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Jun 2

GigaEvo: An Open Source Optimization Framework Powered By LLMs And Evolution Algorithms

Recent advances in LLM-guided evolutionary computation, particularly AlphaEvolve (Novikov et al., 2025; Georgiev et al., 2025), have demonstrated remarkable success in discovering novel mathematical constructions and solving challenging optimization problems. However, the high-level descriptions in published work leave many implementation details unspecified, hindering reproducibility and further research. In this report we present GigaEvo, an extensible open-source framework that enables researchers to study and experiment with hybrid LLM-evolution approaches inspired by AlphaEvolve. Our system provides modular implementations of key components: MAP-Elites quality-diversity algorithms, asynchronous DAG-based evaluation pipelines, LLM-driven mutation operators with insight generation and bidirectional lineage tracking, and flexible multi-island evolutionary strategies. In order to assess reproducibility and validate our implementation we evaluate GigaEvo on challenging problems from the AlphaEvolve paper: Heilbronn triangle placement, circle packing in squares, and high-dimensional kissing numbers. The framework emphasizes modularity, concurrency, and ease of experimentation, enabling rapid prototyping through declarative configuration. We provide detailed descriptions of system architecture, implementation decisions, and experimental methodology to support further research in LLM driven evolutionary methods. The GigaEvo framework and all experimental code are available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/gigaevo-core.

HDTree: Generative Modeling of Cellular Hierarchies for Robust Lineage Inference

In single-cell research, tracing and analyzing high-throughput single-cell differentiation trajectories is crucial for understanding biological processes. Key to this is the robust modeling of hierarchical structures that govern cellular development. Traditional methods face limitations in computational cost, performance, and stability. VAE-based approaches have made strides but still require branch-specific network modules, limiting their scalability and stability, while often suffering from posterior collapse. To overcome these challenges, we introduce HDTree, a generative modeling framework designed for robust lineage inference. HDTree captures tree relationships within a hierarchical latent space using a unified hierarchical codebook and employs a quantized diffusion process to model continuous cell state transitions. By aligning the generative process with the Waddington landscape, this method not only improves stability and scalability but also enhances the biological plausibility of inferred lineages. HDTree's effectiveness is demonstrated through comparisons on both general-purpose and single-cell datasets, where it outperforms existing methods in lineage inference accuracy, reconstruction quality, and hierarchical consistency. These contributions enable accurate and efficient modeling of cellular differentiation paths, offering reliable insights for biological discovery.\footnote{Code is available at https://github.com/zangzelin/code\_HDTree\_icml.

  • 8 authors
·
May 17

BiPO: Bidirectional Partial Occlusion Network for Text-to-Motion Synthesis

Generating natural and expressive human motions from textual descriptions is challenging due to the complexity of coordinating full-body dynamics and capturing nuanced motion patterns over extended sequences that accurately reflect the given text. To address this, we introduce BiPO, Bidirectional Partial Occlusion Network for Text-to-Motion Synthesis, a novel model that enhances text-to-motion synthesis by integrating part-based generation with a bidirectional autoregressive architecture. This integration allows BiPO to consider both past and future contexts during generation while enhancing detailed control over individual body parts without requiring ground-truth motion length. To relax the interdependency among body parts caused by the integration, we devise the Partial Occlusion technique, which probabilistically occludes the certain motion part information during training. In our comprehensive experiments, BiPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HumanML3D dataset, outperforming recent methods such as ParCo, MoMask, and BAMM in terms of FID scores and overall motion quality. Notably, BiPO excels not only in the text-to-motion generation task but also in motion editing tasks that synthesize motion based on partially generated motion sequences and textual descriptions. These results reveal the BiPO's effectiveness in advancing text-to-motion synthesis and its potential for practical applications.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 28, 2024

Domain Elastic Transform: Bayesian Function Registration for High-Dimensional Scientific Data

Nonrigid registration is conventionally divided into point set registration, which aligns sparse geometries, and image registration, which aligns continuous intensity fields on regular grids. However, this dichotomy creates a critical bottleneck for emerging scientific data, such as spatial transcriptomics, where high-dimensional vector-valued functions, e.g., gene expression, are defined on irregular, sparse manifolds. Consequently, researchers currently face a forced choice: either sacrifice single-cell resolution via voxelization to utilize image-based tools, or ignore the critical functional signal to utilize geometric tools. To resolve this dilemma, we propose Domain Elastic Transform (DET), a grid-free probabilistic framework that unifies geometric and functional alignment. By treating data as functions on irregular domains, DET registers high-dimensional signals directly without binning. We formulate the problem within a rigorous Bayesian framework, modeling domain deformation as an elastic motion guided by a joint spatial-functional likelihood. The method is fully unsupervised and scalable, utilizing feature-sensitive downsampling to handle massive atlases. We demonstrate that DET achieves 92\% topological preservation on MERFISH data where state-of-the-art optimal transport methods struggle (<5\%), and successfully registers whole-embryo Stereo-seq atlases across developmental stages -- a task involving massive scale and complex nonrigid growth. The implementation of DET is available on {https://github.com/ohirose/bcpd} (since Mar, 2025).

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 21

Taming Modern Point Tracking for Speckle Tracking Echocardiography via Impartial Motion

Accurate motion estimation for tracking deformable tissues in echocardiography is essential for precise cardiac function measurements. While traditional methods like block matching or optical flow struggle with intricate cardiac motion, modern point tracking approaches remain largely underexplored in this domain. This work investigates the potential of state-of-the-art (SOTA) point tracking methods for ultrasound, with a focus on echocardiography. Although these novel approaches demonstrate strong performance in general videos, their effectiveness and generalizability in echocardiography remain limited. By analyzing cardiac motion throughout the heart cycle in real B-mode ultrasound videos, we identify that a directional motion bias across different views is affecting the existing training strategies. To mitigate this, we refine the training procedure and incorporate a set of tailored augmentations to reduce the bias and enhance tracking robustness and generalization through impartial cardiac motion. We also propose a lightweight network leveraging multi-scale cost volumes from spatial context alone to challenge the advanced spatiotemporal point tracking models. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning with our strategies significantly improves models' performances over their baselines, even for out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. For instance, EchoTracker boosts overall position accuracy by 60.7% and reduces median trajectory error by 61.5% across heart cycle phases. Interestingly, several point tracking models fail to outperform our proposed simple model in terms of tracking accuracy and generalization, reflecting their limitations when applied to echocardiography. Nevertheless, clinical evaluation reveals that these methods improve GLS measurements, aligning more closely with expert-validated, semi-automated tools and thus demonstrating better reproducibility in real-world applications.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 13, 2025

BiFM: Bidirectional Flow Matching for Few-Step Image Editing and Generation

Recent diffusion and flow matching models have demonstrated strong capabilities in image generation and editing by progressively removing noise through iterative sampling. While this enables flexible inversion for semantic-preserving edits, few-step sampling regimes suffer from poor forward process approximation, leading to degraded editing quality. Existing few-step inversion methods often rely on pretrained generators and auxiliary modules, limiting scalability and generalization across different architectures. To address these limitations, we propose BiFM (Bidirectional Flow Matching), a unified framework that jointly learns generation and inversion within a single model. BiFM directly estimates average velocity fields in both ``image to noise" and ``noise to image" directions, constrained by a shared instantaneous velocity field derived from either predefined schedules or pretrained multi-step diffusion models. Additionally, BiFM introduces a novel training strategy using continuous time-interval supervision, stabilized by a bidirectional consistency objective and a lightweight time-interval embedding. This bidirectional formulation also enables one-step inversion and can integrate seamlessly into popular diffusion and flow matching backbones. Across diverse image editing and generation tasks, BiFM consistently outperforms existing few-step approaches, achieving superior performance and editability.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 25

Bidirectional Autoregressive Diffusion Model for Dance Generation

Dance serves as a powerful medium for expressing human emotions, but the lifelike generation of dance is still a considerable challenge. Recently, diffusion models have showcased remarkable generative abilities across various domains. They hold promise for human motion generation due to their adaptable many-to-many nature. Nonetheless, current diffusion-based motion generation models often create entire motion sequences directly and unidirectionally, lacking focus on the motion with local and bidirectional enhancement. When choreographing high-quality dance movements, people need to take into account not only the musical context but also the nearby music-aligned dance motions. To authentically capture human behavior, we propose a Bidirectional Autoregressive Diffusion Model (BADM) for music-to-dance generation, where a bidirectional encoder is built to enforce that the generated dance is harmonious in both the forward and backward directions. To make the generated dance motion smoother, a local information decoder is built for local motion enhancement. The proposed framework is able to generate new motions based on the input conditions and nearby motions, which foresees individual motion slices iteratively and consolidates all predictions. To further refine the synchronicity between the generated dance and the beat, the beat information is incorporated as an input to generate better music-aligned dance movements. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing unidirectional approaches on the prominent benchmark for music-to-dance generation.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 6, 2024

EchoTracker: Advancing Myocardial Point Tracking in Echocardiography

Tissue tracking in echocardiography is challenging due to the complex cardiac motion and the inherent nature of ultrasound acquisitions. Although optical flow methods are considered state-of-the-art (SOTA), they struggle with long-range tracking, noise occlusions, and drift throughout the cardiac cycle. Recently, novel learning-based point tracking techniques have been introduced to tackle some of these issues. In this paper, we build upon these techniques and introduce EchoTracker, a two-fold coarse-to-fine model that facilitates the tracking of queried points on a tissue surface across ultrasound image sequences. The architecture contains a preliminary coarse initialization of the trajectories, followed by reinforcement iterations based on fine-grained appearance changes. It is efficient, light, and can run on mid-range GPUs. Experiments demonstrate that the model outperforms SOTA methods, with an average position accuracy of 67% and a median trajectory error of 2.86 pixels. Furthermore, we show a relative improvement of 25% when using our model to calculate the global longitudinal strain (GLS) in a clinical test-retest dataset compared to other methods. This implies that learning-based point tracking can potentially improve performance and yield a higher diagnostic and prognostic value for clinical measurements than current techniques. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/riponazad/echotracker/.

  • 8 authors
·
May 13, 2024

Tracing the Roots: A Multi-Agent Framework for Uncovering Data Lineage in Post-Training LLMs

Post-training data plays a pivotal role in shaping the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking the systemic connections that underlie their evolution. To disentangle these complex relationships, we introduce the concept of data lineage to the LLM ecosystem and propose an automated multi-agent framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development. Through large-scale lineage analysis, we characterize domain-specific structural patterns, such as vertical refinement in math-oriented datasets and horizontal aggregation in general-domain corpora. Moreover, we uncover pervasive systemic issues, including structural redundancy induced by implicit dataset intersections and the propagation of benchmark contamination along lineage paths. To demonstrate the practical value of lineage analysis for data construction, we leverage the reconstructed lineage graph to create a lineage-aware diversity-oriented dataset. By anchoring instruction sampling at upstream root sources, this approach mitigates downstream homogenization and hidden redundancy, yielding a more diverse post-training corpus. We further highlight lineage-centric analysis as an efficient and robust topological alternative to sample-level dataset comparison for large-scale data ecosystems. By grounding data construction in explicit lineage structures, our work advances post-training data curation toward a more systematic and controllable paradigm.

