Multimodal language models (MLLMs) are increasingly being applied in real-world environments, necessitating their ability to interpret 3D spaces and comprehend temporal dynamics. Current methods often rely on specialized architectural designs or task-specific fine-tuning to achieve this. We introduce Coarse Correspondences, a simple lightweight method that enhances MLLMs’ spatial-temporal reasoning with 2D images as input, without modifying the architecture or requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Our method uses a lightweight tracking model to identify primary object correspondences between frames in a video or across different image viewpoints, and then conveys this information to MLLMs through visual prompting. We demonstrate that this simple training-free approach brings substantial gains to GPT4-V/O consistently on four benchmarks that require spatial-temporal reasoning, including +20.5% improvement on ScanQA, +9.7% on OpenEQA’s episodic memory subset, +6.0% on the long-form video benchmark EgoSchema, and +11% on the R2R navigation benchmark. Additionally, we show that Coarse Correspondences can also enhance open-source MLLMs’ spatial reasoning (by +6.9% on ScanQA) when applied in both training and inference and that the improvement can generalize to unseen datasets such as SQA3D (+3.1%). Taken together, we show that Coarse Correspondences effectively and efficiently boosts models’ performance on downstream tasks requiring spatial-temporal reasoning.

Many real-world user queries (e.g. *"How do to make egg fried rice?"*) could benefit from systems capable of generating responses with both textual steps with accompanying images, similar to a cookbook. Models designed to generate interleaved text and images face challenges in ensuring consistency within and across these modalities. To address these challenges, we present ISG, a comprehensive evaluation framework for interleaved text-and-image generation. ISG leverages a scene graph structure to capture relationships between text and image blocks, evaluating responses on four levels of granularity: holistic, structural, block-level, and image-specific. This multi-tiered evaluation allows for a nuanced assessment of consistency, coherence, and accuracy, and provides interpretable question-answer feedback. In conjunction with ISG, we introduce a benchmark, ISG-Bench, encompassing 1,150 samples across 8 categories and 21 subcategories. This benchmark dataset includes complex language-vision dependencies and golden answers to evaluate models effectively on vision-centric tasks such as style transfer, a challenging area for current models. Using ISG-Bench, we demonstrate that recent unified vision-language models perform poorly on generating interleaved content. While compositional approaches that combine separate language and image models show a 111% improvement over unified models at the holistic level, their performance remains suboptimal at both block and image levels. To facilitate future work, we develop ISG-Agent, a baseline agent employing a *"plan-execute-refine"* pipeline to invoke tools, achieving a 122% performance improvement.

Data valuation plays a crucial role in machine learning. Existing data valuation methods, mainly focused on discriminative models, overlook generative models that have gained attention recently. In generative models, data valuation measures the impact of training data on generated datasets. Very few existing attempts at data valuation methods designed for deep generative models either concentrate on specific models or lack robustness in their outcomes. Moreover, efficiency still reveals vulnerable shortcomings. We formulate the data valuation problem in generative models from a similarity matching perspective to bridge the gaps. Specifically, we introduce Generative Model Valuator (GMValuator), the first training-free and model-agnostic approach to providing data valuation for image generation tasks. It empowers efficient data valuation through our innovative similarity matching module, calibrates biased contributions by incorporating image quality assessment, and attributes credits to all training samples based on their contributions to the generated samples. Additionally, we introduce four evaluation criteria for assessing data valuation methods in generative models. GMValuator is extensively evaluated on benchmark and high-resolution datasets and various mainstream generative architectures to demonstrate its effectiveness. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ubc-tea/GMValuator.

The visual world around us constantly evolves, from real-time news and social media trends to global infrastructure changes visible through satellite imagery and augmented reality enhancements. However, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which automate many tasks, struggle to stay current, limited by the cutoff dates in their fixed training datasets.To quantify this stagnation, we introduce LiveVQA, the first-of-its-kind dataset featuring 107,143 samples and 12 categories data specifically designed to support research in both seeking and updating with live visual knowledge.Drawing from recent news articles, video platforms, and academic publications in April 2024-May 2025, LiveVQA enables evaluation of how models handle latest visual information beyond their knowledge boundaries and how current methods help to update them. Our comprehensive benchmarking of 17 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals significant performance gaps on content beyond knowledge cutoff, and tool-use or agentic visual seeking framework drastically gain an average of 327% improvement. Furthermore, we explore parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods to update MLLMs with new visual knowledge.We dive deeply to the critical balance between adapter capacity and model capability when updating MLLMs with new visual knowledge. All the experimental dataset and source code are publicly available at: https://livevqa.github.io.

Despite thousands of researchers, engineers, and artists actively working on improving text-to-image generation models, systems often fail to produce images that accurately align with the text inputs. We introduce TIFA (Text-to-Image Faithfulness evaluation with question Answering), an automatic evaluation metric that measures the faithfulness of a generated image to its text input via visual question answering (VQA). Specifically, given a text input, we automatically generate several question-answer pairs using a language model. We calculate image faithfulness by checking whether existing VQA models can answer these questions using the generated image. TIFA is a reference-free metric that allows for fine-grained and interpretable evaluations of generated images. TIFA also has better correlations with human judgments than existing metrics. Based on this approach, we introduce TIFA v1.0, a benchmark consisting of 4K diverse text inputs and 25K questions across 12 categories (object, counting, etc.). We present a comprehensive evaluation of existing text-to-image models using TIFA v1.0 and highlight the limitations and challenges of current models. For instance, we find that current text-to-image models, despite doing well on color and material, still struggle in counting, spatial relations, and composing multiple objects. We hope our benchmark will help carefully measure the research progress in text-to-image synthesis and provide valuable insights for further research.1

