While deep generative models have significantly advanced representation learning, they may inherit or amplify biases and fairness issues by encoding sensitive attributes alongside predictive features. Enforcing strict independence in disentanglement is often unrealistic when target and sensitive factors are naturally correlated. To address this challenge, we propose CAD-VAE(Correlation-Aware Disentangled VAE), which introduces a correlated latent code to capture the information shared between the target and sensitive attributes. Given this correlated latent, our method effectively separates overlapping factors without extra domain knowledge by directly minimizing the conditional mutual information between target and sensitive codes. A relevance-driven optimization strategy refines the correlated code by efficiently capturing essential correlated features and eliminating redundancy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CAD-VAE produces fairer representations, realistic counterfactuals, and improved fairness-aware image editing.

Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Multimodal neuroimaging provides complementary structural and functional insights into both human brain organization and disease-related dynamics. Recent studies demonstrate enhanced diagnostic sensitivity for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) through synergistic integration of neuroimaging data (e.g., sMRI, fMRI) with tabular data (e.g., behavioral and cognitive tests). However, the intrinsic heterogeneity across modalities (e.g., 4D spatiotemporal fMRI dynamics vs. 3D anatomical sMRI structure) presents critical challenges for discriminative feature fusion, often leading to information loss or biased fusion. To bridge this gap, we propose M2M-AlignNet: a multimodal co-attention network with latent alignment for early AD diagnosis using sMRI and fMRI. At the core of our approach is a multi-patch-to-multi-patch (M2M) contrastive loss function that quantifies and reduces representational discrepancies via weighted patch correspondence, explicitly aligning fMRI components across brain regions with their sMRI structural substrates without one-to-one constraints. Additionally, we propose a latent-as-query co-attention module to autonomously discover fusion patterns, circumventing modality prioritization biases while minimizing feature redundancy. We conduct extensive experiments to confirm the effectiveness of our method and highlight the correspondence between fMRI and sMRI as AD biomarkers.

The deployment of automated pavement defect detection is often hindered by poor cross-domain generalization. Supervised detectors achieve strong in-domain accuracy but require costly re-annotation for new environments, while standard self-supervised methods capture generic features and remain vulnerable to domain shift. We propose PROBE, a self-supervised framework that visually probes target domains without labels. PROBE introduces a Self-supervised Prompt Enhancement Module (SPEM), which derives defect-aware prompts from unlabeled target data to guide a frozen ViT backbone, and a Domain-Aware Prompt Alignment (DAPA) objective, which aligns prompt-conditioned source and target representations. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks show that PROBE consistently outperforms strong supervised, self-supervised, and adaptation baselines, achieving robust zero-shot transfer, improved resilience to domain variations, and high data efficiency in few-shot adaptation. These results highlight self-supervised prompting as a practical direction for building scalable and adaptive visual inspection systems. Source code is publicly available: https://github.com/xixiaouab/PROBE/tree/main

Accurate road damage detection is crucial for timely infrastructure maintenance and public safety, but existing vision-only datasets and models lack the rich contextual understanding that textual information can provide. To address this limitation, we introduce RoadBench, the first multimodal benchmark for comprehensive road damage understanding. This dataset pairs high-resolution images of road damages with detailed textual descriptions, providing a richer context for model training. We also present RoadCLIP, a novel vision-language model that builds upon CLIP by integrating domain-specific enhancements. It includes a disease-aware positional encoding that captures spatial patterns of road defects and a mechanism for injecting road-condition priors to refine the model’s understanding of road damages. We further employ a GPT-driven data generation pipeline to expand the image–text pairs in Road-Bench, greatly increasing data diversity without exhaustive manual annotation. Experiments demonstrate that Road-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on road damage recognition tasks, significantly outperforming existing vision-only models by 19.2%. These results highlight the advantages of integrating visual and textual information for enhanced road condition analysis, setting new benchmarks for the field and paving the way for more effective infrastructure monitoring through multimodal learning.

