampling concentrates training resources on subnets with intermediate computational resources, which are sampled with high probability. However, subnets with different complexity regions require different optimal training strategies for optimal performance. To address the problem of uniform sampling, we propose ShiftNAS, a method that can adjust the sampling probability based on the complexity of subnets. We achieve this by evaluating the performance variation of subnets with different complexity and designing an architecture generator that can accurately and efficiently provide subnets with the desired complexity. Both the sampling probability and the architecture generator can be trained end-to-end in a gradient-based manner. With ShiftNAS, we can directly obtain the optimal model architecture and parameters for a given computational complexity. We evaluate our approach on multiple visual network models, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs), and demonstrate that ShiftNAS is model-agnostic. Experimental results on ImageNet show that ShiftNAS can improve the performance of one-shot NAS without additional consumption. Source codes are available at https://github.com/bestfleer/ShiftNAS.

In this paper, we study the localization problem in dense urban settings. In such environments, Global Navigation Satellite Systems fail to provide good accuracy due to low likelihood of line-of-sight (LOS) links between the receiver (Rx) to be located and the satellites, due to the presence of obstacles like the buildings. Thus, one has to resort to other technologies, which can reliably operate under non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. Recently, we proposed a Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint and convolutional neural network-based algorithm, LocUNet, and demonstrated its state-of-the-art localization performance with respect to the widely adopted k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm, and to state-of-the-art time of arrival (ToA) ranging-based methods. In the current work, we first recognize LocUNet's ability to learn the underlying prior distribution of the Rx position or Rx and transmitter (Tx) association preferences from the training data, and attribute its high performance to these. Conversely, we demonstrate that classical methods based on probabilistic approach, can greatly benefit from an appropriate incorporation of such prior information. Our studies also numerically prove LocUNet's close to optimal performance in many settings, by comparing it with the theoretically optimal formulations.

In this paper, we proposed a effective but extensible residual one-dimensional convolution neural network as base network, based on the this network, we proposed four subnets to explore the features of skeleton sequences from each aspect. Given a skeleton sequences, the spatial information are encoded into the skeleton joints coordinate in a frame and the temporal information are present by multiple frames. Limited by the skeleton sequence representations, two-dimensional convolution neural network cannot be used directly, we chose one-dimensional convolution layer as the basic layer. Each sub network could extract discriminative features from different aspects. Our first subnet is a two-stream network which could explore both temporal and spatial information. The second is a body-parted network, which could gain micro spatial features and macro temporal features. The third one is an attention network, the main contribution of which is to focus the key frames and feature channels which high related with the action classes in a skeleton sequence. One frame-difference network, as the last subnet, mainly processes the joints changes between the consecutive frames. Four subnets ensemble together by late fusion, the key problem of ensemble method is each subnet should have a certain performance and between the subnets, there are diversity existing. Each subnet shares a wellperformance basenet and differences between subnets guaranteed the diversity. Experimental results show that the ensemble network gets a state-of-the-art performance on three widely used datasets.

We address the challenging problem of efficient inference across many devices and resource constraints, especially on edge devices. Conventional approaches either manually design or use neural architecture search (NAS) to find a specialized neural network and train it from scratch for each case, which is computationally prohibitive (causing CO_2 emission as much as 5 cars' lifetime) thus unscalable. In this work, we propose to train a once-for-all (OFA) network that supports diverse architectural settings by decoupling training and search, to reduce the cost. We can quickly get a specialized sub-network by selecting from the OFA network without additional training. To efficiently train OFA networks, we also propose a novel progressive shrinking algorithm, a generalized pruning method that reduces the model size across many more dimensions than pruning (depth, width, kernel size, and resolution). It can obtain a surprisingly large number of sub-networks (> 10^{19}) that can fit different hardware platforms and latency constraints while maintaining the same level of accuracy as training independently. On diverse edge devices, OFA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) NAS methods (up to 4.0% ImageNet top1 accuracy improvement over MobileNetV3, or same accuracy but 1.5x faster than MobileNetV3, 2.6x faster than EfficientNet w.r.t measured latency) while reducing many orders of magnitude GPU hours and CO_2 emission. In particular, OFA achieves a new SOTA 80.0% ImageNet top-1 accuracy under the mobile setting (<600M MACs). OFA is the winning solution for the 3rd Low Power Computer Vision Challenge (LPCVC), DSP classification track and the 4th LPCVC, both classification track and detection track. Code and 50 pre-trained models (for many devices & many latency constraints) are released at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/once-for-all.

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) significantly accelerates the inference process by predicting the entire target sequence. However, due to the lack of target dependency modelling in the decoder, the conditional generation process heavily depends on the cross-attention. In this paper, we reveal a localness perception problem in NAT cross-attention, for which it is difficult to adequately capture source context. To alleviate this problem, we propose to enhance signals of neighbour source tokens into conventional cross-attention. Experimental results on several representative datasets show that our approach can consistently improve translation quality over strong NAT baselines. Extensive analyses demonstrate that the enhanced cross-attention achieves better exploitation of source contexts by leveraging both local and global information.

Large and performant neural networks are often overparameterized and can be drastically reduced in size and complexity thanks to pruning. Pruning is a group of methods, which seeks to remove redundant or unnecessary weights or groups of weights in a network. These techniques allow the creation of lightweight networks, which are particularly critical in embedded or mobile applications. In this paper, we devise an alternative pruning method that allows extracting effective subnetworks from larger untrained ones. Our method is stochastic and extracts subnetworks by exploring different topologies which are sampled using Gumbel Softmax. The latter is also used to train probability distributions which measure the relevance of weights in the sampled topologies. The resulting subnetworks are further enhanced using a highly efficient rescaling mechanism that reduces training time and improves performance. Extensive experiments conducted on CIFAR show the outperformance of our subnetwork extraction method against the related work.

Maps are a key component in image-based camera localization and visual SLAM systems: they are used to establish geometric constraints between images, correct drift in relative pose estimation, and relocalize cameras after lost tracking. The exact definitions of maps, however, are often application-specific and hand-crafted for different scenarios (e.g. 3D landmarks, lines, planes, bags of visual words). We propose to represent maps as a deep neural net called MapNet, which enables learning a data-driven map representation. Unlike prior work on learning maps, MapNet exploits cheap and ubiquitous sensory inputs like visual odometry and GPS in addition to images and fuses them together for camera localization. Geometric constraints expressed by these inputs, which have traditionally been used in bundle adjustment or pose-graph optimization, are formulated as loss terms in MapNet training and also used during inference. In addition to directly improving localization accuracy, this allows us to update the MapNet (i.e., maps) in a self-supervised manner using additional unlabeled video sequences from the scene. We also propose a novel parameterization for camera rotation which is better suited for deep-learning based camera pose regression. Experimental results on both the indoor 7-Scenes dataset and the outdoor Oxford RobotCar dataset show significant performance improvement over prior work. The MapNet project webpage is https://goo.gl/mRB3Au.

There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ronneber/u-net .

Grounding (i.e. localizing) arbitrary, free-form textual phrases in visual content is a challenging problem with many applications for human-computer interaction and image-text reference resolution. Few datasets provide the ground truth spatial localization of phrases, thus it is desirable to learn from data with no or little grounding supervision. We propose a novel approach which learns grounding by reconstructing a given phrase using an attention mechanism, which can be either latent or optimized directly. During training our approach encodes the phrase using a recurrent network language model and then learns to attend to the relevant image region in order to reconstruct the input phrase. At test time, the correct attention, i.e., the grounding, is evaluated. If grounding supervision is available it can be directly applied via a loss over the attention mechanism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the Flickr 30k Entities and ReferItGame datasets with different levels of supervision, ranging from no supervision over partial supervision to full supervision. Our supervised variant improves by a large margin over the state-of-the-art on both datasets.

Large-scale visual localization systems continue to rely on 3D point clouds built from image collections using structure-from-motion. While the 3D points in these models are represented using local image features, directly matching a query image's local features against the point cloud is challenging due to the scale of the nearest-neighbor search problem. Many recent approaches to visual localization have thus proposed a hybrid method, where first a global (per image) embedding is used to retrieve a small subset of database images, and local features of the query are matched only against those. It seems to have become common belief that global embeddings are critical for said image-retrieval in visual localization, despite the significant downside of having to compute two feature types for each query image. In this paper, we take a step back from this assumption and propose Constrained Approximate Nearest Neighbors (CANN), a joint solution of k-nearest-neighbors across both the geometry and appearance space using only local features. We first derive the theoretical foundation for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval across multiple metrics and then showcase how CANN improves visual localization. Our experiments on public localization benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art global feature-based retrieval and approaches using local feature aggregation schemes. Moreover, it is an order of magnitude faster in both index and query time than feature aggregation schemes for these datasets. Code will be released.

Based on the weight-sharing mechanism, one-shot NAS methods train a supernet and then inherit the pre-trained weights to evaluate sub-models, largely reducing the search cost. However, several works have pointed out that the shared weights suffer from different gradient descent directions during training. And we further find that large gradient variance occurs during supernet training, which degrades the supernet ranking consistency. To mitigate this issue, we propose to explicitly minimize the gradient variance of the supernet training by jointly optimizing the sampling distributions of PAth and DAta (PA&DA). We theoretically derive the relationship between the gradient variance and the sampling distributions, and reveal that the optimal sampling probability is proportional to the normalized gradient norm of path and training data. Hence, we use the normalized gradient norm as the importance indicator for path and training data, and adopt an importance sampling strategy for the supernet training. Our method only requires negligible computation cost for optimizing the sampling distributions of path and data, but achieves lower gradient variance during supernet training and better generalization performance for the supernet, resulting in a more consistent NAS. We conduct comprehensive comparisons with other improved approaches in various search spaces. Results show that our method surpasses others with more reliable ranking performance and higher accuracy of searched architectures, showing the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/ShunLu91/PA-DA.