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the new trend of generative models and have demonstrated a powerful ability of conditional synthesis. Among those, text-to-image diffusion models pre-trained on large-scale image-text pairs are highly controllable by customizable prompts. Unlike the unconditional generative models that focus on low-level attributes and details, text-to-image diffusion models contain more high-level knowledge thanks to the vision-language pre-training. In this paper, we propose VPD (Visual Perception with pre-trained Diffusion models), a new framework that exploits the semantic information of a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model in visual perception tasks. Instead of using the pre-trained denoising autoencoder in a diffusion-based pipeline, we simply use it as a backbone and aim to study how to take full advantage of the learned knowledge. Specifically, we prompt the denoising decoder with proper textual inputs and refine the text features with an adapter, leading to a better alignment to the pre-trained stage and making the visual contents interact with the text prompts. We also propose to utilize the cross-attention maps between the visual features and the text features to provide explicit guidance. Compared with other pre-training methods, we show that vision-language pre-trained diffusion models can be faster adapted to downstream visual perception tasks using the proposed VPD. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation, referring image segmentation, and depth estimation demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, VPD attains 0.254 RMSE on NYUv2 depth estimation and 73.3% oIoU on RefCOCO-val referring image segmentation, establishing new records on these two benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/wl-zhao/VPD.

Most widely-used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) end up with a global average pooling layer and a fully-connected layer. In this pipeline, a certain class is represented by one template vector preserved in the feature banks of fully-connected layer. Yet, a class may have multiple properties useful for recognition while the above formulation only captures one of them. Therefore, it is desired to represent a class by multiple proxies. However, directly adding multiple linear layers turns out to be a trivial solution as no improvement can be observed. To tackle this problem, we adopt optimal transport theory to calculate a non-uniform matching flow between the elements in the feature map of a sample and the proxies of a class in a closed way. By doing so, the models are enabled to achieve partial matching as both the feature maps and the proxy set can now focus on a subset of elements from the counterpart. Such formulation also enables us to embed the samples into the Wasserstein metric space, which has many advantages over the original Euclidean space. This formulation can be achieved by a lightweight iterative algorithm, which can be easily embedded into the automatic differentiation framework. Empirical studies are performed on two widely-used classification datasets, CIFAR, and ILSVRC2012, and the substantial improvements on these two benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Building reliable object detectors that are robust to domain shifts, such as various changes in context, viewpoint, and object appearances, is critical for real-world applications. In this work, we study the effectiveness of auxiliary self-supervised tasks to improve the out-of-distribution generalization of object detectors. Inspired by the principle of maximum entropy, we introduce a novel self-supervised task, instance-level temporal cycle confusion (CycConf), which operates on the region features of the object detectors. For each object, the task is to find the most different object proposals in the adjacent frame in a video and then cycle back to itself for self-supervision. CycConf encourages the object detector to explore invariant structures across instances under various motions, which leads to improved model robustness in unseen domains at test time. We observe consistent out-of-domain performance improvements when training object detectors in tandem with self-supervised tasks on various do-main adaptation benchmarks with static images (Cityscapes, Foggy Cityscapes, Sim10K) and large-scale video datasets (BDD100K and Waymo open data)1.

3D point cloud understanding has made great progress in recent years. However, one major bottleneck is the scarcity of annotated real datasets, especially compared to 2D object detection tasks, since a large amount of labor is involved in annotating the real scans of a scene. A promising solution to this problem is to make better use of the synthetic dataset, which consists of CAD object models, to boost the learning on real datasets. This can be achieved by the pre-training and fine-tuning procedure. However, recent work on 3D pre-training exhibits failure when transfer features learned on synthetic objects to other real-world applications. In this work, we put forward a new method called RandomRooms to accomplish this objective. In particular, we propose to generate random layouts of a scene by making use of the objects in the synthetic CAD dataset and learn the 3D scene representation by applying object-level contrastive learning on two random scenes generated from the same set of synthetic objects. The model pre-trained in this way can serve as a better initialization when later fine-tuning on the 3D object detection task. Empirically, we show consistent improvement in downstream 3D detection tasks on several base models, especially when less training data are used, which strongly demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization of our method. Benefiting from the rich semantic knowledge and diverse objects from synthetic data, our method establishes the new state-of-the-art on widely-used 3D detection benchmarks ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D. We expect our attempt to provide a new perspective for bridging object and scene-level 3D understanding.

Attention is sparse in vision transformers. We observe the final prediction in vision transformers is only based on a subset of most informative tokens, which is sufficient for accurate image recognition. Based on this observation, we propose a dynamic token sparsification framework to prune redundant tokens progressively and dynamically based on the input. Specifically, we devise a lightweight prediction module to estimate the importance score of each token given the current features. The module is added to different layers to prune redundant tokens hierarchically. To optimize the prediction module in an end-to-end manner, we propose an attention masking strategy to differentiably prune a token by blocking its interactions with other tokens. Benefiting from the nature of self-attention, the unstructured sparse tokens are still hardware friendly, which makes our framework easy to achieve actual speed-up. By hierarchically pruning 66% of the input tokens, our method greatly reduces 31% $\sim$ 37% FLOPs and improves the throughput by over 40% while the drop of accuracy is within 0.5% for various vision transformers. Equipped with the dynamic token sparsification framework, DynamicViT models can achieve very competitive complexity/accuracy trade-offs compared to state-of-the-art CNNs and vision transformers on ImageNet. Code is available at https://github.com/raoyongming/DynamicViT