Daily Papers

Diffusion models excel at text-to-image generation, especially in subject-driven generation for personalized images. However, existing methods are inefficient due to the subject-specific fine-tuning, which is computationally intensive and hampers efficient deployment. Moreover, existing methods struggle with multi-subject generation as they often blend features among subjects. We present FastComposer which enables efficient, personalized, multi-subject text-to-image generation without fine-tuning. FastComposer uses subject embeddings extracted by an image encoder to augment the generic text conditioning in diffusion models, enabling personalized image generation based on subject images and textual instructions with only forward passes. To address the identity blending problem in the multi-subject generation, FastComposer proposes cross-attention localization supervision during training, enforcing the attention of reference subjects localized to the correct regions in the target images. Naively conditioning on subject embeddings results in subject overfitting. FastComposer proposes delayed subject conditioning in the denoising step to maintain both identity and editability in subject-driven image generation. FastComposer generates images of multiple unseen individuals with different styles, actions, and contexts. It achieves 300times-2500times speedup compared to fine-tuning-based methods and requires zero extra storage for new subjects. FastComposer paves the way for efficient, personalized, and high-quality multi-subject image creation. Code, model, and dataset are available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/fastcomposer.

Transformers are quickly becoming one of the most heavily applied deep learning architectures across modalities, domains, and tasks. In vision, on top of ongoing efforts into plain transformers, hierarchical transformers have also gained significant attention, thanks to their performance and easy integration into existing frameworks. These models typically employ localized attention mechanisms, such as the sliding-window Neighborhood Attention (NA) or Swin Transformer's Shifted Window Self Attention. While effective at reducing self attention's quadratic complexity, local attention weakens two of the most desirable properties of self attention: long range inter-dependency modeling, and global receptive field. In this paper, we introduce Dilated Neighborhood Attention (DiNA), a natural, flexible and efficient extension to NA that can capture more global context and expand receptive fields exponentially at no additional cost. NA's local attention and DiNA's sparse global attention complement each other, and therefore we introduce Dilated Neighborhood Attention Transformer (DiNAT), a new hierarchical vision transformer built upon both. DiNAT variants enjoy significant improvements over strong baselines such as NAT, Swin, and ConvNeXt. Our large model is faster and ahead of its Swin counterpart by 1.6% box AP in COCO object detection, 1.4% mask AP in COCO instance segmentation, and 1.4% mIoU in ADE20K semantic segmentation. Paired with new frameworks, our large variant is the new state of the art panoptic segmentation model on COCO (58.5 PQ) and ADE20K (49.4 PQ), and instance segmentation model on Cityscapes (45.1 AP) and ADE20K (35.4 AP) (no extra data). It also matches the state of the art specialized semantic segmentation models on ADE20K (58.1 mIoU), and ranks second on Cityscapes (84.5 mIoU) (no extra data).

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 \(\Delta\)ConvFusion to replace conventional self-attention modules with Pyramid Convolution Blocks (\(\Delta\)ConvBlocks).By distilling attention patterns into localized convolutional operations while keeping other components frozen, \(\Delta\)ConvFusion achieves performance comparable to transformer-based counterparts while reducing computational cost by 6929times and surpassing LinFusion by 5.42times in efficiency--all without compromising generative fidelity.

Recent advances in sparse voxel representations have significantly improved the quality of 3D content generation, enabling high-resolution modeling with fine-grained geometry. However, existing frameworks suffer from severe computational inefficiencies due to the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms in their two-stage diffusion pipelines. In this work, we propose Ultra3D, an efficient 3D generation framework that significantly accelerates sparse voxel modeling without compromising quality. Our method leverages the compact VecSet representation to efficiently generate a coarse object layout in the first stage, reducing token count and accelerating voxel coordinate prediction. To refine per-voxel latent features in the second stage, we introduce Part Attention, a geometry-aware localized attention mechanism that restricts attention computation within semantically consistent part regions. This design preserves structural continuity while avoiding unnecessary global attention, achieving up to 6.7x speed-up in latent generation. To support this mechanism, we construct a scalable part annotation pipeline that converts raw meshes into part-labeled sparse voxels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ultra3D supports high-resolution 3D generation at 1024 resolution and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both visual fidelity and user preference.

We present personalized residuals and localized attention-guided sampling for efficient concept-driven generation using text-to-image diffusion models. Our method first represents concepts by freezing the weights of a pretrained text-conditioned diffusion model and learning low-rank residuals for a small subset of the model's layers. The residual-based approach then directly enables application of our proposed sampling technique, which applies the learned residuals only in areas where the concept is localized via cross-attention and applies the original diffusion weights in all other regions. Localized sampling therefore combines the learned identity of the concept with the existing generative prior of the underlying diffusion model. We show that personalized residuals effectively capture the identity of a concept in ~3 minutes on a single GPU without the use of regularization images and with fewer parameters than previous models, and localized sampling allows using the original model as strong prior for large parts of the image.

Recent text-to-image diffusion models have reached an unprecedented level in generating high-quality images. However, their exclusive reliance on textual prompts often falls short in accurately conveying fine-grained spatial compositions. In this paper, we propose LoCo, a training-free approach for layout-to-image synthesis that excels in producing high-quality images aligned with both textual prompts and spatial layouts. Our method introduces a Localized Attention Constraint to refine cross-attention for individual objects, ensuring their precise placement in designated regions. We further propose a Padding Token Constraint to leverage the semantic information embedded in previously neglected padding tokens, thereby preventing the undesired fusion of synthesized objects. LoCo seamlessly integrates into existing text-to-image and layout-to-image models, significantly amplifying their performance and effectively addressing semantic failures observed in prior methods. Through extensive experiments, we showcase the superiority of our approach, surpassing existing state-of-the-art training-free layout-to-image methods both qualitatively and quantitatively across multiple benchmarks.

Medical image segmentation is a cornerstone of modern clinical diagnostics. While Vision Transformers that leverage shifted window-based self-attention have established new benchmarks in this field, they are often hampered by a critical limitation: their localized attention mechanism struggles to effectively fuse local details with global context. This deficiency is particularly detrimental to challenging tasks such as the segmentation of microtumors and miniature organs, where both fine-grained boundary definition and broad contextual understanding are paramount. To address this gap, we propose HBFormer, a novel Hybrid-Bridge Transformer architecture. The 'Hybrid' design of HBFormer synergizes a classic U-shaped encoder-decoder framework with a powerful Swin Transformer backbone for robust hierarchical feature extraction. The core innovation lies in its 'Bridge' mechanism, a sophisticated nexus for multi-scale feature integration. This bridge is architecturally embodied by our novel Multi-Scale Feature Fusion (MFF) decoder. Departing from conventional symmetric designs, the MFF decoder is engineered to fuse multi-scale features from the encoder with global contextual information. It achieves this through a synergistic combination of channel and spatial attention modules, which are constructed from a series of dilated and depth-wise convolutions. These components work in concert to create a powerful feature bridge that explicitly captures long-range dependencies and refines object boundaries with exceptional precision. Comprehensive experiments on challenging medical image segmentation datasets, including multi-organ, liver tumor, and bladder tumor benchmarks, demonstrate that HBFormer achieves state-of-the-art results, showcasing its outstanding capabilities in microtumor and miniature organ segmentation. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/lzeeorno/HBFormer.

Recently, diffusion-based image generation methods are credited for their remarkable text-to-image generation capabilities, while still facing challenges in accurately generating multilingual scene text images. To tackle this problem, we propose Diff-Text, which is a training-free scene text generation framework for any language. Our model outputs a photo-realistic image given a text of any language along with a textual description of a scene. The model leverages rendered sketch images as priors, thus arousing the potential multilingual-generation ability of the pre-trained Stable Diffusion. Based on the observation from the influence of the cross-attention map on object placement in generated images, we propose a localized attention constraint into the cross-attention layer to address the unreasonable positioning problem of scene text. Additionally, we introduce contrastive image-level prompts to further refine the position of the textual region and achieve more accurate scene text generation. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing method in both the accuracy of text recognition and the naturalness of foreground-background blending.

Human perception of surroundings is often guided by the various poses present within the environment. Many computer vision tasks, such as human action recognition and robot imitation learning, rely on pose-based entities like human skeletons or robotic arms. However, conventional Vision Transformer (ViT) models uniformly process all patches, neglecting valuable pose priors in input videos. We argue that incorporating poses into RGB data is advantageous for learning fine-grained and viewpoint-agnostic representations. Consequently, we introduce two strategies for learning pose-aware representations in ViTs. The first method, called Pose-aware Attention Block (PAAB), is a plug-and-play ViT block that performs localized attention on pose regions within videos. The second method, dubbed Pose-Aware Auxiliary Task (PAAT), presents an auxiliary pose prediction task optimized jointly with the primary ViT task. Although their functionalities differ, both methods succeed in learning pose-aware representations, enhancing performance in multiple diverse downstream tasks. Our experiments, conducted across seven datasets, reveal the efficacy of both pose-aware methods on three video analysis tasks, with PAAT holding a slight edge over PAAB. Both PAAT and PAAB surpass their respective backbone Transformers by up to 9.8% in real-world action recognition and 21.8% in multi-view robotic video alignment. Code is available at https://github.com/dominickrei/PoseAwareVT.

Generative recommendation is emerging as a powerful paradigm that directly generates item predictions, moving beyond traditional matching-based approaches. However, current methods face two key challenges: token-item misalignment, where uniform token-level modeling ignores item-level granularity that is critical for collaborative signal learning, and semantic-collaborative signal entanglement, where collaborative and semantic signals exhibit distinct distributions yet are fused in a unified embedding space, leading to conflicting optimization objectives that limit the recommendation performance. To address these issues, we propose DiscRec, a novel framework that enables Disentangled Semantic-Collaborative signal modeling with flexible fusion for generative Recommendation.First, DiscRec introduces item-level position embeddings, assigned based on indices within each semantic ID, enabling explicit modeling of item structure in input token sequences.Second, DiscRec employs a dual-branch module to disentangle the two signals at the embedding layer: a semantic branch encodes semantic signals using original token embeddings, while a collaborative branch applies localized attention restricted to tokens within the same item to effectively capture collaborative signals. A gating mechanism subsequently fuses both branches while preserving the model's ability to model sequential dependencies. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that DiscRec effectively decouples these signals and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our codes are available on https://github.com/Ten-Mao/DiscRec.

The intrinsic link between facial motion and speech is often overlooked in generative modeling, where talking head synthesis and text-to-speech (TTS) are typically addressed as separate tasks. This paper introduces JAM-Flow, a unified framework to simultaneously synthesize and condition on both facial motion and speech. Our approach leverages flow matching and a novel Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) architecture, integrating specialized Motion-DiT and Audio-DiT modules. These are coupled via selective joint attention layers and incorporate key architectural choices, such as temporally aligned positional embeddings and localized joint attention masking, to enable effective cross-modal interaction while preserving modality-specific strengths. Trained with an inpainting-style objective, JAM-Flow supports a wide array of conditioning inputs-including text, reference audio, and reference motion-facilitating tasks such as synchronized talking head generation from text, audio-driven animation, and much more, within a single, coherent model. JAM-Flow significantly advances multi-modal generative modeling by providing a practical solution for holistic audio-visual synthesis. project page: https://joonghyuk.com/jamflow-web

In this work, the Localized Filtering-based Attention (LFA) is introduced to incorporate prior knowledge of local dependencies of natural language into Attention. Based on LFA, we develop and release Yuan 2.0, a large language model with parameters ranging from 2.1 billion to 102.6 billion. A data filtering and generation method is presented to build pretraining and fine-tuning dataset in high quality. A distributed training method with non-uniform pipeline parallel, data parallel, and optimizer parallel is proposed, which greatly reduces the bandwidth requirements of intra-node communication, and achieves good performance in large-scale distributed training. Yuan 2.0 models display impressive ability in code generation, math problem-solving, and chat compared with existing models. The latest version of YUAN 2.0, including model weights and source code, is accessible at Github.

Text-guided image editing aims to modify specific regions of an image according to natural language instructions while maintaining the general structure and the background fidelity. Existing methods utilize masks derived from cross-attention maps generated from diffusion models to identify the target regions for modification. However, since cross-attention mechanisms focus on semantic relevance, they struggle to maintain the image integrity. As a result, these methods often lack spatial consistency, leading to editing artifacts and distortions. In this work, we address these limitations and introduce LOCATEdit, which enhances cross-attention maps through a graph-based approach utilizing self-attention-derived patch relationships to maintain smooth, coherent attention across image regions, ensuring that alterations are limited to the designated items while retaining the surrounding structure. \method consistently and substantially outperforms existing baselines on PIE-Bench, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance and effectiveness on various editing tasks. Code can be found on https://github.com/LOCATEdit/LOCATEdit/

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved impressive results in computer vision by leveraging self-attention to model long-range dependencies. However, their emphasis on global context often comes at the expense of local feature extraction in small datasets, particularly due to the lack of key inductive biases such as locality and translation equivariance. To mitigate this, we propose CoSwin, a novel feature-fusion architecture that augments the hierarchical shifted window attention with localized convolutional feature learning. Specifically, CoSwin integrates a learnable local feature enhancement module into each attention block, enabling the model to simultaneously capture fine-grained spatial details and global semantic structure. We evaluate CoSwin on multiple image classification benchmarks including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, MNIST, SVHN, and Tiny ImageNet. Our experimental results show consistent performance gains over state-of-the-art convolutional and transformer-based models. Notably, CoSwin achieves improvements of 2.17% on CIFAR-10, 4.92% on CIFAR-100, 0.10% on MNIST, 0.26% on SVHN, and 4.47% on Tiny ImageNet over the baseline Swin Transformer. These improvements underscore the effectiveness of local-global feature fusion in enhancing the generalization and robustness of transformers for small-scale vision. Code and pretrained weights available at https://github.com/puskal-khadka/coswin

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm to enhance the factuality of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing RAG systems often suffer from an unfaithfulness issue, where the model's response contradicts evidence from the retrieved context. Existing approaches to improving contextual faithfulness largely rely on external interventions, such as prompt engineering, decoding constraints, or reward-based fine-tuning. These works treat the LLM as a black box and overlook a crucial question: how does the LLM internally integrate retrieved evidence with its parametric memory, particularly under knowledge conflicts? To address this gap, we conduct a probing-based analysis of hidden-state representations in LLMs and observe three findings: knowledge integration occurs hierarchically, conflicts manifest as latent signals at the sentence level, and irrelevant context is often amplified when aligned with parametric knowledge. Building on these findings, we propose CLEAR (Conflict-Localized and Enhanced Attention for RAG), a framework that (i) decomposes context into fine-grained sentence-level knowledge, (ii) employs hidden-state probing to localize conflicting knowledge, and (iii) introduces conflict-aware fine-tuning to guide the model to accurately integrate retrieved evidence. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks demonstrate that CLEAR substantially improves both accuracy and contextual faithfulness, consistently outperforming strong baselines under diverse conflict conditions. The related resources are available at https://github.com/LinfengGao/CLEAR.

