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Mohammed Bennamoun

Publications and source records attributed to Mohammed Bennamoun.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Sports-QA: A Large-Scale Video Question Answering Benchmark for Complex and Professional Sports

Reasoning over sports videos for question answering is an important task with numerous applications, such as player training and information retrieval. However, this task has not been explored due to the lack of relevant datasets and the challenging nature it presents. Most datasets for video question answering (VideoQA) focus mainly on general and coarse-grained understanding of daily-life videos, which is not applicable to sports scenarios requiring professional action understanding and fine-grained motion analysis. In this paper, we introduce the first dataset, named Sports-QA, specifically designed for the sports VideoQA task. The Sports-QA dataset includes various types of questions, such as descriptions, chronologies, causalities, and counterfactual conditions, covering multiple sports. Furthermore, to address the characteristics of the sports VideoQA task, we propose a new Auto-Focus Transformer (AFT) capable of automatically focusing on particular scales of temporal information for question answering. We conduct extensive experiments on Sports-QA, including baseline studies and the evaluation of different methods. The results demonstrate that our AFT achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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Answering from Sure to Uncertain: Uncertainty-Aware Curriculum Learning for Video Question Answering

While significant advancements have been made in video question answering (VideoQA), the potential benefits of enhancing model generalization through tailored difficulty scheduling have been largely overlooked in existing research. This paper seeks to bridge that gap by incorporating VideoQA into a curriculum learning (CL) framework that progressively trains models from simpler to more complex data. Recognizing that conventional self-paced CL methods rely on training loss for difficulty measurement, which might not accurately reflect the intricacies of video-question pairs, we introduce the concept of uncertainty-aware CL. Here, uncertainty serves as the guiding principle for dynamically adjusting the difficulty. Furthermore, we address the challenge posed by uncertainty by presenting a probabilistic modeling approach for VideoQA. Specifically, we conceptualize VideoQA as a stochastic computation graph, where the hidden representations are treated as stochastic variables. This yields two distinct types of uncertainty: one related to the inherent uncertainty in the data and another pertaining to the model's confidence. In practice, we seamlessly integrate the VideoQA model into our framework and conduct comprehensive experiments. The findings affirm that our approach not only achieves enhanced performance but also effectively quantifies uncertainty in the context of VideoQA.

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Boosting Skeleton-based Zero-Shot Action Recognition with Training-Free Test-Time Adaptation

We introduce Skeleton-Cache, the first training-free test-time adaptation framework for skeleton-based zero-shot action recognition (SZAR), aimed at improving model generalization to unseen actions during inference. Skeleton-Cache reformulates inference as a lightweight retrieval process over a non-parametric cache that stores structured skeleton representations, combining both global and fine-grained local descriptors. To guide the fusion of descriptor-wise predictions, we leverage the semantic reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to assign class-specific importance weights. By integrating these structured descriptors with LLM-guided semantic priors, Skeleton-Cache dynamically adapts to unseen actions without any additional training or access to training data. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60/120 and PKU-MMD II demonstrate that Skeleton-Cache consistently boosts the performance of various SZAR backbones under both zero-shot and generalized zero-shot settings. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Alchemist0754/Skeleton-Cache.

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TSkel-Mamba: Temporal Dynamic Modeling via State Space Model for Human Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has garnered significant attention in the computer vision community. Inspired by the recent success of the selective state-space model (SSM) Mamba in modeling 1D temporal sequences, we propose TSkel-Mamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba framework that effectively captures both spatial and temporal dynamics. In particular, our approach leverages Spatial Transformer for spatial feature learning while utilizing Mamba for temporal modeling. Mamba, however, employs separate SSM blocks for individual channels, which inherently limits its ability to model inter-channel dependencies. To better adapt Mamba for skeleton data and enhance Mamba`s ability to model temporal dependencies, we introduce a Temporal Dynamic Modeling (TDM) block, which is a versatile plug-and-play component that integrates a novel Multi-scale Temporal Interaction (MTI) module. The MTI module employs multi-scale Cycle operators to capture cross-channel temporal interactions, a critical factor in action recognition. Extensive experiments on NTU-RGB+D 60, NTU-RGB+D 120, NW-UCLA and UAV-Human datasets demonstrate that TSkel-Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining low inference time, making it both efficient and highly effective.

