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Ismail Ben Ayed

Publications and source records attributed to Ismail Ben Ayed.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Are Online Skill and Memory Modules Always Worth Their Tokens? A Budget-Constrained Study of Web Agents

Online web agents often augment a base actor with memory, workflow, or skill modules. These modules can improve performance, but they also consume test-time tokens, a cost rarely reported alongside the actor's inference cost. We study online augmentation, where this overhead is paid on every task, and re-evaluate its benefits under a fixed total inference budget. We compare AWM, ASI, and ReasoningBank with a token-matched vanilla baseline that uses the same budget for additional actor steps. Across four WebArena domains and three models, Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-5.4-mini, and Qwen 3.6-27B, the vanilla baseline matches or surpasses all three augmentation methods in aggregate success rate while often using fewer total tokens. We observe a similar trend on WorkArena-L1 with Qwen 3.6-27B, indicating that the effect extends to enterprise knowledge-work tasks. Our results suggest that skills and workflow memory can be useful in specific domains, but their apparent gains often vanish against a budget-matched actor. We further show that run-to-run variance materially affects outcomes and should be reported as a core evaluation criterion for online web agents.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

PRiSM: Prototype Regularization for Few-Shot VLMs

Training-free few-shot adaptation methods have gained significant attention recently in the context of Vision-language Models (VLMs). Yet, current benchmarks rely on strong assumptions about the statistics of the adaptation data, e.g., class balance. We question these simplifying assumptions and introduce a more realistic benchmark that varies both the levels of class balance and the effective number of classes in few-shot tasks via Dirichlet sampling. Surprisingly, under our setting, we observe substantial drops in the performances of state-of-the-art methods, more so when the number of labeled samples increases. To mitigate this, we introduce PRiSM, a class-prototype regularization that can be deployed as a plug and play module on top of any existing baseline method, significantly improving performances. Our method optimizes a novel multi-term loss, which includes a regularizer maximizing inter-class pairwise distances, along with additional terms promoting support-feature alignment and fidelity to the baseline prototypes. Furthermore, we introduce an effective and computationally efficient block Majorize-Minimize optimizer for our objective. More specifically, we derive a valid blockwise Lipschitz constant (i.e., a bound on the Hessian's spectral norm), which can be computed efficiently via the Gershgorin circle theorem. Extensive experiments show that PRiSM improves several training-free baselines, with large gains when dealing with severe class imbalance and high numbers of classes.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Quantile Adaptive Temperature Scaling for Confidence Calibration

Deep neural networks often produce poorly calibrated confidence estimates, overstating their certainty even when predictions are incorrect. Temperature Scaling remains the most widely used posthoc calibration method due to its simplicity and effectiveness, yet its global, uniform rescaling of logits fails to correct the highly heterogeneous structure of miscalibration observed across the confidence spectrum. In particular, the largest correctness confidence discrepancies arise in different quantile regions depending on the setting, low confidence predictions, where uncertainty matters most, tend to exhibit the largest correctness confidence discrepancies, which standard TS leaves largely unaddressed. We introduce Quantile Adaptive Temperature Scaling (QaTS), a simple and efficient post hoc calibration method that adapts the temperature as a function of a predictions empirical confidence quantile. By mapping confidences into the quantile space, QaTS normalizes the calibration problem, makes the structure of miscalibration explicit and enables a monotone temperature function that adapts across quantiles while leaving well calibrated high confidence predictions largely unchanged. preserving high confidence behavior. This quantile aware formulation aligns naturally with a reparameterized Expected Calibration Error (ECE) objective and yields a sample wise temperature that is robust across a variety of challenging scenarios, such as class imbalance and distributional shifts. Across a broad range of datasets, architectures, evaluation scenarios and diverse tasks, QaTS consistently, and substantially, outperforms state of the art post hoc calibration methods, delivering more reliable and trustworthy confidence estimates without modifying model predictions.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

MolRGen: A Training and Evaluation Setting for De Novo Molecular Generation with Reasonning Models

