DocFusion: A Unified Framework for Document Parsing Tasks

Document parsing is essential for analyzing complex document structures and extracting fine-grained information, supporting numerous downstream applications. However, existing methods often require integrating multiple independent models to handle various parsing tasks, leading to high complexity and maintenance overhead. To address this, we propose DocFusion, a lightweight generative model with only 0.28B parameters. It unifies task representations and achieves collaborative training through an improved objective function. Experiments reveal and leverage the mutually beneficial interaction among recognition tasks, and integrating recognition data significantly enhances detection performance. The final results demonstrate that DocFusion achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across four key tasks.

CoMPaSS: Enhancing Spatial Understanding in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating photorealistic images, but commonly struggle to render accurate spatial relationships described in text prompts. We identify two core issues underlying this common failure: 1) the ambiguous nature of spatial-related data in existing datasets, and 2) the inability of current text encoders to accurately interpret the spatial semantics of input descriptions. We address these issues with CoMPaSS, a versatile training framework that enhances spatial understanding of any T2I diffusion model. CoMPaSS solves the ambiguity of spatial-related data with the Spatial Constraints-Oriented Pairing (SCOP) data engine, which curates spatially-accurate training data through a set of principled spatial constraints. To better exploit the curated high-quality spatial priors, CoMPaSS further introduces a Token ENcoding ORdering (TENOR) module to allow better exploitation of high-quality spatial priors, effectively compensating for the shortcoming of text encoders. Extensive experiments on four popular open-weight T2I diffusion models covering both UNet- and MMDiT-based architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of CoMPaSS by setting new state-of-the-arts with substantial relative gains across well-known benchmarks on spatial relationships generation, including VISOR (+98%), T2I-CompBench Spatial (+67%), and GenEval Position (+131%). Code will be available at https://github.com/blurgyy/CoMPaSS.

Point Cloud-Assisted Neural Image Compression

High-efficient image compression is a critical requirement. In several scenarios where multiple modalities of data are captured by different sensors, the auxiliary information from other modalities are not fully leveraged by existing image-only codecs, leading to suboptimal compression efficiency. In this paper, we increase image compression performance with the assistance of point cloud, which is widely adopted in the area of autonomous driving. We first unify the data representation for both modalities to facilitate data processing. Then, we propose the point cloud-assisted neural image codec (PCA-NIC) to enhance the preservation of image texture and structure by utilizing the high-dimensional point cloud information. We further introduce a multi-modal feature fusion transform module (MMFFT) to capture more representative image features, remove redundant information between channels and modalities that are not relevant to the image content. Our work is the first to improve image compression performance using point cloud and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

View Transformation Robustness for Multi-View 3D Object Reconstruction with Reconstruction Error-Guided View Selection

View transformation robustness (VTR) is critical for deep-learning-based multi-view 3D object reconstruction models, which indicates the methods' stability under inputs with various view transformations. However, existing research seldom focused on view transformation robustness in multi-view 3D object reconstruction. One direct way to improve the models' VTR is to produce data with more view transformations and add them to model training. Recent progress on large vision models, particularly Stable Diffusion models, has provided great potential for generating 3D models or synthesizing novel view images with only a single image input. Directly deploying these models at inference consumes heavy computation resources and their robustness to view transformations is not guaranteed either. To fully utilize the power of Stable Diffusion models without extra inference computation burdens, we propose to generate novel views with Stable Diffusion models for better view transformation robustness. Instead of synthesizing random views, we propose a reconstruction error-guided view selection method, which considers the reconstruction errors' spatial distribution of the 3D predictions and chooses the views that could cover the reconstruction errors as much as possible. The methods are trained and tested on sets with large view transformations to validate the 3D reconstruction models' robustness to view transformations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction methods and other view transformation robustness comparison methods.

Large Action Models: From Inception to Implementation

As AI continues to advance, there is a growing demand for systems that go beyond language-based assistance and move toward intelligent agents capable of performing real-world actions. This evolution requires the transition from traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating textual responses, to Large Action Models (LAMs), designed for action generation and execution within dynamic environments. Enabled by agent systems, LAMs hold the potential to transform AI from passive language understanding to active task completion, marking a significant milestone in the progression toward artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework for developing LAMs, offering a systematic approach to their creation, from inception to deployment. We begin with an overview of LAMs, highlighting their unique characteristics and delineating their differences from LLMs. Using a Windows OS-based agent as a case study, we provide a detailed, step-by-step guide on the key stages of LAM development, including data collection, model training, environment integration, grounding, and evaluation. This generalizable workflow can serve as a blueprint for creating functional LAMs in various application domains. We conclude by identifying the current limitations of LAMs and discussing directions for future research and industrial deployment, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in realizing the full potential of LAMs in real-world applications. The code for the data collection process utilized in this paper is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/UFO/tree/main/dataflow, and comprehensive documentation can be found at https://microsoft.github.io/UFO/dataflow/overview/.

Position-aware Guided Point Cloud Completion with CLIP Model

Point cloud completion aims to recover partial geometric and topological shapes caused by equipment defects or limited viewpoints. Current methods either solely rely on the 3D coordinates of the point cloud to complete it or incorporate additional images with well-calibrated intrinsic parameters to guide the geometric estimation of the missing parts. Although these methods have achieved excellent performance by directly predicting the location of complete points, the extracted features lack fine-grained information regarding the location of the missing area. To address this issue, we propose a rapid and efficient method to expand an unimodal framework into a multimodal framework. This approach incorporates a position-aware module designed to enhance the spatial information of the missing parts through a weighted map learning mechanism. In addition, we establish a Point-Text-Image triplet corpus PCI-TI and MVP-TI based on the existing unimodal point cloud completion dataset and use the pre-trained vision-language model CLIP to provide richer detail information for 3D shapes, thereby enhancing performance. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art point cloud completion methods.