Towards Early Prediction of Human iPSC Reprogramming Success

This paper presents advancements in automated early-stage prediction of the success of reprogramming human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) as a potential source for regenerative cell therapies.The minuscule success rate of iPSC-reprogramming of around 0.01% to 0.1% makes it labor-intensive, time-consuming, and exorbitantly expensive to generate a stable iPSC line. Since that requires culturing of millions of cells and intense biological scrutiny of multiple clones to identify a single optimal clone. The ability to reliably predict which cells are likely to establish as an optimal iPSC line at an early stage of pluripotency would therefore be ground-breaking in rendering this a practical and cost-effective approach to personalized medicine. Temporal information about changes in cellular appearance over time is crucial for predicting its future growth outcomes. In order to generate this data, we first performed continuous time-lapse imaging of iPSCs in culture using an ultra-high resolution microscope. We then annotated the locations and identities of cells in late-stage images where reliable manual identification is possible. Next, we propagated these labels backwards in time using a semi-automated tracking system to obtain labels for early stages of growth. Finally, we used this data to train deep neural networks to perform automatic cell segmentation and classification. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/abhineet123/ipsc_prediction.

  • 6 authors
·
May 23, 2023

Painting Outside as Inside: Edge Guided Image Outpainting via Bidirectional Rearrangement with Progressive Step Learning

Image outpainting is a very intriguing problem as the outside of a given image can be continuously filled by considering as the context of the image. This task has two main challenges. The first is to maintain the spatial consistency in contents of generated regions and the original input. The second is to generate a high-quality large image with a small amount of adjacent information. Conventional image outpainting methods generate inconsistent, blurry, and repeated pixels. To alleviate the difficulty of an outpainting problem, we propose a novel image outpainting method using bidirectional boundary region rearrangement. We rearrange the image to benefit from the image inpainting task by reflecting more directional information. The bidirectional boundary region rearrangement enables the generation of the missing region using bidirectional information similar to that of the image inpainting task, thereby generating the higher quality than the conventional methods using unidirectional information. Moreover, we use the edge map generator that considers images as original input with structural information and hallucinates the edges of unknown regions to generate the image. Our proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art outpainting and inpainting methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We further compared and evaluated them using BRISQUE, one of the No-Reference image quality assessment (IQA) metrics, to evaluate the naturalness of the output. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods and generates new images with 360{\deg}panoramic characteristics.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 5, 2020

Bidirectional Learning for Robust Neural Networks

A multilayer perceptron can behave as a generative classifier by applying bidirectional learning (BL). It consists of training an undirected neural network to map input to output and vice-versa; therefore it can produce a classifier in one direction, and a generator in the opposite direction for the same data. The learning process of BL tries to reproduce the neuroplasticity stated in Hebbian theory using only backward propagation of errors. In this paper, two novel learning techniques are introduced which use BL for improving robustness to white noise static and adversarial examples. The first method is bidirectional propagation of errors, which the error propagation occurs in backward and forward directions. Motivated by the fact that its generative model receives as input a constant vector per class, we introduce as a second method the hybrid adversarial networks (HAN). Its generative model receives a random vector as input and its training is based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). To assess the performance of BL, we perform experiments using several architectures with fully and convolutional layers, with and without bias. Experimental results show that both methods improve robustness to white noise static and adversarial examples, and even increase accuracy, but have different behavior depending on the architecture and task, being more beneficial to use the one or the other. Nevertheless, HAN using a convolutional architecture with batch normalization presents outstanding robustness, reaching state-of-the-art accuracy on adversarial examples of hand-written digits.

  • 2 authors
·
May 21, 2018

A Decoupled Basis-Vector-Driven Generative Framework for Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization

Dynamic multi-objective optimization requires continuous tracking of moving Pareto fronts. Existing methods struggle with irregular mutations and data sparsity, primarily facing three challenges: the non-linear coupling of dynamic modes, negative transfer from outdated historical data, and the cold-start problem during environmental switches. To address these issues, this paper proposes a decoupled basis-vector-driven generative framework (DB-GEN). First, to resolve non-linear coupling, the framework employs the discrete wavelet transform to separate evolutionary trajectories into low-frequency trends and high-frequency details. Second, to mitigate negative transfer, it learns transferable basis vectors via sparse dictionary learning rather than directly memorizing historical instances. Recomposing these bases under a topology-aware contrastive constraint constructs a structured latent manifold. Finally, to overcome the cold-start problem, a surrogate-assisted search paradigm samples initial populations from this manifold. Pre-trained on 120 million solutions, DB-GEN performs direct online inference without retraining or fine-tuning. This zero-shot generation process executes in milliseconds, requiring approximately 0.2 seconds per environmental change. Experimental results demonstrate that DB-GEN improves tracking accuracy across various dynamic benchmarks compared to existing algorithms.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 31

Stable Part Diffusion 4D: Multi-View RGB and Kinematic Parts Video Generation

We present Stable Part Diffusion 4D (SP4D), a framework for generating paired RGB and kinematic part videos from monocular inputs. Unlike conventional part segmentation methods that rely on appearance-based semantic cues, SP4D learns to produce kinematic parts - structural components aligned with object articulation and consistent across views and time. SP4D adopts a dual-branch diffusion model that jointly synthesizes RGB frames and corresponding part segmentation maps. To simplify the architecture and flexibly enable different part counts, we introduce a spatial color encoding scheme that maps part masks to continuous RGB-like images. This encoding allows the segmentation branch to share the latent VAE from the RGB branch, while enabling part segmentation to be recovered via straightforward post-processing. A Bidirectional Diffusion Fusion (BiDiFuse) module enhances cross-branch consistency, supported by a contrastive part consistency loss to promote spatial and temporal alignment of part predictions. We demonstrate that the generated 2D part maps can be lifted to 3D to derive skeletal structures and harmonic skinning weights with few manual adjustments. To train and evaluate SP4D, we construct KinematicParts20K, a curated dataset of over 20K rigged objects selected and processed from Objaverse XL (Deitke et al., 2023), each paired with multi-view RGB and part video sequences. Experiments show that SP4D generalizes strongly to diverse scenarios, including real-world videos, novel generated objects, and rare articulated poses, producing kinematic-aware outputs suitable for downstream animation and motion-related tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025 2

MSF: Motion-guided Sequential Fusion for Efficient 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences

Point cloud sequences are commonly used to accurately detect 3D objects in applications such as autonomous driving. Current top-performing multi-frame detectors mostly follow a Detect-and-Fuse framework, which extracts features from each frame of the sequence and fuses them to detect the objects in the current frame. However, this inevitably leads to redundant computation since adjacent frames are highly correlated. In this paper, we propose an efficient Motion-guided Sequential Fusion (MSF) method, which exploits the continuity of object motion to mine useful sequential contexts for object detection in the current frame. We first generate 3D proposals on the current frame and propagate them to preceding frames based on the estimated velocities. The points-of-interest are then pooled from the sequence and encoded as proposal features. A novel Bidirectional Feature Aggregation (BiFA) module is further proposed to facilitate the interactions of proposal features across frames. Besides, we optimize the point cloud pooling by a voxel-based sampling technique so that millions of points can be processed in several milliseconds. The proposed MSF method achieves not only better efficiency than other multi-frame detectors but also leading accuracy, with 83.12% and 78.30% mAP on the LEVEL1 and LEVEL2 test sets of Waymo Open Dataset, respectively. Codes can be found at https://github.com/skyhehe123/MSF.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 14, 2023

Think over Trajectories: Leveraging Video Generation to Reconstruct GPS Trajectories from Cellular Signaling

Mobile devices continuously interact with cellular base stations, generating massive volumes of signaling records that provide broad coverage for understanding human mobility. However, such records offer only coarse location cues (e.g., serving-cell identifiers) and therefore limit their direct use in applications that require high-precision GPS trajectories. This paper studies the Sig2GPS problem: reconstructing GPS trajectories from cellular signaling. Inspired by domain experts often lay the signaling trace on the map and sketch the corresponding GPS route, unlike conventional solutions that rely on complex multi-stage engineering pipelines or regress coordinates, Sig2GPS is reframed as an image-to-video generation task that directly operates in the map-visual domain: signaling traces are rendered on a map, and a video generation model is trained to draw a continuous GPS path. To support this paradigm, a paired signaling-to-trajectory video dataset is constructed to fine-tune an open-source video model, and a trajectory-aware reinforcement learning-based optimization method is introduced to improve generation fidelity via rewards. Experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show substantial improvements over strong engineered and learning-based baselines, while additional results on next GPS prediction indicate scalability and cross-city transferability. Overall, these results suggest that map-visual video generation provides a practical interface for trajectory data mining by enabling direct generation and refinement of continuous paths under map constraints.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 27 2

TrajBooster: Boosting Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation via Trajectory-Centric Learning

Recent Vision-Language-Action models show potential to generalize across embodiments but struggle to quickly align with a new robot's action space when high-quality demonstrations are scarce, especially for bipedal humanoids. We present TrajBooster, a cross-embodiment framework that leverages abundant wheeled-humanoid data to boost bipedal VLA. Our key idea is to use end-effector trajectories as a morphology-agnostic interface. TrajBooster (i) extracts 6D dual-arm end-effector trajectories from real-world wheeled humanoids, (ii) retargets them in simulation to Unitree G1 with a whole-body controller trained via a heuristic-enhanced harmonized online DAgger to lift low-dimensional trajectory references into feasible high-dimensional whole-body actions, and (iii) forms heterogeneous triplets that couple source vision/language with target humanoid-compatible actions to post-pre-train a VLA, followed by only 10 minutes of teleoperation data collection on the target humanoid domain. Deployed on Unitree G1, our policy achieves beyond-tabletop household tasks, enabling squatting, cross-height manipulation, and coordinated whole-body motion with markedly improved robustness and generalization. Results show that TrajBooster allows existing wheeled-humanoid data to efficiently strengthen bipedal humanoid VLA performance, reducing reliance on costly same-embodiment data while enhancing action space understanding and zero-shot skill transfer capabilities. For more details, For more details, please refer to our https://jiachengliu3.github.io/TrajBooster/.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 15, 2025

SoulX-FlashTalk: Real-Time Infinite Streaming of Audio-Driven Avatars via Self-Correcting Bidirectional Distillation

