HoGS: Unified Near and Far Object Reconstruction via Homogeneous Gaussian Splatting

Novel view synthesis has demonstrated impressive progress recently, with 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) offering efficient training time and photorealistic real-time rendering. However, reliance on Cartesian coordinates limits 3DGS's performance on distant objects, which is important for reconstructing unbounded outdoor environments. We found that, despite its ultimate simplicity, using homogeneous coordinates, a concept on the projective geometry, for the 3DGS pipeline remarkably improves the rendering accuracies of distant objects. We therefore propose Homogeneous Gaussian Splatting (HoGS) incorporating homogeneous coordinates into the 3DGS framework, providing a unified representation for enhancing near and distant objects. HoGS effectively manages both expansive spatial positions and scales particularly in outdoor unbounded environments by adopting projective geometry principles. Experiments show that HoGS significantly enhances accuracy in reconstructing distant objects while maintaining high-quality rendering of nearby objects, along with fast training speed and real-time rendering capability. Our implementations are available on our project page https://kh129.github.io/hogs/.

Do Vision Models Develop Human-Like Progressive Difficulty Understanding?

When a human undertakes a test, their responses likely follow a pattern: if they answered an easy question $(2 \times 3)$ incorrectly, they would likely answer a more difficult one $(2 \times 3 \times 4)$ incorrectly; and if they answered a difficult question correctly, they would likely answer the easy one correctly. Anything else hints at memorization. Do current visual recognition models exhibit a similarly structured learning capacity? In this work, we consider the task of image classification and study if those models' responses follow that pattern. Since real images aren't labeled with difficulty, we first create a dataset of 100 categories, 10 attributes, and 3 difficulty levels using recent generative models: for each category (e.g., dog) and attribute (e.g., occlusion), we generate images of increasing difficulty (e.g., a dog without occlusion, a dog only partly visible). We find that most of the models do in fact behave similarly to the aforementioned pattern around 80-90% of the time. Using this property, we then explore a new way to evaluate those models. Instead of testing the model on every possible test image, we create an adaptive test akin to GRE, in which the model's performance on the current round of images determines the test images in the next round. This allows the model to skip over questions too easy/hard for itself, and helps us get its overall performance in fewer steps.

IMPROVE: Iterative Model Pipeline Refinement and Optimization Leveraging LLM Agents

Computer vision is a critical component in a wide range of real-world applications, including plant monitoring in agriculture and handwriting classification in digital systems. However, developing high-performance computer vision models traditionally demands both machine learning (ML) expertise and domain-specific knowledge, making the process costly, labor-intensive, and inaccessible to many. Large language model (LLM) agents have emerged as a promising solution to automate this workflow, but most existing methods share a common limitation: they attempt to optimize entire pipelines in a single step before evaluation, making it difficult to attribute improvements to specific changes. This lack of granularity leads to unstable optimization and slower convergence, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we introduce Iterative Refinement, a novel strategy for LLM-driven ML pipeline design inspired by how human ML experts iteratively refine models, focusing on one component at a time rather than making sweeping changes all at once. By systematically updating individual components based on real training feedback, Iterative Refinement improves stability, interpretability, and overall model performance. We implement this strategy in IMPROVE, an end-to-end LLM agent framework for automating and optimizing object classification pipelines. Through extensive evaluations across datasets of varying sizes and domains, including standard benchmarks and Kaggle competition datasets, we demonstrate that Iterative Refinement enables IMPROVE to consistently achieve better performance over existing zero-shot LLM-based approaches. These findings establish Iterative Refinement as an effective new strategy for LLM-driven ML automation and position IMPROVE as an accessible solution for building high-quality computer vision models without requiring ML expertise.

Building a Mind Palace: Structuring Environment-Grounded Semantic Graphs for Effective Long Video Analysis with LLMs

Long-form video understanding with Large Vision Language Models is challenged by the need to analyze temporally dispersed yet spatially concentrated key moments within limited context windows. In this work, we introduce VideoMindPalace, a new framework inspired by the "Mind Palace", which organizes critical video moments into a topologically structured semantic graph. VideoMindPalace organizes key information through (i) hand-object tracking and interaction, (ii) clustered activity zones representing specific areas of recurring activities, and (iii) environment layout mapping, allowing natural language parsing by LLMs to provide grounded insights on spatio-temporal and 3D context. In addition, we propose the Video MindPalace Benchmark (VMB), to assess human-like reasoning, including spatial localization, temporal reasoning, and layout-aware sequential understanding. Evaluated on VMB and established video QA datasets, including EgoSchema, NExT-QA, IntentQA, and the Active Memories Benchmark, VideoMindPalace demonstrates notable gains in spatio-temporal coherence and human-aligned reasoning, advancing long-form video analysis capabilities in VLMs.

Unleashing In-context Learning of Autoregressive Models for Few-shot Image Manipulation

Text-guided image manipulation has experienced notable advancement in recent years. In order to mitigate linguistic ambiguity, few-shot learning with visual examples has been applied for instructions that are underrepresented in the training set, or difficult to describe purely in language. However, learning from visual prompts requires strong reasoning capability, which diffusion models are struggling with. To address this issue, we introduce a novel multi-modal autoregressive model, dubbed $\textbf{InstaManip}$, that can $\textbf{insta}$ntly learn a new image $\textbf{manip}$ulation operation from textual and visual guidance via in-context learning, and apply it to new query images. Specifically, we propose an innovative group self-attention mechanism to break down the in-context learning process into two separate stages -- learning and applying, which simplifies the complex problem into two easier tasks. We also introduce a relation regularization method to further disentangle image transformation features from irrelevant contents in exemplar images. Extensive experiments suggest that our method surpasses previous few-shot image manipulation models by a notable margin ($\geq$19% in human evaluation). We also find our model can be further boosted by increasing the number or diversity of exemplar images.

