Siyuan Wang, Dianyi Wang, Chengxing Zhou, Zejun Li, Zhihao Fan, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Contemporary diffusion models built upon U-Net or Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures have revolutionized image generation through transformer-based attention mechanisms. The prevailing paradigm has commonly employed self-attention with quadratic computational complexity to handle global spatial relationships in complex images, thereby synthesizing high-fidelity images with coherent visual semantics.Contrary to conventional wisdom, our systematic layer-wise analysis reveals an interesting discrepancy: self-attention in pre-trained diffusion models predominantly exhibits localized attention patterns, closely resembling convolutional inductive biases. This suggests that global interactions in self-attention may be less critical than commonly assumed.Driven by this, we propose \(Δ\)ConvFusion to replace conventional self-attention modules with Pyramid Convolution Blocks (\(Δ\)ConvBlocks).By distilling attention patterns into localized convolutional operations while keeping other components frozen, \(Δ\)ConvFusion achieves performance comparable to transformer-based counterparts while reducing computational cost by 6929$\times$ and surpassing LinFusion by 5.42$\times$ in efficiency--all without compromising generative fidelity.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in the development of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Benefiting from the strong language backbones and efficient cross-modal alignment strategies, LVLMs exhibit surprising capabilities to perceive visual signals and perform visually grounded reasoning. However, the capabilities of LVLMs have not been comprehensively and quantitatively evaluated. Most existing multi-modal benchmarks require task-oriented input-output formats, posing great challenges to automatically assess the free-form text output of LVLMs. To effectively leverage the annotations available and reduce the manual efforts required for constructing new benchmarks, we propose to re-formulate existing benchmarks into unified LVLM-compatible formats. Through systematic data collection and reformulation, we present ReForm-Eval benchmark, offering substantial data for evaluating various capabilities of LVLMs. Through extensive experiments and analysis in ReForm-Eval, we demonstrate the comprehensiveness and reliability of ReForm-Eval in assessing various LVLMs. Our benchmark and evaluation framework is now available at https://github.com/FudanDISC/ReForm-Eval