Visual localization is the task of estimating a 6-DoF camera pose of a query image within a provided 3D reference map. Thanks to recent advances in various 3D sensors, 3D point clouds are becoming a more accurate and affordable option for building the reference map, but research to match the points of 3D point clouds with pixels in 2D images for visual localization remains challenging. Existing approaches that jointly learn 2D-3D feature matching suffer from low inliers due to representational differences between the two modalities, and the methods that bypass this problem into classification have an issue of poor refinement. In this work, we propose EP2P-Loc, a novel large-scale visual localization method that mitigates such appearance discrepancy and enables end-to-end training for pose estimation. To increase the number of inliers, we propose a simple algorithm to remove invisible 3D points in the image, and find all 2D-3D correspondences without keypoint detection. To reduce memory usage and search complexity, we take a coarse-to-fine approach where we extract patch-level features from 2D images, then perform 2D patch classification on each 3D point, and obtain the exact corresponding 2D pixel coordinates through positional encoding. Finally, for the first time in this task, we employ a differentiable PnP for end-to-end training. In the experiments on newly curated large-scale indoor and outdoor benchmarks based on 2D-3D-S and KITTI, we show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing visual localization and image-to-point cloud registration methods.

Worldwide Geo-localization aims to pinpoint the precise location of images taken anywhere on Earth. This task has considerable challenges due to immense variation in geographic landscapes. The image-to-image retrieval-based approaches fail to solve this problem on a global scale as it is not feasible to construct a large gallery of images covering the entire world. Instead, existing approaches divide the globe into discrete geographic cells, transforming the problem into a classification task. However, their performance is limited by the predefined classes and often results in inaccurate localizations when an image's location significantly deviates from its class center. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeoCLIP, a novel CLIP-inspired Image-to-GPS retrieval approach that enforces alignment between the image and its corresponding GPS locations. GeoCLIP's location encoder models the Earth as a continuous function by employing positional encoding through random Fourier features and constructing a hierarchical representation that captures information at varying resolutions to yield a semantically rich high-dimensional feature suitable to use even beyond geo-localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work employing GPS encoding for geo-localization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method via extensive experiments and ablations on benchmark datasets. We achieve competitive performance with just 20% of training data, highlighting its effectiveness even in limited-data settings. Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate geo-localization using a text query by leveraging CLIP backbone of our image encoder. The project webpage is available at: https://vicentevivan.github.io/GeoCLIP

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose G3, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In particular, G3 consists of three steps, i.e., Geo-alignment, Geo-diversification, and Geo-verification to optimize both retrieval and generation phases of worldwide geolocalization. During Geo-alignment, our solution jointly learns expressive multi-modal representations for images, GPS and textual descriptions, which allows us to capture location-aware semantics for retrieving nearby images for a given query. During Geo-diversification, we leverage a prompt ensembling method that is robust to inconsistent retrieval performance for different image queries. Finally, we combine both retrieved and generated GPS candidates in Geo-verification for location prediction. Experiments on two well-established datasets IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k verify the superiority of G3 compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Medical image segmentation is an essential prerequisite for developing healthcare systems, especially for disease diagnosis and treatment planning. On various medical image segmentation tasks, the u-shaped architecture, also known as U-Net, has become the de-facto standard and achieved tremendous success. However, due to the intrinsic locality of convolution operations, U-Net generally demonstrates limitations in explicitly modeling long-range dependency. Transformers, designed for sequence-to-sequence prediction, have emerged as alternative architectures with innate global self-attention mechanisms, but can result in limited localization abilities due to insufficient low-level details. In this paper, we propose TransUNet, which merits both Transformers and U-Net, as a strong alternative for medical image segmentation. On one hand, the Transformer encodes tokenized image patches from a convolution neural network (CNN) feature map as the input sequence for extracting global contexts. On the other hand, the decoder upsamples the encoded features which are then combined with the high-resolution CNN feature maps to enable precise localization. We argue that Transformers can serve as strong encoders for medical image segmentation tasks, with the combination of U-Net to enhance finer details by recovering localized spatial information. TransUNet achieves superior performances to various competing methods on different medical applications including multi-organ segmentation and cardiac segmentation. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Beckschen/TransUNet.

We present a robust and real-time monocular six degree of freedom relocalization system. Our system trains a convolutional neural network to regress the 6-DOF camera pose from a single RGB image in an end-to-end manner with no need of additional engineering or graph optimisation. The algorithm can operate indoors and outdoors in real time, taking 5ms per frame to compute. It obtains approximately 2m and 6 degree accuracy for large scale outdoor scenes and 0.5m and 10 degree accuracy indoors. This is achieved using an efficient 23 layer deep convnet, demonstrating that convnets can be used to solve complicated out of image plane regression problems. This was made possible by leveraging transfer learning from large scale classification data. We show the convnet localizes from high level features and is robust to difficult lighting, motion blur and different camera intrinsics where point based SIFT registration fails. Furthermore we show how the pose feature that is produced generalizes to other scenes allowing us to regress pose with only a few dozen training examples. PoseNet code, dataset and an online demonstration is available on our project webpage, at http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/projects/relocalisation/

Recent advances in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) such as one-shot NAS offer the ability to extract specialized hardware-aware sub-network configurations from a task-specific super-network. While considerable effort has been employed towards improving the first stage, namely, the training of the super-network, the search for derivative high-performing sub-networks is still under-explored. Popular methods decouple the super-network training from the sub-network search and use performance predictors to reduce the computational burden of searching on different hardware platforms. We propose a flexible search framework that automatically and efficiently finds optimal sub-networks that are optimized for different performance metrics and hardware configurations. Specifically, we show how evolutionary algorithms can be paired with lightly trained objective predictors in an iterative cycle to accelerate architecture search in a multi-objective setting for various modalities including machine translation and image classification.

Phrase localization is a task that studies the mapping from textual phrases to regions of an image. Given difficulties in annotating phrase-to-object datasets at scale, we develop a Multimodal Alignment Framework (MAF) to leverage more widely-available caption-image datasets, which can then be used as a form of weak supervision. We first present algorithms to model phrase-object relevance by leveraging fine-grained visual representations and visually-aware language representations. By adopting a contrastive objective, our method uses information in caption-image pairs to boost the performance in weakly-supervised scenarios. Experiments conducted on the widely-adopted Flickr30k dataset show a significant improvement over existing weakly-supervised methods. With the help of the visually-aware language representations, we can also improve the previous best unsupervised result by 5.56%. We conduct ablation studies to show that both our novel model and our weakly-supervised strategies significantly contribute to our strong results.

Accurate project localization (e.g., files and functions) for issue resolution is a critical first step in software maintenance. However, existing benchmarks for issue localization, such as SWE-Bench and LocBench, are limited. They focus predominantly on pull-request issues and code locations, ignoring other evidence and non-code files such as commits, comments, configurations, and documentation. To address this gap, we introduce MULocBench, a comprehensive dataset of 1,100 issues from 46 popular GitHub Python projects. Comparing with existing benchmarks, MULocBench offers greater diversity in issue types, root causes, location scopes, and file types, providing a more realistic testbed for evaluation. Using this benchmark, we assess the performance of state-of-the-art localization methods and five LLM-based prompting strategies. Our results reveal significant limitations in current techniques: even at the file level, performance metrics (Acc@5, F1) remain below 40%. This underscores the challenge of generalizing to realistic, multi-faceted issue resolution. To enable future research on project localization for issue resolution, we publicly release MULocBench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/somethingone/MULocBench.

Subgraphs of a larger global graph may be distributed across multiple devices, and only locally accessible due to privacy restrictions, although there may be links between subgraphs. Recently proposed subgraph Federated Learning (FL) methods deal with those missing links across local subgraphs while distributively training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on them. However, they have overlooked the inevitable heterogeneity between subgraphs comprising different communities of a global graph, consequently collapsing the incompatible knowledge from local GNN models. To this end, we introduce a new subgraph FL problem, personalized subgraph FL, which focuses on the joint improvement of the interrelated local GNNs rather than learning a single global model, and propose a novel framework, FEDerated Personalized sUBgraph learning (FED-PUB), to tackle it. Since the server cannot access the subgraph in each client, FED-PUB utilizes functional embeddings of the local GNNs using random graphs as inputs to compute similarities between them, and use the similarities to perform weighted averaging for server-side aggregation. Further, it learns a personalized sparse mask at each client to select and update only the subgraph-relevant subset of the aggregated parameters. We validate our FED-PUB for its subgraph FL performance on six datasets, considering both non-overlapping and overlapping subgraphs, on which it significantly outperforms relevant baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/JinheonBaek/FED-PUB.

The detection and localization of deepfake content, particularly when small fake segments are seamlessly mixed with real videos, remains a significant challenge in the field of digital media security. Based on the recently released AV-Deepfake1M dataset, which contains more than 1 million manipulated videos across more than 2,000 subjects, we introduce the 1M-Deepfakes Detection Challenge. This challenge is designed to engage the research community in developing advanced methods for detecting and localizing deepfake manipulations within the large-scale high-realistic audio-visual dataset. The participants can access the AV-Deepfake1M dataset and are required to submit their inference results for evaluation across the metrics for detection or localization tasks. The methodologies developed through the challenge will contribute to the development of next-generation deepfake detection and localization systems. Evaluation scripts, baseline models, and accompanying code will be available on https://github.com/ControlNet/AV-Deepfake1M.

Neural networks are capable of translating between languages -- in some cases even between two languages where there is little or no access to parallel translations, in what is known as Unsupervised Machine Translation (UMT). Given this progress, it is intriguing to ask whether machine learning tools can ultimately enable understanding animal communication, particularly that of highly intelligent animals. We propose a theoretical framework for analyzing UMT when no parallel translations are available and when it cannot be assumed that the source and target corpora address related subject domains or posses similar linguistic structure. We exemplify this theory with two stylized models of language, for which our framework provides bounds on necessary sample complexity; the bounds are formally proven and experimentally verified on synthetic data. These bounds show that the error rates are inversely related to the language complexity and amount of common ground. This suggests that unsupervised translation of animal communication may be feasible if the communication system is sufficiently complex.

