Test-Time Reasoning Through Visual Human Preferences with VLMs and Soft Rewards

Can Visual Language Models (VLMs) effectively capture human visual preferences? This work addresses this question by training VLMs to think about preferences at test time, employing reinforcement learning methods inspired by DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI O1. Using datasets such as ImageReward and Human Preference Score v2 (HPSv2), our models achieve accuracies of 64.9% on the ImageReward test set (trained on ImageReward official split) and 65.4% on HPSv2 (trained on approximately 25% of its data). These results match traditional encoder-based models while providing transparent reasoning and enhanced generalization. This approach allows to use not only rich VLM world knowledge, but also its potential to think, yielding interpretable outcomes that help decision-making processes. By demonstrating that human visual preferences reasonable by current VLMs, we introduce efficient soft-reward strategies for image ranking, outperforming simplistic selection or scoring methods. This reasoning capability enables VLMs to rank arbitrary images-regardless of aspect ratio or complexity-thereby potentially amplifying the effectiveness of visual Preference Optimization. By reducing the need for extensive markup while improving reward generalization and explainability, our findings can be a strong mile-stone that will enhance text-to-vision models even further.

When Less is Enough: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Image Representation

Vision encoders typically generate a large number of visual tokens, providing information-rich representations but significantly increasing computational demands. This raises the question of whether all generated tokens are equally valuable or if some of them can be discarded to reduce computational costs without compromising quality. In this paper, we introduce a new method for determining feature utility based on the idea that less valuable features can be reconstructed from more valuable ones. We implement this concept by integrating an autoencoder with a Gumbel-Softmax selection mechanism, that allows identifying and retaining only the most informative visual tokens. To validate our approach, we compared the performance of the LLaVA-NeXT model, using features selected by our method with randomly selected features. We found that on OCR-based tasks, more than 50% of the visual context can be removed with minimal performance loss, whereas randomly discarding the same proportion of features significantly affects the model capabilities. Furthermore, in general-domain tasks, even randomly retaining only 30% of tokens achieves performance comparable to using the full set of visual tokens. Our results highlight a promising direction towards adaptive and efficient multimodal pruning that facilitates scalable and low-overhead inference without compromising performance.

GHOST 2.0: generative high-fidelity one shot transfer of heads

While the task of face swapping has recently gained attention in the research community, a related problem of head swapping remains largely unexplored. In addition to skin color transfer, head swap poses extra challenges, such as the need to preserve structural information of the whole head during synthesis and inpaint gaps between swapped head and background. In this paper, we address these concerns with GHOST 2.0, which consists of two problem-specific modules. First, we introduce enhanced Aligner model for head reenactment, which preserves identity information at multiple scales and is robust to extreme pose variations. Secondly, we use a Blender module that seamlessly integrates the reenacted head into the target background by transferring skin color and inpainting mismatched regions. Both modules outperform the baselines on the corresponding tasks, allowing to achieve state of the art results in head swapping. We also tackle complex cases, such as large difference in hair styles of source and target. Code is available at https://github.com/ai-forever/ghost-2.0

MOVE: A Mixture-of-Vision-Encoders Approach for Domain-Focused Vision-Language Processing

Multimodal language models (MLMs) integrate visual and textual information by coupling a vision encoder with a large language model through the specific adapter. While existing approaches commonly rely on a single pre-trained vision encoder, there is a great variability of specialized encoders that can boost model's performance in distinct domains. In this work, we propose MOVE (Mixture of Vision Encoders) a simple yet effective approach to leverage multiple pre-trained encoders for specialized multimodal tasks. MOVE automatically routes inputs to the most appropriate encoder among candidates such as Unichat, InternViT, and Texify, thereby enhancing performance across a diverse set of benchmarks, including ChartQA, MMBench, and MMMU. Experimental results demonstrate that MOVE achieves competitive accuracy without incurring the complexities of image slicing for high-resolution images.

LLM-Microscope: Uncovering the Hidden Role of Punctuation in Context Memory of Transformers

We introduce methods to quantify how Large Language Models (LLMs) encode and store contextual information, revealing that tokens often seen as minor (e.g., determiners, punctuation) carry surprisingly high context. Notably, removing these tokens -- especially stopwords, articles, and commas -- consistently degrades performance on MMLU and BABILong-4k, even if removing only irrelevant tokens. Our analysis also shows a strong correlation between contextualization and linearity, where linearity measures how closely the transformation from one layer's embeddings to the next can be approximated by a single linear mapping. These findings underscore the hidden importance of filler tokens in maintaining context. For further exploration, we present LLM-Microscope, an open-source toolkit that assesses token-level nonlinearity, evaluates contextual memory, visualizes intermediate layer contributions (via an adapted Logit Lens), and measures the intrinsic dimensionality of representations. This toolkit illuminates how seemingly trivial tokens can be critical for long-range understanding.