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Neuromorphic Astronomy: An End-to-End SNN Pipeline for RFI Detection Hardware

Imminent radio telescope observatories provide massive data rates making deep learning based processing appealing while simultaneously demanding real-time performance at low-energy; prohibiting the use of many artificial neural network based approaches. We begin tackling the scientifically existential challenge of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) detection by deploying deep Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on resource-constrained neuromorphic hardware. Our approach partitions large, pre-trained networks onto SynSense Xylo hardware using maximal splitting, a novel greedy algorithm. We validate this pipeline with on-chip power measurements, achieving instrument-scaled inference at 100mW. While our full-scale SNN achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among SNN baselines, our experiments reveal a more important insight that a smaller un-partitioned model significantly outperforms larger, split models. This finding highlights that hardware co-design is paramount for optimal performance. Our work thus provides a practical deployment blueprint, a key insight into the challenges of model scaling, and reinforces radio astronomy as a demanding yet ideal domain for advancing applied neuromorphic computing.

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Multi-Granularity Mutual Refinement Network for Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes with zero samples by transferring semantic knowledge from seen classes. Current approaches typically correlate global visual features with semantic information (i.e., attributes) or align local visual region features with corresponding attributes to enhance visual-semantic interactions. Although effective, these methods often overlook the intrinsic interactions between local region features, which can further improve the acquisition of transferable and explicit visual features. In this paper, we propose a network named Multi-Granularity Mutual Refinement Network (Mg-MRN), which refine discriminative and transferable visual features by learning decoupled multi-granularity features and cross-granularity feature interactions. Specifically, we design a multi-granularity feature extraction module to learn region-level discriminative features through decoupled region feature mining. Then, a cross-granularity feature fusion module strengthens the inherent interactions between region features of varying granularities. This module enhances the discriminability of representations at each granularity level by integrating region representations from adjacent hierarchies, further improving ZSL recognition performance. Extensive experiments on three popular ZSL benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and competitiveness of our proposed Mg-MRN method. Our code is available at https://github.com/NingWang2049/Mg-MRN.

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Spiking Neural Networks for Radio Frequency Interference Detection in Radio Astronomy

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise efficient and dynamic spatio-temporal data processing. This paper reformulates a significant challenge in radio astronomy, Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) detection, as a time-series segmentation task suited for SNN execution. Automated systems capable of real-time operation with minimal energy consumption are increasingly important in modern radio telescopes. We explore several spectrogram encoding methods and network parameters, applying first and second-order leaky integrate and fire SNNs to tackle RFI detection. We introduce a divisive normalisation-inspired pre-processing step, improving detection performance across multiple encodings strategies. Our approach achieves competitive performance on a synthetic dataset and compelling initial results on real data from the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR). We position SNNs as a viable path towards real-time RFI detection, with many possibilities for follow-up studies. These findings highlight the potential for SNNs performing complex time-series tasks, paving the way towards efficient, real-time processing in radio astronomy and other data-intensive fields.

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AdaRD-key: Adaptive Relevance-Diversity Keyframe Sampling for Long-form Video understanding