Recent one-shot Neural Architecture Search algorithms rely on training a hardware-agnostic super-network tailored to a specific task and then extracting efficient sub-networks for different hardware platforms. Popular approaches separate the training of super-networks from the search for sub-networks, often employing predictors to alleviate the computational overhead associated with search. Additionally, certain methods also incorporate the quantization policy within the search space. However, while the quantization policy search for convolutional neural networks is well studied, the extension of these methods to transformers and especially foundation models remains under-explored. In this paper, we demonstrate that by using multi-objective search algorithms paired with lightly trained predictors, we can efficiently search for both the sub-network architecture and the corresponding quantization policy and outperform their respective baselines across different performance objectives such as accuracy, model size, and latency. Specifically, we demonstrate that our approach performs well across both uni-modal (ViT and BERT) and multi-modal (BEiT-3) transformer-based architectures as well as convolutional architectures (ResNet). For certain networks, we demonstrate an improvement of up to 4.80x and 3.44x for latency and model size respectively, without degradation in accuracy compared to the fully quantized INT8 baselines.

As the size of deep learning models continues to grow, finding optimal models under memory and computation constraints becomes increasingly more important. Although usually the architecture and constituent building blocks of neural networks allow them to be used in a modular way, their training process is not aware of this modularity. Consequently, conventional neural network training lacks the flexibility to adapt the computational load of the model during inference. This paper proposes SortedNet, a generalized and scalable solution to harness the inherent modularity of deep neural networks across various dimensions for efficient dynamic inference. Our training considers a nested architecture for the sub-models with shared parameters and trains them together with the main model in a sorted and probabilistic manner. This sorted training of sub-networks enables us to scale the number of sub-networks to hundreds using a single round of training. We utilize a novel updating scheme during training that combines random sampling of sub-networks with gradient accumulation to improve training efficiency. Furthermore, the sorted nature of our training leads to a search-free sub-network selection at inference time; and the nested architecture of the resulting sub-networks leads to minimal storage requirement and efficient switching between sub-networks at inference. Our general dynamic training approach is demonstrated across various architectures and tasks, including large language models and pre-trained vision models. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed approach in achieving efficient sub-networks while outperforming state-of-the-art dynamic training approaches. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of training up to 160 different sub-models simultaneously, showcasing the extensive scalability of our proposed method while maintaining 96% of the model performance.

Network pruning techniques, including weight pruning and filter pruning, reveal that most state-of-the-art neural networks can be accelerated without a significant performance drop. This work focuses on filter pruning which enables accelerated inference with any off-the-shelf deep learning library and hardware. We propose the concept of network pruning spaces that parametrize populations of subnetwork architectures. Based on this concept, we explore the structure aspect of subnetworks that result in minimal loss of accuracy in different pruning regimes and arrive at a series of observations by comparing subnetwork distributions. We conjecture through empirical studies that there exists an optimal FLOPs-to-parameter-bucket ratio related to the design of original network in a pruning regime. Statistically, the structure of a winning subnetwork guarantees an approximately optimal ratio in this regime. Upon our conjectures, we further refine the initial pruning space to reduce the cost of searching a good subnetwork architecture. Our experimental results on ImageNet show that the subnetwork we found is superior to those from the state-of-the-art pruning methods under comparable FLOPs.

Pre-trained language models can be fine-tuned to solve diverse NLP tasks, including in few-shot settings. Thus fine-tuning allows the model to quickly pick up task-specific ``skills,'' but there has been limited study of where these newly-learnt skills reside inside the massive model. This paper introduces the term skill localization for this problem and proposes a solution. Given the downstream task and a model fine-tuned on that task, a simple optimization is used to identify a very small subset of parameters (sim0.01% of model parameters) responsible for (>95%) of the model's performance, in the sense that grafting the fine-tuned values for just this tiny subset onto the pre-trained model gives performance almost as well as the fine-tuned model. While reminiscent of recent works on parameter-efficient fine-tuning, the novel aspects here are that: (i) No further re-training is needed on the subset (unlike, say, with lottery tickets). (ii) Notable improvements are seen over vanilla fine-tuning with respect to calibration of predictions in-distribution (40-90% error reduction) as well as the quality of predictions out-of-distribution (OOD). In models trained on multiple tasks, a stronger notion of skill localization is observed, where the sparse regions corresponding to different tasks are almost disjoint, and their overlap (when it happens) is a proxy for task similarity. Experiments suggest that localization via grafting can assist certain forms of continual learning.

We present a visual localization system that learns to estimate camera poses in the real world with the help of synthetic data. Despite significant progress in recent years, most learning-based approaches to visual localization target at a single domain and require a dense database of geo-tagged images to function well. To mitigate the data scarcity issue and improve the scalability of the neural localization models, we introduce TOPO-DataGen, a versatile synthetic data generation tool that traverses smoothly between the real and virtual world, hinged on the geographic camera viewpoint. New large-scale sim-to-real benchmark datasets are proposed to showcase and evaluate the utility of the said synthetic data. Our experiments reveal that synthetic data generically enhances the neural network performance on real data. Furthermore, we introduce CrossLoc, a cross-modal visual representation learning approach to pose estimation that makes full use of the scene coordinate ground truth via self-supervision. Without any extra data, CrossLoc significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves substantially higher real-data sample efficiency. Our code and datasets are all available at https://crossloc.github.io/.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), such as the time-delay neural network (TDNN), have shown their remarkable capability in learning speaker embedding. However, they meanwhile bring a huge computational cost in storage size, processing, and memory. Discovering the specialized CNN that meets a specific constraint requires a substantial effort of human experts. Compared with hand-designed approaches, neural architecture search (NAS) appears as a practical technique in automating the manual architecture design process and has attracted increasing interest in spoken language processing tasks such as speaker recognition. In this paper, we propose EfficientTDNN, an efficient architecture search framework consisting of a TDNN-based supernet and a TDNN-NAS algorithm. The proposed supernet introduces temporal convolution of different ranges of the receptive field and feature aggregation of various resolutions from different layers to TDNN. On top of it, the TDNN-NAS algorithm quickly searches for the desired TDNN architecture via weight-sharing subnets, which surprisingly reduces computation while handling the vast number of devices with various resources requirements. Experimental results on the VoxCeleb dataset show the proposed EfficientTDNN enables approximate 10^{13} architectures concerning depth, kernel, and width. Considering different computation constraints, it achieves a 2.20% equal error rate (EER) with 204M multiply-accumulate operations (MACs), 1.41% EER with 571M MACs as well as 0.94% EER with 1.45G MACs. Comprehensive investigations suggest that the trained supernet generalizes subnets not sampled during training and obtains a favorable trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly but face significant memory demands. While quantization has shown promise for LLMs, current methods typically require lengthy training to alleviate the performance degradation from quantization loss. However, deploying LLMs across diverse scenarios with different resource constraints, e.g., servers and personal computers, requires repeated training per application, which amplifies the lengthy training problem. Given that, it is advantageous to train a once-for-all (OFA) supernet capable of yielding diverse optimal subnets for downstream applications through one-shot training. Nonetheless, the scale of current language models impedes efficiency and amplifies interference from weight sharing between subnets. We make an initial attempt to extend the once-for-all framework to large language models. Specifically, we decouple shared weights to eliminate the interference and incorporate Low-Rank adapters for training efficiency. Furthermore, we observe the imbalance allocation of training resources from the traditional uniform sampling. A non-parametric scheduler is introduced to adjust the sampling rate for each quantization configuration, achieving a more balanced allocation among subnets with varying demands. We validate the approach on LLaMA2 families, and downstream evaluation confirms our ability to maintain high performance while significantly reducing deployment time faced with multiple scenarios.

Large language models have achieved great success in recent years, so as their variants in vision. Existing vision-language models can describe images in natural languages, answer visual-related questions, or perform complex reasoning about the image. However, it is yet unclear how localization tasks, such as word grounding or referring localization, can be performed using large language models. In this work, we aim to develop a vision-language model that can take locations, for example, a set of points or boxes, as either inputs or outputs. When taking locations as inputs, the model performs location-conditioned captioning, which generates captions for the indicated object or region. When generating locations as outputs, our model regresses pixel coordinates for each output word generated by the language model, and thus performs dense word grounding. Our model is pre-trained on the Localized Narrative dataset, which contains pixel-word-aligned captioning from human attention. We show our model can be applied to various location-aware vision-language tasks, including referring localization, location-conditioned captioning, and dense object captioning, archiving state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO and Visual Genome. Project page: https://jerryxu.net/PixelLLM .

We introduce the task of localizing a flexible number of objects in real-world 3D scenes using natural language descriptions. Existing 3D visual grounding tasks focus on localizing a unique object given a text description. However, such a strict setting is unnatural as localizing potentially multiple objects is a common need in real-world scenarios and robotic tasks (e.g., visual navigation and object rearrangement). To address this setting we propose Multi3DRefer, generalizing the ScanRefer dataset and task. Our dataset contains 61926 descriptions of 11609 objects, where zero, single or multiple target objects are referenced by each description. We also introduce a new evaluation metric and benchmark methods from prior work to enable further investigation of multi-modal 3D scene understanding. Furthermore, we develop a better baseline leveraging 2D features from CLIP by rendering object proposals online with contrastive learning, which outperforms the state of the art on the ScanRefer benchmark.

Bug localization, which is used to help programmers identify the location of bugs in source code, is an essential task in software development. Researchers have already made efforts to harness the powerful deep learning (DL) techniques to automate it. However, training bug localization model is usually challenging because it requires a large quantity of data labeled with the bug's exact location, which is difficult and time-consuming to collect. By contrast, obtaining bug detection data with binary labels of whether there is a bug in the source code is much simpler. This paper proposes a WEakly supervised bug LocaLization (WELL) method, which only uses the bug detection data with binary labels to train a bug localization model. With CodeBERT finetuned on the buggy-or-not binary labeled data, WELL can address bug localization in a weakly supervised manner. The evaluations on three method-level synthetic datasets and one file-level real-world dataset show that WELL is significantly better than the existing SOTA model in typical bug localization tasks such as variable misuse and other programming bugs.