Diffusion models (DMs) have gained prominence due to their ability to generate high-quality, varied images, with recent advancements in text-to-image generation. The research focus is now shifting towards the controllability of DMs. A significant challenge within this domain is localized editing, where specific areas of an image are modified without affecting the rest of the content. This paper introduces LIME for localized image editing in diffusion models that do not require user-specified regions of interest (RoI) or additional text input. Our method employs features from pre-trained methods and a simple clustering technique to obtain precise semantic segmentation maps. Then, by leveraging cross-attention maps, it refines these segments for localized edits. Finally, we propose a novel cross-attention regularization technique that penalizes unrelated cross-attention scores in the RoI during the denoising steps, ensuring localized edits. Our approach, without re-training and fine-tuning, consistently improves the performance of existing methods in various editing benchmarks.

Recent developments in the field of diffusion models have demonstrated an exceptional capacity to generate high-quality prompt-conditioned image edits. Nevertheless, previous approaches have primarily relied on textual prompts for image editing, which tend to be less effective when making precise edits to specific objects or fine-grained regions within a scene containing single/multiple objects. We introduce a novel framework for zero-shot localized multi-object editing through a multi-diffusion process to overcome this challenge. This framework empowers users to perform various operations on objects within an image, such as adding, replacing, or editing many objects in a complex scene in one pass. Our approach leverages foreground masks and corresponding simple text prompts that exert localized influences on the target regions resulting in high-fidelity image editing. A combination of cross-attention and background preservation losses within the latent space ensures that the characteristics of the object being edited are preserved while simultaneously achieving a high-quality, seamless reconstruction of the background with fewer artifacts compared to the current methods. We also curate and release a dataset dedicated to multi-object editing, named LoMOE-Bench. Our experiments against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the improved effectiveness of our approach in terms of both image editing quality and inference speed.

Recent large-scale text-driven synthesis models have attracted much attention thanks to their remarkable capabilities of generating highly diverse images that follow given text prompts. Such text-based synthesis methods are particularly appealing to humans who are used to verbally describe their intent. Therefore, it is only natural to extend the text-driven image synthesis to text-driven image editing. Editing is challenging for these generative models, since an innate property of an editing technique is to preserve most of the original image, while in the text-based models, even a small modification of the text prompt often leads to a completely different outcome. State-of-the-art methods mitigate this by requiring the users to provide a spatial mask to localize the edit, hence, ignoring the original structure and content within the masked region. In this paper, we pursue an intuitive prompt-to-prompt editing framework, where the edits are controlled by text only. To this end, we analyze a text-conditioned model in depth and observe that the cross-attention layers are the key to controlling the relation between the spatial layout of the image to each word in the prompt. With this observation, we present several applications which monitor the image synthesis by editing the textual prompt only. This includes localized editing by replacing a word, global editing by adding a specification, and even delicately controlling the extent to which a word is reflected in the image. We present our results over diverse images and prompts, demonstrating high-quality synthesis and fidelity to the edited prompts.

Recent work in interpretability shows that large language models (LLMs) can be adapted for new tasks in a learning-free way: it is possible to intervene on LLM representations to elicit desired behaviors for alignment. For instance, adding certain bias vectors to the outputs of certain attention heads is reported to boost the truthfulness of models. In this work, we show that localized fine-tuning serves as an effective alternative to such representation intervention methods. We introduce a framework called Localized Fine-Tuning on LLM Representations (LoFiT), which identifies a subset of attention heads that are most important for learning a specific task, then trains offset vectors to add to the model's hidden representations at those selected heads. LoFiT localizes to a sparse set of heads (3%) and learns the offset vectors from limited training data, comparable to the settings used for representation intervention. For truthfulness and reasoning tasks, we find that LoFiT's intervention vectors are more effective for LLM adaptation than vectors from representation intervention methods such as Inference-time Intervention. We also find that the localization step is important: selecting a task-specific set of attention heads can lead to higher performance than intervening on heads selected for a different task. Finally, for the tasks we study, LoFiT achieves comparable performance to other parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA, despite modifying 20x-200x fewer parameters than these methods.

Despite recent text-to-image models achieving highfidelity text rendering, they still struggle with long or multiple texts due to diluted global attention. We propose DCText, a training-free visual text generation method that adopts a divide-and-conquer strategy, leveraging the reliable short-text generation of Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers. Our method first decomposes a prompt by extracting and dividing the target text, then assigns each to a designated region. To accurately render each segment within their regions while preserving overall image coherence, we introduce two attention masks - Text-Focus and Context-Expansion - applied sequentially during denoising. Additionally, Localized Noise Initialization further improves text accuracy and region alignment without increasing computational cost. Extensive experiments on single- and multisentence benchmarks show that DCText achieves the best text accuracy without compromising image quality while also delivering the lowest generation latency.

While diffusion models show promising results in image editing given a target prompt, achieving both prompt fidelity and background preservation remains difficult. Recent works have introduced score distillation techniques that leverage the rich generative prior of text-to-image diffusion models to solve this task without additional fine-tuning. However, these methods often struggle with tasks such as object insertion. Our investigation of these failures reveals significant variations in gradient magnitude and spatial distribution, making hyperparameter tuning highly input-specific or unsuccessful. To address this, we propose two simple yet effective modifications: attention-based spatial regularization and gradient filtering-normalization, both aimed at reducing these variations during gradient updates. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art score distillation techniques in prompt fidelity, improving successful edits while preserving the background. Users also preferred our method over state-of-the-art techniques across three metrics, and by 58-64% overall.

Image segmentation is about grouping pixels with different semantics, e.g., category or instance membership, where each choice of semantics defines a task. While only the semantics of each task differ, current research focuses on designing specialized architectures for each task. We present Masked-attention Mask Transformer (Mask2Former), a new architecture capable of addressing any image segmentation task (panoptic, instance or semantic). Its key components include masked attention, which extracts localized features by constraining cross-attention within predicted mask regions. In addition to reducing the research effort by at least three times, it outperforms the best specialized architectures by a significant margin on four popular datasets. Most notably, Mask2Former sets a new state-of-the-art for panoptic segmentation (57.8 PQ on COCO), instance segmentation (50.1 AP on COCO) and semantic segmentation (57.7 mIoU on ADE20K).

Recent diffusion-based image editing approaches have exhibited impressive editing capabilities in images with simple compositions. However, localized editing in complex scenarios has not been well-studied in the literature, despite its growing real-world demands. Existing mask-based inpainting methods fall short of retaining the underlying structure within the edit region. Meanwhile, mask-free attention-based methods often exhibit editing leakage and misalignment in more complex compositions. In this work, we develop MAG-Edit, a training-free, inference-stage optimization method, which enables localized image editing in complex scenarios. In particular, MAG-Edit optimizes the noise latent feature in diffusion models by maximizing two mask-based cross-attention constraints of the edit token, which in turn gradually enhances the local alignment with the desired prompt. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in achieving both text alignment and structure preservation for localized editing within complex scenarios.

Although large-scale text-to-image generative models have shown promising performance in synthesizing high-quality images, directly applying these models to image editing remains a significant challenge. This challenge is further amplified in video editing due to the additional dimension of time. Especially for editing real videos as it necessitates maintaining a stable semantic layout across the frames while executing localized edits precisely without disrupting the existing backgrounds. In this paper, we propose RealCraft, an attention-control-based method for zero-shot editing in real videos. By employing the object-centric manipulation of cross-attention between prompts and frames and spatial-temporal attention within the frames, we achieve precise shape-wise editing along with enhanced consistency. Our model can be used directly with Stable Diffusion and operates without the need for additional localized information. We showcase our zero-shot attention-control-based method across a range of videos, demonstrating localized, high-fidelity, shape-precise and time-consistent editing in videos of various lengths, up to 64 frames.

Humans' internal states play a key role in human-machine interaction, leading to the rise of human state estimation as a prominent field. Compared to swift state changes such as surprise and irritation, modeling gradual states like trust and satisfaction are further challenged by label sparsity: long time-series signals are usually associated with a single label, making it difficult to identify the critical span of state shifts. Windowing has been one widely-used technique to enable localized analysis of long time-series data. However, the performance of downstream models can be sensitive to the window size, and determining the optimal window size demands domain expertise and extensive search. To address this challenge, we propose a Selective Windowing Attention Network (SWAN), which employs window prompts and masked attention transformation to enable the selection of attended intervals with flexible lengths. We evaluate SWAN on the task of trust prediction on a new multimodal driving simulation dataset. Experiments show that SWAN significantly outperforms an existing empirical window selection baseline and neural network baselines including CNN-LSTM and Transformer. Furthermore, it shows robustness across a wide span of windowing ranges, compared to the traditional windowing approach.

Although large vision-language models (LVLMs) leverage rich visual token representations to achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks, these tokens also introduce significant computational overhead during inference. Existing training-free token pruning methods typically adopt a single-stage strategy, focusing either on visual self-attention or visual-textual cross-attention. However, such localized perspectives often overlook the broader information flow across the model, leading to substantial performance degradation, especially under high pruning ratios. In this work, we propose STAR (Stage-wise Attention-guided token Reduction), a training-free, plug-and-play framework that approaches token pruning from a global perspective. Instead of pruning at a single point, STAR performs attention-guided reduction in two complementary stages: an early-stage pruning based on visual self-attention to remove redundant low-level features, and a later-stage pruning guided by cross-modal attention to discard task-irrelevant tokens. This holistic approach allows STAR to significantly reduce computational cost while better preserving task-critical information. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLM architectures and benchmarks show that STAR achieves strong acceleration while maintaining comparable, and in some cases even improved performance.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) with 3D full attention power state-of-the-art video generation, but suffer from prohibitive compute cost -- when generating just a 5-second 720P video, attention alone takes 800 out of 945 seconds of total inference time. This paper introduces sliding tile attention (STA) to address this challenge. STA leverages the observation that attention scores in pretrained video diffusion models predominantly concentrate within localized 3D windows. By sliding and attending over the local spatial-temporal region, STA eliminates redundancy from full attention. Unlike traditional token-wise sliding window attention (SWA), STA operates tile-by-tile with a novel hardware-aware sliding window design, preserving expressiveness while being hardware-efficient. With careful kernel-level optimizations, STA offers the first efficient 2D/3D sliding-window-like attention implementation, achieving 58.79% MFU. Precisely, STA accelerates attention by 2.8-17x over FlashAttention-2 (FA2) and 1.6-10x over FlashAttention-3 (FA3). On the leading video DiT, HunyuanVideo, STA reduces end-to-end latency from 945s (FA3) to 685s without quality degradation, requiring no training. Enabling finetuning further lowers latency to 268s with only a 0.09% drop on VBench.

Most existing approaches to referring segmentation achieve strong performance only through fine-tuning or by composing multiple pre-trained models, often at the cost of additional training and architectural modifications. Meanwhile, large-scale generative diffusion models encode rich semantic information, making them attractive as general-purpose feature extractors. In this work, we introduce a new method that directly exploits features, attention scores, from diffusion transformers for downstream tasks, requiring neither architectural modifications nor additional training. To systematically evaluate these features, we extend benchmarks with vision-language grounding tasks spanning both images and videos. Our key insight is that stop words act as attention magnets: they accumulate surplus attention and can be filtered to reduce noise. Moreover, we identify global attention sinks (GAS) emerging in deeper layers and show that they can be safely suppressed or redirected onto auxiliary tokens, leading to sharper and more accurate grounding maps. We further propose an attention redistribution strategy, where appended stop words partition background activations into smaller clusters, yielding sharper and more localized heatmaps. Building on these findings, we develop RefAM, a simple training-free grounding framework that combines cross-attention maps, GAS handling, and redistribution. Across zero-shot referring image and video segmentation benchmarks, our approach consistently outperforms prior methods, establishing a new state of the art without fine-tuning or additional components.

The rise of AI-generated image editing tools has made localized forgeries increasingly realistic, posing challenges for visual content integrity. Although recent efforts have explored localized AIGC detection, existing datasets predominantly focus on object-level forgeries while overlooking broader scene edits in regions such as sky or ground. To address these limitations, we introduce BR-Gen, a large-scale dataset of 150,000 locally forged images with diverse scene-aware annotations, which are based on semantic calibration to ensure high-quality samples. BR-Gen is constructed through a fully automated Perception-Creation-Evaluation pipeline to ensure semantic coherence and visual realism. In addition, we further propose NFA-ViT, a Noise-guided Forgery Amplification Vision Transformer that enhances the detection of localized forgeries by amplifying forgery-related features across the entire image. NFA-ViT mines heterogeneous regions in images, i.e., potential edited areas, by noise fingerprints. Subsequently, attention mechanism is introduced to compel the interaction between normal and abnormal features, thereby propagating the generalization traces throughout the entire image, allowing subtle forgeries to influence a broader context and improving overall detection robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BR-Gen constructs entirely new scenarios that are not covered by existing methods. Take a step further, NFA-ViT outperforms existing methods on BR-Gen and generalizes well across current benchmarks. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/clpbc/BR-Gen.