Hero-SR: One-Step Diffusion for Super-Resolution with Human Perception Priors

Owing to the robust priors of diffusion models, recent approaches have shown promise in addressing real-world super-resolution (Real-SR). However, achieving semantic consistency and perceptual naturalness to meet human perception demands remains difficult, especially under conditions of heavy degradation and varied input complexities. To tackle this, we propose Hero-SR, a one-step diffusion-based SR framework explicitly designed with human perception priors. Hero-SR consists of two novel modules: the Dynamic Time-Step Module (DTSM), which adaptively selects optimal diffusion steps for flexibly meeting human perceptual standards, and the Open-World Multi-modality Supervision (OWMS), which integrates guidance from both image and text domains through CLIP to improve semantic consistency and perceptual naturalness. Through these modules, Hero-SR generates high-resolution images that not only preserve intricate details but also reflect human perceptual preferences. Extensive experiments validate that Hero-SR achieves state-of-the-art performance in Real-SR. The code will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.

LL-ICM: Image Compression for Low-level Machine Vision via Large Vision-Language Model

Image Compression for Machines (ICM) aims to compress images for machine vision tasks rather than human viewing. Current works predominantly concentrate on high-level tasks like object detection and semantic segmentation. However, the quality of original images is usually not guaranteed in the real world, leading to even worse perceptual quality or downstream task performance after compression. Low-level (LL) machine vision models, like image restoration models, can help improve such quality, and thereby their compression requirements should also be considered. In this paper, we propose a pioneered ICM framework for LL machine vision tasks, namely LL-ICM. By jointly optimizing compression and LL tasks, the proposed LL-ICM not only enriches its encoding ability in generalizing to versatile LL tasks but also optimizes the processing ability of down-stream LL task models, achieving mutual adaptation for image codecs and LL task models. Furthermore, we integrate large-scale vision-language models into the LL-ICM framework to generate more universal and distortion-robust feature embeddings for LL vision tasks. Therefore, one LL-ICM codec can generalize to multiple tasks. We establish a solid benchmark to evaluate LL-ICM, which includes extensive objective experiments by using both full and no-reference image quality assessments. Experimental results show that LL-ICM can achieve 22.65% BD-rate reductions over the state-of-the-art methods.

Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey

GUIs have long been central to human-computer interaction, providing an intuitive and visually-driven way to access and interact with digital systems. The advent of LLMs, particularly multimodal models, has ushered in a new era of GUI automation. They have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in natural language understanding, code generation, and visual processing. This has paved the way for a new generation of LLM-brained GUI agents capable of interpreting complex GUI elements and autonomously executing actions based on natural language instructions. These agents represent a paradigm shift, enabling users to perform intricate, multi-step tasks through simple conversational commands. Their applications span across web navigation, mobile app interactions, and desktop automation, offering a transformative user experience that revolutionizes how individuals interact with software. This emerging field is rapidly advancing, with significant progress in both research and industry. To provide a structured understanding of this trend, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of LLM-brained GUI agents, exploring their historical evolution, core components, and advanced techniques. We address research questions such as existing GUI agent frameworks, the collection and utilization of data for training specialized GUI agents, the development of large action models tailored for GUI tasks, and the evaluation metrics and benchmarks necessary to assess their effectiveness. Additionally, we examine emerging applications powered by these agents. Through a detailed analysis, this survey identifies key research gaps and outlines a roadmap for future advancements in the field. By consolidating foundational knowledge and state-of-the-art developments, this work aims to guide both researchers and practitioners in overcoming challenges and unlocking the full potential of LLM-brained GUI agents.

A Semi-Supervised Approach with Error Reflection for Echocardiography Segmentation

Segmenting internal structure from echocardiography is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of various heart diseases. Semi-supervised learning shows its ability in alleviating annotations scarcity. While existing semi-supervised methods have been successful in image segmentation across various medical imaging modalities, few have attempted to design methods specifically addressing the challenges posed by the poor contrast, blurred edge details and noise of echocardiography. These characteristics pose challenges to the generation of high-quality pseudo-labels in semi-supervised segmentation based on Mean Teacher. Inspired by human reflection on erroneous practices, we devise an error reflection strategy for echocardiography semi-supervised segmentation architecture. The process triggers the model to reflect on inaccuracies in unlabeled image segmentation, thereby enhancing the robustness of pseudo-label generation. Specifically, the strategy is divided into two steps. The first step is called reconstruction reflection. The network is tasked with reconstructing authentic proxy images from the semantic masks of unlabeled images and their auxiliary sketches, while maximizing the structural similarity between the original inputs and the proxies. The second step is called guidance correction. Reconstruction error maps decouple unreliable segmentation regions. Then, reliable data that are more likely to occur near high-density areas are leveraged to guide the optimization of unreliable data potentially located around decision boundaries. Additionally, we introduce an effective data augmentation strategy, termed as multi-scale mixing up strategy, to minimize the empirical distribution gap between labeled and unlabeled images and perceive diverse scales of cardiac anatomical structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed method.