Deploying massive diffusion models for real-time, infinite-duration, audio-driven avatar generation presents a significant engineering challenge, primarily due to the conflict between computational load and strict latency constraints. Existing approaches often compromise visual fidelity by enforcing strictly unidirectional attention mechanisms or reducing model capacity. To address this problem, we introduce SoulX-FlashTalk, a 14B-parameter framework optimized for high-fidelity real-time streaming. Diverging from conventional unidirectional paradigms, we use a Self-correcting Bidirectional Distillation strategy that retains bidirectional attention within video chunks. This design preserves critical spatiotemporal correlations, significantly enhancing motion coherence and visual detail. To ensure stability during infinite generation, we incorporate a Multi-step Retrospective Self-Correction Mechanism, enabling the model to autonomously recover from accumulated errors and preventing collapse. Furthermore, we engineered a full-stack inference acceleration suite incorporating hybrid sequence parallelism, Parallel VAE, and kernel-level optimizations. Extensive evaluations confirm that SoulX-FlashTalk is the first 14B-scale system to achieve a sub-second start-up latency (0.87s) while reaching a real-time throughput of 32 FPS, setting a new standard for high-fidelity interactive digital human synthesis.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 29, 2025

One2Scene: Geometric Consistent Explorable 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image

Generating explorable 3D scenes from a single image is a highly challenging problem in 3D vision. Existing methods struggle to support free exploration, often producing severe geometric distortions and noisy artifacts when the viewpoint moves far from the original perspective. We introduce One2Scene, an effective framework that decomposes this ill-posed problem into three tractable sub-tasks to enable immersive explorable scene generation. We first use a panorama generator to produce anchor views from a single input image as initialization. Then, we lift these 2D anchors into an explicit 3D geometric scaffold via a generalizable, feed-forward Gaussian Splatting network. Instead of treating the panorama as a single image for reconstruction, we project it into multiple sparse anchor views and reformulate the reconstruction task as multi-view stereo matching, which allows us to leverage robust geometric priors learned from large-scale multi-view datasets. A bidirectional feature fusion module is used to enforce cross-view consistency, yielding an efficient and geometrically reliable scaffold. Finally, the scaffold serves as a strong prior for a novel view generator to produce photorealistic and geometrically accurate views at arbitrary cameras. By explicitly conditioning on a 3D-consistent scaffold to perform reconstruction, One2Scene works stably under large camera motions, supporting immersive scene exploration. Extensive experiments show that One2Scene substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in panorama depth estimation, feed-forward 360° reconstruction, and explorable 3D scene generation. Project page: https://one2scene5406.github.io/

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 23

Bidirectional Trained Tree-Structured Decoder for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

The Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) task is a critical branch in the field of OCR. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating bidirectional context information significantly improves the performance of HMER models. However, existing methods fail to effectively utilize bidirectional context information during the inference stage. Furthermore, current bidirectional training methods are primarily designed for string decoders and cannot adequately generalize to tree decoders, which offer superior generalization capabilities and structural analysis capacity. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose the Mirror-Flipped Symbol Layout Tree (MF-SLT) and Bidirectional Asynchronous Training (BAT) structure. Our method extends the bidirectional training strategy to the tree decoder, allowing for more effective training by leveraging bidirectional information. Additionally, we analyze the impact of the visual and linguistic perception of the HMER model separately and introduce the Shared Language Modeling (SLM) mechanism. Through the SLM, we enhance the model's robustness and generalization when dealing with visual ambiguity, particularly in scenarios with abundant training data. Our approach has been validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating its ability to achieve new state-of-the-art results on the CROHME 2014, 2016, and 2019 datasets, as well as the HME100K dataset. The code used in our experiments will be publicly available.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 31, 2023

TiP4GEN: Text to Immersive Panorama 4D Scene Generation

With the rapid advancement and widespread adoption of VR/AR technologies, there is a growing demand for the creation of high-quality, immersive dynamic scenes. However, existing generation works predominantly concentrate on the creation of static scenes or narrow perspective-view dynamic scenes, falling short of delivering a truly 360-degree immersive experience from any viewpoint. In this paper, we introduce TiP4GEN, an advanced text-to-dynamic panorama scene generation framework that enables fine-grained content control and synthesizes motion-rich, geometry-consistent panoramic 4D scenes. TiP4GEN integrates panorama video generation and dynamic scene reconstruction to create 360-degree immersive virtual environments. For video generation, we introduce a Dual-branch Generation Model consisting of a panorama branch and a perspective branch, responsible for global and local view generation, respectively. A bidirectional cross-attention mechanism facilitates comprehensive information exchange between the branches. For scene reconstruction, we propose a Geometry-aligned Reconstruction Model based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. By aligning spatial-temporal point clouds using metric depth maps and initializing scene cameras with estimated poses, our method ensures geometric consistency and temporal coherence for the reconstructed scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed designs and the superiority of TiP4GEN in generating visually compelling and motion-coherent dynamic panoramic scenes. Our project page is at https://ke-xing.github.io/TiP4GEN/.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 17, 2025

Exploiting Longitudinal Context in Clinician-Verified Interactive Lesion Tracking

Tracking tumor lesions across serial CT scans is essential for oncological response assessment. Existing automated methods face a fundamental trade-off: end-to-end trackers achieve high automation but offer no opportunity to correct silent tracking failures, while decoupled registration-segmentation pipelines permit user verification yet discard the lesion's prior appearance, limiting accuracy in ambiguous cases. In this work, we propose a Verified Tracking paradigm: a clinician verifies a registration-proposed prompt, which the model leverages alongside the baseline lesion appearance to resolve segmentation ambiguities. We present a unified framework combining early spatial prompt fusion with latent temporal difference weighting for longitudinally-informed segmentation. To address data scarcity, we leverage large-scale synthetic pretraining, proving essential for exploiting longitudinal context, improving performance by up to 4.5 Dice points over training from scratch. Our approach secured first place in the MICCAI autoPET IV challenge. We further curate and release PanTrack, a new longitudinal pancreatic cancer benchmark, to assess out-of-distribution generalization. Experiments show that our model outperforms prior work in both fully automatic and the proposed verified tracking setting offering a clinically safe middle ground between automation and control. Code, model and dataset will be released at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/LongiSeg

MIC-DKFZ MIC at DKFZ
·
May 21

Samba: Synchronized Set-of-Sequences Modeling for Multiple Object Tracking

Multiple object tracking in complex scenarios - such as coordinated dance performances, team sports, or dynamic animal groups - presents unique challenges. In these settings, objects frequently move in coordinated patterns, occlude each other, and exhibit long-term dependencies in their trajectories. However, it remains a key open research question on how to model long-range dependencies within tracklets, interdependencies among tracklets, and the associated temporal occlusions. To this end, we introduce Samba, a novel linear-time set-of-sequences model designed to jointly process multiple tracklets by synchronizing the multiple selective state-spaces used to model each tracklet. Samba autoregressively predicts the future track query for each sequence while maintaining synchronized long-term memory representations across tracklets. By integrating Samba into a tracking-by-propagation framework, we propose SambaMOTR, the first tracker effectively addressing the aforementioned issues, including long-range dependencies, tracklet interdependencies, and temporal occlusions. Additionally, we introduce an effective technique for dealing with uncertain observations (MaskObs) and an efficient training recipe to scale SambaMOTR to longer sequences. By modeling long-range dependencies and interactions among tracked objects, SambaMOTR implicitly learns to track objects accurately through occlusions without any hand-crafted heuristics. Our approach significantly surpasses prior state-of-the-art on the DanceTrack, BFT, and SportsMOT datasets.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024 1

Motion Mamba: Efficient and Long Sequence Motion Generation with Hierarchical and Bidirectional Selective SSM

Human motion generation stands as a significant pursuit in generative computer vision, while achieving long-sequence and efficient motion generation remains challenging. Recent advancements in state space models (SSMs), notably Mamba, have showcased considerable promise in long sequence modeling with an efficient hardware-aware design, which appears to be a promising direction to build motion generation model upon it. Nevertheless, adapting SSMs to motion generation faces hurdles since the lack of a specialized design architecture to model motion sequence. To address these challenges, we propose Motion Mamba, a simple and efficient approach that presents the pioneering motion generation model utilized SSMs. Specifically, we design a Hierarchical Temporal Mamba (HTM) block to process temporal data by ensemble varying numbers of isolated SSM modules across a symmetric U-Net architecture aimed at preserving motion consistency between frames. We also design a Bidirectional Spatial Mamba (BSM) block to bidirectionally process latent poses, to enhance accurate motion generation within a temporal frame. Our proposed method achieves up to 50% FID improvement and up to 4 times faster on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets compared to the previous best diffusion-based method, which demonstrates strong capabilities of high-quality long sequence motion modeling and real-time human motion generation. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MotionMamba/

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024 4

Chreode: A Cell World Model for One-Step Temporal Dynamics and Perturbation Prediction

Predicting how a cell will change its transcriptional state under a developmental signal or a genetic perturbation is the computational core of in-silico biology and the AI Virtual Cell program. Existing approaches either fit static control-to-treated maps that discard time, or solve multi-step ODE / Schrödinger-bridge problems on each dataset independently. We introduce Chreode, a one-step cell world model that predicts action-conditioned cell-state transitions through a structured residual transition operator. It shifts distributional evolution from inference time to training time, enabling single-pass generation while preserving a Waddington-inspired decomposition into downhill landscape flow, rotational in-tangent dynamics, and stochastic spread. The model is pretrained with a shared scVI encoder and a DiT-based dynamics backbone on a 2.4M-cell mouse embryonic atlas spanning 7 datasets. As a fine-tuning initialization, Chreode improves per-target Sinkhorn distance on Weinreb hematopoiesis and Veres islet differentiation over matched scratch models, PI-SDE, and PRESCIENT. As a transferable gene-state embedding for GEARS, the pretrained dynamics representation reduces shared-vocabulary DE20 mean squared error on Norman Perturb-seq from 0.2121 to 0.1858, a 12.4% relative improvement, without changing the GEARS training procedure. We interpret this transfer to perturbation prediction as evidence that pretrained developmental-trajectory dynamics encode differentiation primitives transferable to CRISPR-induced state shifts, since both involve cell-state transitions in a shared latent geometry. The pretrained backbone additionally produces zero-shot clonal fate scores on Weinreb that are competitive with strong dynamic-OT baselines.

