Training-free zero-shot composed image retrieval models are recently gaining increasing research interest due to their generalizability and flexibility in unseen multimodal retrieval. Recent LLM-based advances focus on generating the expected target caption by exploring the compositional ability behind the LLMs. Although efficient, we find that 1) the generated captions tend to introduce unexpected features from the reference image due to the semantic gap between the input image and text modification, where the image contains much more details than the text; 2) the point-to-point alignment during the retrieval stage fails to capture diverse compositions.To address these challenges, we introduce a novel Semantic Transition and Transportation in Collaboration framework for training-free zero-shot CIR tasks. Specifically, given the composed caption inferred by an LLM, we aim to refine it through a transition vector in the embedding space and make it closer to the target image. Combining LLMs with user instruction, the refined caption concentrates more on the core modification intent and thus filters out unnecessary noise. Moreover, to explore diverse alignment during the retrieval stage, we model the caption and image as discrete distributions and reformulate the retrieval task as a set-to-set alignment task. Finally, a bidirectional transportation distance is developed to consider fine-grained alignments across modalities and calculate the retrieval score.Extensive experimentsdemonstrate that our method can be general, effective, and beneficial for many CIR tasks.The code is attached in the supplementary material.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Data matters. In computer vision, data (or pixels) are the primary source of information containing signals that span from low-level attributes to high-level concepts. At scale, the success of modern vision systems has been closely tied to how data is curated for semantic understanding (e.g., ImageNet). Recent trends in spatial intelligence and physical world understanding further highlight the importance of real-world signals that preserve spatial structure, beyond purely semantic signals. This motivates a shift toward curating data that better captures spatially grounded information across diverse environments. In this work, we demonstrate that training on 2B web-crawled images with a self-curation strategy on masked autoencoder (MAE) can learn strong representations for dense prediction tasks, while remaining simple, stable, and efficient. Our model, codenamed "Pixio", is an enhanced masked autoencoder (MAE) with more challenging pre-training tasks and more capable architectures. Pixio yields dense representations achieving promising results across a wide range of dense prediction tasks in the wild, including monocular depth estimation (e.g., Depth Anything), feed-forward 3D reconstruction (i.e., MapAnything), and visual segmentation (e.g., SAM). Our results suggest that data curation can significantly contribute to dense representation learning.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently enabled robotic manipulation by grounding visual and linguistic cues into actions. However, most VLAs assume the Markov property, relying only on the current observation and thus suffering from temporal myopia that degrades long-horizon coherence. In this work, we view motion as a more compact and informative representation of temporal context and world dynamics, capturing inter-state changes while filtering static pixel-level noise. From this perspective, HiF-VLA equips a motion-centric world model for the VLA, enabling agents to reason about temporal dynamics for future evolution during action generation. Building on this idea, we propose HiF-VLA (Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight for VLAs), a unified framework that leverages motion for bidirectional temporal reasoning. HiF-VLA encodes past dynamics through hindsight priors, anticipates future motion via foresight reasoning, and integrates both through a hindsight-modulated joint expert to enable a "think-while-acting" paradigm for long-horizon manipulation. As a result, HiF-VLA surpasses strong baselines on LIBERO-Long and CALVIN ABC-D benchmarks, while incurring negligible additional inference latency. Furthermore, HiF-VLA achieves substantial improvements in real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks, demonstrating its broad effectiveness in practical robotic settings.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Humans constantly reason about 3D proximity, the relations between their body and surrounding objects, to guide perception and action in daily life. Whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can perform such embodied 3D reasoning remains unclear. To this end, we introduce EgoProx, a benchmark for egocentric 3D proximity reasoning. We organize our tasks along a cognitive chain, covering intention, exploration, exploitation, and chain-of-actions reasoning. We also design an agent based data engine that produces diverse and consistent QA pairs at scale. We benchmark prevailing MLLMs on EgoProx and conduct additional analyses with dataset specific and task specific instruction tuning. We observe large cross-domain gains, indicating that current MLLMs contain some spatial knowledge; however, they still struggle to effectively leverage it for spatial reasoning VQA.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhang, Pingrui, Su, Yifei, Wu, Pengyuan, An, Dong, Zhang, Li, Wang, Zhigang, Wang, Dong, Zhao, Bin