Understanding long-form videos remains a significant challenge for vision--language models (VLMs) due to their extensive temporal length and high information density. Most current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) rely on uniform sampling, which often overlooks critical moments, leading to incorrect responses to queries. In parallel, many keyframe selection approaches impose rigid temporal spacing: once a frame is chosen, an exclusion window suppresses adjacent timestamps to reduce redundancy. While effective at limiting overlap, this strategy frequently misses short, fine-grained cues near important events. Other methods instead emphasize visual diversity but neglect query relevance. We propose AdaRD-Key, a training-free keyframe sampling module for query-driven long-form video understanding. AdaRD-Key maximizes a unified Relevance--Diversity Max-Volume (RD-MV) objective, combining a query-conditioned relevance score with a log-determinant diversity component to yield informative yet non-redundant frames. To handle broad queries with weak alignment to the video, AdaRD-Key employs a lightweight relevance-aware gating mechanism; when the relevance distribution indicates weak alignment, the method seamlessly shifts into a diversity-only mode, enhancing coverage without additional supervision. Our pipeline is training-free, computationally efficient (running in real time on a single GPU), and compatible with existing VLMs in a plug-and-play manner. Extensive experiments on LongVideoBench and Video-MME demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, particularly on long-form videos. Code available at https://github.com/Xian867/AdaRD-Key.

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SVR-GS: Spatially Variant Regularization for Probabilistic Masks in 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables fast, high-quality novel view synthesis but typically relies on densification followed by pruning to optimize the number of Gaussians. Existing mask-based pruning, such as MaskGS, regularizes the global mean of the mask, which is misaligned with the local per-pixel (per-ray) reconstruction loss that determines image quality along individual camera rays. This paper introduces SVR-GS, a spatially variant regularizer that renders a per-pixel spatial mask from each Gaussian's effective contribution along the ray, thereby applying sparsity pressure where it matters: on low-importance Gaussians. We explore three spatial-mask aggregation strategies, implement them in CUDA, and conduct a gradient analysis to motivate our final design. Extensive experiments on Tanks\&Temples, Deep Blending, and Mip-NeRF360 datasets demonstrate that, on average across the three datasets, the proposed SVR-GS reduces the number of Gaussians by 1.79\(\times\) compared to MaskGS and 5.63\(\times\) compared to 3DGS, while incurring only 0.50 dB and 0.40 dB PSNR drops, respectively. These gains translate into significantly smaller, faster, and more memory-efficient models, making them well-suited for real-time applications such as robotics, AR/VR, and mobile perception.

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Polarisation-Inclusive Spiking Neural Networks for Real-Time RFI Detection in Modern Radio Telescopes

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a known growing challenge for radio astronomy, intensified by increasing observatory sensitivity and prevalence of orbital RFI sources. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising solution for real-time RFI detection by exploiting the time-varying nature of radio observation and neuron dynamics together. This work explores the inclusion of polarisation information in SNN-based RFI detection, using simulated data from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (HERA) instrument and provides power usage estimates for deploying SNN-based RFI detection on existing neuromorphic hardware. Preliminary results demonstrate state-of-the-art detection accuracy and highlight possible extensive energy-efficiency gains.

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Admitting Ignorance Helps the Video Question Answering Models to Answer

Significant progress has been made in the field of video question answering (VideoQA) thanks to deep learning and large-scale pretraining. Despite the presence of sophisticated model structures and powerful video-text foundation models, most existing methods focus solely on maximizing the correlation between answers and video-question pairs during training. We argue that these models often establish shortcuts, resulting in spurious correlations between questions and answers, especially when the alignment between video and text data is suboptimal. To address these spurious correlations, we propose a novel training framework in which the model is compelled to acknowledge its ignorance when presented with an intervened question, rather than making guesses solely based on superficial question-answer correlations. We introduce methodologies for intervening in questions, utilizing techniques such as displacement and perturbation, and design frameworks for the model to admit its lack of knowledge in both multi-choice VideoQA and open-ended settings. In practice, we integrate a state-of-the-art model into our framework to validate its effectiveness. The results clearly demonstrate that our framework can significantly enhance the performance of VideoQA models with minimal structural modifications.