  • 7 authors
·
May 26

EventTracer: Fast Path Tracing-based Event Stream Rendering

Simulating event streams from 3D scenes has become a common practice in event-based vision research, as it meets the demand for large-scale, high temporal frequency data without setting up expensive hardware devices or undertaking extensive data collections. Yet existing methods in this direction typically work with noiseless RGB frames that are costly to render, and therefore they can only achieve a temporal resolution equivalent to 100-300 FPS, far lower than that of real-world event data. In this work, we propose EventTracer, a path tracing-based rendering pipeline that simulates high-fidelity event sequences from complex 3D scenes in an efficient and physics-aware manner. Specifically, we speed up the rendering process via low sample-per-pixel (SPP) path tracing, and train a lightweight event spiking network to denoise the resulting RGB videos into realistic event sequences. To capture the physical properties of event streams, the network is equipped with a bipolar leaky integrate-and-fired (BiLIF) spiking unit and trained with a bidirectional earth mover distance (EMD) loss. Our EventTracer pipeline runs at a speed of about 4 minutes per second of 720p video, and it inherits the merit of accurate spatiotemporal modeling from its path tracing backbone. We show in two downstream tasks that EventTracer captures better scene details and demonstrates a greater similarity to real-world event data than other event simulators, which establishes it as a promising tool for creating large-scale event-RGB datasets at a low cost, narrowing the sim-to-real gap in event-based vision, and boosting various application scenarios such as robotics, autonomous driving, and VRAR.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 1, 2025

Dual Triangle Attention: Effective Bidirectional Attention Without Positional Embeddings

Bidirectional transformers are the foundation of many sequence modeling tasks across natural, biological, and chemical language domains, but they are permutation-invariant without explicit positional embeddings. In contrast, unidirectional attention inherently encodes positional information through its triangular mask, enabling models to operate without positional embeddings altogether. Here, we introduce Dual Triangle Attention, a novel bidirectional attention mechanism that separates the query-key subspace of each attention head into two complementary triangular masks: one that attends to past-and-self positions and one that attends to future-and-self positions. This design provides bidirectional context while maintaining the causal mask's implicit positional inductive bias in both directions. Using PyTorch's flex_attention, Dual Triangle Attention is implemented as a single compiled kernel call with no additional parameters beyond standard multi-head attention. We evaluated Dual Triangle Attention across three settings: (1) a synthetic argmax position probe, (2) masked language modeling (MLM) on natural language, and (3) MLM on protein sequences. In the argmax task, both Dual Triangle Attention and causal attention learn positional information without explicit positional embeddings, whereas standard bidirectional attention cannot. In the MLM experiments, Dual Triangle Attention with Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) achieved the best context extension performance and strong performance across the board. These findings suggest that Dual Triangle Attention is a viable attention mechanism for bidirectional transformers, with or without positional embeddings.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 8

FlowLong: Inference-time Long Video Generation via Manifold-constrained Tweedie Matching

Extending the generation horizon of video diffusion models to long sequences remains a long-standing and important challenge. Existing training-free approaches fall into two categories: extensions of bidirectional models, which are tightly coupled to specific architectures and suffer from quality degradation over long horizons, and autoregressive models, which accumulate drift errors due to exposure bias and tend to produce repetitive motion patterns. To address these issues, we propose a novel but simple inference-time approach for long video generation that is architecture-agnostic and requires no additional training. Our method generates long videos via overlapping sliding windows, where predicted clean samples from adjacent windows are blended via Tweedie matching to enforce both manifold constraint and temporal consistency across overlap regions. Stochastic early-phase sampling then synchronizes per-window trajectories by injecting fresh noise after each Tweedie matching correction in the high-noise phase, before transitioning to deterministic ODE sampling to preserve fine-grained visual fidelity. Applied to various video generation models, our method generates videos several times longer than the native window length while outperforming both training-free and autoregressive baselines in temporal consistency and visual quality, and further extends to audio-video joint generation and text-to-3DGS without any fine-tuning.

kaist-ai KAIST AI
·
May 19 1

You Only Teach Once: Learn One-Shot Bimanual Robotic Manipulation from Video Demonstrations

Bimanual robotic manipulation is a long-standing challenge of embodied intelligence due to its characteristics of dual-arm spatial-temporal coordination and high-dimensional action spaces. Previous studies rely on pre-defined action taxonomies or direct teleoperation to alleviate or circumvent these issues, often making them lack simplicity, versatility and scalability. Differently, we believe that the most effective and efficient way for teaching bimanual manipulation is learning from human demonstrated videos, where rich features such as spatial-temporal positions, dynamic postures, interaction states and dexterous transitions are available almost for free. In this work, we propose the YOTO (You Only Teach Once), which can extract and then inject patterns of bimanual actions from as few as a single binocular observation of hand movements, and teach dual robot arms various complex tasks. Furthermore, based on keyframes-based motion trajectories, we devise a subtle solution for rapidly generating training demonstrations with diverse variations of manipulated objects and their locations. These data can then be used to learn a customized bimanual diffusion policy (BiDP) across diverse scenes. In experiments, YOTO achieves impressive performance in mimicking 5 intricate long-horizon bimanual tasks, possesses strong generalization under different visual and spatial conditions, and outperforms existing visuomotor imitation learning methods in accuracy and efficiency. Our project link is https://hnuzhy.github.io/projects/YOTO.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 23, 2025

Multi-view Consistent 3D Gaussian Head Avatars 'without' Multi-view Generation

High-fidelity 3D Gaussian head avatar generation is critical for applications such as AR/VR, telepresence, and digital humans. Existing methods depend on multi-view datasets, 3D captures, or intermediate 2D view synthesis. In contrast, we learn both conditional and unconditional 3D head models from randomly sampled 2D images alone, without using multi-view data, 3D supervision, or intermediate view generation. We introduce MVCHead, a single-shot state space model that enforces multi-view consistency (MVC) directly in the 3D representation while regressing 3D Gaussians under these constraints. At its core, we propose a Hierarchical State Space (HiSS) block that progressively refines Gaussians from coarse to fine, while capturing long-range dependencies. Within each HiSS block, we modify Mamba's standard unidirectional scan with the proposed Hierarchical Bi-directional State Scan (HiBiSS) that aligns recurrence with the axes along which multi-view inconsistencies are strongest. Finally, we design an SE(3) Multi-view Critic that judges whether a set of self-renders arises from a single underlying 3D configuration, rewarding cross-view pixel alignment without observing real multi-view pairs. MVCHead achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality, surpasses prior methods in both texture and geometric consistency, and maintains comparable shape consistency. To demonstrate scalability, we release FaceGS-10K, the first large-scale dataset of ready-to-use 3D Gaussian head assets for training and evaluation of 3D head models. Project Page and code: https://humansensinglab.github.io/MVCHead/

ViD-GPT: Introducing GPT-style Autoregressive Generation in Video Diffusion Models

With the advance of diffusion models, today's video generation has achieved impressive quality. But generating temporal consistent long videos is still challenging. A majority of video diffusion models (VDMs) generate long videos in an autoregressive manner, i.e., generating subsequent clips conditioned on last frames of previous clip. However, existing approaches all involve bidirectional computations, which restricts the receptive context of each autoregression step, and results in the model lacking long-term dependencies. Inspired from the huge success of large language models (LLMs) and following GPT (generative pre-trained transformer), we bring causal (i.e., unidirectional) generation into VDMs, and use past frames as prompt to generate future frames. For Causal Generation, we introduce causal temporal attention into VDM, which forces each generated frame to depend on its previous frames. For Frame as Prompt, we inject the conditional frames by concatenating them with noisy frames (frames to be generated) along the temporal axis. Consequently, we present Video Diffusion GPT (ViD-GPT). Based on the two key designs, in each autoregression step, it is able to acquire long-term context from prompting frames concatenated by all previously generated frames. Additionally, we bring the kv-cache mechanism to VDMs, which eliminates the redundant computation from overlapped frames, significantly boosting the inference speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ViD-GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively on long video generation. Code will be available at https://github.com/Dawn-LX/Causal-VideoGen.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 16, 2024

HiAR: Efficient Autoregressive Long Video Generation via Hierarchical Denoising

Autoregressive (AR) diffusion offers a promising framework for generating videos of theoretically infinite length. However, a major challenge is maintaining temporal continuity while preventing the progressive quality degradation caused by error accumulation. To ensure continuity, existing methods typically condition on highly denoised contexts; yet, this practice propagates prediction errors with high certainty, thereby exacerbating degradation. In this paper, we argue that a highly clean context is unnecessary. Drawing inspiration from bidirectional diffusion models, which denoise frames at a shared noise level while maintaining coherence, we propose that conditioning on context at the same noise level as the current block provides sufficient signal for temporal consistency while effectively mitigating error propagation. Building on this insight, we propose HiAR, a hierarchical denoising framework that reverses the conventional generation order: instead of completing each block sequentially, it performs causal generation across all blocks at every denoising step, so that each block is always conditioned on context at the same noise level. This hierarchy naturally admits pipelined parallel inference, yielding a 1.8 wall-clock speedup in our 4-step setting. We further observe that self-rollout distillation under this paradigm amplifies a low-motion shortcut inherent to the mode-seeking reverse-KL objective. To counteract this, we introduce a forward-KL regulariser in bidirectional-attention mode, which preserves motion diversity for causal inference without interfering with the distillation loss. On VBench (20s generation), HiAR achieves the best overall score and the lowest temporal drift among all compared methods.

Exact Diffusion Inversion via Bi-directional Integration Approximation

Recently, various methods have been proposed to address the inconsistency issue of DDIM inversion to enable image editing, such as EDICT [36] and Null-text inversion [22]. However, the above methods introduce considerable computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a new technique, named bi-directional integration approximation (BDIA), to perform exact diffusion inversion with neglible computational overhead. Suppose we would like to estimate the next diffusion state z_{i-1} at timestep t_i with the historical information (i,z_i) and (i+1,z_{i+1}). We first obtain the estimated Gaussian noise boldsymbol{epsilon}(z_i,i), and then apply the DDIM update procedure twice for approximating the ODE integration over the next time-slot [t_i, t_{i-1}] in the forward manner and the previous time-slot [t_i, t_{t+1}] in the backward manner. The DDIM step for the previous time-slot is used to refine the integration approximation made earlier when computing z_i. A nice property of BDIA-DDIM is that the update expression for z_{i-1} is a linear combination of (z_{i+1}, z_i, boldsymbol{epsilon}(z_i,i)). This allows for exact backward computation of z_{i+1} given (z_i, z_{i-1}), thus leading to exact diffusion inversion. It is demonstrated with experiments that (round-trip) BDIA-DDIM is particularly effective for image editing. Our experiments further show that BDIA-DDIM produces markedly better image sampling qualities than DDIM for text-to-image generation. BDIA can also be applied to improve the performance of other ODE solvers in addition to DDIM. In our work, it is found that applying BDIA to the EDM sampling procedure produces consistently better performance over four pre-trained models.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 10, 2023

SoulX-FlashHead: Oracle-guided Generation of Infinite Real-time Streaming Talking Heads