Image generation and editing have seen a great deal of advancements with the rise of large-scale diffusion models that allow user control of different modalities such as text, mask, depth maps, etc. However, controlled editing of videos still lags behind. Prior work in this area has focused on using 2D diffusion models to globally change the style of an existing video. On the other hand, in many practical applications, editing localized parts of the video is critical. In this work, we propose a method to edit videos using a pre-trained inpainting image diffusion model. We systematically redesign the forward path of the model by replacing the self-attention modules with an extended version of attention modules that creates frame-level dependencies. In this way, we ensure that the edited information will be consistent across all the video frames no matter what the shape and position of the masked area is. We qualitatively compare our results with state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy on several video editing tasks like object retargeting, object replacement, and object removal tasks. Simulations demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed strategy.

Generating multiview images from a single view facilitates the rapid generation of a 3D mesh conditioned on a single image. Recent methods that introduce 3D global representation into diffusion models have shown the potential to generate consistent multiviews, but they have reduced generation speed and face challenges in maintaining generalizability and quality. To address this issue, we propose EpiDiff, a localized interactive multiview diffusion model. At the core of the proposed approach is to insert a lightweight epipolar attention block into the frozen diffusion model, leveraging epipolar constraints to enable cross-view interaction among feature maps of neighboring views. The newly initialized 3D modeling module preserves the original feature distribution of the diffusion model, exhibiting compatibility with a variety of base diffusion models. Experiments show that EpiDiff generates 16 multiview images in just 12 seconds, and it surpasses previous methods in quality evaluation metrics, including PSNR, SSIM and LPIPS. Additionally, EpiDiff can generate a more diverse distribution of views, improving the reconstruction quality from generated multiviews. Please see our project page at https://huanngzh.github.io/EpiDiff/.

Transformers have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of sequence modeling tasks, but their quadratic attention complexity limits scalability to long sequences. Linear models such as Mamba and sliding-window attention (SWA) address this by mixing tokens through recurrent or localized operations with fixed-size memory, achieving efficient inference. However, these methods risk degrading performance on long sequences due to their inability to retain detailed information from distant tokens. We propose SCOUT (Segment Compression for Optimized Utility in Transformers), a hybrid architecture that compresses tokens locally within fixed-size segments and applies attention only over these compressed representations. Each token embedding is first enriched via a linear local mixer, Mamba or SWA, that integrates recent context. Then, instead of attending to all previous tokens, each token sparsely attends to a small number of compressed checkpoint tokens that summarize the input history. This design retains much of the expressivity of full attention while substantially reducing the computational and memory cost. By attending to compressed history rather than all previous tokens, SCOUT incurs slightly higher memory than purely linear models, but its growth rate remains sub-quadratic and far more scalable than that of full Transformers. We analyze SCOUT's computational and memory efficiency and evaluate it empirically on long-context language modeling and reasoning tasks. SCOUT with both Mamba and SWA mixers outperforms strong long-sequence baselines under the same computational budget, matches full-attention Transformers on language modeling and common-sense reasoning tasks at 400M and 1.3B scales. Moreover, our SCOUT achieves higher end-to-end throughput than SOTA models, while delivering comparable results on long sequence benchmarks.

Image style transfer aims to imbue digital imagery with the distinctive attributes of style targets, such as colors, brushstrokes, shapes, whilst concurrently preserving the semantic integrity of the content. Despite the advancements in arbitrary style transfer methods, a prevalent challenge remains the delicate equilibrium between content semantics and style attributes. Recent developments in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have heralded unprecedented synthesis capabilities, albeit at the expense of relying on extensive and often imprecise textual descriptions to delineate artistic styles. Addressing these limitations, this paper introduces DiffStyler, a novel approach that facilitates efficient and precise arbitrary image style transfer. DiffStyler lies the utilization of a text-to-image Stable Diffusion model-based LoRA to encapsulate the essence of style targets. This approach, coupled with strategic cross-LoRA feature and attention injection, guides the style transfer process. The foundation of our methodology is rooted in the observation that LoRA maintains the spatial feature consistency of UNet, a discovery that further inspired the development of a mask-wise style transfer technique. This technique employs masks extracted through a pre-trained FastSAM model, utilizing mask prompts to facilitate feature fusion during the denoising process, thereby enabling localized style transfer that preserves the original image's unaffected regions. Moreover, our approach accommodates multiple style targets through the use of corresponding masks. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that DiffStyler surpasses previous methods in achieving a more harmonious balance between content preservation and style integration.

This paper presents UniVST, a unified framework for localized video style transfer based on diffusion models. It operates without the need for training, offering a distinct advantage over existing diffusion methods that transfer style across entire videos. The endeavors of this paper comprise: (1) A point-matching mask propagation strategy that leverages the feature maps from the DDIM inversion. This streamlines the model's architecture by obviating the need for tracking models. (2) A training-free AdaIN-guided localized video stylization mechanism that operates at both the latent and attention levels. This balances content fidelity and style richness, mitigating the loss of localized details commonly associated with direct video stylization. (3) A sliding-window consistent smoothing scheme that harnesses optical flow within the pixel representation and refines predicted noise to update the latent space. This significantly enhances temporal consistency and diminishes artifacts in stylized video. Our proposed UniVST has been validated to be superior to existing methods in quantitative and qualitative metrics. It adeptly addresses the challenges of preserving the primary object's style while ensuring temporal consistency and detail preservation. Our code is available at https://github.com/QuanjianSong/UniVST.

Window-based transformers excel in large-scale point cloud understanding by capturing context-aware representations with affordable attention computation in a more localized manner. However, the sparse nature of point clouds leads to a significant variance in the number of voxels per window. Existing methods group the voxels in each window into fixed-length sequences through extensive sorting and padding operations, resulting in a non-negligible computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we introduce ScatterFormer, which to the best of our knowledge, is the first to directly apply attention to voxels across different windows as a single sequence. The key of ScatterFormer is a Scattered Linear Attention (SLA) module, which leverages the pre-computation of key-value pairs in linear attention to enable parallel computation on the variable-length voxel sequences divided by windows. Leveraging the hierarchical structure of GPUs and shared memory, we propose a chunk-wise algorithm that reduces the SLA module's latency to less than 1 millisecond on moderate GPUs. Furthermore, we develop a cross-window interaction module that improves the locality and connectivity of voxel features across different windows, eliminating the need for extensive window shifting. Our proposed ScatterFormer demonstrates 73.8 mAP (L2) on the Waymo Open Dataset and 72.4 NDS on the NuScenes dataset, running at an outstanding detection rate of 23 FPS.The code is available at https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer{https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer}.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been the standard for image classification tasks for a long time, but more recently attention-based mechanisms have gained traction. This project aims to compare traditional CNNs with attention-augmented CNNs across an image classification task. By evaluating and comparing their performance, accuracy and computational efficiency, the project will highlight benefits and trade-off of the localized feature extraction of traditional CNNs and the global context capture in attention-augmented CNNs. By doing this, we can reveal further insights into their respective strengths and weaknesses, guide the selection of models based on specific application needs and ultimately, enhance understanding of these architectures in the deep learning community. This was our final project for CS7643 Deep Learning course at Georgia Tech.

Generating multiple new concepts remains a challenging problem in the text-to-image task. Current methods often overfit when trained on a small number of samples and struggle with attribute leakage, particularly for class-similar subjects (e.g., two specific dogs). In this paper, we introduce Fuse-and-Refine (FaR), a novel approach that tackles these challenges through two key contributions: Concept Fusion technique and Localized Refinement loss function. Concept Fusion systematically augments the training data by separating reference subjects from backgrounds and recombining them into composite images to increase diversity. This augmentation technique tackles the overfitting problem by mitigating the narrow distribution of the limited training samples. In addition, Localized Refinement loss function is introduced to preserve subject representative attributes by aligning each concept's attention map to its correct region. This approach effectively prevents attribute leakage by ensuring that the diffusion model distinguishes similar subjects without mixing their attention maps during the denoising process. By fine-tuning specific modules at the same time, FaR balances the learning of new concepts with the retention of previously learned knowledge. Empirical results show that FaR not only prevents overfitting and attribute leakage while maintaining photorealism, but also outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective models of the human language system, with some models predicting most explainable variance of brain activity in current datasets. Even in untrained models, the representations induced by architectural priors can exhibit reasonable alignment to brain data. In this work, we investigate the key architectural components driving the surprising alignment of untrained models. To estimate LLM-to-brain similarity, we first select language-selective units within an LLM, similar to how neuroscientists identify the language network in the human brain. We then benchmark the brain alignment of these LLM units across five different brain recording datasets. By isolating critical components of the Transformer architecture, we identify tokenization strategy and multihead attention as the two major components driving brain alignment. A simple form of recurrence further improves alignment. We further demonstrate this quantitative brain alignment of our model by reproducing landmark studies in the language neuroscience field, showing that localized model units -- just like language voxels measured empirically in the human brain -- discriminate more reliably between lexical than syntactic differences, and exhibit similar response profiles under the same experimental conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our model's representations for language modeling, achieving improved sample and parameter efficiency over comparable architectures. Our model's estimates of surprisal sets a new state-of-the-art in the behavioral alignment to human reading times. Taken together, we propose a highly brain- and behaviorally-aligned model that conceptualizes the human language system as an untrained shallow feature encoder, with structural priors, combined with a trained decoder to achieve efficient and performant language processing.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models reformulate vision-language models by tuning them with millions of robotic demonstrations. While they perform well when fine-tuned for a single embodiment or task family, extending them to multi-skill settings remains challenging: directly merging VLA experts trained on different tasks results in near-zero success rates. This raises a fundamental question: what prevents VLAs from mastering multiple skills within one model? With an empirical decomposition of learnable parameters during VLA fine-tuning, we identify two key sources of non-mergeability: (1) Finetuning drives LoRA adapters in the VLM backbone toward divergent, task-specific directions beyond the capacity of existing merging methods to unify. (2) Action experts develop inter-block dependencies through self-attention feedback, causing task information to spread across layers and preventing modular recombination. To address these challenges, we present MergeVLA, a merging-oriented VLA architecture that preserves mergeability by design. MergeVLA introduces sparsely activated LoRA adapters via task masks to retain consistent parameters and reduce irreconcilable conflicts in the VLM. Its action expert replaces self-attention with cross-attention-only blocks to keep specialization localized and composable. When the task is unknown, it uses a test-time task router to adaptively select the appropriate task mask and expert head from the initial observation, enabling unsupervised task inference. Across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin, and multi-task experiments on the real SO101 robotic arm, MergeVLA achieves performance comparable to or even exceeding individually finetuned experts, demonstrating robust generalization across tasks, embodiments, and environments.

Text-driven video editing aims to modify video content according to natural language instructions. While recent training-free approaches have made progress by leveraging pre-trained diffusion models, they typically rely on inversion-based techniques that map input videos into the latent space, which often leads to temporal inconsistencies and degraded structural fidelity. To address this, we propose FlowDirector, a novel inversion-free video editing framework. Our framework models the editing process as a direct evolution in data space, guiding the video via an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) to smoothly transition along its inherent spatiotemporal manifold, thereby preserving temporal coherence and structural details. To achieve localized and controllable edits, we introduce an attention-guided masking mechanism that modulates the ODE velocity field, preserving non-target regions both spatially and temporally. Furthermore, to address incomplete edits and enhance semantic alignment with editing instructions, we present a guidance-enhanced editing strategy inspired by Classifier-Free Guidance, which leverages differential signals between multiple candidate flows to steer the editing trajectory toward stronger semantic alignment without compromising structural consistency. Extensive experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that FlowDirector achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction adherence, temporal consistency, and background preservation, establishing a new paradigm for efficient and coherent video editing without inversion.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending complex visual content. However, the mechanisms underlying how VLMs process visual information remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis, focusing on attention modules across layers. We reveal several key insights about how these models process visual data: (i) the internal representation of the query tokens (e.g., representations of "describe the image"), is utilized by VLMs to store global image information; we demonstrate that these models generate surprisingly descriptive responses solely from these tokens, without direct access to image tokens. (ii) Cross-modal information flow is predominantly influenced by the middle layers (approximately 25% of all layers), while early and late layers contribute only marginally.(iii) Fine-grained visual attributes and object details are directly extracted from image tokens in a spatially localized manner, i.e., the generated tokens associated with a specific object or attribute attend strongly to their corresponding regions in the image. We propose novel quantitative evaluation to validate our observations, leveraging real-world complex visual scenes. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our findings in facilitating efficient visual processing in state-of-the-art VLMs.

Effectively representing medical images, especially retinal images, presents a considerable challenge due to variations in appearance, size, and contextual information of pathological signs called lesions. Precise discrimination of these lesions is crucial for diagnosing vision-threatening issues such as diabetic retinopathy. While visual attention-based neural networks have been introduced to learn spatial context and channel correlations from retinal images, they often fall short in capturing localized lesion context. Addressing this limitation, we propose a novel attention mechanism called Guided Context Gating, an unique approach that integrates Context Formulation, Channel Correlation, and Guided Gating to learn global context, spatial correlations, and localized lesion context. Our qualitative evaluation against existing attention mechanisms emphasize the superiority of Guided Context Gating in terms of explainability. Notably, experiments on the Zenodo-DR-7 dataset reveal a substantial 2.63% accuracy boost over advanced attention mechanisms & an impressive 6.53% improvement over the state-of-the-art Vision Transformer for assessing the severity grade of retinopathy, even with imbalanced and limited training samples for each class.