Developing generalizable ML-based solutions for disparate learning problems in network security is highly desired. However, despite a rich history of applying ML to network security, most existing solutions lack generalizability. This lack of progress can be attributed to an overreliance on supervised learning techniques and the associated challenges of curating well-specified labeled training data. This paper addresses a fundamental gap by introducing a novel transformer-based network foundation model, netFound. We employ self-supervised learning techniques on abundant, unlabeled network telemetry data for pre-training. This pretrained model can subsequently be fine-tuned to create generalizable learning artifacts for disparate learning tasks, even when using commonly available but challenging labeled datasets that are sparse, noisy, and skewed. To realize this goal, netFound leverages various domain-specific attributes and constraints unique to network data (packet traces) by developing multi-modal embeddings, protocol-aware tokenization, data-driven token composition, and hierarchical transformers. Our results demonstrate that netFound's domain-specific design choices ensure that it (1) effectively captures the hidden networking context in production settings, (2) outperforms four different SOTA methods on five different learning tasks, and (3) is robust to both noisy labels and learning shortcuts -- critical for developing generalizable ML models in practical settings.

Recently, it is shown that deploying a proper self-supervision is a prospective way to enhance the performance of supervised learning. Yet, the benefits of self-supervision are not fully exploited as previous pretext tasks are specialized for unsupervised representation learning. To this end, we begin by presenting three desirable properties for such auxiliary tasks to assist the supervised objective. First, the tasks need to guide the model to learn rich features. Second, the transformations involved in the self-supervision should not significantly alter the training distribution. Third, the tasks are preferred to be light and generic for high applicability to prior arts. Subsequently, to show how existing pretext tasks can fulfill these and be tailored for supervised learning, we propose a simple auxiliary self-supervision task, predicting localizable rotation (LoRot). Our exhaustive experiments validate the merits of LoRot as a pretext task tailored for supervised learning in terms of robustness and generalization capability. Our code is available at https://github.com/wjun0830/Localizable-Rotation.

The way that information propagates in neural networks is of great importance. In this paper, we propose Path Aggregation Network (PANet) aiming at boosting information flow in proposal-based instance segmentation framework. Specifically, we enhance the entire feature hierarchy with accurate localization signals in lower layers by bottom-up path augmentation, which shortens the information path between lower layers and topmost feature. We present adaptive feature pooling, which links feature grid and all feature levels to make useful information in each feature level propagate directly to following proposal subnetworks. A complementary branch capturing different views for each proposal is created to further improve mask prediction. These improvements are simple to implement, with subtle extra computational overhead. Our PANet reaches the 1st place in the COCO 2017 Challenge Instance Segmentation task and the 2nd place in Object Detection task without large-batch training. It is also state-of-the-art on MVD and Cityscapes. Code is available at https://github.com/ShuLiu1993/PANet

In this paper, we present BitNet Distillation (BitDistill), a lightweight pipeline that fine-tunes off-the-shelf full-precision LLMs (e.g., Qwen) into 1.58-bit precision (i.e., ternary weights {-1, 0, 1}) for specific downstream tasks, achieving strong task-specific performance with minimal computational cost. Specifically, BitDistill incorporates three key techniques: the SubLN module, as introduced in BitNet; multi-head attention distillation, based on MiniLM; and continual pre-training, which serves as a crucial warm-up step to mitigate the scalability issue of the performance gap between finetuned full-precision and 1.58-bit LLMs on specific tasks. Experimental results show that BitDistill achieves performance comparable to the full-precision counterpart models across model size, while enabling up to 10x memory savings and 2.65x faster inference on CPUs. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/BitNet.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) require high-resolution visual information to perform fine-grained perception, yet processing entire high-resolution images is computationally prohibitive. While recent methods leverage a Region-of-Interest (RoI) mechanism to focus on salient areas, they typically present a difficult trade-off: training-based approaches depend on large-scale annotated datasets, while training-free methods that utilize the model's internal attention are computationally inefficient and less accurate, requiring either multi-pass prefill stages or reliance on the slow auto-regressive decoding process. In this paper, we propose an efficient, annotation-free Self-Distilled Region Proposal Network (SD-RPN) that resolves this trade-off. The SD-RPN is built around a pipeline that transforms the noisy attention maps from the MLLM's middle layers into high-quality pseudo-RoI labels by explicitly denoising the signal and resolving ambiguity. We use these labels to train a lightweight Region Proposal Network (RPN) that learns a more precise localization. This RPN is also highly efficient, predicting the RoI in a single forward pass using features from the MLLM's middle layers, decoupling RoI identification from the auto-regressive generation and avoiding costly multi-pass operations.To validate our approach, we integrate the framework into the LLaVA-1.5 architecture. Despite being trained on only a few (e.g. 10K) question-answer pairs, our method demonstrates exceptional data efficiency and generalization, achieving over a 10% absolute accuracy improvement on unseen benchmarks, including TextVQA, DocVQA, and V-Star. Our work presents a practical and scalable solution for enhancing the fine-grained perception of MLLMs without requiring costly supervision or full model fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/YuHengsss/SD-RPN.

In healthcare, medical image segmentation is crucial for accurate disease diagnosis and the development of effective treatment strategies. Early detection can significantly aid in managing diseases and potentially prevent their progression. Machine learning, particularly deep convolutional neural networks, has emerged as a promising approach to addressing segmentation challenges. Traditional methods like U-Net use encoding blocks for local representation modeling and decoding blocks to uncover semantic relationships. However, these models often struggle with multi-scale objects exhibiting significant variations in texture and shape, and they frequently fail to capture long-range dependencies in the input data. Transformers designed for sequence-to-sequence predictions have been proposed as alternatives, utilizing global self-attention mechanisms. Yet, they can sometimes lack precise localization due to insufficient granular details. To overcome these limitations, we introduce TransDAE: a novel approach that reimagines the self-attention mechanism to include both spatial and channel-wise associations across the entire feature space, while maintaining computational efficiency. Additionally, TransDAE enhances the skip connection pathway with an inter-scale interaction module, promoting feature reuse and improving localization accuracy. Remarkably, TransDAE outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the Synaps multi-organ dataset, even without relying on pre-trained weights.

This work addresses the challenge of sub-pixel accuracy in detecting 2D local features, a cornerstone problem in computer vision. Despite the advancements brought by neural network-based methods like SuperPoint and ALIKED, these modern approaches lag behind classical ones such as SIFT in keypoint localization accuracy due to their lack of sub-pixel precision. We propose a novel network that enhances any detector with sub-pixel precision by learning an offset vector for detected features, thereby eliminating the need for designing specialized sub-pixel accurate detectors. This optimization directly minimizes test-time evaluation metrics like relative pose error. Through extensive testing with both nearest neighbors matching and the recent LightGlue matcher across various real-world datasets, our method consistently outperforms existing methods in accuracy. Moreover, it adds only around 7 ms to the time of a particular detector. The code is available at https://github.com/KimSinjeong/keypt2subpx .

Is it possible to build a system to determine the location where a photo was taken using just its pixels? In general, the problem seems exceptionally difficult: it is trivial to construct situations where no location can be inferred. Yet images often contain informative cues such as landmarks, weather patterns, vegetation, road markings, and architectural details, which in combination may allow one to determine an approximate location and occasionally an exact location. Websites such as GeoGuessr and View from your Window suggest that humans are relatively good at integrating these cues to geolocate images, especially en-masse. In computer vision, the photo geolocation problem is usually approached using image retrieval methods. In contrast, we pose the problem as one of classification by subdividing the surface of the earth into thousands of multi-scale geographic cells, and train a deep network using millions of geotagged images. While previous approaches only recognize landmarks or perform approximate matching using global image descriptors, our model is able to use and integrate multiple visible cues. We show that the resulting model, called PlaNet, outperforms previous approaches and even attains superhuman levels of accuracy in some cases. Moreover, we extend our model to photo albums by combining it with a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture. By learning to exploit temporal coherence to geolocate uncertain photos, we demonstrate that this model achieves a 50% performance improvement over the single-image model.

Pruning methods have recently grown in popularity as an effective way to reduce the size and computational complexity of deep neural networks. Large numbers of parameters can be removed from trained models with little discernible loss in accuracy after a small number of continued training epochs. However, pruning too many parameters at once often causes an initial steep drop in accuracy which can undermine convergence quality. Iterative pruning approaches mitigate this by gradually removing a small number of parameters over multiple epochs. However, this can still lead to subnetworks that overfit local regions of the loss landscape. We introduce a novel and effective approach to tuning subnetworks through a regularization technique we call Stochastic Subnetwork Annealing. Instead of removing parameters in a discrete manner, we instead represent subnetworks with stochastic masks where each parameter has a probabilistic chance of being included or excluded on any given forward pass. We anneal these probabilities over time such that subnetwork structure slowly evolves as mask values become more deterministic, allowing for a smoother and more robust optimization of subnetworks at high levels of sparsity.

Data-based and learning-based sound source localization (SSL) has shown promising results in challenging conditions, and is commonly set as a classification or a regression problem. Regression-based approaches have certain advantages over classification-based, such as continuous direction-of-arrival estimation of static and moving sources. However, multi-source scenarios require multiple regressors without a clear training strategy up-to-date, that does not rely on auxiliary information such as simultaneous sound classification. We investigate end-to-end training of such methods with a technique recently proposed for video object detectors, adapted to the SSL setting. A differentiable network is constructed that can be plugged to the output of the localizer to solve the optimal assignment between predictions and references, optimizing directly the popular CLEAR-MOT tracking metrics. Results indicate large improvements over directly optimizing mean squared errors, in terms of localization error, detection metrics, and tracking capabilities.

Speech translation for subtitling (SubST) is the task of automatically translating speech data into well-formed subtitles by inserting subtitle breaks compliant to specific displaying guidelines. Similar to speech translation (ST), model training requires parallel data comprising audio inputs paired with their textual translations. In SubST, however, the text has to be also annotated with subtitle breaks. So far, this requirement has represented a bottleneck for system development, as confirmed by the dearth of publicly available SubST corpora. To fill this gap, we propose a method to convert existing ST corpora into SubST resources without human intervention. We build a segmenter model that automatically segments texts into proper subtitles by exploiting audio and text in a multimodal fashion, achieving high segmentation quality in zero-shot conditions. Comparative experiments with SubST systems respectively trained on manual and automatic segmentations result in similar performance, showing the effectiveness of our approach.