3D medical image segmentation is a challenging task with crucial implications for disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Recent advances in deep learning have significantly enhanced fully supervised medical image segmentation. However, this approach heavily relies on labor-intensive and time-consuming fully annotated ground-truth labels, particularly for 3D volumes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel probabilistic-aware weakly supervised learning pipeline, specifically designed for 3D medical imaging. Our pipeline integrates three innovative components: a Probability-based Pseudo-Label Generation technique for synthesizing dense segmentation masks from sparse annotations, a Probabilistic Multi-head Self-Attention network for robust feature extraction within our Probabilistic Transformer Network, and a Probability-informed Segmentation Loss Function to enhance training with annotation confidence. Demonstrating significant advances, our approach not only rivals the performance of fully supervised methods but also surpasses existing weakly supervised methods in CT and MRI datasets, achieving up to 18.1% improvement in Dice scores for certain organs. The code is available at https://github.com/runminjiang/PW4MedSeg .

3D skeletal action recognition has emerged as a powerful alternative to traditional RGB and depth-based approaches, offering robustness to environmental variations, computational efficiency, and enhanced privacy. Despite remarkable progress, current research remains fragmented across diverse input representations and lacks evaluation under scenarios that reflect real-world challenges. This paper presents a representation-centric review of supervised skeletal action recognition, systematically categorizing state-of-the-art methods by their input feature types: joint coordinates, bone vectors, motion flows, and extended representations, and analyzing how these choices influence spatiotemporal modeling strategies. Building on the insights from this review, we introduce ANUBIS, a large-scale, challenging dataset designed to address critical gaps in existing benchmarks. ANUBIS incorporates multi-view recordings with back-view perspectives, complex multi-person interactions, fine-grained and violent actions, and contemporary social behaviors. We benchmark a diverse set of state-of-the-art models on ANUBIS and conduct an in-depth analysis of how different feature types affect recognition performance across 102 action categories. Our results show strong action-feature dependencies, highlight the limitations of naïve multi-representational fusion, and point toward the need for task-aware, semantically aligned integration strategies. This work offers both a comprehensive foundation and a practical benchmarking resource, aiming to guide the next generation of robust, generalizable skeleton-based action recognition systems for complex real-world scenarios. The dataset, benchmarking framework, and code are available at https://yliu1082.github.io/ANUBIS/ .

Teacher-student frameworks have emerged as a leading approach in semi-supervised medical image segmentation, demonstrating strong performance across various tasks. However, the learning effects are still limited by the strong correlation and unreliable knowledge transfer process between teacher and student networks. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel switching Dual-Student architecture that strategically selects the most reliable student at each iteration to enhance dual-student collaboration and prevent error reinforcement. We also introduce a strategy of Loss-Aware Exponential Moving Average to dynamically ensure that the teacher absorbs meaningful information from students, improving the quality of pseudo-labels. Our plug-and-play framework is extensively evaluated on 3D medical image segmentation datasets, where it outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving segmentation accuracy under limited supervision.

Object detection has witnessed remarkable advancements over the past decade, largely driven by breakthroughs in deep learning and the proliferation of large-scale datasets. However, the domain of road damage detection remains relatively underexplored, despite its critical significance for applications such as infrastructure maintenance and road safety. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a novel top-down benchmark that offers a complementary perspective to existing datasets, specifically tailored for road damage detection. Our proposed Top-Down Road Damage Detection Dataset (TD-RD) includes three primary categories of road damage—cracks, potholes, and patches—captured from an top-down viewpoint. The dataset consists of 7,088 high-resolution images, encompassing 12,882 annotated instances of road damage. Additionally, we present a novel real-time object detection framework, TD-YOLOV10, designed to handle the unique challenges posed by the TD-RD dataset. Comparative studies with state-of-the-art models demonstrate competitive baseline results. By releasing TD-RD, we aim to accelerate research in this crucial area. A sample of the dataset will be made publicly available upon the paper’s acceptance.

Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) has emerged as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning paradigm for vision transformers, with conventional approaches utilizing dataset-level prompts that remain the same across all input instances. We observe that this strategy results in sub-optimal performance due to high variance in downstream datasets. To address this challenge, we propose Visual Instance-aware Prompt Tuning (ViaPT), which generates instance-aware prompts based on each individual input and fuses them with dataset-level prompts, leveraging Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to retain important prompting information. Moreover, we reveal that VPT-Deep and VPT-Shallow represent two corner cases based on a conceptual understanding, in which they fail to effectively capture instance-specific information, while random dimension reduction on prompts only yields performance between the two extremes. Instead, ViaPT overcomes these limitations by balancing dataset-level and instance-level knowledge, while reducing the amount of learnable parameters compared to VPT-Deep. Extensive experiments across 34 diverse datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, establishing a new paradigm for analyzing and optimizing visual prompts for vision transformers.