Universal Adversarial Attack on Aligned Multimodal LLMs

We propose a universal adversarial attack on multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) that leverages a single optimized image to override alignment safeguards across diverse queries and even multiple models. By backpropagating through the vision encoder and language head, we craft a synthetic image that forces the model to respond with a targeted phrase (e.g., ''Sure, here it is'') or otherwise unsafe content-even for harmful prompts. In experiments on the SafeBench benchmark, our method achieves significantly higher attack success rates than existing baselines, including text-only universal prompts (e.g., up to 93% on certain models). We further demonstrate cross-model transferability by training on several multimodal LLMs simultaneously and testing on unseen architectures. Additionally, a multi-answer variant of our approach produces more natural-sounding (yet still malicious) responses. These findings underscore critical vulnerabilities in current multimodal alignment and call for more robust adversarial defenses. We will release code and datasets under the Apache-2.0 license. Warning: some content generated by Multimodal LLMs in this paper may be offensive to some readers.

MaterialFusion: High-Quality, Zero-Shot, and Controllable Material Transfer with Diffusion Models

Manipulating the material appearance of objects in images is critical for applications like augmented reality, virtual prototyping, and digital content creation. We present MaterialFusion, a novel framework for high-quality material transfer that allows users to adjust the degree of material application, achieving an optimal balance between new material properties and the object's original features. MaterialFusion seamlessly integrates the modified object into the scene by maintaining background consistency and mitigating boundary artifacts. To thoroughly evaluate our approach, we have compiled a dataset of real-world material transfer examples and conducted complex comparative analyses. Through comprehensive quantitative evaluations and user studies, we demonstrate that MaterialFusion significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of quality, user control, and background preservation. Code is available at https://github.com/kzGarifullin/MaterialFusion.

MaxInfo: A Training-Free Key-Frame Selection Method Using Maximum Volume for Enhanced Video Understanding

Modern Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) often rely on uniform frame sampling for video understanding, but this approach frequently fails to capture critical information due to frame redundancy and variations in video content. We propose MaxInfo, a training-free method based on the maximum volume principle, which selects and retains the most representative frames from the input video. By maximizing the geometric volume formed by selected embeddings, MaxInfo ensures that the chosen frames cover the most informative regions of the embedding space, effectively reducing redundancy while preserving diversity. This method enhances the quality of input representations and improves long video comprehension performance across benchmarks. For instance, MaxInfo achieves a 3.28% improvement on LongVideoBench and a 6.4% improvement on EgoSchema for LLaVA-Video-7B. It also achieves a 3.47% improvement for LLaVA-Video-72B. The approach is simple to implement and works with existing VLLMs without the need for additional training, making it a practical and effective alternative to traditional uniform sampling methods.

Addressing Hallucinations in Language Models with Knowledge Graph Embeddings as an Additional Modality

In this paper we present an approach to reduce hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating Knowledge Graphs (KGs) as an additional modality. Our method involves transforming input text into a set of KG embeddings and using an adapter to integrate these embeddings into the language model space, without relying on external retrieval processes. To facilitate this, we created WikiEntities, a dataset containing over 3 million Wikipedia texts annotated with entities from Wikidata and their corresponding embeddings from PyTorch-BigGraph. This dataset serves as a valuable resource for training Entity Linking models and adapting the described method to various LLMs using specialized adapters. Our method does not require fine-tuning of the language models themselves; instead, we only train the adapter. This ensures that the model's performance on other tasks is not affected. We trained an adapter for the Mistral 7B, LLaMA 2-7B (chat), and LLaMA 3-8B (instruct) models using this dataset and demonstrated that our approach improves performance on the HaluEval, True-False benchmarks and FEVER dataset. The results indicate that incorporating KGs as a new modality can effectively reduce hallucinations and improve the factual accuracy of language models, all without the need for external retrieval.

Unleashing the power of novel conditional generative approaches for new materials discovery

For a very long time, computational approaches to the design of new materials have relied on an iterative process of finding a candidate material and modeling its properties. AI has played a crucial role in this regard, helping to accelerate the discovery and optimization of crystal properties and structures through advanced computational methodologies and data-driven approaches. To address the problem of new materials design and fasten the process of new materials search, we have applied latest generative approaches to the problem of crystal structure design, trying to solve the inverse problem: by given properties generate a structure that satisfies them without utilizing supercomputer powers. In our work we propose two approaches: 1) conditional structure modification: optimization of the stability of an arbitrary atomic configuration, using the energy difference between the most energetically favorable structure and all its less stable polymorphs and 2) conditional structure generation. We used a representation for materials that includes the following information: lattice, atom coordinates, atom types, chemical features, space group and formation energy of the structure. The loss function was optimized to take into account the periodic boundary conditions of crystal structures. We have applied Diffusion models approach, Flow matching, usual Autoencoder (AE) and compared the results of the models and approaches. As a metric for the study, physical PyMatGen matcher was employed: we compare target structure with generated one using default tolerances. So far, our modifier and generator produce structures with needed properties with accuracy 41% and 82% respectively. To prove the offered methodology efficiency, inference have been carried out, resulting in several potentially new structures with formation energy below the AFLOW-derived convex hulls.