Recent reasoning-based large language models have shown strong performance on tasks with verifiable outcomes, but their use in de novo molecular generation remains limited by the lack of training environments where rewards can be computed without reference molecules. We introduce MolRGen, a benchmark and molecular verifier for training and evaluating reasoning LLMs on de novo molecular generation. MolRGen contains approximately 4,500 protein-pocket targets, resulting in 50k multi-objective optimization prompts combining docking scores with molecular properties such as QED, synthetic accessibility, logP, and physicochemical descriptors. Unlike caption-based generation or molecule-editing benchmarks, MolRGen evaluates molecules proposed from scratch by computing rewards at generation time. We benchmark general-purpose and chemistry-specialized open-source LLMs and introduce a diversity-aware top-k metric to measure whether models can generate a diverse set of high-scoring molecules. Finally, we use the verifier to fine-tune a 128B LLM with GRPO, showing improved performance, at the cost of a diversity-exploitation trade-off. MolRGen provides a scalable testbed for studying verifier-based reasoning and reinforcement learning in molecular design.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

TRUST: Test-Time Refinement using Uncertainty-Guided SSM Traverses

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as efficient alternatives to Vision Transformers (ViTs), with VMamba standing out as a pioneering architecture designed for vision tasks. However, their generalization performance degrades significantly under distribution shifts. To address this limitation, we propose TRUST (Test-Time Refinement using Uncertainty-Guided SSM Traverses), a novel test-time adaptation (TTA) method that leverages diverse traversal permutations to generate multiple causal perspectives of the input image. Model predictions serve as pseudo-labels to guide updates of the Mamba-specific parameters, and the adapted weights are averaged to integrate the learned information across traversal scans. Altogether, TRUST is the first approach that explicitly leverages the unique architectural properties of SSMs for adaptation. Experiments on seven benchmarks show that TRUST consistently improves robustness and outperforms existing TTA methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

ORION: ORthonormal Text Encoding for Universal VLM AdaptatION

Vision language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization across diverse tasks, yet their performance remains constrained by the quality and geometry of the textual prototypes used to represent classes. Standard zero shot classifiers, derived from frozen text encoders and handcrafted prompts, may yield correlated or weakly separated embeddings that limit task specific discriminability. We introduce ORION, a text encoder fine tuning framework that improves pretrained VLMs using only class names. Our method optimizes, via low rank adaptation, a novel loss integrating two terms, one promoting pairwise orthogonality between the textual representations of the classes of a given task and the other penalizing deviations from the initial class prototypes. Furthermore, we provide a probabilistic interpretation of our orthogonality penalty, connecting it to the general maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) principle via Huygens theorem. We report extensive experiments on 11 benchmarks and three large VLM backbones, showing that the refined textual embeddings yield powerful replacements for the standard CLIP prototypes. Added as plug and play module on top of various state of the art methods, and across different prediction settings (zero shot, few shot and test time adaptation), ORION improves the performance consistently and significantly.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Information Maximization for Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Domain Generalization

Semi-supervised domain generalization (SSDG) has recently emerged as an appealing alternative to tackle domain generalization when labeled data is scarce but unlabeled samples across domains are abundant. In this work, we identify an important limitation that hampers the deployment of state-of-the-art methods on more challenging but practical scenarios. In particular, state-of-the-art SSDG severely suffers in the presence of long-tailed class distributions, an arguably common situation in real-world settings. To alleviate this limitation, we propose IMaX, a simple yet effective objective based on the well-known InfoMax principle adapted to the SSDG scenario, where the Mutual Information (MI) between the learned features and latent labels is maximized, constrained by the supervision from the labeled samples. Our formulation integrates an α-entropic objective, which mitigates the class-balance bias encoded in the standard marginal entropy term of the MI, thereby better handling arbitrary class distributions. IMaX can be seamlessly plugged into recent state-of-the-art SSDG, consistently enhancing their performance, as demonstrated empirically across two different image modalities.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Locality-Attending Vision Transformer