Decoding visual experiences from fMRI offers a powerful avenue to understand human perception and develop advanced brain-computer interfaces. However, current progress often prioritizes maximizing reconstruction fidelity while overlooking interpretability, an essential aspect for deriving neuroscientific insight. To address this gap, we propose MoRE-Brain, a neuro-inspired framework designed for high-fidelity, adaptable, and interpretable visual reconstruction. MoRE-Brain uniquely employs a hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts architecture where distinct experts process fMRI signals from functionally related voxel groups, mimicking specialized brain networks. The experts are first trained to encode fMRI into the frozen CLIP space. A finetuned diffusion model then synthesizes images, guided by expert outputs through a novel dual-stage routing mechanism that dynamically weighs expert contributions across the diffusion process. MoRE-Brain offers three main advancements: First, it introduces a novel Mixture-of-Experts architecture grounded in brain network principles for neuro-decoding. Second, it achieves efficient cross-subject generalization by sharing core expert networks while adapting only subject-specific routers. Third, it provides enhanced mechanistic insight, as the explicit routing reveals precisely how different modeled brain regions shape the semantic and spatial attributes of the reconstructed image. Extensive experiments validate MoRE-Brain’s high reconstruction fidelity, with bottleneck analyses further demonstrating its effective utilization of fMRI signals, distinguishing genuine neural decoding from over-reliance on generative priors. Consequently, MoRE-Brain marks a substantial advance towards more generalizable and interpretable fMRI-based visual decoding.

Uncertainty estimation for unlabeled data is crucial to active learning. With a deep neural network employed as the backbone model, the data selection process is highly challenging due to the potential over-confidence of the model inference. Existing methods resort to special learning fashions (e.g. adversarial) or auxiliary models to address this challenge. This tends to result in complex and inefficient pipelines, which would render the methods impractical. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm that leverages noise stability to estimate data uncertainty. The key idea is to measure the output derivation from the original observation when the model parameters are randomly perturbed by noise. We provide theoretical analyses by leveraging the small Gaussian noise theory and demonstrate that our method favors a subset with large and diverse gradients. Our method is generally applicable in various tasks, including computer vision, natural language processing, and structural data analysis. It achieves competitive performance compared against state-of-the-art active learning baselines.

The accurate segmentation of medical images is crucial for diagnosing and treating diseases. Recent studies demonstrate that vision transformer-based methods have significantly improved performance in medical image segmentation, primarily due to their superior ability to establish global relationships among features and adaptability to various inputs. However, these methods struggle with the low signal-to-noise ratio inherent to medical images. Additionally, the effective utilization of channel and spatial information, which are essential for medical image segmentation, is limited by the representation capacity of self-attention. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-dimension Transformer with Attention-based Filtering (MDT-AF), which redesigns the patch embedding and self-attention mechanism for medical image segmentation. MDT-AF incorporates an attention-based feature filtering mechanism into the patch embedding blocks and employs a coarse-to-fine process to mitigate the impact of a low signal-to-noise ratio. To better capture complex structures in medical images, MDT-AF extends self-attention and introduces an interaction mechanism to build and enhance feature relationships between dimensions, which can achieve richer feature representations across the spatial and channel dimensions. Experimental results on three public medical image segmentation benchmarks show that MDT-AF achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

While deep learning succeeds in a wide range of tasks, it highly depends on the massive collection of annotated data which is expensive and time-consuming. To lower the cost of data annotation, active learning has been proposed to interactively query an oracle to annotate a small proportion of informative samples in an unlabeled dataset. Inspired by the fact that the samples with higher loss are usually more informative to the model than the samples with lower loss, in this article we present a novel deep active learning approach that queries the oracle for data annotation when the unlabeled sample is believed to incorporate high loss. The core of our approach is a measurement temporal output discrepancy (TOD) that estimates the sample loss by evaluating the discrepancy of outputs given by models at different optimization steps. Our theoretical investigation shows that TOD lower-bounds the accumulated sample loss thus it can be used to select informative unlabeled samples. On basis of TOD, we further develop an effective unlabeled data sampling strategy as well as an unsupervised learning criterion for active learning. Due to the simplicity of TOD, our methods are efficient, flexible, and task-agnostic. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performances than the state-of-the-art active learning methods on image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. In addition, we show that TOD can be utilized to select the best model of potentially the highest testing accuracy from a pool of candidate models.