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LatentMove: Towards Complex Human Movement Video Generation

Image-to-video (I2V) generation seeks to produce realistic motion sequences from a single reference image. Although recent methods exhibit strong temporal consistency, they often struggle when dealing with complex, non-repetitive human movements, leading to unnatural deformations. To tackle this issue, we present LatentMove, a DiT-based framework specifically tailored for highly dynamic human animation. Our architecture incorporates a conditional control branch and learnable face/body tokens to preserve consistency as well as fine-grained details across frames. We introduce Complex-Human-Videos (CHV), a dataset featuring diverse, challenging human motions designed to benchmark the robustness of I2V systems. We also introduce two metrics to assess the flow and silhouette consistency of generated videos with their ground truth. Experimental results indicate that LatentMove substantially improves human animation quality--particularly when handling rapid, intricate movements--thereby pushing the boundaries of I2V generation. The code, the CHV dataset, and the evaluation metrics will be available at https://github.com/ --.

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Multi-Resolution Pathology-Language Pre-training Model with Text-Guided Visual Representation

In Computational Pathology (CPath), the introduction of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has opened new avenues for research, focusing primarily on aligning image-text pairs at a single magnification level. However, this approach might not be sufficient for tasks like cancer subtype classification, tissue phenotyping, and survival analysis due to the limited level of detail that a single-resolution image can provide. Addressing this, we propose a novel multi-resolution paradigm leveraging Whole Slide Images (WSIs) to extract histology patches at multiple resolutions and generate corresponding textual descriptions through advanced CPath VLM. We introduce visual-textual alignment at multiple resolutions as well as cross-resolution alignment to establish more effective text-guided visual representations. Cross-resolution alignment using a multimodal encoder enhances the model's ability to capture context from multiple resolutions in histology images. Our model aims to capture a broader range of information, supported by novel loss functions, enriches feature representation, improves discriminative ability, and enhances generalization across different resolutions. Pre-trained on a comprehensive TCGA dataset with 34 million image-language pairs at various resolutions, our fine-tuned model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) counterparts across multiple datasets and tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in CPath. The code is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/MR-PLIP

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Advancing RFI-Detection in Radio Astronomy with Liquid State Machines

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) from anthropogenic radio sources poses significant challenges to current and future radio telescopes. Contemporary approaches to detecting RFI treat the task as a semantic segmentation problem on radio telescope spectrograms. Typically, complex heuristic algorithms handle this task of `flagging' in combination with manual labeling (in the most difficult cases). While recent machine-learning approaches have demonstrated high accuracy, they often fail to meet the stringent operational requirements of modern radio observatories. Owing to their inherently time-varying nature, spiking neural networks (SNNs) are a promising alternative method to RFI-detection by utilizing the time-varying nature of the spectrographic source data. In this work, we apply Liquid State Machines (LSMs), a class of spiking neural networks, to RFI-detection. We employ second-order Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LiF) neurons, marking the first use of this architecture and neuron type for RFI-detection. We test three encoding methods and three increasingly complex readout layers, including a transformer decoder head, providing a hybrid of SNN and ANN techniques. Our methods extend LSMs beyond conventional classification tasks to fine-grained spatio-temporal segmentation. We train LSMs on simulated data derived from the Hyrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA), a known benchmark for RFI-detection. Our model achieves a per-pixel accuracy of 98% and an F1-score of 0.743, demonstrating competitive performance on this highly challenging task. This work expands the sophistication of SNN techniques and architectures applied to RFI-detection, and highlights the effectiveness of LSMs in handling fine-grained, complex, spatio-temporal signal-processing tasks.

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STING-BEE: Towards Vision-Language Model for Real-World X-ray Baggage Security Inspection

Advancements in Computer-Aided Screening (CAS) systems are essential for improving the detection of security threats in X-ray baggage scans. However, current datasets are limited in representing real-world, sophisticated threats and concealment tactics, and existing approaches are constrained by a closed-set paradigm with predefined labels. To address these challenges, we introduce STCray, the first multimodal X-ray baggage security dataset, comprising 46,642 image-caption paired scans across 21 threat categories, generated using an X-ray scanner for airport security. STCray is meticulously developed with our specialized protocol that ensures domain-aware, coherent captions, that lead to the multi-modal instruction following data in X-ray baggage security. This allows us to train a domain-aware visual AI assistant named STING-BEE that supports a range of vision-language tasks, including scene comprehension, referring threat localization, visual grounding, and visual question answering (VQA), establishing novel baselines for multi-modal learning in X-ray baggage security. Further, STING-BEE shows state-of-the-art generalization in cross-domain settings. Code, data, and models are available at https://divs1159.github.io/STING-BEE/.