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires the agent to navigate based on natural instructions. This task is challenging due to partial observability, which makes it difficult to align perception with language. Recent methods mitigate this by imagining future scenes, yet they rely on vision-based synthesis, leading to high computational cost and redundant details. To this end, we propose to adaptively imagine key environmental semantics via language form, enabling a more reliable and efficient strategy. Specifically, we introduce Adaptive Text Dreamer (ATD), a dual-branch self-guided imagination policy built upon a large language model (LLM). ATD is designed with a human-like left-right brain architecture, where the left brain focuses on logical integration, and the right brain is responsible for imaginative prediction of future scenes. To achieve this, we fine-tune only the Q-former within both brains to efficiently activate domain-specific knowledge in the LLM, enabling dynamic updates of logical reasoning and imagination during navigation. Furthermore, we propose a cross-interaction mechanism that regularizes the imagined latent-space outputs and integrates them with the navigation expert module via a decoder-free latent interface, thereby enabling ATD to jointly harness the reasoning ability of the LLM and the task-specific knowledge of the navigation model. We conduct extensive experiments across the R2R, REVERIE, and R4R benchmarks, demonstrating that ATD achieves competitive performance with significantly fewer parameters. The code will be available.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination -- competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: \mathcal P ^ \mathrm i (pure identity), \mathcal P ^ \mathrm s (pure shape), and \mathcal P ^ \mathrm i+s (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers \mathcal P ^ \mathrm i+s toward optimal balance: \mathcal E _ \mathrm shape ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while \mathcal E _ \mathrm id employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
RGB-Thermal (RGBT) tracking aims to achieve robust object localization across diverse environmental conditions by fusing visible and thermal infrared modalities. However, existing RGBT trackers rely solely on initial-frame visual information for target modeling, failing to adapt to appearance variations due to the absence of language guidance. Furthermore, current methods suffer from redundant search regions and heterogeneous modality gaps, causing background distraction. To address these issues, we first introduce textual descriptions into RGBT tracking benchmarks. This is accomplished through a pipeline that leverages Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to automatically produce texual annotations. Afterwards, we propose RAGTrack, a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for robust RGBT tracking. To this end, we introduce a Multi-modal Transformer Encoder (MTE) for unified visual-language modeling. Then, we design an Adaptive Token Fusion (ATF) to select target-relevant tokens and perform channel exchanges based on cross-modal correlations, mitigating search redundancies and modality gaps. Finally, we propose a Context-aware Reasoning Module (CRM) to maintain a dynamic knowledge base and employ a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enable temporal linguistic reasoning for robust target modeling. Extensive experiments on four RGBT benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across various challenging scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/IdolLab/RAGTrack.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Retrieval-augmented diffusion models (RAG-DMs) have been increasingly deployed across applications, reflecting a broader trend of adopting retrieval-augmented pipelines in AI agent systems and the emerging OpenClaw framework. Despite the success, their trustworthiness remains underexplored. Existing backdoor attacks focus on either manipulating the generation phase or the retrieval phase under the white-box setting, which suffer from knowledge conflicts between retrieved images and user prompts. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel red-teaming approach JOB, which is the first jointly optimized backdoor attack tailored to black-box RAG-DMs. Specifically, JOB poisons the knowledge base with a small number of target class images and learns a trigger through multi-objective optimization, steering retrieval toward poisoned images and aligning the generated outputs with the target class, while preserving benign performance. Experiments show that JOB effectively attacks black-box RAG-DMs, achieving high success rates and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.AI