Vision transformers have demonstrated remarkable success in classification by leveraging global self-attention to capture long-range dependencies. However, this same mechanism can obscure fine-grained spatial details crucial for tasks such as segmentation. In this work, we seek to enhance segmentation performance of vision transformers after standard image-level classification training. More specifically, we present a simple yet effective add-on that improves performance on segmentation tasks while retaining vision transformers' image-level recognition capabilities. In our approach, we modulate the self-attention with a learnable Gaussian kernel that biases the attention toward neighboring patches. We further refine the patch representations to learn better embeddings at patch positions. These modifications encourage tokens to focus on local surroundings and ensure meaningful representations at spatial positions, while still preserving the model's ability to incorporate global information. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our modifications, evidenced by substantial segmentation gains on three benchmarks (e.g., over 6% and 4% on ADE20K for ViT Tiny and Base), without changing the training regime or sacrificing classification performance. The code is available at https://github.com/sinahmr/LocAtViT/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Are foundation models for computer vision good conformal predictors?

Recent advances in self-supervision and contrastive learning have brought the performance of foundation models to unprecedented levels in a variety of tasks. Fueled by this progress, these models are becoming the prevailing approach for a wide array of real-world vision problems, including risk-sensitive and high-stakes applications. However, ensuring safe deployment in these scenarios requires a more comprehensive understanding of their uncertainty modeling capabilities, which has received little attention. In this work, we delve into the behaviour of vision and vision-language foundation models under Conformal Prediction (CP), a statistical framework that provides theoretical guarantees of marginal coverage of the true class. Across extensive experiments including popular vision classification benchmarks, well-known foundation vision models, and three CP methods, our findings reveal that foundation models are well-suited for conformalization procedures, particularly those integrating Vision Transformers. We also show that calibrating the confidence predictions of these models, a popular strategy to improve their uncertainty quantification, actually leads to efficiency degradation of the conformal set on adaptive CP methods. Furthermore, few-shot adaptation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks, whose popularity is surging, enhances conformal scores compared to zero-shot predictions. Last, our empirical study exposes APS as particularly promising in the context of vision foundation models, as it does not violate the marginal coverage guarantees across multiple challenging, yet realistic scenarios.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Histopath-C: Towards Realistic Domain Shifts for Histopathology Vision-Language Adaptation

Medical Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable performances in various medical imaging domains such as histo\-pathology by leveraging pre-trained, contrastive models that exploit visual and textual information. However, histopathology images may exhibit severe domain shifts, such as staining, contamination, blurring, and noise, which may severely degrade the VLM's downstream performance. In this work, we introduce Histopath-C, a new benchmark with realistic synthetic corruptions designed to mimic real-world distribution shifts observed in digital histopathology. Our framework dynamically applies corruptions to any available dataset and evaluates Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) mechanisms on the fly. We then propose LATTE, a transductive, low-rank adaptation strategy that exploits multiple text templates, mitigating the sensitivity of histopathology VLMs to diverse text inputs. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art TTA methods originally designed for natural images across a breadth of histopathology datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed design for robust adaptation in histopathology images. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Mehrdad-Noori/Histopath-C.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Class Adaptive Conformal Training

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success across a variety of tasks, yet they often suffer from unreliable probability estimates. As a result, they can be overconfident in their predictions. Conformal Prediction (CP) offers a principled framework for uncertainty quantification, yielding prediction sets with rigorous coverage guarantees. Existing conformal training methods optimize for overall set size, but shaping the prediction sets in a class-conditional manner is not straightforward and typically requires prior knowledge of the data distribution. In this work, we introduce Class Adaptive Conformal Training (CaCT), which formulates conformal training as an augmented Lagrangian optimization problem that adaptively learns to shape prediction sets class-conditionally without making any distributional assumptions. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, including standard and long-tailed image recognition as well as text classification, demonstrate that CaCT consistently outperforms prior conformal training methods, producing significantly smaller and more informative prediction sets while maintaining the desired coverage guarantees.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

