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Yaowei Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yaowei Wang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

From Verbatim to Gist: Distilling Pyramidal Multimodal Memory via Semantic Information Bottleneck for Long-Horizon Video Agents

While multimodal large language models have demonstrated impressive short-term reasoning, they struggle with long-horizon video understanding due to limited context windows and static memory mechanisms that fail to mirror human cognitive efficiency. Existing paradigms typically fall into two extremes: vision-centric methods that incur high latency and redundancy through dense visual accumulation, or text-centric approaches that suffer from detail loss and hallucination via aggressive captioning. To bridge this gap, we propose MM-Mem, a pyramidal multimodal memory architecture grounded in Fuzzy-Trace Theory. MM-Mem structures memory hierarchically into a Sensory Buffer, Episodic Stream, and Symbolic Schema, enabling the progressive distillation of fine-grained perceptual traces (verbatim) into high-level semantic schemas (gist). Furthermore, to govern the dynamic construction of memory, we derive a Semantic Information Bottleneck objective and introduce SIB-GRPO to optimize the trade-off between memory compression and task-relevant information retention. In inference, we design an entropy-driven top-down memory retrieval strategy. Extensive experiments across 4 benchmarks confirm that MM-Mem achieves state-of-the-art performance on both offline and streaming tasks, demonstrating robust generalization and validating the effectiveness of cognition-inspired memory organization. Code and associated configurations are publicly available at https://github.com/EliSpectre/MM-Mem.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

HiPrune: Hierarchical Attention for Efficient Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) encode images and videos into abundant tokens, which contain substantial redundancy and computation cost. While visual token pruning mitigates the issue, most existing methods lack insight into the intrinsic property of the vision encoder itself. In this work, we dive into the vision encoder and prove that the middle layers pay more attention to the main objects of the image qualitatively and quantitatively, while the deep layers to tokens with rich global information. Utilizing this Hierarchical attention pattern, we propose HiPrune, a training-free and model-agnostic token Pruning method. HiPrune identifies three types of visual tokens according to their attention in different phases of the vision encoder, which preserves different levels of information. By coupling with the similarity of text tokens, we propose a prompt-aware variance, HiPrune++, which further improves instruction following performance under a very low token budget. Extensive experiments across four representative VLMs show that HiPrune achieves up to 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens, while reducing inference FLOPs by 58.7%. HiPrune++ maintains up to 99.7% accuracy with 2/9 tokens, highlighting robustness under high-resolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/Danielement321/HiPrune.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Latent-Condensed Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) reduces the KV cache by projecting tokens into a low-dimensional latent space, while sparse attention reduces computation. However, sparse methods cannot operate natively on MLA's compressed latent structure, missing opportunities for joint optimization. In this paper, we propose Latent-Condensed Attention (LCA), which directly condenses context within MLA's latent space, where the representation is disentangled into semantic latent vectors and positional keys. LCA separately aggregates semantic vectors via query-aware pooling and preserves positional keys via anchor selection. This approach jointly reduces both computational cost and KV cache without adding parameters. Beyond MLA, LCA's design is architecture-agnostic and readily extends to other attention mechanisms such as GQA. Theoretically, we prove a length-independent error bound. Experiments show LCA achieves up to 2.5$\times$ prefilling speedup and 90% KV cache reduction at 128K context while maintaining competitive performance.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Efficient Adversarial Training via Criticality-Aware Fine-Tuning