Recent advances in diffusion models (DMs) have achieved exceptional visual quality in image editing tasks. However, the global denoising dynamics of DMs inherently conflate local editing targets with the full-image context, leading to unintended modifications in non-target regions. In this paper, we shift our attention beyond DMs and turn to Masked Generative Transformers (MGTs) as an alternative approach to tackle this challenge. By predicting multiple masked tokens rather than holistic refinement, MGTs exhibit a localized decoding paradigm that endows them with the inherent capacity to explicitly preserve non-relevant regions during the editing process. Building upon this insight, we introduce the first MGT-based image editing framework, termed EditMGT. We first demonstrate that MGT's cross-attention maps provide informative localization signals for localizing edit-relevant regions and devise a multi-layer attention consolidation scheme that refines these maps to achieve fine-grained and precise localization. On top of these adaptive localization results, we introduce region-hold sampling, which restricts token flipping within low-attention areas to suppress spurious edits, thereby confining modifications to the intended target regions and preserving the integrity of surrounding non-target areas. To train EditMGT, we construct CrispEdit-2M, a high-resolution dataset spanning seven diverse editing categories. Without introducing additional parameters, we adapt a pre-trained text-to-image MGT into an image editing model through attention injection. Extensive experiments across four standard benchmarks demonstrate that, with fewer than 1B parameters, our model achieves similarity performance while enabling 6 times faster editing. Moreover, it delivers comparable or superior editing quality, with improvements of 3.6% and 17.6% on style change and style transfer tasks, respectively.

This paper demonstrates that progressive localization, the gradual increase of attention locality from early distributed layers to late localized layers, represents the optimal architecture for creating interpretable large language models (LLMs) while preserving performance. Through systematic experimentation with GPT-2 fine-tuned on The Psychology of Artificial Superintelligence, we evaluate five locality configurations: two uniform baselines (fully distributed and fully localist) and three progressive polynomial schedules. We investigate whether interpretability constraints can be aligned with natural semantic structure while being applied strategically across network depth. We demonstrate that progressive semantic localization, combining adaptive semantic block partitioning with steep polynomial locality schedules, achieves near-baseline language modeling performance while providing interpretable attention patterns. Multiple independent training runs with different random seeds establish that results are statistically robust and highly reproducible. The approach dramatically outperforms both fixed-window localization and naive uniform locality constraints. Analysis reveals that maintaining flexibility through low-fidelity constraints preserves model capacity while providing interpretability benefits, and that steep schedules concentrating locality in decision-critical final layers while preserving distributed learning in early layers achieve near-baseline attention distribution characteristics. These findings demonstrate that interpretability mechanisms should align with semantic structure to achieve practical performance-interpretability tradeoffs for trustworthy AI systems.

Although new vision foundation models such as Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) have significantly enhanced zero-shot image segmentation capabilities, reliance on human-provided prompts poses significant challenges in adapting SAM2 to medical image segmentation tasks. Moreover, SAM2's performance in medical image segmentation was limited by the domain shift issue, since it was originally trained on natural images and videos. To address these challenges, we proposed SAM2 with support-set guided prompting (SAM2-SGP), a framework that eliminated the need for manual prompts. The proposed model leveraged the memory mechanism of SAM2 to generate pseudo-masks using image-mask pairs from a support set via a Pseudo-mask Generation (PMG) module. We further introduced a novel Pseudo-mask Attention (PMA) module, which used these pseudo-masks to automatically generate bounding boxes and enhance localized feature extraction by guiding attention to relevant areas. Furthermore, a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) strategy was adopted to mitigate the domain shift issue. The proposed framework was evaluated on both 2D and 3D datasets across multiple medical imaging modalities, including fundus photography, X-ray, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound. The results demonstrated a significant performance improvement over state-of-the-art models, such as nnUNet and SwinUNet, as well as foundation models, such as SAM2 and MedSAM2, underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/astlian9/SAM_Support.

Large language models have achieved great success in recent years, so as their variants in vision. Existing vision-language models can describe images in natural languages, answer visual-related questions, or perform complex reasoning about the image. However, it is yet unclear how localization tasks, such as word grounding or referring localization, can be performed using large language models. In this work, we aim to develop a vision-language model that can take locations, for example, a set of points or boxes, as either inputs or outputs. When taking locations as inputs, the model performs location-conditioned captioning, which generates captions for the indicated object or region. When generating locations as outputs, our model regresses pixel coordinates for each output word generated by the language model, and thus performs dense word grounding. Our model is pre-trained on the Localized Narrative dataset, which contains pixel-word-aligned captioning from human attention. We show our model can be applied to various location-aware vision-language tasks, including referring localization, location-conditioned captioning, and dense object captioning, archiving state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO and Visual Genome. Project page: https://jerryxu.net/PixelLLM .

Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language understanding and generation but remain vulnerable to factual errors, limiting their reliability in knowledge-intensive tasks. While decoding-time strategies provide a promising efficient solution without training, existing methods typically treat token-level and layer-level signals in isolation, overlooking the joint dynamics between them. In this work, we introduce a token-aware, layer-localized contrastive decoding method that aligns specific token types with their most influential transformer layers to improve factual generation. Through empirical attention analysis, we identify two key patterns: punctuation tokens receive dominant attention in early layers, while conceptual tokens govern semantic reasoning in intermediate layers. By selectively suppressing attention to these token types at their respective depths, we achieve the induction of controlled factual degradation and derive contrastive signals to guide the final factual decoding. Our method requires no additional training or model modification, and experiments demonstrate that our method consistently improves factuality across multiple LLMs and various benchmarks.

Can we localize the weights and mechanisms used by a language model to memorize and recite entire paragraphs of its training data? In this paper, we show that while memorization is spread across multiple layers and model components, gradients of memorized paragraphs have a distinguishable spatial pattern, being larger in lower model layers than gradients of non-memorized examples. Moreover, the memorized examples can be unlearned by fine-tuning only the high-gradient weights. We localize a low-layer attention head that appears to be especially involved in paragraph memorization. This head is predominantly focusing its attention on distinctive, rare tokens that are least frequent in a corpus-level unigram distribution. Next, we study how localized memorization is across the tokens in the prefix by perturbing tokens and measuring the caused change in the decoding. A few distinctive tokens early in a prefix can often corrupt the entire continuation. Overall, memorized continuations are not only harder to unlearn, but also to corrupt than non-memorized ones.

Editing natural images using textual descriptions in text-to-image diffusion models remains a significant challenge, particularly in achieving consistent generation and handling complex, non-rigid objects. Existing methods often struggle to preserve textures and identity, require extensive fine-tuning, and exhibit limitations in editing specific spatial regions or objects while retaining background details. This paper proposes Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation (CPAM), a novel zero-shot framework for complicated, non-rigid real image editing. Specifically, we propose a preservation adaptation module that adjusts self-attention mechanisms to preserve and independently control the object and background effectively. This ensures that the objects' shapes, textures, and identities are maintained while keeping the background undistorted during the editing process using the mask guidance technique. Additionally, we develop a localized extraction module to mitigate the interference with the non-desired modified regions during conditioning in cross-attention mechanisms. We also introduce various mask-guidance strategies to facilitate diverse image manipulation tasks in a simple manner. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Image Manipulation BenchmArk (IMBA), a robust benchmark dataset specifically designed for real image editing, demonstrate that our proposed method is the preferred choice among human raters, outperforming existing state-of-the-art editing techniques.

Essential to visual generation is efficient modeling of visual data priors. Conventional next-token prediction methods define the process as learning the conditional probability distribution of successive tokens. Recently, next-scale prediction methods redefine the process to learn the distribution over multi-scale representations, significantly reducing generation latency. However, these methods condition each scale on all previous scales and require each token to consider all preceding tokens, exhibiting scale and spatial redundancy. To better model the distribution by mitigating redundancy, we propose Markovian Visual AutoRegressive modeling (MVAR), a novel autoregressive framework that introduces scale and spatial Markov assumptions to reduce the complexity of conditional probability modeling. Specifically, we introduce a scale-Markov trajectory that only takes as input the features of adjacent preceding scale for next-scale prediction, enabling the adoption of a parallel training strategy that significantly reduces GPU memory consumption. Furthermore, we propose spatial-Markov attention, which restricts the attention of each token to a localized neighborhood of size k at corresponding positions on adjacent scales, rather than attending to every token across these scales, for the pursuit of reduced modeling complexity. Building on these improvements, we reduce the computational complexity of attention calculation from O(N^2) to O(Nk), enabling training with just eight NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPUs and eliminating the need for KV cache during inference. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that MVAR achieves comparable or superior performance with both small model trained from scratch and large fine-tuned models, while reducing the average GPU memory footprint by 3.0x.

Facial personalization represents a crucial downstream task in the domain of text-to-image generation. To preserve identity fidelity while ensuring alignment with user-defined prompts, current mainstream frameworks for facial personalization predominantly employ identity embedding mechanisms to associate identity information with textual embeddings. However, our experiments show that identity embeddings compromise the effectiveness of other tokens within the prompt, thereby hindering high prompt consistency, particularly when prompts involve multiple facial attributes. Moreover, previous works overlook the fact that their corresponding foundation models hold great potential to generate faces aligning to prompts well and can be easily leveraged to cure these ill-aligned attributes in personalized models. Building upon these insights, we propose FreeCure, a training-free framework that harnesses the intrinsic knowledge from the foundation models themselves to improve the prompt consistency of personalization models. First, by extracting cross-attention and semantic maps from the denoising process of foundation models, we identify easily localized attributes (e.g., hair, accessories, etc). Second, we enhance multiple attributes in the outputs of personalization models through a novel noise-blending strategy coupled with an inversion-based process. Our approach offers several advantages: it eliminates the need for training; it effectively facilitates the enhancement for a wide array of facial attributes in a non-intrusive manner; and it can be seamlessly integrated into existing popular personalization models. FreeCure has demonstrated significant improvements in prompt consistency across a diverse set of state-of-the-art facial personalization models while maintaining the integrity of original identity fidelity.

We investigate the mechanisms of factual recall in the Mamba state space model. Our work is inspired by previous findings in autoregressive transformer language models suggesting that their knowledge recall is localized to particular modules at specific token locations; we therefore ask whether factual recall in Mamba can be similarly localized. To investigate this, we conduct four lines of experiments on Mamba. First, we apply causal tracing or interchange interventions to localize key components inside Mamba that are responsible for recalling facts, revealing that specific components within middle layers show strong causal effects at the last token of the subject, while the causal effect of intervening on later layers is most pronounced at the last token of the prompt, matching previous findings on autoregressive transformers. Second, we show that rank-one model editing methods can successfully insert facts at specific locations, again resembling findings on transformer models. Third, we examine the linearity of Mamba's representations of factual relations. Finally we adapt attention-knockout techniques to Mamba to dissect information flow during factual recall. We compare Mamba directly to a similar-sized transformer and conclude that despite significant differences in architectural approach, when it comes to factual recall, the two architectures share many similarities.

3D content manipulation is an important computer vision task with many real-world applications (e.g., product design, cartoon generation, and 3D Avatar editing). Recently proposed 3D GANs can generate diverse photorealistic 3D-aware contents using Neural Radiance fields (NeRF). However, manipulation of NeRF still remains a challenging problem since the visual quality tends to degrade after manipulation and suboptimal control handles such as 2D semantic maps are used for manipulations. While text-guided manipulations have shown potential in 3D editing, such approaches often lack locality. To overcome these problems, we propose Local Editing NeRF (LENeRF), which only requires text inputs for fine-grained and localized manipulation. Specifically, we present three add-on modules of LENeRF, the Latent Residual Mapper, the Attention Field Network, and the Deformation Network, which are jointly used for local manipulations of 3D features by estimating a 3D attention field. The 3D attention field is learned in an unsupervised way, by distilling the zero-shot mask generation capability of CLIP to the 3D space with multi-view guidance. We conduct diverse experiments and thorough evaluations both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Text-to-image diffusion models have proven effective for solving many image editing tasks. However, the seemingly straightforward task of seamlessly relocating objects within a scene remains surprisingly challenging. Existing methods addressing this problem often struggle to function reliably in real-world scenarios due to lacking spatial reasoning. In this work, we propose a training-free method, dubbed DiffUHaul, that harnesses the spatial understanding of a localized text-to-image model, for the object dragging task. Blindly manipulating layout inputs of the localized model tends to cause low editing performance due to the intrinsic entanglement of object representation in the model. To this end, we first apply attention masking in each denoising step to make the generation more disentangled across different objects and adopt the self-attention sharing mechanism to preserve the high-level object appearance. Furthermore, we propose a new diffusion anchoring technique: in the early denoising steps, we interpolate the attention features between source and target images to smoothly fuse new layouts with the original appearance; in the later denoising steps, we pass the localized features from the source images to the interpolated images to retain fine-grained object details. To adapt DiffUHaul to real-image editing, we apply a DDPM self-attention bucketing that can better reconstruct real images with the localized model. Finally, we introduce an automated evaluation pipeline for this task and showcase the efficacy of our method. Our results are reinforced through a user preference study.

Recent advances in text-guided image editing enable users to perform image edits through simple text inputs, leveraging the extensive priors of multi-step diffusion-based text-to-image models. However, these methods often fall short of the speed demands required for real-world and on-device applications due to the costly multi-step inversion and sampling process involved. In response to this, we introduce SwiftEdit, a simple yet highly efficient editing tool that achieve instant text-guided image editing (in 0.23s). The advancement of SwiftEdit lies in its two novel contributions: a one-step inversion framework that enables one-step image reconstruction via inversion and a mask-guided editing technique with our proposed attention rescaling mechanism to perform localized image editing. Extensive experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SwiftEdit. In particular, SwiftEdit enables instant text-guided image editing, which is extremely faster than previous multi-step methods (at least 50 times faster) while maintain a competitive performance in editing results. Our project page is at: https://swift-edit.github.io/

Fashion design is a complex creative process that blends visual and textual expressions. Designers convey ideas through sketches, which define spatial structure and design elements, and textual descriptions, capturing material, texture, and stylistic details. In this paper, we present LOcalized Text and Sketch for fashion image generation (LOTS), an approach for compositional sketch-text based generation of complete fashion outlooks. LOTS leverages a global description with paired localized sketch + text information for conditioning and introduces a novel step-based merging strategy for diffusion adaptation. First, a Modularized Pair-Centric representation encodes sketches and text into a shared latent space while preserving independent localized features; then, a Diffusion Pair Guidance phase integrates both local and global conditioning via attention-based guidance within the diffusion model's multi-step denoising process. To validate our method, we build on Fashionpedia to release Sketchy, the first fashion dataset where multiple text-sketch pairs are provided per image. Quantitative results show LOTS achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance on both global and localized metrics, while qualitative examples and a human evaluation study highlight its unprecedented level of design customization.