Image geolocalization is the challenging task of predicting the geographic coordinates of origin for a given photo. It is an unsolved problem relying on the ability to combine visual clues with general knowledge about the world to make accurate predictions across geographies. We present https://huggingface.co/geolocal/StreetCLIP{StreetCLIP}, a robust, publicly available foundation model not only achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple open-domain image geolocalization benchmarks but also doing so in a zero-shot setting, outperforming supervised models trained on more than 4 million images. Our method introduces a meta-learning approach for generalized zero-shot learning by pretraining CLIP from synthetic captions, grounding CLIP in a domain of choice. We show that our method effectively transfers CLIP's generalized zero-shot capabilities to the domain of image geolocalization, improving in-domain generalized zero-shot performance without finetuning StreetCLIP on a fixed set of classes.

Visual manipulation localization (VML) aims to identify tampered regions in images and videos, a task that has become increasingly challenging with the rise of advanced editing tools. Existing methods face two main issues: resolution diversity, where resizing or padding distorts forensic traces and reduces efficiency, and the modality gap, as images and videos often require separate models. To address these challenges, we propose RelayFormer, a unified framework that adapts to varying resolutions and modalities. RelayFormer partitions inputs into fixed-size sub-images and introduces Global-Local Relay (GLR) tokens, which propagate structured context through a global-local relay attention (GLRA) mechanism. This enables efficient exchange of global cues, such as semantic or temporal consistency, while preserving fine-grained manipulation artifacts. Unlike prior methods that rely on uniform resizing or sparse attention, RelayFormer naturally scales to arbitrary resolutions and video sequences without excessive overhead. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that RelayFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance with notable efficiency, combining resolution adaptivity without interpolation or excessive padding, unified modeling for both images and videos, and a strong balance between accuracy and computational cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer.

Supervised or weakly supervised methods for phrase localization (textual grounding) either rely on human annotations or some other supervised models, e.g., object detectors. Obtaining these annotations is labor-intensive and may be difficult to scale in practice. We propose to leverage recent advances in contrastive language-vision models, CLIP, pre-trained on image and caption pairs collected from the internet. In its original form, CLIP only outputs an image-level embedding without any spatial resolution. We adapt CLIP to generate high-resolution spatial feature maps. Importantly, we can extract feature maps from both ViT and ResNet CLIP model while maintaining the semantic properties of an image embedding. This provides a natural framework for phrase localization. Our method for phrase localization requires no human annotations or additional training. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing no-training methods in zero-shot phrase localization, and in some cases, it even outperforms supervised methods. Code is available at https://github.com/pals-ttic/adapting-CLIP .

This study presents a deep learning system for breast cancer detection in mammography, developed using a modified EfficientNetV2 architecture with enhanced attention mechanisms. The model was trained on mammograms from a major Thai medical center and validated on three distinct datasets: an in-domain test set (9,421 cases), a biopsy-confirmed set (883 cases), and an out-of-domain generalizability set (761 cases) collected from two different hospitals. For cancer detection, the model achieved AUROCs of 0.89, 0.96, and 0.94 on the respective datasets. The system's lesion localization capability, evaluated using metrics including Lesion Localization Fraction (LLF) and Non-Lesion Localization Fraction (NLF), demonstrated robust performance in identifying suspicious regions. Clinical validation through concordance tests showed strong agreement with radiologists: 83.5% classification and 84.0% localization concordance for biopsy-confirmed cases, and 78.1% classification and 79.6% localization concordance for out-of-domain cases. Expert radiologists' acceptance rate also averaged 96.7% for biopsy-confirmed cases, and 89.3% for out-of-domain cases. The system achieved a System Usability Scale score of 74.17 for source hospital, and 69.20 for validation hospitals, indicating good clinical acceptance. These results demonstrate the model's effectiveness in assisting mammogram interpretation, with the potential to enhance breast cancer screening workflows in clinical practice.

Neural networks are deployed widely in natural language processing tasks on the industrial scale, and perhaps the most often they are used as compounds of automatic machine translation systems. In this work, we present a simple approach to fool state-of-the-art machine translation tools in the task of translation from Russian to English and vice versa. Using a novel black-box gradient-free tensor-based optimizer, we show that many online translation tools, such as Google, DeepL, and Yandex, may both produce wrong or offensive translations for nonsensical adversarial input queries and refuse to translate seemingly benign input phrases. This vulnerability may interfere with understanding a new language and simply worsen the user's experience while using machine translation systems, and, hence, additional improvements of these tools are required to establish better translation.

High-resolution representations are essential for position-sensitive vision problems, such as human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Existing state-of-the-art frameworks first encode the input image as a low-resolution representation through a subnetwork that is formed by connecting high-to-low resolution convolutions in series (e.g., ResNet, VGGNet), and then recover the high-resolution representation from the encoded low-resolution representation. Instead, our proposed network, named as High-Resolution Network (HRNet), maintains high-resolution representations through the whole process. There are two key characteristics: (i) Connect the high-to-low resolution convolution streams in parallel; (ii) Repeatedly exchange the information across resolutions. The benefit is that the resulting representation is semantically richer and spatially more precise. We show the superiority of the proposed HRNet in a wide range of applications, including human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection, suggesting that the HRNet is a stronger backbone for computer vision problems. All the codes are available at~{https://github.com/HRNet}.

For named entity recognition (NER) in zero-resource languages, utilizing knowledge distillation methods to transfer language-independent knowledge from the rich-resource source languages to zero-resource languages is an effective means. Typically, these approaches adopt a teacher-student architecture, where the teacher network is trained in the source language, and the student network seeks to learn knowledge from the teacher network and is expected to perform well in the target language. Despite the impressive performance achieved by these methods, we argue that they have two limitations. Firstly, the teacher network fails to effectively learn language-independent knowledge shared across languages due to the differences in the feature distribution between the source and target languages. Secondly, the student network acquires all of its knowledge from the teacher network and ignores the learning of target language-specific knowledge. Undesirably, these limitations would hinder the model's performance in the target language. This paper proposes an unsupervised prototype knowledge distillation network (ProKD) to address these issues. Specifically, ProKD presents a contrastive learning-based prototype alignment method to achieve class feature alignment by adjusting the distance among prototypes in the source and target languages, boosting the teacher network's capacity to acquire language-independent knowledge. In addition, ProKD introduces a prototypical self-training method to learn the intrinsic structure of the language by retraining the student network on the target data using samples' distance information from prototypes, thereby enhancing the student network's ability to acquire language-specific knowledge. Extensive experiments on three benchmark cross-lingual NER datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

To scale neural speech synthesis to various real-world languages, we present a multilingual end-to-end framework that maps byte inputs to spectrograms, thus allowing arbitrary input scripts. Besides strong results on 40+ languages, the framework demonstrates capabilities to adapt to new languages under extreme low-resource and even few-shot scenarios of merely 40s transcribed recording, without the need of per-language resources like lexicon, extra corpus, auxiliary models, or linguistic expertise, thus ensuring scalability. While it retains satisfactory intelligibility and naturalness matching rich-resource models. Exhaustive comparative and ablation studies are performed to reveal the potential of the framework for low-resource languages. Furthermore, we propose a novel method to extract language-specific sub-networks in a multilingual model for a better understanding of its mechanism.

With the rapid growth of the low-altitude economy, UAVs have become crucial for measurement and tracking in patrol systems. However, in GNSS-denied areas, satellite-based localization methods are prone to failure. This paper presents a cross-view UAV localization framework that performs map matching via object detection, aimed at effectively addressing cross-temporal, cross-view, heterogeneous aerial image matching. In typical pipelines, UAV visual localization is formulated as an image-retrieval problem: features are extracted to build a localization map, and the pose of a query image is estimated by matching it to a reference database with known poses. Because publicly available UAV localization datasets are limited, many approaches recast localization as a classification task and rely on scene labels in these datasets to ensure accuracy. Other methods seek to reduce cross-domain differences using polar-coordinate reprojection, perspective transformations, or generative adversarial networks; however, they can suffer from misalignment, content loss, and limited realism. In contrast, we leverage modern object detection to accurately extract salient instances from UAV and satellite images, and integrate a graph neural network to reason about inter-image and intra-image node relationships. Using a fine-grained, graph-based node-similarity metric, our method achieves strong retrieval and localization performance. Extensive experiments on public and real-world datasets show that our approach handles heterogeneous appearance differences effectively and generalizes well, making it applicable to scenarios with larger modality gaps, such as infrared-visible image matching. Our dataset will be publicly available at the following URL: https://github.com/liutao23/ODGNNLoc.git.

The limited and dynamically varied resources on edge devices motivate us to deploy an optimized deep neural network that can adapt its sub-networks to fit in different resource constraints. However, existing works often build sub-networks through searching different network architectures in a hand-crafted sampling space, which not only can result in a subpar performance but also may cause on-device re-configuration overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel training algorithm, Dynamic REal-time Sparse Subnets (DRESS). DRESS samples multiple sub-networks from the same backbone network through row-based unstructured sparsity, and jointly trains these sub-networks in parallel with weighted loss. DRESS also exploits strategies including parameter reusing and row-based fine-grained sampling for efficient storage consumption and efficient on-device adaptation. Extensive experiments on public vision datasets show that DRESS yields significantly higher accuracy than state-of-the-art sub-networks.

Existing deep learning-based cross-view geo-localization methods primarily focus on improving the accuracy of cross-domain image matching, rather than enabling models to comprehensively capture contextual information around the target and minimize the cost of localization errors. To support systematic research into this Distance-Aware Cross-View Geo-Localization (DACVGL) problem, we construct Distance-Aware Campus (DA-Campus), the first benchmark that pairs multi-view imagery with precise distance annotations across three spatial resolutions. Based on DA-Campus, we formulate DACVGL as a hierarchical retrieval problem across different domains. Our study further reveals that, due to the inherent complexity of spatial relationships among buildings, this problem can only be addressed via a contrastive learning paradigm, rather than conventional metric learning. To tackle this challenge, we propose Dynamic Contrastive Learning (DyCL), a novel framework that progressively aligns feature representations according to hierarchical spatial margins. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DyCL is highly complementary to existing multi-scale metric learning methods and yields substantial improvements in both hierarchical retrieval performance and overall cross-view geo-localization accuracy. Our code and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/anocodetest1/DyCL.