Vision Transformer (ViT) models have achieved remarkable performance across various vision tasks, with scalability being a key advantage when applied to large datasets. This scalability enables ViT models to exhibit strong generalization capabilities. However, as the number of parameters increases, the robustness of ViT models to adversarial examples does not scale proportionally. Adversarial training (AT), one of the most effective methods for enhancing robustness, typically requires fine-tuning the entire model, leading to prohibitively high computational costs, especially for large ViT architectures. In this paper, we aim to robustly fine-tune only a small subset of parameters to achieve robustness comparable to standard AT. To accomplish this, we introduce Criticality-Aware Adversarial Training (CAAT), a novel method that adaptively allocates resources to the most robustness-critical parameters, fine-tuning only selected modules. Specifically, CAAT efficiently identifies parameters that contribute most to adversarial robustness. It then leverages parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to robustly adjust weight matrices where the number of critical parameters exceeds a predefined threshold. CAAT exhibits favorable generalization when scaled to larger vision transformer architectures, potentially paving the way for adversarial training at scale, e.g, compared with plain adversarial training, CAAT incurs only a 4.3% decrease in adversarial robustness while tuning approximately 6% of its parameters. Extensive experiments on three widely used adversarial learning datasets demonstrate that CAAT outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight AT methods with fewer trainable parameters.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Imagine Before Concentration: Diffusion-Guided Registers Enhance Partially Relevant Video Retrieval

Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos based on text queries that describe only partial events. Existing methods suffer from incomplete global contextual perception, struggling with query ambiguity and local noise induced by spurious responses. To address these issues, we propose DreamPRVR, which adopts a coarse-to-fine representation learning paradigm. The model first generates global contextual semantic registers as coarse-grained highlights spanning the entire video and then concentrates on fine-grained similarity optimization for precise cross-modal matching. Concretely, these registers are generated by initializing from the video-centric distribution produced by a probabilistic variational sampler and then iteratively refined via a text-supervised truncated diffusion model. During this process, textual semantic structure learning constructs a well-formed textual latent space, enhancing the reliability of global perception. The registers are then adaptively fused with video tokens through register-augmented Gaussian attention blocks, enabling context-aware feature learning. Extensive experiments show that DreamPRVR outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code is released at https://github.com/lijun2005/CVPR26-DreamPRVR.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Interactive Tracking: A Human-in-the-Loop Paradigm with Memory-Augmented Adaptation

Existing visual trackers mainly operate in a non-interactive, fire-and-forget manner, making them impractical for real-world scenarios that require human-in-the-loop adaptation. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Interactive Tracking, a new paradigm that allows users to guide the tracker at any time using natural language commands. To support research in this direction, we make three main contributions. First, we present InteractTrack, the first large-scale benchmark for interactive tracking, containing 150 videos with dense bounding box annotations and timestamped language instructions. Second, we propose a comprehensive evaluation protocol and evaluate 25 representative trackers, showing that state-of-the-art methods fail in interactive scenarios; strong performance on conventional benchmarks does not transfer. Third, we introduce Interactive Memory-Augmented Tracking (IMAT), a new baseline that employs a dynamic memory mechanism to learn from user feedback and update tracking behavior accordingly. Our benchmark, protocol, and baseline establish a foundation for developing more intelligent, adaptive, and collaborative tracking systems, bridging the gap between automated perception and human guidance. The full benchmark, tracking results, and analysis are available at https://github.com/NorahGreen/InteractTrack.git.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

A Step Toward Federated Pretraining of Multimodal Large Language Models

The rapid evolution of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is bottlenecked by the saturation of high-quality public data, while vast amounts of diverse multimodal data remain inaccessible in privacy-sensitive silos. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising solution to unlock these distributed resources, but existing research focuses predominantly on fine-tuning, leaving the foundational pre-training phase largely unexplored. In this paper, we formally introduce the Federated MLLM Alignment (Fed-MA) task, a lightweight pre-training paradigm that freezes the vision encoder and LLM while collaboratively training the cross-modal projector. We identify two critical challenges in this setting: (i) parameter interference in aggregating local projectors; and (ii) gradient oscillations in one-pass collaborative SGD. To address these challenges, we propose Fed-CMP, a pioneering framework for federated MLLM pre-training. Fed-CMP employs Canonical Reliability-Aware Aggregation, which constructs a canonical space to decompose client projectors into a shared alignment basis and client-specific coefficients, then performs reliability-weighted fusion to suppress parameter interference. Furthermore, Fed-CMP introduces Orthogonality-Preserved Momentum, which applies momentum to the shared alignment basis via orthogonal projection, accumulating historical optimization directions while preserving geometric structure. We construct four federated pre-training scenarios based on public datasets, and extensive experiments validate that Fed-CMP significantly outperforms existing baselines.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Cluster-Wise Spatio-Temporal Masking for Efficient Video-Language Pretraining