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a cornerstone for robotics, with flow-matching policies like \pi_0 showing great promise in generating smooth, continuous actions. As these models advance, their unique action generation mechanism--the vector field dynamics--presents a critical yet unexplored security vulnerability, particularly backdoor vulnerabilities. Existing backdoor attacks designed for autoregressive discretization VLAs cannot be directly applied to this new continuous dynamics.We introduce FlowHijack, the first backdoor attack framework to systematically target the underlying vector-field dynamics of flow-matching VLAs. Our method combines a novel \tau-conditioned injection strategy, which manipulates the initial phase of the action generation, with a dynamics mimicry regularizer. Experiments demonstrate that FlowHijack achieves high attack success rates using stealthy, context-aware triggers where prior works failed. Crucially, it preserves benign task performance and, by enforcing kinematic similarity, generates malicious actions that are behaviorally indistinguishable from normal actions. Our findings reveal a significant vulnerability in continuous embodied models, highlighting the urgent need for defenses targeting the model's internal generative dynamics.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Colored glass is widely used in everyday settings, yet its reflective and absorptive properties often introduce ghost shadows and color bias in captured images. However, existing methods typically neglect the absorption issue, making it difficult to address color bias caused by colored glass. To address this, we are the first to apply polarization imaging theory to model the light transmission process within glass. Specifically, we propose a novel imaging model, the Polarization State Tracing Model (PSTM), which traces polarized light along multiple propagation paths and accounts for wavelength-selective absorption, enabling joint reflection removal and color-consistent reconstruction. Guided by PSTM, we design a Channel Ring Attention (CRA) mechanism to efficiently capture inter-angle polarization dependencies and enhance feature interaction across polarization channels, ensuring physically consistent recovery. Besides, the recovered polarization information can be directly applied to advanced downstream tasks, such as Shape-from-Polarization (SfP). We construct a real-world dataset, GlassPol, containing a wide range of glass materials, enabling testing under diverse optical conditions. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 3dB improvement in PSNR, establishing a new benchmark for polarized reflection removal.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
We present PhysInOne, a large-scale synthetic dataset addressing the critical scarcity of physically-grounded training data for AI systems. Unlike existing datasets limited to merely hundreds or thousands of examples, PhysInOne provides 2 million videos across 153,810 dynamic 3D scenes, covering 71 basic physical phenomena in mechanics, optics, fluid dynamics, and magnetism. Distinct from previous works, our scenes feature multiobject interactions against complex backgrounds, with comprehensive ground-truth annotations including 3D geometry, semantics, dynamic motion, physical properties, and text descriptions. We demonstrate PhysInOne's efficacy across four emerging applications: physics-aware video generation, long-/short-term future frame prediction, physical property estimation, and motion transfer. Experiments show that fine-tuning foundation models on PhysInOne significantly enhances physical plausibility, while also exposing critical gaps in modeling complex physical dynamics and estimating intrinsic properties. As the largest dataset of its kind, orders of magnitude beyond prior works, PhysInOne establishes a new benchmark for advancing physics-grounded world models in generation, simulation, and embodied AI.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Humans naturally allocate more time before acting when handling complex tasks in the physical world. This paradigm has recently led to remarkable advances in boosting Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex tasks in digital domains. However, the potential of test-time computing remains largely unexplored for robotic foundation models that interact with the physical world. In this work, we propose FM-Steer, a test-time computing framework that augments flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) generalist policies with value-guided sampling and cascaded action denoising, enabling stronger control performance and real-time action rates for dexterous robot manipulation. FM-Steer first introduces an intermediate flow verifier to estimate state-action values for candidate actions. At test time, the policy iteratively samples multiple noisy action proposals and retains the one with the highest predicted value, yielding value-aligned, high-quality actions without retraining. To satisfy the stringent frequency demands of robot control, FM-Steer further introduces cascaded action denoising, decoupling expensive value-guided sampling from fast action refinement. A lightweight Lite-Flow denoiser asynchronously takes the selected high-value noisy action and rapidly denoises it to produce the final control signal, enabling fluid, high-rate execution. During deployment, the intermediate verifier operates at a low frequency to provide value-guided sampling, while the Lite-Flow denoiser continually processes selected candidates to maintain real-time control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FM-Steer scales flow-based VLA models effectively at test time and achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world dexterous robotic tasks. The source code is available on the project page: https://hume-vla.github.io.