Self-supervised models have revolutionized speech processing, achieving new levels of performance in a wide variety of tasks with limited resources. However, the inner workings of these models are still opaque. In this paper, we aim to analyze the encoded contextual representation of these foundation models based on their inter- and intra-model similarity, independent of any external annotation and task-specific constraint. We examine different SSL models varying their training paradigm -- Contrastive (Wav2Vec2.0) and Predictive models (HuBERT); and model sizes (base and large). We explore these models on different levels of localization/distributivity of information including (i) individual neurons; (ii) layer representation; (iii) attention weights and (iv) compare the representations with their finetuned counterparts.Our results highlight that these models converge to similar representation subspaces but not to similar neuron-localized concepts\footnote{A concept represents a coherent fragment of knowledge, such as ``a class containing certain objects as elements, where the objects have certain properties. We made the code publicly available for facilitating further research, we publicly released our code.

Text-guided image editing with diffusion models has achieved remarkable quality but suffers from prohibitive latency, hindering real-world applications. We introduce FlashEdit, a novel framework designed to enable high-fidelity, real-time image editing. Its efficiency stems from three key innovations: (1) a One-Step Inversion-and-Editing (OSIE) pipeline that bypasses costly iterative processes; (2) a Background Shield (BG-Shield) technique that guarantees background preservation by selectively modifying features only within the edit region; and (3) a Sparsified Spatial Cross-Attention (SSCA) mechanism that ensures precise, localized edits by suppressing semantic leakage to the background. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlashEdit maintains superior background consistency and structural integrity, while performing edits in under 0.2 seconds, which is an over 150times speedup compared to prior multi-step methods. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/JunyiWuCode/FlashEdit.

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have rapidly advanced collaborative reasoning, tool use, and role-specialized coordination in complex tasks. However, reliability-critical deployment remains hindered by a systemic failure mode: hierarchical compliance under instruction conflicts (system-user, peer-peer), where agents misprioritize system-level rules in the presence of competing demands. Moreover, widely used macro-level metrics (e.g., pass@k) obscure these micro-level violations and offer little actionable guidance for remedy. In this work, we present a full-stack, three-stage framework: (1) Diagnose - Contextualized Role Adherence Score (CRAS), a query-wise, context-aware scoring metric that decomposes role adherence into four measurable dimensions; (2) Localize - attention drift analysis revealing that instruction conflicts are resolved by attention heads that are largely concentrated in middle layers; (3) Align - Surgical Alignment of Instruction Layers (SAIL), which installs LoRA only on the localized focal layers and optimizes a token-weighted DPO-style preference objective that credits tokens by their focal attentional contribution. Across standard benchmarks and MAS frameworks, our surgical approach improves instruction hierarchy compliance (e.g., +5.60% with AutoGen on MedQA) without full-model finetuning.

Attention Model has now become an important concept in neural networks that has been researched within diverse application domains. This survey provides a structured and comprehensive overview of the developments in modeling attention. In particular, we propose a taxonomy which groups existing techniques into coherent categories. We review salient neural architectures in which attention has been incorporated, and discuss applications in which modeling attention has shown a significant impact. We also describe how attention has been used to improve the interpretability of neural networks. Finally, we discuss some future research directions in attention. We hope this survey will provide a succinct introduction to attention models and guide practitioners while developing approaches for their applications.

The ability to process long contexts is crucial for many natural language processing tasks, yet it remains a significant challenge. While substantial progress has been made in enhancing the efficiency of attention mechanisms, there is still a gap in understanding how attention heads function in long-context settings. In this paper, we observe that while certain heads consistently attend to local information only, others swing between attending to local and long-context information depending on the query. This raises the question: can we identify which heads require long-context information to predict the next token accurately? We demonstrate that it's possible to predict which heads are crucial for long-context processing using only local keys. The core idea here is to exploit a simple model for the long-context scores via second moment approximations. These findings unveil simple properties of attention in the context of long sequences, and open the door to potentially significant gains in efficiency.

An attentional mechanism has lately been used to improve neural machine translation (NMT) by selectively focusing on parts of the source sentence during translation. However, there has been little work exploring useful architectures for attention-based NMT. This paper examines two simple and effective classes of attentional mechanism: a global approach which always attends to all source words and a local one that only looks at a subset of source words at a time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches over the WMT translation tasks between English and German in both directions. With local attention, we achieve a significant gain of 5.0 BLEU points over non-attentional systems which already incorporate known techniques such as dropout. Our ensemble model using different attention architectures has established a new state-of-the-art result in the WMT'15 English to German translation task with 25.9 BLEU points, an improvement of 1.0 BLEU points over the existing best system backed by NMT and an n-gram reranker.

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving force behind many recent state-of-the-art NLP models such as Transformer-based MT models and BERT. These models apply multiple attention mechanisms in parallel, with each attention "head" potentially focusing on different parts of the input, which makes it possible to express sophisticated functions beyond the simple weighted average. In this paper we make the surprising observation that even if models have been trained using multiple heads, in practice, a large percentage of attention heads can be removed at test time without significantly impacting performance. In fact, some layers can even be reduced to a single head. We further examine greedy algorithms for pruning down models, and the potential speed, memory efficiency, and accuracy improvements obtainable therefrom. Finally, we analyze the results with respect to which parts of the model are more reliant on having multiple heads, and provide precursory evidence that training dynamics play a role in the gains provided by multi-head attention.

Soft attention is a critical mechanism powering LLMs to locate relevant parts within a given context. However, individual attention weights are determined by the similarity of only a single query and key token vector. This "single token attention" bottlenecks the amount of information used in distinguishing a relevant part from the rest of the context. To address this issue, we propose a new attention method, Multi-Token Attention (MTA), which allows LLMs to condition their attention weights on multiple query and key vectors simultaneously. This is achieved by applying convolution operations over queries, keys and heads, allowing nearby queries and keys to affect each other's attention weights for more precise attention. As a result, our method can locate relevant context using richer, more nuanced information that can exceed a single vector's capacity. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that MTA achieves enhanced performance on a range of popular benchmarks. Notably, it outperforms Transformer baseline models on standard language modeling tasks, and on tasks that require searching for information within long contexts, where our method's ability to leverage richer information proves particularly beneficial.

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at greater computational cost-has been relatively underexplored. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing Local Linear Attention (LLA), a novel attention mechanism derived from nonparametric statistics through the lens of test-time regression. First, we show that LLA offers theoretical advantages over Linear and Softmax Attention for associative memory via a bias-variance trade-off analysis. Next, we address its computational challenges and propose two memory-efficient primitives to tackle the Theta(n^2 d) and Theta(n d^2) complexity. We then introduce FlashLLA, a hardware-efficient, blockwise algorithm that enables scalable and parallel computation on modern accelerators. In addition, we implement and profile a customized inference kernel that significantly reduces memory overheads. Finally, we empirically validate the advantages and limitations of LLA on test-time regression, in-context regression, associative recall and state tracking tasks. Experiment results demonstrate that LLA effectively adapts to non-stationarity, outperforming strong baselines in test-time training and in-context learning, and exhibiting promising evidence for its scalability and applicability in large-scale models. Code is available at https://github.com/Yifei-Zuo/Flash-LLA.

We introduce an attention-based method that uses learned binary attention masks to ensure that only attended image regions influence the prediction. Context can strongly affect object perception, sometimes leading to biased representations, particularly when objects appear in out-of-distribution backgrounds. At the same time, many image-level object-centric tasks require identifying relevant regions, often requiring context. To address this conundrum, we propose a two-stage framework: stage 1 processes the full image to discover object parts and identify task-relevant regions, while stage 2 leverages input attention masking to restrict its receptive field to these regions, enabling a focused analysis while filtering out potentially spurious information. Both stages are trained jointly, allowing stage 2 to refine stage 1. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness against spurious correlations and out-of-distribution backgrounds.

The attention mechanism has gained significant recognition in the field of computer vision due to its ability to effectively enhance the performance of deep neural networks. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively utilize spatial information or, if they do, they come at the cost of reducing channel dimensions or increasing the complexity of neural networks. In order to address these limitations, this paper introduces an Efficient Local Attention (ELA) method that achieves substantial performance improvements with a simple structure. By analyzing the limitations of the Coordinate Attention method, we identify the lack of generalization ability in Batch Normalization, the adverse effects of dimension reduction on channel attention, and the complexity of attention generation process. To overcome these challenges, we propose the incorporation of 1D convolution and Group Normalization feature enhancement techniques. This approach enables accurate localization of regions of interest by efficiently encoding two 1D positional feature maps without the need for dimension reduction, while allowing for a lightweight implementation. We carefully design three hyperparameters in ELA, resulting in four different versions: ELA-T, ELA-B, ELA-S, and ELA-L, to cater to the specific requirements of different visual tasks such as image classification, object detection and sementic segmentation. ELA can be seamlessly integrated into deep CNN networks such as ResNet, MobileNet, and DeepLab. Extensive evaluations on the ImageNet, MSCOCO, and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ELA module over current state-of-the-art methods in all three aforementioned visual tasks.

We present a novel framework for training large language models with continuously adjustable internal representations that span the full spectrum from localist (interpretable, rule-based) to distributed (generalizable, efficient) encodings. The key innovation is a locality dial, a tunable parameter that dynamically controls the degree of localization during both training and inference without requiring model retraining. This is achieved through group sparsity penalties on attention mechanisms, information-theoretic anchor design, and dynamic rule injection. We provide rigorous mathematical proofs establishing explicit threshold conditions under which attention provably concentrates on semantically relevant blocks, with exponential bounds on attention entropy and pointer fidelity. Specifically, we prove that when group sparsity penalties exceed certain threshold values, the model's attention mechanisms concentrate on semantically relevant blocks, achieving low entropy and high fidelity with negligible error. This framework enables practitioners to continuously interpolate between interpretable and high-performance modes, supporting applications in regulated domains requiring both transparency and capability.

The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work positions attention as a privileged substrate that renders the internal logic of LLMs legible, not merely as a byproduct of computation, but as a mechanistic blueprint of reasoning itself. We first distinguish attention heads between locally and globally focused information processing and reveal that locally focused heads produce a sawtooth pattern near the diagonal indicating phrasal chunks, while globally focused heads expose tokens that exert broad downstream influence over future tokens. We formalize these with two metrics: 1) Windowed Average Attention Distance, which measures the extent of backward attention within a clipped window; 2) Future Attention Influence, which quantifies a token's global importance as the average attention it receives from subsequent tokens. Taken together, these signals reveal a recurring preplan-and-anchor mechanism, where the model first performs a long-range contextual reference to generate an introductory token, which is immediately followed by or coincides with a semantic anchor token that organizes subsequent reasoning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce three novel RL strategies that dynamically perform targeted credit assignment to critical nodes (preplan tokens, anchor tokens, and their temporal coupling) and show consistent performance gains across various reasoning tasks. By aligning optimization with the model's intrinsic reasoning rhythm, we aim to transform opaque optimization into an actionable structure-aware process, hoping to offer a potential step toward more transparent and effective optimization of LLM reasoning.

We present Neural Attention Search (NAtS), a framework that automatically evaluates the importance of each token within a sequence and determines if the corresponding token can be dropped after several steps. This approach can efficiently reduce the KV cache sizes required by transformer-based models during inference and thus reduce inference costs. In this paper, we design a search space that contains three token types: (i) Global Tokens will be preserved and queried by all the following tokens. (ii) Local Tokens survive until the next global token appears. (iii) Sliding Window Tokens have an impact on the inference of a fixed size of the next following tokens. Similar to the One-Shot Neural Architecture Search approach, this token-type information can be learned jointly with the architecture weights via a learnable attention mask. Experiments on both training a new transformer from scratch and fine-tuning existing large language models show that NAtS can efficiently reduce the KV cache size required for the models while maintaining the models' performance.

This paper presents the first empirical demonstration of controllable locality in transformer language models, a novel architectural framework that enables continuous control over the degree of representation localization through a tunable locality dial parameter. Unlike traditional language models that rely exclusively on distributed representations, our approach allows dynamic interpolation between highly interpretable localist encodings and efficient distributed representations without requiring model retraining. We conducted experiments on the WikiText corpus using a two-layer transformer architecture, systematically varying the locality parameter λ across the full spectrum from 1.0 (fully localist) to 0.0 (fully distributed). Our results demonstrate that localist configurations achieve dramatically lower attention entropy, with λ = 1.0 yielding 5.36 bits compared to 7.18 bits at λ = 0.0, while maintaining substantially higher pointer fidelity scores reflecting stronger alignment with rule-specified targets. Prediction experiments reveal that intermediate locality values optimize the tradeoff between interpretability and performance, with λ = 0.6 achieving test perplexity of 4.65 and accuracy of 84.7%. These findings establish that localist language models provide a practical framework for applications in regulated domains requiring both transparency and capability, offering precise mathematical control over the interpretability-performance spectrum through explicit penalty thresholds and information-theoretic design principles.