Large-scale video-language pretraining enables strong generalization across multimodal tasks but often incurs prohibitive computational costs. Although recent advances in masked visual modeling help mitigate this issue, they still suffer from two fundamental limitations: severe visual information loss under high masking ratios and temporal information leakage caused by inter-frame correlations. To address these challenges, we propose ClusterSTM, a Cluster-Wise Spatio-Temporal Masking strategy for efficient video-language pretraining. ClusterSTM first performs intra-frame clustering to partition visual tokens into multiple semantically independent clusters, then conducts cluster-wise masking by retaining the token with the highest temporal density within each cluster. Our masking strategy ensure that the retained tokens capture holistic video content while exhibit strong temporal correlation. Additionally, we introduce a video-text relevance reconstruction objective that aligns high-level multimodal semantics beyond conventional visual reconstruction. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ClusterSTM achieves superior performance on video-text retrieval, video question answering, and video captioning tasks, establishing a new state-of-the-art among efficient video-language models.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

CoPRS: Learning Positional Prior from Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Segmentation

Existing works on reasoning segmentation either connect hidden features from a language model directly to a mask decoder or represent positions in text, which limits interpretability and semantic detail. To solve this, we present CoPRS, a Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (MCoT)-based positional perception model that bridges language reasoning to segmentation through a differentiable and interpretable positional prior instantiated as a heatmap. By making the reasoning process clear via MCoT and expressing it as a dense, differentiable heatmap, this interface enhances interpretability and diagnostic analysis and yields more concentrated evidence on the target. A learnable concentration token aggregates features of the image and reasoning text to generate this positional prior, which is decoded to precise masks through a lightweight decoder, providing a direct connection between reasoning and segmentation. Across the RefCOCO series and ReasonSeg, CoPRS matches or surpasses the best reported metrics on each standard split under comparable protocols, with performance at or above the prior state of the art across both validation and test partitions. Extensive experiments demonstrate a strong positive correlation among the CoT trajectory, the generated heatmap, and the decoded mask, supporting an interpretable alignment between the reasoning output and downstream mask generation. Collectively, these findings support the utility of this paradigm in bridging reasoning and segmentation and show advantages in concentration driven by reasoning and in more precise mask prediction. Code has been released at https://github.com/ZhenyuLU-Heliodore/CoPRS.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

High Quality Underwater Image Compression with Adaptive Color Correction

With the increasing exploration and exploitation of the underwater world, underwater images have become a critical medium for human interaction with marine environments, driving extensive research into their efficient transmission and storage. However, contemporary underwater image compression algorithms fail to adequately address the impact of water refraction and scattering on light waves, which not only elevate training complexity but also result in suboptimal compression performance. To tackle this limitation, we propose High Quality Underwater Image Compression (HQUIC), a novel framework designed to handle the unique illumination conditions and color shifts inherent in underwater images, thereby achieving superior compression performance. HQUIC first incorporates an Adaptive Lighting and Tone Correction (ALTC) module to adaptively predict the attenuation coefficients and global light information of images, effectively alleviating issues stemming from variations in illumination and tone across underwater images. Secondly, it dynamically weights multi-scale frequency components, prioritizing information critical to distortion quality while discarding redundant details. Furthermore, we introduce a tone adjustment loss to enable the model to better balance discrepancies among different color channels. Comprehensive evaluations on diverse underwater datasets validate that HQUIC outperforms state-of-the-art compression methods, demonstrating its effectiveness.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Prototype Perturbation for Relaxing Alignment Constraints in Backward-Compatible Learning