Achieving a balance between high-fidelity visual quality and low-latency streaming remains a formidable challenge in audio-driven portrait generation. Existing large-scale models often suffer from prohibitive computational costs, while lightweight alternatives typically compromise on holistic facial representations and temporal stability. In this paper, we propose SoulX-FlashHead, a unified 1.3B-parameter framework designed for real-time, infinite-length, and high-fidelity streaming video generation. To address the instability of audio features in streaming scenarios, we introduce Streaming-Aware Spatiotemporal Pre-training equipped with a Temporal Audio Context Cache mechanism, which ensures robust feature extraction from short audio fragments. Furthermore, to mitigate the error accumulation and identity drift inherent in long-sequence autoregressive generation, we propose Oracle-Guided Bidirectional Distillation, leveraging ground-truth motion priors to provide precise physical guidance. We also present VividHead, a large-scale, high-quality dataset containing 782 hours of strictly aligned footage to support robust training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SoulX-FlashHead achieves state-of-the-art performance on HDTF and VFHQ benchmarks. Notably, our Lite variant achieves an inference speed of 96 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090, facilitating ultra-fast interaction without sacrificing visual coherence.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 7 1

Residual Feature Integration is Sufficient to Prevent Negative Transfer

Transfer learning has become a central paradigm in modern machine learning, yet it suffers from the long-standing problem of negative transfer, where leveraging source representations can harm rather than help performance on the target task. Although empirical remedies have been proposed, there remains little theoretical understanding of how to reliably avoid negative transfer. In this paper, we investigate a simple yet remarkably effective strategy: augmenting frozen, pretrained source-side features with a trainable target-side encoder that adapts target features to capture residual signals overlooked by models pretrained on the source data. We show this residual feature integration strategy is sufficient to provably prevent negative transfer, by establishing theoretical guarantees that it has no worse convergence rate than training from scratch under the informative class of target distributions up to logarithmic factors, and that the convergence rate can transition seamlessly from nonparametric to near-parametric when source representations are informative. To our knowledge, this is the first theoretical work that ensures protection against negative transfer. We carry out extensive numerical experiments across image, text and tabular benchmarks, and empirically verify that the method consistently safeguards performance under distribution shift, label noise, semantic perturbation, and class imbalance. We additionally demonstrate that this residual integration mechanism uniquely supports adapt-time multimodality extension, enabling a pretrained single-cell foundation model to incorporate spatial signals for lymph-node anatomical classification despite the source model being trained without them. Our study thus advances the theory of safe transfer learning, and provides a principled approach that is simple, robust, architecture-agnostic, and broadly applicable.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 13

Bidirectional Learning for Offline Model-based Biological Sequence Design

Offline model-based optimization aims to maximize a black-box objective function with a static dataset of designs and their scores. In this paper, we focus on biological sequence design to maximize some sequence score. A recent approach employs bidirectional learning, combining a forward mapping for exploitation and a backward mapping for constraint, and it relies on the neural tangent kernel (NTK) of an infinitely wide network to build a proxy model. Though effective, the NTK cannot learn features because of its parametrization, and its use prevents the incorporation of powerful pre-trained Language Models (LMs) that can capture the rich biophysical information in millions of biological sequences. We adopt an alternative proxy model, adding a linear head to a pre-trained LM, and propose a linearization scheme. This yields a closed-form loss and also takes into account the biophysical information in the pre-trained LM. In addition, the forward mapping and the backward mapping play different roles and thus deserve different weights during sequence optimization. To achieve this, we train an auxiliary model and leverage its weak supervision signal via a bi-level optimization framework to effectively learn how to balance the two mappings. Further, by extending the framework, we develop the first learning rate adaptation module Adaptive-eta, which is compatible with all gradient-based algorithms for offline model-based optimization. Experimental results on DNA/protein sequence design tasks verify the effectiveness of our algorithm. Our code is available~https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BIB-ICLR2023-Submission/README.md{here.}

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 7, 2023

PSAT: Pediatric Segmentation Approaches via Adult Augmentations and Transfer Learning

Pediatric medical imaging presents unique challenges due to significant anatomical and developmental differences compared to adults. Direct application of segmentation models trained on adult data often yields suboptimal performance, particularly for small or rapidly evolving structures. To address these challenges, several strategies leveraging the nnU-Net framework have been proposed, differing along four key axes: (i) the fingerprint dataset (adult, pediatric, or a combination thereof) from which the Training Plan -including the network architecture-is derived; (ii) the Learning Set (adult, pediatric, or mixed), (iii) Data Augmentation parameters, and (iv) the Transfer learning method (finetuning versus continual learning). In this work, we introduce PSAT (Pediatric Segmentation Approaches via Adult Augmentations and Transfer learning), a systematic study that investigates the impact of these axes on segmentation performance. We benchmark the derived strategies on two pediatric CT datasets and compare them with state-of-theart methods, including a commercial radiotherapy solution. PSAT highlights key pitfalls and provides actionable insights for improving pediatric segmentation. Our experiments reveal that a training plan based on an adult fingerprint dataset is misaligned with pediatric anatomy-resulting in significant performance degradation, especially when segmenting fine structures-and that continual learning strategies mitigate institutional shifts, thus enhancing generalization across diverse pediatric datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/ICANS-Strasbourg/PSAT.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 8, 2025

Multi-marginal Schrödinger Bridges with Iterative Reference Refinement

Practitioners frequently aim to infer an unobserved population trajectory using sample snapshots at multiple time points. For instance, in single-cell sequencing, scientists would like to learn how gene expression evolves over time. But sequencing any cell destroys that cell. So we cannot access any cell's full trajectory, but we can access snapshot samples from many cells. Stochastic differential equations are commonly used to analyze systems with full individual-trajectory access; since here we have only sample snapshots, these methods are inapplicable. The deep learning community has recently explored using Schr\"odinger bridges (SBs) and their extensions to estimate these dynamics. However, these methods either (1) interpolate between just two time points or (2) require a single fixed reference dynamic within the SB, which is often just set to be Brownian motion. But learning piecewise from adjacent time points can fail to capture long-term dependencies. And practitioners are typically able to specify a model class for the reference dynamic but not the exact values of the parameters within it. So we propose a new method that (1) learns the unobserved trajectories from sample snapshots across multiple time points and (2) requires specification only of a class of reference dynamics, not a single fixed one. In particular, we suggest an iterative projection method inspired by Schr\"odinger bridges; we alternate between learning a piecewise SB on the unobserved trajectories and using the learned SB to refine our best guess for the dynamics within the reference class. We demonstrate the advantages of our method via a well-known simulated parametric model from ecology, simulated and real data from systems biology, and real motion-capture data.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 12, 2024

Bidirectional Representations Augmented Autoregressive Biological Sequence Generation:Application in De Novo Peptide Sequencing

Autoregressive (AR) models, common in sequence generation, are limited in many biological tasks such as de novo peptide sequencing and protein modeling by their unidirectional nature, failing to capture crucial global bidirectional token dependencies. Non-Autoregressive (NAR) models offer holistic, bidirectional representations but face challenges with generative coherence and scalability. To transcend this, we propose a hybrid framework enhancing AR generation by dynamically integrating rich contextual information from non-autoregressive mechanisms. Our approach couples a shared input encoder with two decoders: a non-autoregressive one learning latent bidirectional biological features, and an AR decoder synthesizing the biological sequence by leveraging these bidirectional features. A novel cross-decoder attention module enables the AR decoder to iteratively query and integrate these bidirectional features, enriching its predictions. This synergy is cultivated via a tailored training strategy with importance annealing for balanced objectives and cross-decoder gradient blocking for stable, focused learning. Evaluations on a demanding nine-species benchmark of de novo peptide sequencing show that our model substantially surpasses AR and NAR baselines. It uniquely harmonizes AR stability with NAR contextual awareness, delivering robust, superior performance on diverse downstream data. This research advances biological sequence modeling techniques and contributes a novel architectural paradigm for augmenting AR models with enhanced bidirectional understanding for complex sequence generation. Code is available at https://github.com/BEAM-Labs/denovo.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer

Modeling users' dynamic and evolving preferences from their historical behaviors is challenging and crucial for recommendation systems. Previous methods employ sequential neural networks (e.g., Recurrent Neural Network) to encode users' historical interactions from left to right into hidden representations for making recommendations. Although these methods achieve satisfactory results, they often assume a rigidly ordered sequence which is not always practical. We argue that such left-to-right unidirectional architectures restrict the power of the historical sequence representations. For this purpose, we introduce a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for sequential Recommendation (BERT4Rec). However, jointly conditioning on both left and right context in deep bidirectional model would make the training become trivial since each item can indirectly "see the target item". To address this problem, we train the bidirectional model using the Cloze task, predicting the masked items in the sequence by jointly conditioning on their left and right context. Comparing with predicting the next item at each position in a sequence, the Cloze task can produce more samples to train a more powerful bidirectional model. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential models consistently.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 14, 2019

Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation

We present Follow-Your-Emoji, a diffusion-based framework for portrait animation, which animates a reference portrait with target landmark sequences. The main challenge of portrait animation is to preserve the identity of the reference portrait and transfer the target expression to this portrait while maintaining temporal consistency and fidelity. To address these challenges, Follow-Your-Emoji equipped the powerful Stable Diffusion model with two well-designed technologies. Specifically, we first adopt a new explicit motion signal, namely expression-aware landmark, to guide the animation process. We discover this landmark can not only ensure the accurate motion alignment between the reference portrait and target motion during inference but also increase the ability to portray exaggerated expressions (i.e., large pupil movements) and avoid identity leakage. Then, we propose a facial fine-grained loss to improve the model's ability of subtle expression perception and reference portrait appearance reconstruction by using both expression and facial masks. Accordingly, our method demonstrates significant performance in controlling the expression of freestyle portraits, including real humans, cartoons, sculptures, and even animals. By leveraging a simple and effective progressive generation strategy, we extend our model to stable long-term animation, thus increasing its potential application value. To address the lack of a benchmark for this field, we introduce EmojiBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising diverse portrait images, driving videos, and landmarks. We show extensive evaluations on EmojiBench to verify the superiority of Follow-Your-Emoji.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 3, 2024