SoC: Semantic Orthogonal Calibration for Test-Time Prompt Tuning

With the increasing adoption of vision-language models (VLMs) in critical decision-making systems such as healthcare or autonomous driving, the calibration of their uncertainty estimates becomes paramount. Yet, this dimension has been largely underexplored in the VLM test-time prompt-tuning (TPT) literature, which has predominantly focused on improving their discriminative performance. Recent state-of-the-art advocates for enforcing full orthogonality over pairs of text prompt embeddings to enhance separability, and therefore calibration. Nevertheless, as we theoretically show in this work, the inherent gradients from fully orthogonal constraints will strongly push semantically related classes away, ultimately making the model overconfident. Based on our findings, we propose Semantic Orthogonal Calibration (SoC), a Huber-based regularizer that enforces smooth prototype separation while preserving semantic proximity, thereby improving calibration compared to prior orthogonality-based approaches. Across a comprehensive empirical validation, we demonstrate that SoC consistently improves calibration performance, while also maintaining competitive discriminative capabilities.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Semantic Anchor Transport: Robust Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

Large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have shown unprecedented zero-shot performance across a wide range of tasks. Nevertheless, these models may be unreliable under distributional shifts, as their performance is significantly degraded. In this work, we investigate how to efficiently utilize class text information to mitigate distribution drifts encountered by VLMs during inference. In particular, we propose generating pseudo-labels for the noisy test-time samples by aligning visual embeddings with reliable, text-based semantic anchors. Specifically, to maintain the regular structure of the dataset properly, we formulate the problem as a batch-wise label assignment, which is efficiently solved using Optimal Transport. Our method, Semantic Anchor Transport (SAT), utilizes such pseudo-labels as supervisory signals for test-time adaptation, yielding a principled cross-modal alignment solution. Moreover, SAT further leverages heterogeneous textual clues, with a multi-template distillation approach that replicates multi-view contrastive learning strategies in unsupervised representation learning without incurring additional computational complexity. Extensive experiments on multiple popular test-time adaptation benchmarks presenting diverse complexity empirically show the superiority of SAT, achieving consistent performance gains over recent state-of-the-art methods, yet being computationally efficient.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Recently, test-time adaptation has attracted wide interest in the context of vision-language models for image classification. However, to the best of our knowledge, the problem is completely overlooked in dense prediction tasks such as Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS). In response, we propose a novel TTA method tailored to adapting VLMs for segmentation during test time. Unlike TTA methods for image classification, our Multi-Level and Multi-Prompt (MLMP) entropy minimization integrates features from intermediate vision-encoder layers and is performed with different text-prompt templates at both the global CLS token and local pixel-wise levels. Our approach could be used as plug-and-play for any segmentation network, does not require additional training data or labels, and remains effective even with a single test sample. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive OVSS TTA benchmark suite, which integrates a rigorous evaluation protocol, nine segmentation datasets, 15 common synthetic corruptions, and additional real and rendered domain shifts, \textbf{with a total of 87 distinct test scenarios}, establishing a standardized and comprehensive testbed for future TTA research in open-vocabulary segmentation. Our experiments on this suite demonstrate that our segmentation-tailored method consistently delivers significant gains over direct adoption of TTA classification baselines. Code and data are available at https://github.com/dosowiechi/MLMP.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Learning Task-Agnostic Representations through Multi-Teacher Distillation

Casting complex inputs into tractable representations is a critical step across various fields. Diverse embedding models emerge from differences in architectures, loss functions, input modalities and datasets, each capturing unique aspects of the input. Multi-teacher distillation leverages this diversity to enrich representations but often remains tailored to specific tasks. In this paper, we introduce a task-agnostic framework based on a ``majority vote" objective function. We demonstrate that this function is bounded by the mutual information between student and teachers' embeddings, leading to a task-agnostic distillation loss that eliminates dependence on task-specific labels or prior knowledge. Our evaluations across text, vision models, and molecular modeling show that our method effectively leverages teacher diversity, resulting in representations enabling better performance for a wide range of downstream tasks such as classification, clustering, or regression. Additionally, we train and release state-of-the-art embedding models, enhancing downstream performance in various modalities.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