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HOPE: A Memory-Based and Composition-Aware Framework for Zero-Shot Learning with Hopfield Network and Soft Mixture of Experts

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) has emerged as an essential paradigm in machine learning, aiming to overcome the constraints of traditional zero-shot learning by incorporating compositional thinking into its methodology. Conventional zero-shot learning has difficulty managing unfamiliar combinations of seen and unseen classes because it depends on pre-defined class embeddings. In contrast, Compositional Zero-Shot Learning leverages the inherent hierarchies and structural connections among classes, creating new class representations by combining attributes, components, or other semantic elements. In our paper, we propose a novel framework that for the first time combines the Modern \underline{H}opfield Network with a Mixture \underline{o}f \underline{E}x\underline{p}erts (HOPE) to classify the compositions of previously unseen objects. Specifically, the Modern Hopfield Network creates a memory that stores label prototypes and identifies relevant labels for a given input image. Subsequently, the Mixture of Expert models integrates the image with the appropriate prototype to produce the final composition classification. Our approach achieves SOTA performance on several benchmarks, including MIT-States and UT-Zappos. We also examine how each component contributes to improved generalization.

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Dynamic Neural Surfaces for Elastic 4D Shape Representation and Analysis

We propose a novel framework for the statistical analysis of genus-zero 4D surfaces, i.e., 3D surfaces that deform and evolve over time. This problem is particularly challenging due to the arbitrary parameterizations of these surfaces and their varying deformation speeds, necessitating effective spatiotemporal registration. Traditionally, 4D surfaces are discretized, in space and time, before computing their spatiotemporal registrations, geodesics, and statistics. However, this approach may result in suboptimal solutions and, as we demonstrate in this paper, is not necessary. In contrast, we treat 4D surfaces as continuous functions in both space and time. We introduce Dynamic Spherical Neural Surfaces (D-SNS), an efficient smooth and continuous spatiotemporal representation for genus-0 4D surfaces. We then demonstrate how to perform core 4D shape analysis tasks such as spatiotemporal registration, geodesics computation, and mean 4D shape estimation, directly on these continuous representations without upfront discretization and meshing. By integrating neural representations with classical Riemannian geometry and statistical shape analysis techniques, we provide the building blocks for enabling full functional shape analysis. We demonstrate the efficiency of the framework on 4D human and face datasets. The source code and additional results are available at https://4d-dsns.github.io/DSNS/.

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AquaticCLIP: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Underwater Scene Analysis

The preservation of aquatic biodiversity is critical in mitigating the effects of climate change. Aquatic scene understanding plays a pivotal role in aiding marine scientists in their decision-making processes. In this paper, we introduce AquaticCLIP, a novel contrastive language-image pre-training model tailored for aquatic scene understanding. AquaticCLIP presents a new unsupervised learning framework that aligns images and texts in aquatic environments, enabling tasks such as segmentation, classification, detection, and object counting. By leveraging our large-scale underwater image-text paired dataset without the need for ground-truth annotations, our model enriches existing vision-language models in the aquatic domain. For this purpose, we construct a 2 million underwater image-text paired dataset using heterogeneous resources, including YouTube, Netflix, NatGeo, etc. To fine-tune AquaticCLIP, we propose a prompt-guided vision encoder that progressively aggregates patch features via learnable prompts, while a vision-guided mechanism enhances the language encoder by incorporating visual context. The model is optimized through a contrastive pretraining loss to align visual and textual modalities. AquaticCLIP achieves notable performance improvements in zero-shot settings across multiple underwater computer vision tasks, outperforming existing methods in both robustness and interpretability. Our model sets a new benchmark for vision-language applications in underwater environments. The code and dataset for AquaticCLIP are publicly available on GitHub at xxx.

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