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Reconstructing 3D humans and scenes from monocular videos is a challenging task, particularly due to human motion, varying illumination, and dynamic scene shadows. While recent works have explored scene disentanglement by jointly modeling humans and their surrounding scenes, they often overlook illumination and shadow effects--resulting in inconsistent human appearance and degraded scene realism. To address this gap, we propose a photometrically consistent integration of human and scene reconstruction based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, with a key focus on modeling spatially-varying illumination and shadows. Central to our method is a learnable light volume that provides localized lighting cues to human Gaussians, enabling more realistic and consistent appearance synthesis. To further ensure accurate human geometry and alignment, we adopt a two-stage reconstruction strategy: we first optimize a human mesh and then anchor Gaussians to the refined surface. In addition, we introduce an implicit shadow estimation module that disentangles cast shadows from the scene, thus supporting plausible human shadow synthesis. Our framework also facilitates human relighting and compositing into novel scenes with contextually appropriate lighting. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing consistent appearances, realistic illumination, and enhanced overall scene realism.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Existing single object trackers typically treat temporal modeling superficially by passing limited inter-frame information, such as propagated tokens or template updates, without intrinsic temporal supervision learning. To address this limitation, we propose TGTrack, a new unified tracking framework that incorporates a temporally generative supervision task to guide the model in learning temporal dynamics. The core of TGTrack is a temporally generative learning paradigm equipped with a transformer-based generative decoder, which consists of a gated fusion module and an autoregressive prediction mechanism. This joint design enables the model to infer future scenarios from preceding information, thereby improving its ability to model both visual appearance and temporal dynamics. Furthermore, we introduce a time token embedding to explicitly encode the temporal position of each frame. Experiments on 11 benchmarks spanning five modalities show that TGTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance in robust unified tracking. For instance, TGTrack-B384 achieves an AUC of 75.3% on LaSOT. Code is available at https://github.com/wtg1/TGTrack.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
With growing real-world demands, efficient tracking has received increasing attention. However, most existing methods are limited to RGB inputs and struggle in multi-modal scenarios. Moreover, current multi-modal tracking approaches typically use complex designs, making them too heavy and slow for resource-constrained deployment. To tackle these limitations, we propose UETrack, a unified and efficient framework for single object tracking. UETrack demonstrates high practicality and versatility, efficiently handling multiple modalities including RGB, Depth, Thermal, Event, and Language, and addresses the gap in efficient multi-modal tracking. It introduces two key components: a Token-Pooling-based Mixture-of-Experts mechanism that enhances modeling capacity through feature aggregation and expert specialization, and a Target-aware Adaptive Distillation strategy that selectively performs distillation based on sample characteristics, reducing redundant supervision and improving performance. Extensive experiments on 12 benchmarks across 3 hardware platforms show that UETrack achieves a superior speed-accuracy trade-off compared to pervious methods. For instance, UETrack-B achieves 69.2% AUC on LaSOT and runs at 163/56/60 FPS on GPU/CPU/AGX, demonstrating strong practicality and versatility. Code is available at https://github.com/kangben258/UETrack.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly within the unified Transformer architecture, yet their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains challenging due to high computational complexity. While pruning has emerged as an effective technique for compressing VLMs, existing approaches predominantly focus on a single mode by pruning either parameters or tokens, neglecting fully exploring the inherent redundancy in each mode, which leads to substantial performance degradation at high pruning ratios. To address the above limitations, we propose Collaborative Multi-Mode Pruning (CoMP), a novel framework tailored for VLMs by performing joint parameter and token pruning. Specifically, we first design a Collaborative Importance Metric (CIM) that investigates the mutual interference between the coupled parameters and tokens. It incorporates distinct significance of tokens into the computation of parameter importance scores, while simultaneously mitigating the affect of pruned parameters on token importance scores. Moreover, we develop a Multi-Mode Pruning Strategy (MPS) that decomposes the overall pruning process into a sequence of pruning stages, while in each stage we estimate the priory of different pruning modes based on their pruning cost and adaptively shift to the optimal one. Additionally, MPS integrates the historical cost and random exploration, in order to achieve a stable pruning process and avoid local optimum. Extensive experiments across various vision-language tasks and models demonstrate that our method effectively promotes the performance under high pruning ratios by comparing to the state-of-the-art approaches. The source code is available at https://github.com/Wuzimeng/CoMP.git.