ViLU: Learning Vision-Language Uncertainties for Failure Prediction

Reliable Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) and failure prediction remain open challenges for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce ViLU, a new Vision-Language Uncertainty quantification framework that contextualizes uncertainty estimates by leveraging all task-relevant textual representations. ViLU constructs an uncertainty-aware multi-modal representation by integrating the visual embedding, the predicted textual embedding, and an image-conditioned textual representation via cross-attention. Unlike traditional UQ methods based on loss prediction, ViLU trains an uncertainty predictor as a binary classifier to distinguish correct from incorrect predictions using a weighted binary cross-entropy loss, making it loss-agnostic. In particular, our proposed approach is well-suited for post-hoc settings, where only vision and text embeddings are available without direct access to the model itself. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets show the significant gains of our method compared to state-of-the-art failure prediction methods. We apply our method to standard classification datasets, such as ImageNet-1k, as well as large-scale image-caption datasets like CC12M and LAION-400M. Ablation studies highlight the critical role of our architecture and training in achieving effective uncertainty quantification. Our code is publicly available and can be found here: https://github.com/ykrmm/ViLU.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Purge-Gate: Backpropagation-Free Test-Time Adaptation for Point Clouds Classification via Token Purging

Test-time adaptation (TTA) is crucial for mitigating performance degradation caused by distribution shifts in 3D point cloud classification. In this work, we introduce Token Purging (PG), a novel backpropagation-free approach that removes tokens highly affected by domain shifts before they reach attention layers. Unlike existing TTA methods, PG operates at the token level, ensuring robust adaptation without iterative updates. We propose two variants: PG-SP, which leverages source statistics, and PG-SF, a fully source-free version relying on CLS-token-driven adaptation. Extensive evaluations on ModelNet40-C, ShapeNet-C, and ScanObjectNN-C demonstrate that PG-SP achieves an average of +10.3\% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art backpropagation-free methods, while PG-SF sets new benchmarks for source-free adaptation. Moreover, PG is 12.4 times faster and 5.5 times more memory efficient than our baseline, making it suitable for real-world deployment. Code is available at \hyperlink{https://github.com/MosyMosy/Purge-Gate}{https://github.com/MosyMosy/Purge-Gate}

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Language-Aware Information Maximization for Transductive Few-Shot CLIP

Transductive few-shot learning has triggered an abundant literature focusing on vision-only models, but is still at a nascent stage within the recent context of foundational vision-language models (VLMs). Only a few recent methods addressed the problem, pointing to the potential of tranduction in VLMs and to the need for VLM-tailored methods. Building on this momentum, we leverage information-theoretic concepts and recent progress in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), developing a highly competitive transductive few-shot CLIP method. Specifically, we introduce a novel Language-aware Information MaximizatiOn (LIMO) loss integrating three complementary terms: (i) the mutual information between the vision inputs and the textual class descriptions; (ii) a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence penalizing deviation of the network's probabilistic outputs from the text-driven zero-shot predictions; and (iii) a standard cross-entropy loss based on the labeled shots. Furthermore, we challenge the commonly followed fine-tuning practices in the context of transductive few-shot learning, and explore PEFT strategies, completely overlooked in this context. Surprisingly, we observe substantial boosts in performances, which points to the potential of adapting a subset of the model's parameters in the transductive few-shot setting. We report comprehensive evaluations, which show that LIMO outperforms the very recent transductive few-shot CLIP methods by a large margin and yields significant gains over the best-performing inductive methods. Our code is publicly available at:\[ \href{https://github.com/ghassenbaklouti/LIMO}{\text{here}} \]

cs.CV↗