The traditional paradigm to update retrieval models requires re-computing the embeddings of the gallery data, a time-consuming and computationally intensive process known as backfilling. To circumvent backfilling, Backward-Compatible Learning (BCL) has been widely explored, which aims to train a new model compatible with the old one. Many previous works focus on effectively aligning the embeddings of the new model with those of the old one to enhance the backward-compatibility. Nevertheless, such strong alignment constraints would compromise the discriminative ability of the new model, particularly when different classes are closely clustered and hard to distinguish in the old feature space. To address this issue, we propose to relax the constraints by introducing perturbations to the old feature prototypes. This allows us to align the new feature space with a pseudo-old feature space defined by these perturbed prototypes, thereby preserving the discriminative ability of the new model in backward-compatible learning. We have developed two approaches for calculating the perturbations: Neighbor-Driven Prototype Perturbation (NDPP) and Optimization-Driven Prototype Perturbation (ODPP). Particularly, they take into account the feature distributions of not only the old but also the new models to obtain proper perturbations along with new model updating. Extensive experiments on the landmark and commodity datasets demonstrate that our approaches perform favorably against state-of-the-art BCL algorithms.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

EPRBench: A High-Quality Benchmark Dataset for Event Stream Based Visual Place Recognition

Event stream-based Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is an emerging research direction that offers a compelling solution to the instability of conventional visible-light cameras under challenging conditions such as low illumination, overexposure, and high-speed motion. Recognizing the current scarcity of dedicated datasets in this domain, we introduce EPRBench, a high-quality benchmark specifically designed for event stream-based VPR. EPRBench comprises 10K event sequences and 65K event frames, collected using both handheld and vehicle-mounted setups to comprehensively capture real-world challenges across diverse viewpoints, weather conditions, and lighting scenarios. To support semantic-aware and language-integrated VPR research, we provide LLM-generated scene descriptions, subsequently refined through human annotation, establishing a solid foundation for integrating LLMs into event-based perception pipelines. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we implement and benchmark 15 state-of-the-art VPR algorithms on EPRBench, offering a strong baseline for future algorithmic comparisons. Furthermore, we propose a novel multi-modal fusion paradigm for VPR: leveraging LLMs to generate textual scene descriptions from raw event streams, which then guide spatially attentive token selection, cross-modal feature fusion, and multi-scale representation learning. This framework not only achieves highly accurate place recognition but also produces interpretable reasoning processes alongside its predictions, significantly enhancing model transparency and explainability. The dataset and source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/Neuromorphic_ReID

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Optimus-3: Dual-Router Aligned Mixture-of-Experts Agent with Dual-Granularity Reasoning-Aware Policy Optimization

Developing generalist agents capable of solving open-ended tasks in visually rich, dynamic environments remains a core pursuit of embodied AI. While Minecraft has emerged as a compelling benchmark, existing agents often suffer from fragmented cognitive abilities, lacking the synergy between reflexive execution (System 1) and deliberative reasoning (System 2). In this paper, we introduce Optimus-3, a generalist agent that organically integrates these dual capabilities within a unified framework. To achieve this, we address three fundamental challenges. First, to overcome the scarcity of reasoning data, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced Automated Data Generation Pipeline. It synthesizes high-quality System 2 reasoning traces from raw System 1 interaction trajectories, effectively mitigating hallucinations via injection of domain knowledge. We release the resulting dataset, \textbf{OptimusM$^{4}$}, to the community. Second, to reconcile the dichotomous computational requirements of the dual systems, we design a Dual-Router Aligned MoE Architecture. It employs a Task Router to prevent task interference via parameter decoupling, and a Layer Router to dynamically modulate reasoning depth, creating a computational ``Fast Path'' for System 1 and a ``Deep Path'' for System 2. Third, to activate the reasoning capabilities of System 2, we propose Dual-Granularity Reasoning-Aware Policy Optimization (DGRPO) algorithm. It enforces Process-Outcome Co-Supervision via dual-granularity dense rewards, ensuring consistency between the thought process and the answer. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Optimus-3 surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods on both System~2 (21$\%$ on Planning, 66\% on Captioning, 76\% on Embodied QA, 3.4$\times$ on Grounding, and 18\% on Reflection) and System~1 (3\% on Long-Horizon Action) tasks, with a notable 60\% success rate on open-ended tasks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