Beyond Core and Penumbra: Bi-Temporal Image-Driven Stroke Evolution Analysis

Computed tomography perfusion (CTP) at admission is routinely used to estimate the ischemic core and penumbra, while follow-up diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) provides the definitive infarct outcome. However, single time-point segmentations fail to capture the biological heterogeneity and temporal evolution of stroke. We propose a bi-temporal analysis framework that characterizes ischemic tissue using statistical descriptors, radiomic texture features, and deep feature embeddings from two architectures (mJ-Net and nnU-Net). Bi-temporal refers to admission (T1) and post-treatment follow-up (T2). All features are extracted at T1 from CTP, with follow-up DWI aligned to ensure spatial correspondence. Manually delineated masks at T1 and T2 are intersected to construct six regions of interest (ROIs) encoding both initial tissue state and final outcome. Features were aggregated per region and analyzed in feature space. Evaluation on 18 patients with successful reperfusion demonstrated meaningful clustering of region-level representations. Regions classified as penumbra or healthy at T1 that ultimately recovered exhibited feature similarity to preserved brain tissue, whereas infarct-bound regions formed distinct groupings. Both baseline GLCM and deep embeddings showed a similar trend: penumbra regions exhibit features that are significantly different depending on final state, whereas this difference is not significant for core regions. Deep feature spaces, particularly mJ-Net, showed strong separation between salvageable and non-salvageable tissue, with a penumbra separation index that differed significantly from zero (Wilcoxon signed-rank test). These findings suggest that encoder-derived feature manifolds reflect underlying tissue phenotypes and state transitions, providing insight into imaging-based quantification of stroke evolution.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 6

Bidirectional Copy-Paste for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

In semi-supervised medical image segmentation, there exist empirical mismatch problems between labeled and unlabeled data distribution. The knowledge learned from the labeled data may be largely discarded if treating labeled and unlabeled data separately or in an inconsistent manner. We propose a straightforward method for alleviating the problem - copy-pasting labeled and unlabeled data bidirectionally, in a simple Mean Teacher architecture. The method encourages unlabeled data to learn comprehensive common semantics from the labeled data in both inward and outward directions. More importantly, the consistent learning procedure for labeled and unlabeled data can largely reduce the empirical distribution gap. In detail, we copy-paste a random crop from a labeled image (foreground) onto an unlabeled image (background) and an unlabeled image (foreground) onto a labeled image (background), respectively. The two mixed images are fed into a Student network and supervised by the mixed supervisory signals of pseudo-labels and ground-truth. We reveal that the simple mechanism of copy-pasting bidirectionally between labeled and unlabeled data is good enough and the experiments show solid gains (e.g., over 21% Dice improvement on ACDC dataset with 5% labeled data) compared with other state-of-the-arts on various semi-supervised medical image segmentation datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/DeepMed-Lab-ECNU/BCP}.

  • 5 authors
·
May 1, 2023

Diffusion-Based Hierarchical Multi-Label Object Detection to Analyze Panoramic Dental X-rays

Due to the necessity for precise treatment planning, the use of panoramic X-rays to identify different dental diseases has tremendously increased. Although numerous ML models have been developed for the interpretation of panoramic X-rays, there has not been an end-to-end model developed that can identify problematic teeth with dental enumeration and associated diagnoses at the same time. To develop such a model, we structure the three distinct types of annotated data hierarchically following the FDI system, the first labeled with only quadrant, the second labeled with quadrant-enumeration, and the third fully labeled with quadrant-enumeration-diagnosis. To learn from all three hierarchies jointly, we introduce a novel diffusion-based hierarchical multi-label object detection framework by adapting a diffusion-based method that formulates object detection as a denoising diffusion process from noisy boxes to object boxes. Specifically, to take advantage of the hierarchically annotated data, our method utilizes a novel noisy box manipulation technique by adapting the denoising process in the diffusion network with the inference from the previously trained model in hierarchical order. We also utilize a multi-label object detection method to learn efficiently from partial annotations and to give all the needed information about each abnormal tooth for treatment planning. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art object detection methods, including RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, DETR, and DiffusionDet for the analysis of panoramic X-rays, demonstrating the great potential of our method for hierarchically and partially annotated datasets. The code and the data are available at: https://github.com/ibrahimethemhamamci/HierarchicalDet.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 11, 2023

RoboForge: Physically Optimized Text-guided Whole-Body Locomotion for Humanoids

While generative models have become effective at producing human-like motions from text, transferring these motions to humanoid robots for physical execution remains challenging. Existing pipelines are often limited by retargeting, where kinematic quality is undermined by physical infeasibility, contact-transition errors, and the high cost of real-world dynamical data. We present a unified latent-driven framework that bridges natural language and whole-body humanoid locomotion through a retarget-free, physics-optimized pipeline. Rather than treating generation and control as separate stages, our key insight is to couple them bidirectionally under physical constraints.We introduce a Physical Plausibility Optimization (PP-Opt) module as the coupling interface. In the forward direction, PP-Opt refines a teacher-student distillation policy with a plausibility-centric reward to suppress artifacts such as floating, skating, and penetration. In the backward direction, it converts reward-optimized simulation rollouts into high-quality explicit motion data, which is used to fine-tune the motion generator toward a more physically plausible latent distribution. This bidirectional design forms a self-improving cycle: the generator learns a physically grounded latent space, while the controller learns to execute latent-conditioned behaviors with dynamical integrity.Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid show that our bidirectional optimization improves tracking accuracy and success rates. Across IsaacLab and MuJoCo, the implicit latent-driven pipeline consistently outperforms conventional explicit retargeting baselines in both precision and stability. By coupling diffusion-based motion generation with physical plausibility optimization, our framework provides a practical path toward deployable text-guided humanoid intelligence.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 18

TrackVLA++: Unleashing Reasoning and Memory Capabilities in VLA Models for Embodied Visual Tracking

Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) is a fundamental ability that underpins practical applications, such as companion robots, guidance robots and service assistants, where continuously following moving targets is essential. Recent advances have enabled language-guided tracking in complex and unstructured scenes. However, existing approaches lack explicit spatial reasoning and effective temporal memory, causing failures under severe occlusions or in the presence of similar-looking distractors. To address these challenges, we present TrackVLA++, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that enhances embodied visual tracking with two key modules, a spatial reasoning mechanism and a Target Identification Memory (TIM). The reasoning module introduces a Chain-of-Thought paradigm, termed Polar-CoT, which infers the target's relative position and encodes it as a compact polar-coordinate token for action prediction. Guided by these spatial priors, the TIM employs a gated update strategy to preserve long-horizon target memory, ensuring spatiotemporal consistency and mitigating target loss during extended occlusions. Extensive experiments show that TrackVLA++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks across both egocentric and multi-camera settings. On the challenging EVT-Bench DT split, TrackVLA++ surpasses the previous leading approach by 5.1 and 12, respectively. Furthermore, TrackVLA++ exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, enabling robust real-world tracking in dynamic and occluded scenarios.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

ETAP: Event-based Tracking of Any Point

Tracking any point (TAP) recently shifted the motion estimation paradigm from focusing on individual salient points with local templates to tracking arbitrary points with global image contexts. However, while research has mostly focused on driving the accuracy of models in nominal settings, addressing scenarios with difficult lighting conditions and high-speed motions remains out of reach due to the limitations of the sensor. This work addresses this challenge with the first event camera-based TAP method. It leverages the high temporal resolution and high dynamic range of event cameras for robust high-speed tracking, and the global contexts in TAP methods to handle asynchronous and sparse event measurements. We further extend the TAP framework to handle event feature variations induced by motion -- thereby addressing an open challenge in purely event-based tracking -- with a novel feature-alignment loss which ensures the learning of motion-robust features. Our method is trained with data from a new data generation pipeline and systematically ablated across all design decisions. Our method shows strong cross-dataset generalization and performs 136% better on the average Jaccard metric than the baselines. Moreover, on an established feature tracking benchmark, it achieves a 20% improvement over the previous best event-only method and even surpasses the previous best events-and-frames method by 4.1%. Our code is available at https://github.com/tub-rip/ETAP

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 28, 2024 1

EgoTraj-Bench: Towards Robust Trajectory Prediction Under Ego-view Noisy Observations

Reliable trajectory prediction from an ego-centric perspective is crucial for robotic navigation in human-centric environments. However, existing methods typically assume noiseless observation histories, failing to account for the perceptual artifacts inherent in first-person vision, such as occlusions, ID switches, and tracking drift. This discrepancy between training assumptions and deployment reality severely limits model robustness. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoTraj-Bench, built upon TBD dataset, which is the first real-world benchmark that aligns noisy, first-person visual histories with clean, bird's-eye-view future trajectories, enabling robust learning under realistic perceptual constraints. Building on this benchmark, we propose BiFlow, a dual-stream flow matching model that concurrently denoises historical observations and forecasts future motion. To better model agent intent, BiFlow incorporates our EgoAnchor mechanism, which conditions the prediction decoder on distilled historical features via feature modulation. Extensive experiments show that BiFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing minADE and minFDE by 10-15% on average and demonstrating superior robustness. We anticipate that our benchmark and model will provide a critical foundation for robust real-world ego-centric trajectory prediction. The benchmark library is available at: https://github.com/zoeyliu1999/EgoTraj-Bench.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 4

Generative Point Tracking with Flow Matching

Tracking a point through a video can be a challenging task due to uncertainty arising from visual obfuscations, such as appearance changes and occlusions. Although current state-of-the-art discriminative models excel in regressing long-term point trajectory estimates -- even through occlusions -- they are limited to regressing to a mean (or mode) in the presence of uncertainty, and fail to capture multi-modality. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Generative Point Tracker (GenPT), a generative framework for modelling multi-modal trajectories. GenPT is trained with a novel flow matching formulation that combines the iterative refinement of discriminative trackers, a window-dependent prior for cross-window consistency, and a variance schedule tuned specifically for point coordinates. We show how our model's generative capabilities can be leveraged to improve point trajectory estimates by utilizing a best-first search strategy on generated samples during inference, guided by the model's own confidence of its predictions. Empirically, we evaluate GenPT against the current state of the art on the standard PointOdyssey, Dynamic Replica, and TAP-Vid benchmarks. Further, we introduce a TAP-Vid variant with additional occlusions to assess occluded point tracking performance and highlight our model's ability to capture multi-modality. GenPT is capable of capturing the multi-modality in point trajectories, which translates to state-of-the-art tracking accuracy on occluded points, while maintaining competitive tracking accuracy on visible points compared to extant discriminative point trackers.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025

Hand2World: Autoregressive Egocentric Interaction Generation via Free-Space Hand Gestures

Egocentric interactive world models are essential for augmented reality and embodied AI, where visual generation must respond to user input with low latency, geometric consistency, and long-term stability. We study egocentric interaction generation from a single scene image under free-space hand gestures, aiming to synthesize photorealistic videos in which hands enter the scene, interact with objects, and induce plausible world dynamics under head motion. This setting introduces fundamental challenges, including distribution shift between free-space gestures and contact-heavy training data, ambiguity between hand motion and camera motion in monocular views, and the need for arbitrary-length video generation. We present Hand2World, a unified autoregressive framework that addresses these challenges through occlusion-invariant hand conditioning based on projected 3D hand meshes, allowing visibility and occlusion to be inferred from scene context rather than encoded in the control signal. To stabilize egocentric viewpoint changes, we inject explicit camera geometry via per-pixel Plücker-ray embeddings, disentangling camera motion from hand motion and preventing background drift. We further develop a fully automated monocular annotation pipeline and distill a bidirectional diffusion model into a causal generator, enabling arbitrary-length synthesis. Experiments on three egocentric interaction benchmarks show substantial improvements in perceptual quality and 3D consistency while supporting camera control and long-horizon interactive generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 10

ReSurgSAM2: Referring Segment Anything in Surgical Video via Credible Long-term Tracking

Surgical scene segmentation is critical in computer-assisted surgery and is vital for enhancing surgical quality and patient outcomes. Recently, referring surgical segmentation is emerging, given its advantage of providing surgeons with an interactive experience to segment the target object. However, existing methods are limited by low efficiency and short-term tracking, hindering their applicability in complex real-world surgical scenarios. In this paper, we introduce ReSurgSAM2, a two-stage surgical referring segmentation framework that leverages Segment Anything Model 2 to perform text-referred target detection, followed by tracking with reliable initial frame identification and diversity-driven long-term memory. For the detection stage, we propose a cross-modal spatial-temporal Mamba to generate precise detection and segmentation results. Based on these results, our credible initial frame selection strategy identifies the reliable frame for the subsequent tracking. Upon selecting the initial frame, our method transitions to the tracking stage, where it incorporates a diversity-driven memory mechanism that maintains a credible and diverse memory bank, ensuring consistent long-term tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReSurgSAM2 achieves substantial improvements in accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods, operating in real-time at 61.2 FPS. Our code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/jinlab-imvr/ReSurgSAM2.