Multilingual Machine Translation promises to improve translation quality between non-English languages. This is advantageous for several reasons, namely lower latency (no need to translate twice), and reduced error cascades (e.g., avoiding losing gender and formality information when translating through English). On the downside, adding more languages reduces model capacity per language, which is usually countered by increasing the overall model size, making training harder and inference slower. In this work, we introduce Language-Specific Transformer Layers (LSLs), which allow us to increase model capacity, while keeping the amount of computation and the number of parameters used in the forward pass constant. The key idea is to have some layers of the encoder be source or target language-specific, while keeping the remaining layers shared. We study the best way to place these layers using a neural architecture search inspired approach, and achieve an improvement of 1.3 chrF (1.5 spBLEU) points over not using LSLs on a separate decoder architecture, and 1.9 chrF (2.2 spBLEU) on a shared decoder one.

Training a unified multilingual model promotes knowledge transfer but inevitably introduces negative interference. Language-specific modeling methods show promise in reducing interference. However, they often rely on heuristics to distribute capacity and struggle to foster cross-lingual transfer via isolated modules. In this paper, we explore intrinsic task modularity within multilingual networks and leverage these observations to circumvent interference under multilingual translation. We show that neurons in the feed-forward layers tend to be activated in a language-specific manner. Meanwhile, these specialized neurons exhibit structural overlaps that reflect language proximity, which progress across layers. Based on these findings, we propose Neuron Specialization, an approach that identifies specialized neurons to modularize feed-forward layers and then continuously updates them through sparse networks. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves consistent performance gains over strong baselines with additional analyses demonstrating reduced interference and increased knowledge transfer.

Localizing objects in image collections without supervision can help to avoid expensive annotation campaigns. We propose a simple approach to this problem, that leverages the activation features of a vision transformer pre-trained in a self-supervised manner. Our method, LOST, does not require any external object proposal nor any exploration of the image collection; it operates on a single image. Yet, we outperform state-of-the-art object discovery methods by up to 8 CorLoc points on PASCAL VOC 2012. We also show that training a class-agnostic detector on the discovered objects boosts results by another 7 points. Moreover, we show promising results on the unsupervised object discovery task. The code to reproduce our results can be found at https://github.com/valeoai/LOST.

Image geolocation is a critical task in various image-understanding applications. However, existing methods often fail when analyzing challenging, in-the-wild images. Inspired by the exceptional background knowledge of multimodal language models, we systematically evaluate their geolocation capabilities using a novel image dataset and a comprehensive evaluation framework. We first collect images from various countries via Google Street View. Then, we conduct training-free and training-based evaluations on closed-source and open-source multi-modal language models. we conduct both training-free and training-based evaluations on closed-source and open-source multimodal language models. Our findings indicate that closed-source models demonstrate superior geolocation abilities, while open-source models can achieve comparable performance through fine-tuning.

We propose Semantic Parser Localizer (SPL), a toolkit that leverages Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems to localize a semantic parser for a new language. Our methodology is to (1) generate training data automatically in the target language by augmenting machine-translated datasets with local entities scraped from public websites, (2) add a few-shot boost of human-translated sentences and train a novel XLMR-LSTM semantic parser, and (3) test the model on natural utterances curated using human translators. We assess the effectiveness of our approach by extending the current capabilities of Schema2QA, a system for English Question Answering (QA) on the open web, to 10 new languages for the restaurants and hotels domains. Our models achieve an overall test accuracy ranging between 61% and 69% for the hotels domain and between 64% and 78% for restaurants domain, which compares favorably to 69% and 80% obtained for English parser trained on gold English data and a few examples from validation set. We show our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methodology by more than 30% for hotels and 40% for restaurants with localized ontologies for the subset of languages tested. Our methodology enables any software developer to add a new language capability to a QA system for a new domain, leveraging machine translation, in less than 24 hours.

Existing Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) methods typically require expensive pixel-level or box-level annotations for supervision. In this paper, we observe that the referring texts used in RIS already provide sufficient information to localize the target object. Hence, we propose a novel weakly-supervised RIS framework to formulate the target localization problem as a classification process to differentiate between positive and negative text expressions. While the referring text expressions for an image are used as positive expressions, the referring text expressions from other images can be used as negative expressions for this image. Our framework has three main novelties. First, we propose a bilateral prompt method to facilitate the classification process, by harmonizing the domain discrepancy between visual and linguistic features. Second, we propose a calibration method to reduce noisy background information and improve the correctness of the response maps for target object localization. Third, we propose a positive response map selection strategy to generate high-quality pseudo-labels from the enhanced response maps, for training a segmentation network for RIS inference. For evaluation, we propose a new metric to measure localization accuracy. Experiments on four benchmarks show that our framework achieves promising performances to existing fully-supervised RIS methods while outperforming state-of-the-art weakly-supervised methods adapted from related areas. Code is available at https://github.com/fawnliu/TRIS.

Learning-based visual localization methods that use scene coordinate regression (SCR) offer the advantage of smaller map sizes. However, on datasets with complex illumination changes or image-level ambiguities, it remains a less robust alternative to feature matching methods. This work aims to close the gap. We introduce a covisibility graph-based global encoding learning and data augmentation strategy, along with a depth-adjusted reprojection loss to facilitate implicit triangulation. Additionally, we revisit the network architecture and local feature extraction module. Our method achieves state-of-the-art on challenging large-scale datasets without relying on network ensembles or 3D supervision. On Aachen Day-Night, we are 10times more accurate than previous SCR methods with similar map sizes and require at least 5times smaller map sizes than any other SCR method while still delivering superior accuracy. Code will be available at: https://github.com/cvg/scrstudio .

Recent dense audio-visual (AV) models achieve impressive retrieval and emergent localization, but almost all evidence comes from English-centric, caption-rich web video. It is unclear whether these objectives survive in low-resource, code-switched, and noisy multilingual settings that typify developing regions. We show they do**-**and that the choice of aggregation function becomes even more critical. Using a multilingual subset of Project Vaani spanning dozens of Indian languages and dialectal variants, we compare three contrastive objectives: (i) a global mean-pooled loss (CLIP-style), (ii) a dense max-mean token matcher (DenseAV-style), and (iii) a simple hybrid (motivated by frozen-vision alignment strategies). The dense objective delivers a +59% relative R@1 (Audio Visual) improvement over global pooling and substantially lower mean/median ranks, while consistently producing sharp zero-shot localization heatmaps of spoken objects-despite keeping the vision backbone entirely frozen (no LoRA / partial fine-tuning). Our results demonstrate that dense token routing is not a luxury of high-resource English corpora; it is more decisive when annotations and acoustic cleanliness are scarce. We release the codebase and trained models.

State-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have limited scalability with respect to the graph and model sizes. On large graphs, increasing the model depth often means exponential expansion of the scope (i.e., receptive field). Beyond just a few layers, two fundamental challenges emerge: 1. degraded expressivity due to oversmoothing, and 2. expensive computation due to neighborhood explosion. We propose a design principle to decouple the depth and scope of GNNs -- to generate representation of a target entity (i.e., a node or an edge), we first extract a localized subgraph as the bounded-size scope, and then apply a GNN of arbitrary depth on top of the subgraph. A properly extracted subgraph consists of a small number of critical neighbors, while excluding irrelevant ones. The GNN, no matter how deep it is, smooths the local neighborhood into informative representation rather than oversmoothing the global graph into "white noise". Theoretically, decoupling improves the GNN expressive power from the perspectives of graph signal processing (GCN), function approximation (GraphSAGE) and topological learning (GIN). Empirically, on seven graphs (with up to 110M nodes) and six backbone GNN architectures, our design achieves significant accuracy improvement with orders of magnitude reduction in computation and hardware cost.

This paper describes the FBK's participation in the Simultaneous Translation and Automatic Subtitling tracks of the IWSLT 2023 Evaluation Campaign. Our submission focused on the use of direct architectures to perform both tasks: for the simultaneous one, we leveraged the knowledge already acquired by offline-trained models and directly applied a policy to obtain the real-time inference; for the subtitling one, we adapted the direct ST model to produce well-formed subtitles and exploited the same architecture to produce timestamps needed for the subtitle synchronization with audiovisual content. Our English-German SimulST system shows a reduced computational-aware latency compared to the one achieved by the top-ranked systems in the 2021 and 2022 rounds of the task, with gains of up to 3.5 BLEU. Our automatic subtitling system outperforms the only existing solution based on a direct system by 3.7 and 1.7 SubER in English-German and English-Spanish respectively.

One of the challenges in a task oriented natural language application like the Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa is to localize the output to many languages. This paper explores doing this by applying machine translation to the English output. Using machine translation is very scalable, as it can work with any English output and can handle dynamic text, but otherwise the problem is a poor fit. The required quality bar is close to perfection, the range of sentences is extremely narrow, and the sentences are often very different than the ones in the machine translation training data. This combination of requirements is novel in the field of domain adaptation for machine translation. We are able to reach the required quality bar by building on existing ideas and adding new ones: finetuning on in-domain translations, adding sentences from the Web, adding semantic annotations, and using automatic error detection. The paper shares our approach and results, together with a distillation model to serve the translation models at scale.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong capabilities in document understanding, particularly in identifying and extracting textual information from complex documents. Despite this, accurately localizing answers within documents remains a major challenge, limiting both interpretability and real-world applicability. To address this, we introduce DocExplainerV0, a plug-and-play bounding-box prediction module that decouples answer generation from spatial localization. This design makes it applicable to existing VLMs, including proprietary systems where fine-tuning is not feasible. Through systematic evaluation, we provide quantitative insights into the gap between textual accuracy and spatial grounding, showing that correct answers often lack reliable localization. Our standardized framework highlights these shortcomings and establishes a benchmark for future research toward more interpretable and robust document information extraction VLMs.