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) significantly accelerates the inference process by predicting the entire target sequence. However, due to the lack of target dependency modelling in the decoder, the conditional generation process heavily depends on the cross-attention. In this paper, we reveal a localness perception problem in NAT cross-attention, for which it is difficult to adequately capture source context. To alleviate this problem, we propose to enhance signals of neighbour source tokens into conventional cross-attention. Experimental results on several representative datasets show that our approach can consistently improve translation quality over strong NAT baselines. Extensive analyses demonstrate that the enhanced cross-attention achieves better exploitation of source contexts by leveraging both local and global information.

Long-context large language models (LLMs) are prone to be distracted by irrelevant contexts. The reason for distraction remains poorly understood. In this paper, we first identify the contextual heads, a special group of attention heads that control the overall attention of the LLM. Then, we demonstrate that distraction arises when contextual heads fail to allocate sufficient attention to relevant contexts and can be mitigated by increasing attention to these contexts. We further identify focus directions, located at the key and query activations of these heads, which enable them to allocate more attention to relevant contexts without explicitly specifying which context is relevant. We comprehensively evaluate the effect of focus direction on various long-context tasks and find out focus directions could help to mitigate the poor task alignment of the long-context LLMs. We believe our findings could promote further research on long-context LLM alignment.

In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of Native Sparse Attention (NSA) and propose targeted improvements that enhance long-context modeling. A key insight is that alternating between local (sliding-window) and global (compression, selective) attention across layers, rather than using fixed patterns, enables more effective propagation of long-range dependencies and substantially boosts performance on long-sequence tasks. Meanwhile, we further refine NSA's branches with Latent Attention that the sliding-window branch is enhanced with Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) while compression and selective branches adopt Group-head Latent Attention (GLA). These changes reduce KV-cache memory by 50\% versus NSA while improving the model's common-sense reasoning and long-text understanding capabilities. Experiments on models from 340M to 1.3B parameters (trained on 15B and 100B tokens) show our method matches or exceeds full attention and native sparse attention in both common-sense reasoning and long-context understanding tasks.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and describing visual content, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various vision-language tasks. However, these models frequently exhibit hallucination behavior, where they generate descriptions containing objects or details absent in the input image. Our work investigates this phenomenon by analyzing attention patterns across transformer layers and heads, revealing that hallucinations often stem from progressive degradation of visual grounding in deeper layers. We propose a novel attention modification approach that combines selective token emphasis and head-specific modulation to maintain visual grounding throughout the generation process. Our method introduces two key components: (1) a dual-stream token selection mechanism that identifies and prioritizes both locally informative and spatially significant visual tokens, and (2) an attention head-specific modulation strategy that differentially amplifies visual information processing based on measured visual sensitivity of individual attention heads. Through extensive experimentation on the MSCOCO dataset, we demonstrate that our approach reduces hallucination rates by up to 62.3\% compared to baseline models while maintaining comparable task performance. Our analysis reveals that selectively modulating tokens across attention heads with varying levels of visual sensitivity can significantly improve visual grounding without requiring model retraining.

Action localization networks are often structured as a feature encoder sub-network and a localization sub-network, where the feature encoder learns to transform an input video to features that are useful for the localization sub-network to generate reliable action proposals. While some of the encoded features may be more useful for generating action proposals, prior action localization approaches do not include any attention mechanism that enables the localization sub-network to attend more to the more important features. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism, the Class Semantics-based Attention (CSA), that learns from the temporal distribution of semantics of action classes present in an input video to find the importance scores of the encoded features, which are used to provide attention to the more useful encoded features. We demonstrate on two popular action detection datasets that incorporating our novel attention mechanism provides considerable performance gains on competitive action detection models (e.g., around 6.2% improvement over BMN action detection baseline to obtain 47.5% mAP on the THUMOS-14 dataset), and a new state-of-the-art of 36.25% mAP on the ActivityNet v1.3 dataset. Further, the CSA localization model family which includes BMN-CSA, was part of the second-placed submission at the 2021 ActivityNet action localization challenge. Our attention mechanism outperforms prior self-attention modules such as the squeeze-and-excitation in action detection task. We also observe that our attention mechanism is complementary to such self-attention modules in that performance improvements are seen when both are used together.

Diffusion models have exhibited impressive prowess in the text-to-image task. Recent methods add image-level structure controls, e.g., edge and depth maps, to manipulate the generation process together with text prompts to obtain desired images. This controlling process is globally operated on the entire image, which limits the flexibility of control regions. In this paper, we explore a novel and practical task setting: local control. It focuses on controlling specific local region according to user-defined image conditions, while the remaining regions are only conditioned by the original text prompt. However, it is non-trivial to achieve local conditional controlling. The naive manner of directly adding local conditions may lead to the local control dominance problem, which forces the model to focus on the controlled region and neglect object generation in other regions. To mitigate this problem, we propose Regional Discriminate Loss to update the noised latents, aiming at enhanced object generation in non-control regions. Furthermore, the proposed Focused Token Response suppresses weaker attention scores which lack the strongest response to enhance object distinction and reduce duplication. Lastly, we adopt Feature Mask Constraint to reduce quality degradation in images caused by information differences across the local control region. All proposed strategies are operated at the inference stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can synthesize high-quality images aligned with the text prompt under local control conditions.

Attention-based arbitrary style transfer studies have shown promising performance in synthesizing vivid local style details. They typically use the all-to-all attention mechanism -- each position of content features is fully matched to all positions of style features. However, all-to-all attention tends to generate distorted style patterns and has quadratic complexity, limiting the effectiveness and efficiency of arbitrary style transfer. In this paper, we propose a novel all-to-key attention mechanism -- each position of content features is matched to stable key positions of style features -- that is more in line with the characteristics of style transfer. Specifically, it integrates two newly proposed attention forms: distributed and progressive attention. Distributed attention assigns attention to key style representations that depict the style distribution of local regions; Progressive attention pays attention from coarse-grained regions to fine-grained key positions. The resultant module, dubbed StyA2K, shows extraordinary performance in preserving the semantic structure and rendering consistent style patterns. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.

Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied to natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, attention weights are often claimed to confer interpretability, purportedly useful both for providing insights to practitioners and for explaining why a model makes its decisions to stakeholders. We call the latter use of attention mechanisms into question by demonstrating a simple method for training models to produce deceptive attention masks. Our method diminishes the total weight assigned to designated impermissible tokens, even when the models can be shown to nevertheless rely on these features to drive predictions. Across multiple models and tasks, our approach manipulates attention weights while paying surprisingly little cost in accuracy. Through a human study, we show that our manipulated attention-based explanations deceive people into thinking that predictions from a model biased against gender minorities do not rely on the gender. Consequently, our results cast doubt on attention's reliability as a tool for auditing algorithms in the context of fairness and accountability.

The Transformer architecture processes sequences by implementing a form of neural message-passing that consists of iterative information retrieval (attention), followed by local processing (position-wise MLP). Two types of information are essential under this general computational paradigm: "sensory" information about individual objects, and "relational" information describing the relationships between objects. Standard attention naturally encodes the former, but does not explicitly encode the latter. In this paper, we present an extension of Transformers where multi-head attention is augmented with two distinct types of attention heads, each routing information of a different type. The first type is the standard attention mechanism of Transformers, which captures object-level features, while the second type is a novel attention mechanism we propose to explicitly capture relational information. The two types of attention heads each possess different inductive biases, giving the resulting architecture greater efficiency and versatility. The promise of this approach is demonstrated empirically across a range of tasks.

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing LLMs for tool-use. Specifically, the crucial information in the context will be potentially overlooked by model when it is positioned in the trough zone of the attention waveform, leading to decreased performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference method named Attention Buckets. It allows LLMs to process their input through multiple parallel processes. Each process utilizes a distinct base angle for the rotary position embedding, thereby creating a unique attention waveform. By compensating an attention trough of a particular process with an attention peak of another process, our approach enhances LLM's awareness to various contextual positions, thus mitigating the risk of overlooking crucial information. In the largest tool-use benchmark, our method elevates a 7B model to achieve state-of-the-art performance, comparable to that of GPT-4. On other benchmarks and some RAG tasks, which also demand a thorough understanding of contextual content, Attention Buckets also exhibited notable enhancements in performance.

Large reasoning models achieve strong performance through test-time scaling but incur substantial computational overhead, particularly from excessive token generation when processing short input prompts. While sparse attention mechanisms can reduce latency and memory usage, existing approaches suffer from significant accuracy degradation due to accumulated errors during long-generation reasoning. These methods generally require either high token retention rates or expensive retraining. We introduce LessIsMore, a training-free sparse attention mechanism for reasoning tasks, which leverages global attention patterns rather than relying on traditional head-specific local optimizations. LessIsMore aggregates token selections from local attention heads with recent contextual information, enabling unified cross-head token ranking for future decoding layers. This unified selection improves generalization and efficiency by avoiding the need to maintain separate token subsets per head. Evaluation across diverse reasoning tasks and benchmarks shows that LessIsMore preserves -- and in some cases improves -- accuracy while achieving a 1.1times average decoding speed-up compared to full attention. Moreover, LessIsMore attends to 2times fewer tokens without accuracy loss, achieving a 1.13times end-to-end speed-up compared to existing sparse attention methods.

When automatically generating a sentence description for an image or video, it often remains unclear how well the generated caption is grounded, that is whether the model uses the correct image regions to output particular words, or if the model is hallucinating based on priors in the dataset and/or the language model. The most common way of relating image regions with words in caption models is through an attention mechanism over the regions that are used as input to predict the next word. The model must therefore learn to predict the attentional weights without knowing the word it should localize. This is difficult to train without grounding supervision since recurrent models can propagate past information and there is no explicit signal to force the captioning model to properly ground the individual decoded words. In this work, we help the model to achieve this via a novel cyclical training regimen that forces the model to localize each word in the image after the sentence decoder generates it, and then reconstruct the sentence from the localized image region(s) to match the ground-truth. Our proposed framework only requires learning one extra fully-connected layer (the localizer), a layer that can be removed at test time. We show that our model significantly improves grounding accuracy without relying on grounding supervision or introducing extra computation during inference, for both image and video captioning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/chihyaoma/cyclical-visual-captioning .

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently taken computer vision by storm. However, the softmax attention underlying ViTs comes with a quadratic complexity in time and memory, hindering the application of ViTs to high-resolution images. We revisit the attention design and propose a linear attention method to address the limitation, which doesn't sacrifice ViT's core advantage of capturing global representation like existing methods (e.g. local window attention of Swin). We further investigate the key difference between linear attention and softmax attention. Our empirical results suggest that linear attention lacks a fundamental property of concentrating the distribution of the attention matrix. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a local concentration module to enhance linear attention. By incorporating enhanced linear global attention and local window attention, we propose a new ViT architecture, dubbed L^2ViT. Notably, L^2ViT can effectively capture both global interactions and local representations while enjoying linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong performance of L^2ViT. On image classification, L^2ViT achieves 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K without any extra training data or label. By further pre-training on ImageNet-22k, it attains 87.0% when fine-tuned with resolution 384^2. For downstream tasks, L^2ViT delivers favorable performance as a backbone on object detection as well as semantic segmentation.

Neural networks, particularly Transformer-based architectures, have achieved significant performance improvements on several retrieval benchmarks. When the items being retrieved are documents, the time and memory cost of employing Transformers over a full sequence of document terms can be prohibitive. A popular strategy involves considering only the first n terms of the document. This can, however, result in a biased system that under retrieves longer documents. In this work, we propose a local self-attention which considers a moving window over the document terms and for each term attends only to other terms in the same window. This local attention incurs a fraction of the compute and memory cost of attention over the whole document. The windowed approach also leads to more compact packing of padded documents in minibatches resulting in additional savings. We also employ a learned saturation function and a two-staged pooling strategy to identify relevant regions of the document. The Transformer-Kernel pooling model with these changes can efficiently elicit relevance information from documents with thousands of tokens. We benchmark our proposed modifications on the document ranking task from the TREC 2019 Deep Learning track and observe significant improvements in retrieval quality as well as increased retrieval of longer documents at moderate increase in compute and memory costs.

We explore different ways to utilize position-based cross-attention in seq2seq networks to enable length generalization in algorithmic tasks. We show that a simple approach of interpolating the original and reversed encoded representations combined with relative attention allows near-perfect length generalization for both forward and reverse lookup tasks or copy tasks that had been generally hard to tackle. We also devise harder diagnostic tasks where the relative distance of the ideal attention position varies with timestep. In such settings, the simple interpolation trick with relative attention is not sufficient. We introduce novel variants of location attention building on top of Dubois et al. (2020) to address the new diagnostic tasks. We also show the benefits of our approaches for length generalization in SCAN (Lake & Baroni, 2018) and CFQ (Keysers et al., 2020). Our code is available on GitHub.

Vision Transformers achieved outstanding performance in many computer vision tasks. Early Vision Transformers such as ViT and DeiT adopt global self-attention, which is computationally expensive when the number of patches is large. To improve efficiency, recent Vision Transformers adopt local self-attention mechanisms, where self-attention is computed within local windows. Despite the fact that window-based local self-attention significantly boosts efficiency, it fails to capture the relationships between distant but similar patches in the image plane. To overcome this limitation of image-space local attention, in this paper, we further exploit the locality of patches in the feature space. We group the patches into multiple clusters using their features, and self-attention is computed within every cluster. Such feature-space local attention effectively captures the connections between patches across different local windows but still relevant. We propose a Bilateral lOcal Attention vision Transformer (BOAT), which integrates feature-space local attention with image-space local attention. We further integrate BOAT with both Swin and CSWin models, and extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our BOAT-CSWin model clearly and consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art CNN models and vision Transformers.