Ascend HiFloat8 Format for Deep Learning

This preliminary white paper proposes a novel 8-bit floating-point data format HiFloat8 (abbreviated as HiF8) for deep learning. HiF8 features tapered precision. For normal value encoding, it provides 7 exponent values with 3-bit mantissa, 8 exponent values with 2-bit mantissa, and 16 exponent values with 1-bit mantissa. For denormal value encoding, it extends the dynamic range by 7 extra powers of 2, from 31 to 38 binades (notice that FP16 covers 40 binades). Meanwhile, HiF8 encodes all the special values except that positive zero and negative zero are represented by only one bit-pattern. Thanks to the better balance between precision and dynamic range, HiF8 can be simultaneously used in both forward and backward passes of AI training. In this paper, we will describe the definition and rounding methods of HiF8, as well as the tentative training and inference solutions. To demonstrate the efficacy of HiF8, massive simulation results on various neural networks, including traditional neural networks and large language models (LLMs), will also be presented.

PanGu-Draw: Advancing Resource-Efficient Text-to-Image Synthesis with Time-Decoupled Training and Reusable Coop-Diffusion

Current large-scale diffusion models represent a giant leap forward in conditional image synthesis, capable of interpreting diverse cues like text, human poses, and edges. However, their reliance on substantial computational resources and extensive data collection remains a bottleneck. On the other hand, the integration of existing diffusion models, each specialized for different controls and operating in unique latent spaces, poses a challenge due to incompatible image resolutions and latent space embedding structures, hindering their joint use. Addressing these constraints, we present "PanGu-Draw", a novel latent diffusion model designed for resource-efficient text-to-image synthesis that adeptly accommodates multiple control signals. We first propose a resource-efficient Time-Decoupling Training Strategy, which splits the monolithic text-to-image model into structure and texture generators. Each generator is trained using a regimen that maximizes data utilization and computational efficiency, cutting data preparation by 48% and reducing training resources by 51%. Secondly, we introduce "Coop-Diffusion", an algorithm that enables the cooperative use of various pre-trained diffusion models with different latent spaces and predefined resolutions within a unified denoising process. This allows for multi-control image synthesis at arbitrary resolutions without the necessity for additional data or retraining. Empirical validations of Pangu-Draw show its exceptional prowess in text-to-image and multi-control image generation, suggesting a promising direction for future model training efficiencies and generation versatility. The largest 5B T2I PanGu-Draw model is released on the Ascend platform. Project page: $\href{https://pangu-draw.github.io}{this~https~URL}$

A Sentence Speaks a Thousand Images: Domain Generalization through Distilling CLIP with Language Guidance

Domain generalization studies the problem of training a model with samples from several domains (or distributions) and then testing the model with samples from a new, unseen domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for domain generalization that leverages recent advances in large vision-language models, specifically a CLIP teacher model, to train a smaller model that generalizes to unseen domains. The key technical contribution is a new type of regularization that requires the student's learned image representations to be close to the teacher's learned text representations obtained from encoding the corresponding text descriptions of images. We introduce two designs of the loss function, absolute and relative distance, which provide specific guidance on how the training process of the student model should be regularized. We evaluate our proposed method, dubbed RISE (Regularized Invariance with Semantic Embeddings), on various benchmark datasets and show that it outperforms several state-of-the-art domain generalization methods. To our knowledge, our work is the first to leverage knowledge distillation using a large vision-language model for domain generalization. By incorporating text-based information, RISE improves the generalization capability of machine learning models.

Leveraging Large Language Models for Scalable Vector Graphics-Driven Image Understanding

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in natural language understanding and generation. However, their potential in computer vision remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a new, exploratory approach that enables LLMs to process images using the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. By leveraging the XML-based textual descriptions of SVG representations instead of raster images, we aim to bridge the gap between the visual and textual modalities, allowing LLMs to directly understand and manipulate images without the need for parameterized visual components. Our method facilitates simple image classification, generation, and in-context learning using only LLM capabilities. We demonstrate the promise of our approach across discriminative and generative tasks, highlighting its (i) robustness against distribution shift, (ii) substantial improvements achieved by tapping into the in-context learning abilities of LLMs, and (iii) image understanding and generation capabilities with human guidance. Our code, data, and models can be found here https://github.com/mu-cai/svg-llm.

Expeditious Saliency-guided Mix-up through Random Gradient Thresholding

Mix-up training approaches have proven to be effective in improving the generalization ability of Deep Neural Networks. Over the years, the research community expands mix-up methods into two directions, with extensive efforts to improve saliency-guided procedures but minimal focus on the arbitrary path, leaving the randomization domain unexplored. In this paper, inspired by the superior qualities of each direction over one another, we introduce a novel method that lies at the junction of the two routes. By combining the best elements of randomness and saliency utilization, our method balances speed, simplicity, and accuracy. We name our method R-Mix following the concept of "Random Mix-up". We demonstrate its effectiveness in generalization, weakly supervised object localization, calibration, and robustness to adversarial attacks. Finally, in order to address the question of whether there exists a better decision protocol, we train a Reinforcement Learning agent that decides the mix-up policies based on the classifier's performance, reducing dependency on human-designed objectives and hyperparameter tuning. Extensive experiments further show that the agent is capable of performing at the cutting-edge level, laying the foundation for a fully automatic mix-up. Our code is released at [https://github.com/minhlong94/Random-Mixup].