Cross-view geo-localization identifies the locations of street-view images by matching them with geo-tagged satellite images or OSM. However, most existing studies focus on image-to-image retrieval, with fewer addressing text-guided retrieval, a task vital for applications like pedestrian navigation and emergency response. In this work, we introduce a novel task for cross-view geo-localization with natural language descriptions, which aims to retrieve corresponding satellite images or OSM database based on scene text descriptions. To support this task, we construct the CVG-Text dataset by collecting cross-view data from multiple cities and employing a scene text generation approach that leverages the annotation capabilities of Large Multimodal Models to produce high-quality scene text descriptions with localization details. Additionally, we propose a novel text-based retrieval localization method, CrossText2Loc, which improves recall by 10% and demonstrates excellent long-text retrieval capabilities. In terms of explainability, it not only provides similarity scores but also offers retrieval reasons. More information can be found at https://yejy53.github.io/CVG-Text/ .

Neural Network Language Models (NNLMs) for Virtual Assistants (VAs) are generally language-, region-, and in some cases, device-dependent, which increases the effort to scale and maintain them. Combining NNLMs for one or more of the categories is one way to improve scalability. In this work, we combine regional variants of English to build a ``World English'' NNLM for on-device VAs. In particular, we investigate the application of adapter bottlenecks to model dialect-specific characteristics in our existing production NNLMs {and enhance the multi-dialect baselines}. We find that adapter modules are more effective in modeling dialects than specializing entire sub-networks. Based on this insight and leveraging the design of our production models, we introduce a new architecture for World English NNLM that meets the accuracy, latency, and memory constraints of our single-dialect models.

This research is aimed to solve the tweet/user geolocation prediction task and provide a flexible methodology for the geotagging of textual big data. The suggested approach implements neural networks for natural language processing (NLP) to estimate the location as coordinate pairs (longitude, latitude) and two-dimensional Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). The scope of proposed models has been finetuned on a Twitter dataset using pretrained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) as base models. Performance metrics show a median error of fewer than 30 km on a worldwide-level, and fewer than 15 km on the US-level datasets for the models trained and evaluated on text features of tweets' content and metadata context.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse visual tasks, including image recognition, video understanding, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) when explicitly trained for these tasks. Despite these advances, we find that current VLMs lack a fundamental cognitive ability: learning to localize objects in a scene by taking into account the context. In this work, we focus on the task of few-shot personalized localization, where a model is given a small set of annotated images (in-context examples) -- each with a category label and bounding box -- and is tasked with localizing the same object type in a query image. To provoke personalized localization abilities in models, we present a data-centric solution that fine-tunes them using carefully curated data from video object tracking datasets. By leveraging sequences of frames tracking the same object across multiple shots, we simulate instruction-tuning dialogues that promote context awareness. To reinforce this, we introduce a novel regularization technique that replaces object labels with pseudo-names, ensuring the model relies on visual context rather than prior knowledge. Our method significantly enhances few-shot localization performance without sacrificing generalization, as demonstrated on several benchmarks tailored to personalized localization. This work is the first to explore and benchmark personalized few-shot localization for VLMs, laying a foundation for future research in context-driven vision-language applications. The code for our project is available at https://github.com/SivanDoveh/IPLoc

Recent advances in 1-bit Large Language Models (LLMs), such as BitNet and BitNet b1.58, present a promising approach to enhancing the efficiency of LLMs in terms of speed and energy consumption. These developments also enable local LLM deployment across a broad range of devices. In this work, we introduce bitnet.cpp, a tailored software stack designed to unlock the full potential of 1-bit LLMs. Specifically, we develop a set of kernels to support fast and lossless inference of ternary BitNet b1.58 LLMs on CPUs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that bitnet.cpp achieves significant speedups, ranging from 2.37x to 6.17x on x86 CPUs and from 1.37x to 5.07x on ARM CPUs, across various model sizes. The code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/BitNet.

LiDAR-camera fusion methods have shown impressive performance in 3D object detection. Recent advanced multi-modal methods mainly perform global fusion, where image features and point cloud features are fused across the whole scene. Such practice lacks fine-grained region-level information, yielding suboptimal fusion performance. In this paper, we present the novel Local-to-Global fusion network (LoGoNet), which performs LiDAR-camera fusion at both local and global levels. Concretely, the Global Fusion (GoF) of LoGoNet is built upon previous literature, while we exclusively use point centroids to more precisely represent the position of voxel features, thus achieving better cross-modal alignment. As to the Local Fusion (LoF), we first divide each proposal into uniform grids and then project these grid centers to the images. The image features around the projected grid points are sampled to be fused with position-decorated point cloud features, maximally utilizing the rich contextual information around the proposals. The Feature Dynamic Aggregation (FDA) module is further proposed to achieve information interaction between these locally and globally fused features, thus producing more informative multi-modal features. Extensive experiments on both Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) and KITTI datasets show that LoGoNet outperforms all state-of-the-art 3D detection methods. Notably, LoGoNet ranks 1st on Waymo 3D object detection leaderboard and obtains 81.02 mAPH (L2) detection performance. It is noteworthy that, for the first time, the detection performance on three classes surpasses 80 APH (L2) simultaneously. Code will be available at https://github.com/sankin97/LoGoNet.

Multilingual machine translation suffers from negative interference across languages. A common solution is to relax parameter sharing with language-specific modules like adapters. However, adapters of related languages are unable to transfer information, and their total number of parameters becomes prohibitively expensive as the number of languages grows. In this work, we overcome these drawbacks using hyper-adapters -- hyper-networks that generate adapters from language and layer embeddings. While past work had poor results when scaling hyper-networks, we propose a rescaling fix that significantly improves convergence and enables training larger hyper-networks. We find that hyper-adapters are more parameter efficient than regular adapters, reaching the same performance with up to 12 times less parameters. When using the same number of parameters and FLOPS, our approach consistently outperforms regular adapters. Also, hyper-adapters converge faster than alternative approaches and scale better than regular dense networks. Our analysis shows that hyper-adapters learn to encode language relatedness, enabling positive transfer across languages.

We propose a novel method for geolocalizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environments lacking Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Current state-of-the-art techniques employ an offline-trained encoder to generate a vector representation (embedding) of the UAV's current view, which is then compared with pre-computed embeddings of geo-referenced images to determine the UAV's position. Here, we demonstrate that the performance of these methods can be significantly enhanced by preprocessing the images to extract their edges, which exhibit robustness to seasonal and illumination variations. Furthermore, we establish that utilizing edges enhances resilience to orientation and altitude inaccuracies. Additionally, we introduce a confidence criterion for localization. Our findings are substantiated through synthetic experiments.

We consider the problem of cross-view geo-localization. The primary challenge of this task is to learn the robust feature against large viewpoint changes. Existing benchmarks can help, but are limited in the number of viewpoints. Image pairs, containing two viewpoints, e.g., satellite and ground, are usually provided, which may compromise the feature learning. Besides phone cameras and satellites, in this paper, we argue that drones could serve as the third platform to deal with the geo-localization problem. In contrast to the traditional ground-view images, drone-view images meet fewer obstacles, e.g., trees, and could provide a comprehensive view when flying around the target place. To verify the effectiveness of the drone platform, we introduce a new multi-view multi-source benchmark for drone-based geo-localization, named University-1652. University-1652 contains data from three platforms, i.e., synthetic drones, satellites and ground cameras of 1,652 university buildings around the world. To our knowledge, University-1652 is the first drone-based geo-localization dataset and enables two new tasks, i.e., drone-view target localization and drone navigation. As the name implies, drone-view target localization intends to predict the location of the target place via drone-view images. On the other hand, given a satellite-view query image, drone navigation is to drive the drone to the area of interest in the query. We use this dataset to analyze a variety of off-the-shelf CNN features and propose a strong CNN baseline on this challenging dataset. The experiments show that University-1652 helps the model to learn the viewpoint-invariant features and also has good generalization ability in the real-world scenario.

Code localization--identifying precisely where in a codebase changes need to be made--is a fundamental yet challenging task in software maintenance. Existing approaches struggle to efficiently navigate complex codebases when identifying relevant code sections. The challenge lies in bridging natural language problem descriptions with the appropriate code elements, often requiring reasoning across hierarchical structures and multiple dependencies. We introduce LocAgent, a framework that addresses code localization through graph-based representation. By parsing codebases into directed heterogeneous graphs, LocAgent creates a lightweight representation that captures code structures (files, classes, functions) and their dependencies (imports, invocations, inheritance), enabling LLM agents to effectively search and locate relevant entities through powerful multi-hop reasoning. Experimental results on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances accuracy in code localization. Notably, our method with the fine-tuned Qwen-2.5-Coder-Instruct-32B model achieves comparable results to SOTA proprietary models at greatly reduced cost (approximately 86% reduction), reaching up to 92.7% accuracy on file-level localization while improving downstream GitHub issue resolution success rates by 12% for multiple attempts (Pass@10). Our code is available at https://github.com/gersteinlab/LocAgent.

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at various image-related tasks, they encounter challenges in precisely aligning coordinates with spatial information within images, particularly in position-aware tasks such as visual grounding. This limitation arises from two key factors. First, MLLMs lack explicit spatial references, making it difficult to associate textual descriptions with precise image locations. Second, their feature extraction processes prioritize global context over fine-grained spatial details, leading to weak localization capability. To address this issue, we introduce VPP-LLaVA, an MLLM equipped with Visual Position Prompt (VPP) to improve its grounding capability. VPP-LLaVA integrates two complementary mechanisms. The global VPP overlays learnable, axis-like embeddings onto the input image to provide structured spatial cues. The local VPP focuses on fine-grained localization by incorporating position-aware queries, which suggests probable object locations. We also introduce a VPP-SFT dataset with 0.6M samples, consolidating high-quality visual grounding data into a compact format for efficient model training. Training on this dataset with VPP enhances the model's performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on standard grounding benchmarks despite using fewer training samples compared to other MLLMs like MiniGPT-v2, which rely on much larger datasets (sim21M samples). The code and VPP-SFT dataset will be available at https://github.com/WayneTomas/VPP-LLaVA upon acceptance.