  • 7 authors
·
May 13, 2025 2

DinoBloom: A Foundation Model for Generalizable Cell Embeddings in Hematology

In hematology, computational models offer significant potential to improve diagnostic accuracy, streamline workflows, and reduce the tedious work of analyzing single cells in peripheral blood or bone marrow smears. However, clinical adoption of computational models has been hampered by the lack of generalization due to large batch effects, small dataset sizes, and poor performance in transfer learning from natural images. To address these challenges, we introduce DinoBloom, the first foundation model for single cell images in hematology, utilizing a tailored DINOv2 pipeline. Our model is built upon an extensive collection of 13 diverse, publicly available datasets of peripheral blood and bone marrow smears, the most substantial open-source cohort in hematology so far, comprising over 380,000 white blood cell images. To assess its generalization capability, we evaluate it on an external dataset with a challenging domain shift. We show that our model outperforms existing medical and non-medical vision models in (i) linear probing and k-nearest neighbor evaluations for cell-type classification on blood and bone marrow smears and (ii) weakly supervised multiple instance learning for acute myeloid leukemia subtyping by a large margin. A family of four DinoBloom models (small, base, large, and giant) can be adapted for a wide range of downstream applications, be a strong baseline for classification problems, and facilitate the assessment of batch effects in new datasets. All models are available at github.com/marrlab/DinoBloom.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 7, 2024

Motion simulation of radio-labeled cells in whole-body positron emission tomography

Cell tracking is a subject of active research gathering great interest in medicine and biology. Positron emission tomography (PET) is well suited for tracking radio-labeled cells in vivo due to its exceptional sensitivity and whole-body capability. For validation, ground-truth data are desirable that realistically mimic the flow of cells in a clinical situation. This study develops a workflow (CeFloPS) for simulating moving radio-labeled cells in a human phantom. From the XCAT phantom, the blood vessels are reduced to nodal networks along which cells can move and distribute to organs and tissues. The movement is directed by the blood flow, which is calculated in each node using the Hagen-Pooiseuille equation and Kirchhoff's laws assuming laminar flow. Organs are voxelized and movement of cells from artery entry to vein exit is generated via a biased 3D random walk. The probabilities of cells moving or remaining in tissues are derived from rate constants of tracer kinetic-based compartment modeling. PET listmode data is generated using the Monte-Carlo simulation framework GATE based on the definition of a large-body PET scanner with cell paths as moving radioactive sources and the XCAT phantom providing attenuation data. From the flow simulation of 100,000 cells, 100 sample cells were further processed by GATE and listmode data was reconstructed into images for comparison. As demonstrated by comparisons of simulated and reconstructed cell distributions, CeFloPS is capable of simulating cell behavior in whole-body PET. It achieves this simulation in a way that is anatomically and physiologically reasonable, thereby providing valuable data for the development and validation of cell tracking algorithms.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 10, 2024

No Pose, No Problem in 4D: Feed-Forward Dynamic Gaussians from Unposed Multi-View Videos

Recent feed-forward 3D gaussian splatting methods have made dramatic progress on individual aspects of 3D scene reconstruction, but no existing method jointly addresses dynamic content, multi-view input, and unknown camera poses in a single feed-forward pass. Methods that handle dynamics either require accurate camera poses or accept only monocular input; pose-free multi-view methods address only static scenes; and per-scene optimization methods bridge some of these gaps but at minutes-to-hours cost per scene. We introduce NoPo4D, the first feed-forward system that addresses this empty quadrant. Building on a pretrained geometry backbone and recent 4D Gaussian frameworks, NoPo4D introduces a velocity decomposition that splits Gaussian motion into per-pixel image-plane shifts and depth changes, allowing direct supervision from pseudo ground-truth optical flow on the 2D component. This sidesteps both the differentiable rendering that couples prior posed methods to pose accuracy and the 3D motion ground truth that prior pose-free methods require. The system is rounded out by a bidirectional motion encoder for cross-view and cross-frame feature aggregation, and view-dependent opacity that mitigates cross-view and cross-timestep Gaussian misalignments. On four multi-view dynamic benchmarks, NoPo4D consistently outperforms prior feed-forward baselines, and with an optional post-optimization stage surpasses per-scene optimization methods, while running orders of magnitude faster.

  • 6 authors
·
May 20

MV-SSM: Multi-View State Space Modeling for 3D Human Pose Estimation

While significant progress has been made in single-view 3D human pose estimation, multi-view 3D human pose estimation remains challenging, particularly in terms of generalizing to new camera configurations. Existing attention-based transformers often struggle to accurately model the spatial arrangement of keypoints, especially in occluded scenarios. Additionally, they tend to overfit specific camera arrangements and visual scenes from training data, resulting in substantial performance drops in new settings. In this study, we introduce a novel Multi-View State Space Modeling framework, named MV-SSM, for robustly estimating 3D human keypoints. We explicitly model the joint spatial sequence at two distinct levels: the feature level from multi-view images and the person keypoint level. We propose a Projective State Space (PSS) block to learn a generalized representation of joint spatial arrangements using state space modeling. Moreover, we modify Mamba's traditional scanning into an effective Grid Token-guided Bidirectional Scanning (GTBS), which is integral to the PSS block. Multiple experiments demonstrate that MV-SSM achieves strong generalization, outperforming state-of-the-art methods: +10.8 on AP25 (+24%) on the challenging three-camera setting in CMU Panoptic, +7.0 on AP25 (+13%) on varying camera arrangements, and +15.3 PCP (+38%) on Campus A1 in cross-dataset evaluations. Project Website: https://aviralchharia.github.io/MV-SSM

Bidirectional Language Models Are Also Few-shot Learners

Large language models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) can perform arbitrary tasks without undergoing fine-tuning after being prompted with only a few labeled examples. An arbitrary task can be reformulated as a natural language prompt, and a language model can be asked to generate the completion, indirectly performing the task in a paradigm known as prompt-based learning. To date, emergent prompt-based learning capabilities have mainly been demonstrated for unidirectional language models. However, bidirectional language models pre-trained on denoising objectives such as masked language modeling produce stronger learned representations for transfer learning. This motivates the possibility of prompting bidirectional models, but their pre-training objectives have made them largely incompatible with the existing prompting paradigm. We present SAP (Sequential Autoregressive Prompting), a technique that enables the prompting of bidirectional models. Utilizing the machine translation task as a case study, we prompt the bidirectional mT5 model (Xue et al., 2021) with SAP and demonstrate its few-shot and zero-shot translations outperform the few-shot translations of unidirectional models like GPT-3 and XGLM (Lin et al., 2021), despite mT5's approximately 50% fewer parameters. We further show SAP is effective on question answering and summarization. For the first time, our results demonstrate prompt-based learning is an emergent property of a broader class of language models, rather than only unidirectional models.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 28, 2022

CholecTrack20: A Multi-Perspective Tracking Dataset for Surgical Tools

Tool tracking in surgical videos is essential for advancing computer-assisted interventions, such as skill assessment, safety zone estimation, and human-machine collaboration. However, the lack of context-rich datasets limits AI applications in this field. Existing datasets rely on overly generic tracking formalizations that fail to capture surgical-specific dynamics, such as tools moving out of the camera's view or exiting the body. This results in less clinically relevant trajectories and a lack of flexibility for real-world surgical applications. Methods trained on these datasets often struggle with visual challenges such as smoke, reflection, and bleeding, further exposing the limitations of current approaches. We introduce CholecTrack20, a specialized dataset for multi-class, multi-tool tracking in surgical procedures. It redefines tracking formalization with three perspectives: (i) intraoperative, (ii) intracorporeal, and (iii) visibility, enabling adaptable and clinically meaningful tool trajectories. The dataset comprises 20 full-length surgical videos, annotated at 1 fps, yielding over 35K frames and 65K labeled tool instances. Annotations include spatial location, category, identity, operator, phase, and scene visual challenge. Benchmarking state-of-the-art methods on CholecTrack20 reveals significant performance gaps, with current approaches (< 45\% HOTA) failing to meet the accuracy required for clinical translation. These findings motivate the need for advanced and intuitive tracking algorithms and establish CholecTrack20 as a foundation for developing robust AI-driven surgical assistance systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 12, 2023

Hard to Track Objects with Irregular Motions and Similar Appearances? Make It Easier by Buffering the Matching Space

We propose a Cascaded Buffered IoU (C-BIoU) tracker to track multiple objects that have irregular motions and indistinguishable appearances. When appearance features are unreliable and geometric features are confused by irregular motions, applying conventional Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) methods may generate unsatisfactory results. To address this issue, our C-BIoU tracker adds buffers to expand the matching space of detections and tracks, which mitigates the effect of irregular motions in two aspects: one is to directly match identical but non-overlapping detections and tracks in adjacent frames, and the other is to compensate for the motion estimation bias in the matching space. In addition, to reduce the risk of overexpansion of the matching space, cascaded matching is employed: first matching alive tracks and detections with a small buffer, and then matching unmatched tracks and detections with a large buffer. Despite its simplicity, our C-BIoU tracker works surprisingly well and achieves state-of-the-art results on MOT datasets that focus on irregular motions and indistinguishable appearances. Moreover, the C-BIoU tracker is the dominant component for our 2-nd place solution in the CVPR'22 SoccerNet MOT and ECCV'22 MOTComplex DanceTrack challenges. Finally, we analyze the limitation of our C-BIoU tracker in ablation studies and discuss its application scope.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 24, 2022