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models, such as BERT, has shown enormous success among various NLP tasks. Though simple and effective, the process of fine-tuning has been found unstable, which often leads to unexpected poor performance. To increase stability and generalizability, most existing works resort to maintaining the parameters or representations of pre-trained models during fine-tuning. Nevertheless, very little work explores mining the reliable part of pre-learned information that can help to stabilize fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel solution in which we fine-tune BERT with stabilized cross-layer mutual information. Our method aims to preserve the reliable behaviors of cross-layer information propagation, instead of preserving the information itself, of the pre-trained model. Therefore, our method circumvents the domain conflicts between pre-trained and target tasks. We conduct extensive experiments with popular pre-trained BERT variants on NLP datasets, demonstrating the universal effectiveness and robustness of our method.

Transfer learning has been a popular learning paradigm in the deep learning era, especially in annotation-insufficient scenarios. Better ImageNet pre-trained models have been demonstrated, from the perspective of architecture, by previous research to have better transferability to downstream tasks[26]. However, in this paper, we find that during the same pre-training process, models at middle epochs, which are inadequately pre-trained, can outperform fully trained models when used as feature extractors (FE), while the fine-tuning (FT) performance still grows with the source performance. This reveals that there is not a solid positive correlation between top-1 accuracy on ImageNet and the transferring result on target data. Based on the contradictory phenomenon between FE and FT that a better feature extractor fails to be fine-tuned better accordingly, we conduct comprehensive analyses on features before the softmax layer to provide insightful explanations. Our discoveries suggest that, during pre-training, models tend to first learn spectral components corresponding to large singular values and the residual components contribute more when fine-tuning.

Central to active learning (AL) is what data should be selected for annotation. Existing works attempt to select highly uncertain or informative data for annotation. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how selected data impacts the test performance of the task model used in AL. In this work, we explore such an impact by theoretically proving that selecting unlabeled data of higher gradient norm leads to a lower upper-bound of test loss, resulting in a better test performance. However, due to the lack of label information, directly computing gradient norm for unlabeled data is infeasible. To address this challenge, we propose two schemes, namely expected-gradnorm and entropy-gradnorm. The former computes the gradient norm by constructing an expected empirical loss while the latter constructs an unsupervised loss with entropy. Furthermore, we integrate the two schemes in a universal AL framework. We evaluate our method on classical image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. To demonstrate its competency in domain applications and its robustness to noise, we also validate our method on a cellular imaging analysis task, namely cryo-Electron Tomography subtomogram classification. Results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance against the state of the art. We refer readers to https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.05683.pdf for the full version of this paper which includes the appendix and source code link.

Arbitrary image style transfer is a challenging task which aims to stylize a content image conditioned on arbitrary style images. In this task the feature-level content-style transformation plays a vital role for proper fusion of features. Existing feature transformation algorithms often suffer from loss of content or style details, non-natural stroke patterns, and unstable training. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes a new feature-level style transformation technique, named Style Projection, for parameter-free, fast, and effective content-style transformation. This paper further presents a real-time feed-forward model to leverage Style Projection for arbitrary image style transfer, which includes a regularization term for matching the semantics between input contents and stylized outputs. Extensive qualitative analysis, quantitative evaluation, and user study have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.

Cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) is an emerging 3D imaging technique which shows great potentials in structural biology research. One of the main challenges is to perform classification of macromolecules captured by cryo-ET. Re-cent efforts exploit deep learning to address this challenge. However, training reliable deep models usually requires a huge amount of labeled data in supervised fashion. Annotating cryo-ET data is arguably very expensive. Deep Active Learning (DAL) can be used to reduce labeling cost while not sacrificing the task performance too much. Nevertheless, most existing methods resort to auxiliary models or complex fashions (e.g. adversarial learning) for uncertainty estimation, the core of DAL. These models need to be highly customized for cryo-ET tasks which require 3D networks, and extra efforts are also indispensable for tuning these models, rendering a difficulty of deployment on cryo-ET tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel metric for data selection in DAL, which can also be leveraged as a regularizer of the empirical loss, further boosting the task model. We demonstrate the superiority of our method via extensive experiments on both simulated and real cryo-ET datasets. Our source Code and Appendix can be found at this URL.