In this work, we study the Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model. Redundant vision tokens consume a significant amount of computational memory and resources. Therefore, many previous works compress them in the Vision Projector to reduce the number of vision tokens. However, simply compressing in the Vision Projector can lead to the loss of visual information, especially for tasks that rely on fine-grained spatial relationships, such as OCR and Chart \& Table Understanding. To address this problem, we propose Vision Remember, which is inserted between the LLM decoder layers to allow vision tokens to re-memorize vision features. Specifically, we retain multi-level vision features and resample them with the vision tokens that have interacted with the text token. During the resampling process, each vision token only attends to a local region in vision features, which is referred to as saliency-enhancing local attention. Saliency-enhancing local attention not only improves computational efficiency but also captures more fine-grained contextual information and spatial relationships within the region. Comprehensive experiments on multiple visual understanding benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method when combined with various Efficient Vision Projectors, showing performance gains without sacrificing efficiency. Based on Vision Remember, LLaVA-VR with only 2B parameters is also superior to previous representative MLLMs such as Tokenpacker-HD-7B and DeepSeek-VL-7B.

Attention-based mechanisms are widely used in machine learning, most prominently in transformers. However, hyperparameters such as the rank of the attention matrices and the number of heads are scaled nearly the same way in all realizations of this architecture, without theoretical justification. In this work we show that there are dramatic trade-offs between the rank and number of heads of the attention mechanism. Specifically, we present a simple and natural target function that can be represented using a single full-rank attention head for any context length, but that cannot be approximated by low-rank attention unless the number of heads is exponential in the embedding dimension, even for short context lengths. Moreover, we prove that, for short context lengths, adding depth allows the target to be approximated by low-rank attention. For long contexts, we conjecture that full-rank attention is necessary. Finally, we present experiments with off-the-shelf transformers that validate our theoretical findings.

Machine comprehension (MC), answering a query about a given context paragraph, requires modeling complex interactions between the context and the query. Recently, attention mechanisms have been successfully extended to MC. Typically these methods use attention to focus on a small portion of the context and summarize it with a fixed-size vector, couple attentions temporally, and/or often form a uni-directional attention. In this paper we introduce the Bi-Directional Attention Flow (BIDAF) network, a multi-stage hierarchical process that represents the context at different levels of granularity and uses bi-directional attention flow mechanism to obtain a query-aware context representation without early summarization. Our experimental evaluations show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results in Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and CNN/DailyMail cloze test.

Neighborhood attention reduces the cost of self attention by restricting each token's attention span to its nearest neighbors. This restriction, parameterized by a window size and dilation factor, draws a spectrum of possible attention patterns between linear projection and self attention. Neighborhood attention, and more generally sliding window attention patterns, have long been bounded by infrastructure, particularly in higher-rank spaces (2-D and 3-D), calling for the development of custom kernels, which have been limited in either functionality, or performance, if not both. In this work, we first show that neighborhood attention can be represented as a batched GEMM problem, similar to standard attention, and implement it for 1-D and 2-D neighborhood attention. These kernels on average provide 895% and 272% improvement in full precision latency compared to existing naive kernels for 1-D and 2-D neighborhood attention respectively. We find certain inherent inefficiencies in all unfused neighborhood attention kernels that bound their performance and lower-precision scalability. We also developed fused neighborhood attention; an adaptation of fused dot-product attention kernels that allow fine-grained control over attention across different spatial axes. Known for reducing the quadratic time complexity of self attention to a linear complexity, neighborhood attention can now enjoy a reduced and constant memory footprint, and record-breaking half precision latency. We observe that our fused kernels successfully circumvent some of the unavoidable inefficiencies in unfused implementations. While our unfused GEMM-based kernels only improve half precision performance compared to naive kernels by an average of 496% and 113% in 1-D and 2-D problems respectively, our fused kernels improve naive kernels by an average of 1607% and 581% in 1-D and 2-D problems respectively.

Many sparse attention mechanisms such as Neighborhood Attention have typically failed to consistently deliver speedup over the self attention baseline. This is largely due to the level of complexity in attention infrastructure, and the rapid evolution of AI hardware architecture. At the same time, many state-of-the-art foundational models, particularly in computer vision, are heavily bound by attention, and need reliable sparsity to escape the O(n^2) complexity. In this paper, we study a class of promising sparse attention mechanisms that focus on locality, and aim to develop a better analytical model of their performance improvements. We first introduce Generalized Neighborhood Attention (GNA), which can describe sliding window, strided sliding window, and blocked attention. We then consider possible design choices in implementing these approaches, and create a simulator that can provide much more realistic speedup upper bounds for any given setting. Finally, we implement GNA on top of a state-of-the-art fused multi-headed attention (FMHA) kernel designed for the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture in CUTLASS. Our implementation can fully realize the maximum speedup theoretically possible in many perfectly block-sparse cases, and achieves an effective utilization of 1.3 petaFLOPs/second in FP16. In addition, we plug various GNA configurations into off-the-shelf generative models, such as Cosmos-7B, HunyuanVideo, and FLUX, and show that it can deliver 28% to 46% end-to-end speedup on B200 without any fine-tuning. We will open source our simulator and Blackwell kernels directly through the NATTEN project.

Inspired by recent work in machine translation and object detection, we introduce an attention based model that automatically learns to describe the content of images. We describe how we can train this model in a deterministic manner using standard backpropagation techniques and stochastically by maximizing a variational lower bound. We also show through visualization how the model is able to automatically learn to fix its gaze on salient objects while generating the corresponding words in the output sequence. We validate the use of attention with state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets: Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS COCO.

We prove under practical assumptions that Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) introduces an intrinsic distance-dependent bias in attention scores that limits RoPE's ability to model long-context. RoPE extension methods may alleviate this issue, but they typically require post-hoc adjustments after pretraining, such as rescaling or hyperparameters retuning. This paper introduces Token-Aware Phase Attention (TAPA), a new positional encoding method that incorporates a learnable phase function into the attention mechanism. TAPA preserves token interactions over long range, extends to longer contexts with direct and light fine-tuning, extrapolates to unseen lengths, and attains significantly lower perplexity on long-context than RoPE families.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is significantly sensitive to the contextual position of information in the input. To investigate the mechanism behind this positional bias, our extensive experiments reveal a consistent phenomenon we term the attention basin: when presented with a sequence of structured items (e.g., retrieved documents or few-shot examples), models systematically assign higher attention to the items at the beginning and end of the sequence, while neglecting those in the middle. Crucially, our analysis further reveals that allocating higher attention to critical information is key to enhancing model performance. Based on these insights, we introduce Attention-Driven Reranking (AttnRank), a two-stage framework that (i) estimates a model's intrinsic positional attention preferences using a small calibration set, and (ii) reorders retrieved documents or few-shot examples to align the most salient content with these high-attention positions. AttnRank is a model-agnostic, training-free, and plug-and-play method with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on multi-hop QA and few-shot in-context learning tasks demonstrate that AttnRank achieves substantial improvements across 10 large language models of varying architectures and scales, without modifying model parameters or training procedures.

Attention mechanisms are a central property of cognitive systems allowing them to selectively deploy cognitive resources in a flexible manner. Attention has been long studied in the neurosciences and there are numerous phenomenological models that try to capture its core properties. Recently attentional mechanisms have become a dominating architectural choice of machine learning and are the central innovation of Transformers. The dominant intuition and formalism underlying their development has drawn on ideas of keys and queries in database management systems. In this work, we propose an alternative Bayesian foundation for attentional mechanisms and show how this unifies different attentional architectures in machine learning. This formulation allows to to identify commonality across different attention ML architectures as well as suggest a bridge to those developed in neuroscience. We hope this work will guide more sophisticated intuitions into the key properties of attention architectures and suggest new ones.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant popularity in recent years and have proliferated into many applications. However, their behavior under different learning paradigms is not well explored. We compare ViTs trained through different methods of supervision, and show that they learn a diverse range of behaviors in terms of their attention, representations, and downstream performance. We also discover ViT behaviors that are consistent across supervision, including the emergence of Offset Local Attention Heads. These are self-attention heads that attend to a token adjacent to the current token with a fixed directional offset, a phenomenon that to the best of our knowledge has not been highlighted in any prior work. Our analysis shows that ViTs are highly flexible and learn to process local and global information in different orders depending on their training method. We find that contrastive self-supervised methods learn features that are competitive with explicitly supervised features, and they can even be superior for part-level tasks. We also find that the representations of reconstruction-based models show non-trivial similarity to contrastive self-supervised models. Project website (https://www.cs.umd.edu/~sakshams/vit_analysis) and code (https://www.github.com/mwalmer-umd/vit_analysis) are publicly available.

Visual search is important in our daily life. The efficient allocation of visual attention is critical to effectively complete visual search tasks. Prior research has predominantly modelled the spatial allocation of visual attention in images at the pixel level, e.g. using a saliency map. However, emerging evidence shows that visual attention is guided by objects rather than pixel intensities. This paper introduces the Object-level Attention Transformer (OAT), which predicts human scanpaths as they search for a target object within a cluttered scene of distractors. OAT uses an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder captures information about the position and appearance of the objects within an image and about the target. The decoder predicts the gaze scanpath as a sequence of object fixations, by integrating output features from both the encoder and decoder. We also propose a new positional encoding that better reflects spatial relationships between objects. We evaluated OAT on the Amazon book cover dataset and a new dataset for visual search that we collected. OAT's predicted gaze scanpaths align more closely with human gaze patterns, compared to predictions by algorithms based on spatial attention on both established metrics and a novel behavioural-based metric. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of OAT, as it accurately predicts human scanpaths for unseen layouts and target objects.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have generated significant interest in their ability to autonomously interact with and interpret Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). A major challenge in these systems is grounding-accurately identifying critical GUI components such as text or icons based on a GUI image and a corresponding text query. Traditionally, this task has relied on fine-tuning MLLMs with specialized training data to predict component locations directly. However, in this paper, we propose a novel Tuning-free Attention-driven Grounding (TAG) method that leverages the inherent attention patterns in pretrained MLLMs to accomplish this task without the need for additional fine-tuning. Our method involves identifying and aggregating attention maps from specific tokens within a carefully constructed query prompt. Applied to MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5, a state-of-the-art MLLM, our tuning-free approach achieves performance comparable to tuning-based methods, with notable success in text localization. Additionally, we demonstrate that our attention map-based grounding technique significantly outperforms direct localization predictions from MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5, highlighting the potential of using attention maps from pretrained MLLMs and paving the way for future innovations in this domain.

In recent years, the long-range attention mechanism of vision transformers has driven significant performance breakthroughs across various computer vision tasks. However, the traditional self-attention mechanism, which processes both informative and non-informative tokens, suffers from inefficiency and inaccuracies. While sparse attention mechanisms have been introduced to mitigate these issues by pruning tokens involved in attention, they often lack context-awareness and intelligence. These mechanisms frequently apply a uniform token selection strategy across different inputs for batch training or optimize efficiency only for the inference stage. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm: Select and Pack Attention (SPA). SPA dynamically selects informative tokens using a low-cost gating layer supervised by selection labels and packs these tokens into new batches, enabling a variable number of tokens to be used in parallelized GPU batch training and inference. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and computer vision tasks demonstrate that SPA delivers superior performance and efficiency, including a 0.6 mAP improvement in object detection and a 16.4% reduction in computational costs.

The Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) integrates computer vision and natural language processing techniques, offering substantial application potential. However, these models demand extensive resources during inference. Adaptive attention techniques can dynamically reduce computational redundancy and thus improve efficiency. Although current adaptive attention methods significantly reduce the memory requirements of Transformer-based language models, they are not tailored for LVLMs. We observe that LVLMs generate responses from both remote image tokens and local text tokens, and different modalities have different attention patterns. This observation inspires us to manage the attention for each modality separately. Specifically, for visual input, we store the cache of potentially useful information but only compute the most critical parts. For language input, we care more about local information. Based on our observation and analysis of vision-language attention patterns, we develop A-VL, a plug-and-play adaptive attention tailored for LVLM inference. Extensive evaluations on three vision-language tasks and five datasets show the effectiveness of our designs. Our approach A-VL outperforms existing adaptive attention methods in reducing memory usage and computational load without compromising performance.

Motivated by the factorization inherent in the original fast multipole method and the improved fast Gauss transform we introduce a factorable form of attention that operates efficiently in high dimensions. This approach reduces the computational and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in transformers from O(N^2) to O(N). In comparison to previous attempts, our work presents a linearly scaled attention mechanism that maintains the full representation of the attention matrix without compromising on sparsification and incorporates the all-to-all relationship between tokens. We explore the properties of our new attention metric and conduct tests in various standard settings. Results indicate that our attention mechanism has a robust performance and holds significant promise for diverse applications where self-attention is used.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However, recent findings indicate that LMMs have an extraordinary tendency to consistently allocate high attention weights to specific visual tokens, even when these tokens are irrelevant to the corresponding text. In this study, we investigate the property behind the appearance of these irrelevant visual tokens and examine their characteristics. Our findings show that this behavior arises due to the massive activation of certain hidden state dimensions, which resembles the attention sink found in language models. Hence, we refer to this phenomenon as the visual attention sink. In particular, our analysis reveals that removing the irrelevant visual sink tokens does not impact model performance, despite receiving high attention weights. Consequently, we recycle the attention to these tokens as surplus resources, redistributing the attention budget to enhance focus on the image. To achieve this, we introduce Visual Attention Redistribution (VAR), a method that redistributes attention in image-centric heads, which we identify as innately focusing on visual information. VAR can be seamlessly applied across different LMMs to improve performance on a wide range of tasks, including general vision-language tasks, visual hallucination tasks, and vision-centric tasks, all without the need for additional training, models, or inference steps. Experimental results demonstrate that VAR enables LMMs to process visual information more effectively by adjusting their internal attention mechanisms, offering a new direction to enhancing the multimodal capabilities of LMMs.