Understanding cybercrime communications is paramount for cybersecurity defence. This often involves translating communications into English for processing, interpreting, and generating timely intelligence. The problem is that translation is hard. Human translation is slow, expensive, and scarce. Machine translation is inaccurate and biased. We propose using fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLM) to generate translations that can accurately capture the nuances of cybercrime language. We apply our technique to public chats from the NoName057(16) Russian-speaking hacktivist group. Our results show that our fine-tuned LLM model is better, faster, more accurate, and able to capture nuances of the language. Our method shows it is possible to achieve high-fidelity translations and significantly reduce costs by a factor ranging from 430 to 23,000 compared to a human translator.

The dominant CNN-based methods for cross-view image geo-localization rely on polar transform and fail to model global correlation. We propose a pure transformer-based approach (TransGeo) to address these limitations from a different perspective. TransGeo takes full advantage of the strengths of transformer related to global information modeling and explicit position information encoding. We further leverage the flexibility of transformer input and propose an attention-guided non-uniform cropping method, so that uninformative image patches are removed with negligible drop on performance to reduce computation cost. The saved computation can be reallocated to increase resolution only for informative patches, resulting in performance improvement with no additional computation cost. This "attend and zoom-in" strategy is highly similar to human behavior when observing images. Remarkably, TransGeo achieves state-of-the-art results on both urban and rural datasets, with significantly less computation cost than CNN-based methods. It does not rely on polar transform and infers faster than CNN-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Jeff-Zilence/TransGeo2022.

Cross-view localization, the task of estimating a camera's 3-degrees-of-freedom (3-DoF) pose by aligning ground-level images with satellite images, is crucial for large-scale outdoor applications like autonomous navigation and augmented reality. Existing methods often rely on fully supervised learning, which requires costly ground-truth pose annotations. In this work, we propose GeoDistill, a Geometry guided weakly supervised self distillation framework that uses teacher-student learning with Field-of-View (FoV)-based masking to enhance local feature learning for robust cross-view localization. In GeoDistill, the teacher model localizes a panoramic image, while the student model predicts locations from a limited FoV counterpart created by FoV-based masking. By aligning the student's predictions with those of the teacher, the student focuses on key features like lane lines and ignores textureless regions, such as roads. This results in more accurate predictions and reduced uncertainty, regardless of whether the query images are panoramas or limited FoV images. Our experiments show that GeoDistill significantly improves localization performance across different frameworks. Additionally, we introduce a novel orientation estimation network that predicts relative orientation without requiring precise planar position ground truth. GeoDistill provides a scalable and efficient solution for real-world cross-view localization challenges. Code and model can be found at https://github.com/tongshw/GeoDistill.

Graph-based learning has emerged as a transformative approach for modeling complex relationships across diverse domains, yet its potential in wireless security remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce the first application of graph-based learning for jamming source localization, addressing the imminent threat of jamming attacks in wireless networks. Unlike geometric optimization techniques that struggle under environmental uncertainties and dense interference, we reformulate localization as an inductive graph regression task. Our approach integrates structured node representations that encode local and global signal aggregation, ensuring spatial coherence and adaptive signal fusion. To enhance robustness, we incorporate an attention-based graph neural network that adaptively refines neighborhood influence and introduces a confidence-guided estimation mechanism that dynamically balances learned predictions with domain-informed priors. We evaluate our approach under complex radio frequency environments with varying sampling densities and signal propagation conditions, conducting comprehensive ablation studies on graph construction, feature selection, and pooling strategies. Results demonstrate that our novel graph-based learning framework significantly outperforms established localization baselines, particularly in challenging scenarios with sparse and obfuscated signal information. Code is available at [https://github.com/daniaherzalla/gnn-jamming-source-localization](https://github.com/daniaherzalla/gnn-jamming-source-localization).

Data-driven Wi-Fi localization and tracking have shown great promise due to their lower reliance on specialized hardware compared to model-based methods. However, most existing data collection techniques provide only coarse-grained ground truth or a limited number of labeled points, significantly hindering the advancement of data-driven approaches. While systems like lidar can deliver precise ground truth, their high costs make them inaccessible to many users. To address these challenges, we propose LoFi, a vision-aided label generator for Wi-Fi localization and tracking. LoFi can generate ground truth position coordinates solely from 2D images, offering high precision, low cost, and ease of use. Utilizing our method, we have compiled a Wi-Fi tracking and localization dataset using the ESP32-S3 and a webcam, which will be open-sourced along with the code upon publication.

Worldwide image geolocalization-the task of predicting GPS coordinates from images taken anywhere on Earth-poses a fundamental challenge due to the vast diversity in visual content across regions. While recent approaches adopt a two-stage pipeline of retrieving candidates and selecting the best match, they typically rely on simplistic similarity heuristics and point-wise supervision, failing to model spatial relationships among candidates. In this paper, we propose GeoRanker, a distance-aware ranking framework that leverages large vision-language models to jointly encode query-candidate interactions and predict geographic proximity. In addition, we introduce a multi-order distance loss that ranks both absolute and relative distances, enabling the model to reason over structured spatial relationships. To support this, we curate GeoRanking, the first dataset explicitly designed for geographic ranking tasks with multimodal candidate information. GeoRanker achieves state-of-the-art results on two well-established benchmarks (IM2GPS3K and YFCC4K), significantly outperforming current best methods.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become a popular approach for wireless localization based on channel state information (CSI). A common practice is to use the raw CSI in the input and allow the network to learn relevant channel representations for mapping to location information. However, various works show that raw CSI can be very sensitive to system impairments and small changes in the environment. On the contrary, hand-designing features may hinder the limits of channel representation learning of the DNN. In this work, we propose attention-based CSI for robust feature learning. We evaluate the performance of attended features in centralized and distributed massive MIMO systems for ray-tracing channels in two non-stationary railway track environments. By comparison to a base DNN, our approach provides exceptional performance.

We learn a visual representation that captures information about the camera that recorded a given photo. To do this, we train a multimodal embedding between image patches and the EXIF metadata that cameras automatically insert into image files. Our model represents this metadata by simply converting it to text and then processing it with a transformer. The features that we learn significantly outperform other self-supervised and supervised features on downstream image forensics and calibration tasks. In particular, we successfully localize spliced image regions "zero shot" by clustering the visual embeddings for all of the patches within an image.

We present YORO - a multi-modal transformer encoder-only architecture for the Visual Grounding (VG) task. This task involves localizing, in an image, an object referred via natural language. Unlike the recent trend in the literature of using multi-stage approaches that sacrifice speed for accuracy, YORO seeks a better trade-off between speed an accuracy by embracing a single-stage design, without CNN backbone. YORO consumes natural language queries, image patches, and learnable detection tokens and predicts coordinates of the referred object, using a single transformer encoder. To assist the alignment between text and visual objects, a novel patch-text alignment loss is proposed. Extensive experiments are conducted on 5 different datasets with ablations on architecture design choices. YORO is shown to support real-time inference and outperform all approaches in this class (single-stage methods) by large margins. It is also the fastest VG model and achieves the best speed/accuracy trade-off in the literature.

A big convergence of model architectures across language, vision, speech, and multimodal is emerging. However, under the same name "Transformers", the above areas use different implementations for better performance, e.g., Post-LayerNorm for BERT, and Pre-LayerNorm for GPT and vision Transformers. We call for the development of Foundation Transformer for true general-purpose modeling, which serves as a go-to architecture for various tasks and modalities with guaranteed training stability. In this work, we introduce a Transformer variant, named Magneto, to fulfill the goal. Specifically, we propose Sub-LayerNorm for good expressivity, and the initialization strategy theoretically derived from DeepNet for stable scaling up. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance and better stability than the de facto Transformer variants designed for various applications, including language modeling (i.e., BERT, and GPT), machine translation, vision pretraining (i.e., BEiT), speech recognition, and multimodal pretraining (i.e., BEiT-3).

We introduce Groma, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with grounded and fine-grained visual perception ability. Beyond holistic image understanding, Groma is adept at region-level tasks such as region captioning and visual grounding. Such capabilities are built upon a localized visual tokenization mechanism, where an image input is decomposed into regions of interest and subsequently encoded into region tokens. By integrating region tokens into user instructions and model responses, we seamlessly enable Groma to understand user-specified region inputs and ground its textual output to images. Besides, to enhance the grounded chat ability of Groma, we curate a visually grounded instruction dataset by leveraging the powerful GPT-4V and visual prompting techniques. Compared with MLLMs that rely on the language model or external module for localization, Groma consistently demonstrates superior performances in standard referring and grounding benchmarks, highlighting the advantages of embedding localization into image tokenization. Project page: https://groma-mllm.github.io/.

For many segmentation tasks, especially for the biomedical image, the topological prior is vital information which is useful to exploit. The containment/nesting is a typical inter-class geometric relationship. In the MICCAI Brain tumor segmentation challenge, with its three hierarchically nested classes 'whole tumor', 'tumor core', 'active tumor', the nested classes relationship is introduced into the 3D-residual-Unet architecture. The network comprises a context aggregation pathway and a localization pathway, which encodes increasingly abstract representation of the input as going deeper into the network, and then recombines these representations with shallower features to precisely localize the interest domain via a localization path. The nested-class-prior is combined by proposing the multi-class activation function and its corresponding loss function. The model is trained on the training dataset of Brats2018, and 20% of the dataset is regarded as the validation dataset to determine parameters. When the parameters are fixed, we retrain the model on the whole training dataset. The performance achieved on the validation leaderboard is 86%, 77% and 72% Dice scores for the whole tumor, enhancing tumor and tumor core classes without relying on ensembles or complicated post-processing steps. Based on the same start-of-the-art network architecture, the accuracy of nested-class (enhancing tumor) is reasonably improved from 69% to 72% compared with the traditional Softmax-based method which blind to topological prior.