While deep learning succeeds in a wide range of tasks, it highly depends on the massive collection of annotated data which is expensive and time-consuming. To lower the cost of data annotation, active learning has been proposed to interactively query an oracle to annotate a small proportion of informative samples in an unlabeled dataset. Inspired by the fact that the samples with higher loss are usually more informative to the model than the samples with lower loss, in this paper we present a novel deep active learning approach that queries the oracle for data annotation when the unlabeled sample is believed to incorporate high loss. The core of our approach is a measurement Temporal Output Discrepancy (TOD) that estimates the sample loss by evaluating the discrepancy of outputs given by models at different optimization steps. Our theoretical investigation shows that TOD lower-bounds the accumulated sample loss thus it can be used to select informative unlabeled samples. On basis of TOD, we further develop an effective unlabeled data sampling strategy as well as an unsupervised learning criterion that enhances model performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Due to the simplicity of TOD, our active learning approach is efficient, flexible, and task-agnostic. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performances than the state-of-the-art active learning methods on image classification and semantic segmentation tasks.

Image generation from sketch is a popular and well-studied computer vision problem. However, the inverse problem image-to-sketch (I2S) synthesis still remains open and challenging, let alone image-to-scene sketch (I2S2) synthesis, especially when full-scene sketch generations are highly desired. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating full-scene sketch representations from natural scene images, aiming to generate outputs that approximate hand-drawn scene sketches. Specifically, we exploit generative adversarial models to produce full-scene sketches given arbitrary input images that are actually conditions which are incorporated to guide the distribution mapping in the context of adversarial learning. To advance the use of such conditions, we further investigate edge detection solutions and propose to utilize Holistically-nested Edge Detection (HED) maps to condition the generative model. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the proposed framework and provide detailed quantitative and qualitative evaluations to demonstrate its effectiveness. In addition, we also demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed framework by using different conditional inputs, such as the Canny edge detector.

Real-world image denoising is a challenging but significant problem in computer vision. Unlike Gaussian denoising on which most existing methods focus, the real-world noise is nonadditive, and the distributions are difficult to model. This leads to unsatisfactory performance when applying a Gaussian denoising approach on real-world denoising problems. In this paper, we propose a simple framework for effective real-world image denoising. Specifically, we investigate the intrinsic properties of the Gaussian denoising prior and demonstrate this prior can aid real-world image denoising. To leverage this prior, we fine-tune it for only one epoch on a recently proposed real-world image denoising dataset, and the learned model can enhance both visual and quantitative results (peak-signal-noise-ratio) for real-world image denoising tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and indicate that the Gaussian denoising prior can be also transferred to real-world image denoising by exploiting appropriate training schemes.

Deep transfer learning recently has acquired significant research interest. It makes use of pre-trained models that are learned from a source domain, and utilizes these models for the tasks in a target domain. Model-based deep transfer learning is probably the most frequently used method. However, very little research work has been devoted to enhancing deep transfer learning by focusing on the influence of data. In this paper, we propose an instance-based approach to improve deep transfer learning in a target domain. Specifically, we choose a pre-trained model from a source domain and apply this model to estimate the influence of training samples in a target domain. Then we optimize the training data of the target domain by removing the training samples that will lower the performance of the pre-trained model. We later either fine-tune the pre-trained model with the optimized training data in the target domain, or build a new model which is initialized partially based on the pre-trained model, and fine-tune it with the optimized training data in the target domain. Using this approach, transfer learning can help deep learning models to capture more useful features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on boosting the quality of deep learning models for some common computer vision tasks, such as image classification.

Deep learning models learn to fit training data while they are highly expected to generalize well to testing data. Most works aim at finding such models by creatively designing architectures and fine-tuning parameters. To adapt to particular tasks, hand-crafted information such as image prior has also been incorporated into end-to-end learning. However, very little progress has been made on investigating how an individual training sample will influence the generalization ability of a model. In other words, to achieve high generalization accuracy, do we really need all the samples in a training dataset? In this paper, we demonstrate that deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks may not favor all training samples, and generalization accuracy can be further improved by dropping those unfavorable samples. Specifically, the influence of removing a training sample is quantifiable, and we propose a Two-Round Training approach, aiming to achieve higher generalization accuracy. We locate unfavorable samples after the first round of training, and then retrain the model from scratch with the reduced training dataset in the second round. Since our approach is essentially different from fine-tuning or further training, the computational cost should not be a concern. Our extensive experimental results indicate that, with identical settings, the proposed approach can boost performance of the well-known networks on both high-level computer vision problems such as image classification, and low-level vision problems such as image denoising.