History-Aware Transformation of ReID Features for Multiple Object Tracking

The aim of multiple object tracking (MOT) is to detect all objects in a video and bind them into multiple trajectories. Generally, this process is carried out in two steps: detecting objects and associating them across frames based on various cues and metrics. Many studies and applications adopt object appearance, also known as re-identification (ReID) features, for target matching through straightforward similarity calculation. However, we argue that this practice is overly naive and thus overlooks the unique characteristics of MOT tasks. Unlike regular re-identification tasks that strive to distinguish all potential targets in a general representation, multi-object tracking typically immerses itself in differentiating similar targets within the same video sequence. Therefore, we believe that seeking a more suitable feature representation space based on the different sample distributions of each sequence will enhance tracking performance. In this paper, we propose using history-aware transformations on ReID features to achieve more discriminative appearance representations. Specifically, we treat historical trajectory features as conditions and employ a tailored Fisher Linear Discriminant (FLD) to find a spatial projection matrix that maximizes the differentiation between different trajectories. Our extensive experiments reveal that this training-free projection can significantly boost feature-only trackers to achieve competitive, even superior tracking performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while also demonstrating impressive zero-shot transfer capabilities. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal and further encourages future investigation into the importance and customization of ReID models in multiple object tracking. The code will be released at https://github.com/HELLORPG/HATReID-MOT.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 16, 2025

A Quantitative Evaluation of Dense 3D Reconstruction of Sinus Anatomy from Monocular Endoscopic Video

Generating accurate 3D reconstructions from endoscopic video is a promising avenue for longitudinal radiation-free analysis of sinus anatomy and surgical outcomes. Several methods for monocular reconstruction have been proposed, yielding visually pleasant 3D anatomical structures by retrieving relative camera poses with structure-from-motion-type algorithms and fusion of monocular depth estimates. However, due to the complex properties of the underlying algorithms and endoscopic scenes, the reconstruction pipeline may perform poorly or fail unexpectedly. Further, acquiring medical data conveys additional challenges, presenting difficulties in quantitatively benchmarking these models, understanding failure cases, and identifying critical components that contribute to their precision. In this work, we perform a quantitative analysis of a self-supervised approach for sinus reconstruction using endoscopic sequences paired with optical tracking and high-resolution computed tomography acquired from nine ex-vivo specimens. Our results show that the generated reconstructions are in high agreement with the anatomy, yielding an average point-to-mesh error of 0.91 mm between reconstructions and CT segmentations. However, in a point-to-point matching scenario, relevant for endoscope tracking and navigation, we found average target registration errors of 6.58 mm. We identified that pose and depth estimation inaccuracies contribute equally to this error and that locally consistent sequences with shorter trajectories generate more accurate reconstructions. These results suggest that achieving global consistency between relative camera poses and estimated depths with the anatomy is essential. In doing so, we can ensure proper synergy between all components of the pipeline for improved reconstructions that will facilitate clinical application of this innovative technology.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 22, 2023

D3LM: A Discrete DNA Diffusion Language Model for Bidirectional DNA Understanding and Generation

Early DNA foundation models adopted BERT-style training, achieving good performance on DNA understanding tasks but lacking generative capabilities. Recent autoregressive models enable DNA generation, but employ left-to-right causal modeling that is suboptimal for DNA where regulatory relationships are inherently bidirectional. We present D3LM (Discrete DNA Diffusion Language Model), which unifies bidirectional representation learning and DNA generation through masked diffusion. D3LM directly adopts the Nucleotide Transformer (NT) v2 architecture but reformulates the training objective as masked diffusion in discrete DNA space, enabling both bidirectional understanding and generation capabilities within a single model. Compared to NT v2 of the same size, D3LM achieves improved performance on understanding tasks. Notably, on regulatory element generation, D3LM achieves an SFID of 10.92, closely approaching real DNA sequences (7.85) and substantially outperforming the previous best result of 29.16 from autoregressive models. Our work suggests diffusion language models as a promising paradigm for unified DNA foundation models. We further present the first systematic study of masked diffusion models in the DNA domain, investigating practical design choices such as tokenization schemes and sampling strategies, thereby providing empirical insights and a solid foundation for future research. D3LM has been released at https://huggingface.co/collections/Hengchang-Liu/d3lm.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 2

3D-MuPPET: 3D Multi-Pigeon Pose Estimation and Tracking

Markerless methods for animal posture tracking have been rapidly developing recently, but frameworks and benchmarks for tracking large animal groups in 3D are still lacking. To overcome this gap in the literature, we present 3D-MuPPET, a framework to estimate and track 3D poses of up to 10 pigeons at interactive speed using multiple camera views. We train a pose estimator to infer 2D keypoints and bounding boxes of multiple pigeons, then triangulate the keypoints to 3D. For identity matching of individuals in all views, we first dynamically match 2D detections to global identities in the first frame, then use a 2D tracker to maintain IDs across views in subsequent frames. We achieve comparable accuracy to a state of the art 3D pose estimator in terms of median error and Percentage of Correct Keypoints. Additionally, we benchmark the inference speed of 3D-MuPPET, with up to 9.45 fps in 2D and 1.89 fps in 3D, and perform quantitative tracking evaluation, which yields encouraging results. Finally, we showcase two novel applications for 3D-MuPPET. First, we train a model with data of single pigeons and achieve comparable results in 2D and 3D posture estimation for up to 5 pigeons. Second, we show that 3D-MuPPET also works in outdoors without additional annotations from natural environments. Both use cases simplify the domain shift to new species and environments, largely reducing annotation effort needed for 3D posture tracking. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a framework for 2D/3D animal posture and trajectory tracking that works in both indoor and outdoor environments for up to 10 individuals. We hope that the framework can open up new opportunities in studying animal collective behaviour and encourages further developments in 3D multi-animal posture tracking.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 29, 2023

GraphEcho: Graph-Driven Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Echocardiogram Video Segmentation

Echocardiogram video segmentation plays an important role in cardiac disease diagnosis. This paper studies the unsupervised domain adaption (UDA) for echocardiogram video segmentation, where the goal is to generalize the model trained on the source domain to other unlabelled target domains. Existing UDA segmentation methods are not suitable for this task because they do not model local information and the cyclical consistency of heartbeat. In this paper, we introduce a newly collected CardiacUDA dataset and a novel GraphEcho method for cardiac structure segmentation. Our GraphEcho comprises two innovative modules, the Spatial-wise Cross-domain Graph Matching (SCGM) and the Temporal Cycle Consistency (TCC) module, which utilize prior knowledge of echocardiogram videos, i.e., consistent cardiac structure across patients and centers and the heartbeat cyclical consistency, respectively. These two modules can better align global and local features from source and target domains, improving UDA segmentation results. Experimental results showed that our GraphEcho outperforms existing state-of-the-art UDA segmentation methods. Our collected dataset and code will be publicly released upon acceptance. This work will lay a new and solid cornerstone for cardiac structure segmentation from echocardiogram videos. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/GraphEcho

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 20, 2023

BAMM: Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model

Generating human motion from text has been dominated by denoising motion models either through diffusion or generative masking process. However, these models face great limitations in usability by requiring prior knowledge of the motion length. Conversely, autoregressive motion models address this limitation by adaptively predicting motion endpoints, at the cost of degraded generation quality and editing capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model (BAMM), a novel text-to-motion generation framework. BAMM consists of two key components: (1) a motion tokenizer that transforms 3D human motion into discrete tokens in latent space, and (2) a masked self-attention transformer that autoregressively predicts randomly masked tokens via a hybrid attention masking strategy. By unifying generative masked modeling and autoregressive modeling, BAMM captures rich and bidirectional dependencies among motion tokens, while learning the probabilistic mapping from textual inputs to motion outputs with dynamically-adjusted motion sequence length. This feature enables BAMM to simultaneously achieving high-quality motion generation with enhanced usability and built-in motion editability. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that BAMM surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative measures. Our project page is available at https://exitudio.github.io/BAMM-page

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024

Follow-Your-Emoji-Faster: Towards Efficient, Fine-Controllable, and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation

We present Follow-Your-Emoji-Faster, an efficient diffusion-based framework for freestyle portrait animation driven by facial landmarks. The main challenges in this task are preserving the identity of the reference portrait, accurately transferring target expressions, and maintaining long-term temporal consistency while ensuring generation efficiency. To address identity preservation and accurate expression retargeting, we enhance Stable Diffusion with two key components: a expression-aware landmarks as explicit motion signals, which improve motion alignment, support exaggerated expressions, and reduce identity leakage; and a fine-grained facial loss that leverages both expression and facial masks to better capture subtle expressions and faithfully preserve the reference appearance. With these components, our model supports controllable and expressive animation across diverse portrait types, including real faces, cartoons, sculptures, and animals. However, diffusion-based frameworks typically struggle to efficiently generate long-term stable animation results, which remains a core challenge in this task. To address this, we propose a progressive generation strategy for stable long-term animation, and introduce a Taylor-interpolated cache, achieving a 2.6X lossless acceleration. These two strategies ensure that our method produces high-quality results efficiently, making it user-friendly and accessible. Finally, we introduce EmojiBench++, a more comprehensive benchmark comprising diverse portraits, driving videos, and landmark sequences. Extensive evaluations on EmojiBench++ demonstrate that Follow-Your-Emoji-Faster achieves superior performance in both animation quality and controllability. The code, training dataset and benchmark will be found in https://follow-your-emoji.github.io/.

  • 14 authors
·
Sep 20, 2025

ARIG: Autoregressive Interactive Head Generation for Real-time Conversations

Face-to-face communication, as a common human activity, motivates the research on interactive head generation. A virtual agent can generate motion responses with both listening and speaking capabilities based on the audio or motion signals of the other user and itself. However, previous clip-wise generation paradigm or explicit listener/speaker generator-switching methods have limitations in future signal acquisition, contextual behavioral understanding, and switching smoothness, making it challenging to be real-time and realistic. In this paper, we propose an autoregressive (AR) based frame-wise framework called ARIG to realize the real-time generation with better interaction realism. To achieve real-time generation, we model motion prediction as a non-vector-quantized AR process. Unlike discrete codebook-index prediction, we represent motion distribution using diffusion procedure, achieving more accurate predictions in continuous space. To improve interaction realism, we emphasize interactive behavior understanding (IBU) and detailed conversational state understanding (CSU). In IBU, based on dual-track dual-modal signals, we summarize short-range behaviors through bidirectional-integrated learning and perform contextual understanding over long ranges. In CSU, we use voice activity signals and context features of IBU to understand the various states (interruption, feedback, pause, etc.) that exist in actual conversations. These serve as conditions for the final progressive motion prediction. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our model.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025 1