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual reasoning tasks, serving as the core perception engines for emerging AI agents like OpenClaw. While recent studies have introduced several effective image-based jailbreak methods, the vulnerabilities inherent in the video modality remain a largely unexplored frontier. As a pioneering effort to bridge this critical safety gap, we demonstrate that video-driven jailbreak attacks are significantly more effective and robust against pre-defined system prompts than their image-based counterparts. Specifically, we find that simply repeating a harmful image across multiple frames to construct a video can bypass the safety mechanisms of MLLMs. Our analysis reveals that unsafe videos are embedded more similarly to safe videos in the model's representation space than individual harmful images, making them harder to detect. Moreover, videos composed of identical frames are processed more like static images and are more likely to trigger safety defenses compared to videos with diverse frames. Motivated by these findings, we propose an algorithm that injects harmful content into typographic videos by interleaving it with diverse, safety-proximal frames, thereby evading MLLM safety alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art jailbreak performance on several widely-used MLLMs (e.g., VideoLLaMA-2, Qwen2.5-VL, GPT-4.1, and Gemini-2.5) under 16 different safety policies.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Recent advances in visuomotor policy learning have enabled robots to perform control directly from visual inputs. Yet, extending such end-to-end learning from single-arm to bimanual manipulation remains challenging due to the need for both independent perception and coordinated interaction between arms. Existing methods typically favor one side--either decoupling the two arms to avoid interference or enforcing strong cross-arm coupling for coordination--thus lacking a unified treatment. We propose CUBic, a Coordinated and Unified framework for Bimanual perception and control that reformulates bimanual coordination as a unified perceptual modeling problem. CUBic learns a shared tokenized representation bridging perception and control, where independence and coordination emerge intrinsically from structure rather than from hand-crafted coupling. Our approach integrates three components: unidirectional perception aggregation, bidirectional perception coordination through two codebooks with shared mapping, and a unified perception-to-control diffusion policy. Extensive experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark show that CUBic consistently surpasses standard baselines, achieving marked improvements in coordination accuracy and task success rates over state-of-the-art visuomotor baselines.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse applications, such as AI agents, yet remain vulnerable to targeted adversarial attacks. However, the practical robustness of such attacks often remains unclear with limited evaluation under defenses. Diffusion-based purification (DBP), a widely adopted black-box defense, effectively blocks current attacks by removing adversarial perturbations via generative diffusion. Prior DBP evasion attacks target white-box image classifiers and are ill-suited to VLMs, incurring high computational costs and gradient instability when adapted. In this paper, we present PureProof, a black-box targeted attack on VLMs resilient to DBP. It consists of three core components. Stochastic Reverse Alignment (SRA) guides adversarial optimization via single-step reverse prediction, avoiding costly full-trajectory backpropagation. Adaptive Re-noising Augmentation (ARA) mitigates diffusion stochasticity through timestep-adaptive re-noising. Self-Consistency Regularization (SCR) stabilizes optimization by promoting local temporal coherence. Extensive experiments on open-source and commercial VLMs show that PureProof consistently outperforms prior attacks against DBP and achieves strong noise resilience, revealing critical vulnerabilities in VLMs and offering broader safety implications for real-world VLM deployments, including emerging agentic settings.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Wang, Dongsheng, Zhang, Jinsen, Su, Dawei, Huang, Hui
Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for each neuron remains challenging in practice: excessive sparsity might lead to poor reconstruction, whereas insufficient sparsity harms interpretability. While existing activation functions such as ReLU and TopK provide certain sparsity guarantees, they typically require additional sparsity regularization or cherry-picked hyperparameters. We show in this paper that adaptive sparse attention mechanisms using sparsemax can bridge this trade-off, due to their ability to determine the number of concepts in a data-dependent manner.Specifically, we first explore a new class of SAEs based on the cross-attention architecture with the latent features as queries and the learnable dictionary as the key and value matrices. To encourage sparse pattern learning, we employ a sparsemax-based attention strategy that automatically infers a sparse set of concepts according to the complexity of each neuron, resulting in a more flexible and efficient activation function. Through comprehensive evaluation and visualization, we show that our approach successfully achieves lower reconstruction loss while producing high-quality concepts. Moreover, the sparsity level automatically determined by our approach can serve as tuning guidance to improve existing SAEs. The code is available at https://github.com/qyj-bkjx/Sparsemax-SAE.
尚无 AI 解读,展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表