Contemporary diffusion models show remarkable capability in text-to-image generation, while still being limited to restricted resolutions (e.g., 1,024 X 1,024). Recent advances enable tuning-free higher-resolution image generation by recycling pre-trained diffusion models and extending them via regional denoising or dilated sampling/convolutions. However, these models struggle to simultaneously preserve global semantic structure and produce creative regional details in higher-resolution images. To address this, we present C-Upscale, a new recipe of tuning-free image upscaling that pivots on global-regional priors derived from given global prompt and estimated regional prompts via Multimodal LLM. Technically, the low-frequency component of low-resolution image is recognized as global structure prior to encourage global semantic consistency in high-resolution generation. Next, we perform regional attention control to screen cross-attention between global prompt and each region during regional denoising, leading to regional attention prior that alleviates object repetition issue. The estimated regional prompts containing rich descriptive details further act as regional semantic prior to fuel the creativity of regional detail generation. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our C-Upscale manages to generate ultra-high-resolution images (e.g., 4,096 X 4,096 and 8,192 X 8,192) with higher visual fidelity and more creative regional details.

Grounding (i.e. localizing) arbitrary, free-form textual phrases in visual content is a challenging problem with many applications for human-computer interaction and image-text reference resolution. Few datasets provide the ground truth spatial localization of phrases, thus it is desirable to learn from data with no or little grounding supervision. We propose a novel approach which learns grounding by reconstructing a given phrase using an attention mechanism, which can be either latent or optimized directly. During training our approach encodes the phrase using a recurrent network language model and then learns to attend to the relevant image region in order to reconstruct the input phrase. At test time, the correct attention, i.e., the grounding, is evaluated. If grounding supervision is available it can be directly applied via a loss over the attention mechanism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the Flickr 30k Entities and ReferItGame datasets with different levels of supervision, ranging from no supervision over partial supervision to full supervision. Our supervised variant improves by a large margin over the state-of-the-art on both datasets.

While Attention has come to be an important mechanism in deep learning, there remains limited intuition for why it works so well. Here, we show that Transformer Attention can be closely related under certain data conditions to Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM), a biologically plausible associative memory model. We confirm that these conditions are satisfied in pre-trained GPT2 Transformer models. We discuss the implications of the Attention-SDM map and provide new computational and biological interpretations of Attention.

Human attention modelling has proven, in recent years, to be particularly useful not only for understanding the cognitive processes underlying visual exploration, but also for providing support to artificial intelligence models that aim to solve problems in various domains, including image and video processing, vision-and-language applications, and language modelling. This survey offers a reasoned overview of recent efforts to integrate human attention mechanisms into contemporary deep learning models and discusses future research directions and challenges. For a comprehensive overview on the ongoing research refer to our dedicated repository available at https://github.com/aimagelab/awesome-human-visual-attention.

As fine-tuning (FT) becomes increasingly impractical at scale, probing is emerging as the preferred evaluation protocol for self-supervised learning (SSL). Yet, the standard linear probing (LP) fails to adequately reflect the potential of models trained with Masked Image Modeling (MIM), due to the distributed nature of patch tokens. This motivates the need for attentive probing, an alternative that uses attention to selectively aggregate patch-level features. Despite its growing adoption, attentive probing remains under-explored, with existing methods suffering from excessive parameterization and poor computational efficiency. In this work, we revisit attentive probing through the lens of the accuracy-efficiency trade-off. We conduct a systematic study of existing methods, analyzing their mechanisms and benchmarking their performance. We introduce efficient probing (EP), a multi-query cross-attention mechanism that eliminates redundant projections, reduces the number of trainable parameters, and achieves up to a 10times speed-up over conventional multi-head attention. Despite its simplicity, EP outperforms LP and prior attentive probing approaches across seven benchmarks, generalizes well beyond MIM to diverse pre-training paradigms, produces interpretable attention maps, and achieves strong gains in low-shot and layer-wise settings. Code available at https://github.com/billpsomas/efficient-probing.

End-to-end models reach state-of-the-art performance for speech recognition, but global soft attention is not monotonic, which might lead to convergence problems, to instability, to bad generalisation, cannot be used for online streaming, and is also inefficient in calculation. Monotonicity can potentially fix all of this. There are several ad-hoc solutions or heuristics to introduce monotonicity, but a principled introduction is rarely found in literature so far. In this paper, we present a mathematically clean solution to introduce monotonicity, by introducing a new latent variable which represents the audio position or segment boundaries. We compare several monotonic latent models to our global soft attention baseline such as a hard attention model, a local windowed soft attention model, and a segmental soft attention model. We can show that our monotonic models perform as good as the global soft attention model. We perform our experiments on Switchboard 300h. We carefully outline the details of our training and release our code and configs.

Recent Transformer-based diffusion models have shown remarkable performance, largely attributed to the ability of the self-attention mechanism to accurately capture both global and local contexts by computing all-pair interactions among input tokens. However, their quadratic complexity poses significant computational challenges for long-sequence inputs. Conversely, a recent state space model called Mamba offers linear complexity by compressing a filtered global context into a hidden state. Despite its efficiency, compression inevitably leads to information loss of fine-grained local dependencies among tokens, which are crucial for effective visual generative modeling. Motivated by these observations, we introduce Local Attentional Mamba (LaMamba) blocks that combine the strengths of self-attention and Mamba, capturing both global contexts and local details with linear complexity. Leveraging the efficient U-Net architecture, our model exhibits exceptional scalability and surpasses the performance of DiT across various model scales on ImageNet at 256x256 resolution, all while utilizing substantially fewer GFLOPs and a comparable number of parameters. Compared to state-of-the-art diffusion models on ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512, our largest model presents notable advantages, such as a reduction of up to 62\% GFLOPs compared to DiT-XL/2, while achieving superior performance with comparable or fewer parameters.

We introduce three new attention mechanisms that outperform standard multi-head attention in terms of efficiency and learning capabilities, thereby improving the performance and broader deployability of Transformer models. Our first contribution is Optimised Attention, which performs similarly to standard attention, but has 3/4 as many parameters and one matrix multiplication fewer per head. Next, we introduce Efficient Attention, which performs on par with standard attention with only 1/2 as many parameters as many parameters and two matrix multiplications fewer per head and is up to twice as fast as standard attention. Lastly, we introduce Super Attention, which surpasses standard attention by a significant margin in both vision and natural language processing tasks while having fewer parameters and matrix multiplications. In addition to providing rigorous mathematical comparisons, we evaluate the presented attention mechanisms on MNIST, CIFAR100, IMDB Movie Reviews, and Amazon Reviews datasets.

Point-based interactive colorization techniques allow users to effortlessly colorize grayscale images using user-provided color hints. However, point-based methods often face challenges when different colors are given to semantically similar areas, leading to color intermingling and unsatisfactory results-an issue we refer to as color collapse. The fundamental cause of color collapse is the inadequacy of points for defining the boundaries for each color. To mitigate color collapse, we introduce a lasso tool that can control the scope of each color hint. Additionally, we design a framework that leverages the user-provided lassos to localize the attention masks. The experimental results show that using a single lasso is as effective as applying 4.18 individual color hints and can achieve the desired outcomes in 30% less time than using points alone.

We propose Localized Narratives, a new form of multimodal image annotations connecting vision and language. We ask annotators to describe an image with their voice while simultaneously hovering their mouse over the region they are describing. Since the voice and the mouse pointer are synchronized, we can localize every single word in the description. This dense visual grounding takes the form of a mouse trace segment per word and is unique to our data. We annotated 849k images with Localized Narratives: the whole COCO, Flickr30k, and ADE20K datasets, and 671k images of Open Images, all of which we make publicly available. We provide an extensive analysis of these annotations showing they are diverse, accurate, and efficient to produce. We also demonstrate their utility on the application of controlled image captioning.

The design choices in the Transformer attention mechanism, including weak inductive bias and quadratic computational complexity, have limited its application for modeling long sequences. In this paper, we introduce Mega, a simple, theoretically grounded, single-head gated attention mechanism equipped with (exponential) moving average to incorporate inductive bias of position-aware local dependencies into the position-agnostic attention mechanism. We further propose a variant of Mega that offers linear time and space complexity yet yields only minimal quality loss, by efficiently splitting the whole sequence into multiple chunks with fixed length. Extensive experiments on a wide range of sequence modeling benchmarks, including the Long Range Arena, neural machine translation, auto-regressive language modeling, and image and speech classification, show that Mega achieves significant improvements over other sequence models, including variants of Transformers and recent state space models.

Length extrapolation algorithms based on Rotary position embedding (RoPE) have shown promising results in extending the context length of language models. However, understanding how position embedding can capture longer-range contextual information remains elusive. Based on the intuition that different dimensions correspond to different frequency of changes in RoPE encoding, we conducted a dimension-level analysis to investigate the correlation between a hidden dimension of an attention head and its contribution to capturing long-distance dependencies. Using our correlation metric, we identified a particular type of attention heads, which we named Positional Heads, from various length-extrapolated models. These heads exhibit a strong focus on long-range information interaction and play a pivotal role in long input processing, as evidence by our ablation. We further demonstrate the correlation between the efficiency of length extrapolation and the extension of the high-dimensional attention allocation of these heads. The identification of Positional Heads provides insights for future research in long-text comprehension.

Widely adopted in modern Vision Transformer designs, Softmax attention can effectively capture long-range visual information; however, it incurs excessive computational cost when dealing with high-resolution inputs. In contrast, linear attention naturally enjoys linear complexity and has great potential to scale up to higher-resolution images. Nonetheless, the unsatisfactory performance of linear attention greatly limits its practical application in various scenarios. In this paper, we take a step forward to close the gap between the linear and Softmax attention with novel theoretical analyses, which demystify the core factors behind the performance deviations. Specifically, we present two key perspectives to understand and alleviate the limitations of linear attention: the injective property and the local modeling ability. Firstly, we prove that linear attention is not injective, which is prone to assign identical attention weights to different query vectors, thus adding to severe semantic confusion since different queries correspond to the same outputs. Secondly, we confirm that effective local modeling is essential for the success of Softmax attention, in which linear attention falls short. The aforementioned two fundamental differences significantly contribute to the disparities between these two attention paradigms, which is demonstrated by our substantial empirical validation in the paper. In addition, more experiment results indicate that linear attention, as long as endowed with these two properties, can outperform Softmax attention across various tasks while maintaining lower computation complexity. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/InLine.

Transformer-based methods have demonstrated impressive performance in low-level visual tasks such as Image Super-Resolution (SR). However, its computational complexity grows quadratically with the spatial resolution. A series of works attempt to alleviate this problem by dividing Low-Resolution images into local windows, axial stripes, or dilated windows. SR typically leverages the redundancy of images for reconstruction, and this redundancy appears not only in local regions but also in long-range regions. However, these methods limit attention computation to content-agnostic local regions, limiting directly the ability of attention to capture long-range dependency. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight Content-Aware Token Aggregation Network (CATANet). Specifically, we propose an efficient Content-Aware Token Aggregation module for aggregating long-range content-similar tokens, which shares token centers across all image tokens and updates them only during the training phase. Then we utilize intra-group self-attention to enable long-range information interaction. Moreover, we design an inter-group cross-attention to further enhance global information interaction. The experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art cluster-based method SPIN, our method achieves superior performance, with a maximum PSNR improvement of 0.33dB and nearly double the inference speed.

The quadratic computational complexity of the attention mechanism in current Large Language Models (LLMs) renders inference with long contexts prohibitively expensive. To address this challenge, various approaches aim to retain critical portions of the context to optimally approximate Full Attention (FA) through Key-Value (KV) compression or Sparse Attention (SA), enabling the processing of virtually unlimited text lengths in a streaming manner. However, these methods struggle to achieve performance levels comparable to FA, particularly in retrieval tasks. In this paper, our analysis of attention head patterns reveals that LLMs' attention distributions show strong local correlations, naturally reflecting a chunking mechanism for input context. We propose Ltri-LLM framework, which divides KVs into spans, stores them in an offline index, and retrieves the relevant KVs into memory for various queries. Experimental results on popular long text benchmarks show that Ltri-LLM can achieve performance close to FA while maintaining efficient, streaming-based inference.

We present a novel framework for training large language models with continuously adjustable internal representations that span the full spectrum from localist (interpretable, rule-based) to distributed (generalizable, efficient) encodings. The key innovations are (1) a locality dial, a tunable parameter that dynamically controls the degree of localization during both training and inference without requiring model retraining, (2) an information-theoretic recruitment mechanism that adaptively allocates semantic blocks as needed, eliminating the requirement for complete domain knowledge at initialization, and (3) a hierarchical recruitment framework that extends capacity allocation to entire specialized LLMs, enabling multi-granularity architectural adaptation. This is achieved through group sparsity penalties on attention mechanisms, information-theoretic anchor design, dynamic rule injection, and principled recruitment criteria based on penalized likelihood with explicit units. We provide rigorous mathematical results establishing explicit threshold conditions under which attention provably concentrates on semantically relevant blocks at stationary points, with exact bounds on attention entropy and pointer fidelity. The hierarchical recruitment mechanism provides convergence guarantees at both the block level (fine-grained, within-LLM) and the LLM level (coarse-grained, cross-domain), ensuring the system discovers semantic partitions that balance model complexity against data encoding efficiency. This framework enables practitioners to continuously interpolate between interpretable and high-performance modes while adapting architectural capacity at multiple granularities, supporting applications in regulated domains requiring both transparency and capability.

Attention guides our gaze to fixate the proper location of the scene and holds it in that location for the deserved amount of time given current processing demands, before shifting to the next one. As such, gaze deployment crucially is a temporal process. Existing computational models have made significant strides in predicting spatial aspects of observer's visual scanpaths (where to look), while often putting on the background the temporal facet of attention dynamics (when). In this paper we present TPP-Gaze, a novel and principled approach to model scanpath dynamics based on Neural Temporal Point Process (TPP), that jointly learns the temporal dynamics of fixations position and duration, integrating deep learning methodologies with point process theory. We conduct extensive experiments across five publicly available datasets. Our results show the overall superior performance of the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/phuselab/tppgaze.