MirrorLA: Reflecting Feature Map for Vision Linear Attention

Linear attention significantly reduces the computational complexity of Transformers from quadratic to linear, yet it consistently lags behind softmax-based attention in performance. We identify the root cause of this degradation as the non-negativity constraint imposed on kernel feature maps: standard projections like ReLU act as "passive truncation" operators, indiscriminately discarding semantic information residing in the negative domain. We propose MirrorLA, a geometric framework that substitutes passive truncation with active reorientation. By leveraging learnable Householder reflections, MirrorLA rotates the feature geometry into the non-negative orthant to maximize information retention. Our approach restores representational density through a cohesive, multi-scale design: it first optimizes local discriminability via block-wise isometries, stabilizes long-context dynamics using variance-aware modulation to diversify activations, and finally, integrates dispersed subspaces via cross-head reflections to induce global covariance mixing. MirrorLA achieves state-of-the-art performance across standard benchmarks, demonstrating that strictly linear efficiency can be achieved without compromising representational fidelity.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Rectified Decoupled Dataset Distillation: A Closer Look for Fair and Comprehensive Evaluation

Dataset distillation aims to generate compact synthetic datasets that enable models trained on them to achieve performance comparable to those trained on full real datasets, while substantially reducing storage and computational costs. Early bi-level optimization methods (e.g., MTT) have shown promising results on small-scale datasets, but their scalability is limited by high computational overhead. To address this limitation, recent decoupled dataset distillation methods (e.g., SRe$^2$L) separate the teacher model pre-training from the synthetic data generation process. These methods also introduce random data augmentation and epoch-wise soft labels during the post-evaluation phase to improve performance and generalization. However, existing decoupled distillation methods suffer from inconsistent post-evaluation protocols, which hinders progress in the field. In this work, we propose Rectified Decoupled Dataset Distillation (RD$^3$), and systematically investigate how different post-evaluation settings affect test accuracy. We further examine whether the reported performance differences across existing methods reflect true methodological advances or stem from discrepancies in evaluation procedures. Our analysis reveals that much of the performance variation can be attributed to inconsistent evaluation rather than differences in the intrinsic quality of the synthetic data. In addition, we identify general strategies that improve the effectiveness of distilled datasets across settings. By establishing a standardized benchmark and rigorous evaluation protocol, RD$^3$ provides a foundation for fair and reproducible comparisons in future dataset distillation research.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

CLIP-Guided Adaptable Self-Supervised Learning for Human-Centric Visual Tasks

Human-centric visual analysis plays a pivotal role in diverse applications, including surveillance, healthcare, and human-computer interaction. With the emergence of large-scale unlabeled human image datasets, there is an increasing need for a general unsupervised pre-training model capable of supporting diverse human-centric downstream tasks. To achieve this goal, we propose CLASP (CLIP-guided Adaptable Self-suPervised learning), a novel framework designed for unsupervised pre-training in human-centric visual tasks. CLASP leverages the powerful vision-language model CLIP to generate both low-level (e.g., body parts) and high-level (e.g., attributes) semantic pseudo-labels. These multi-level semantic cues are then integrated into the learned visual representations, enriching their expressiveness and generalizability. Recognizing that different downstream tasks demand varying levels of semantic granularity, CLASP incorporates a Prompt-Controlled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. MoE dynamically adapts feature extraction based on task-specific prompts, mitigating potential feature conflicts and enhancing transferability. Furthermore, CLASP employs a multi-task pre-training strategy, where part- and attribute-level pseudo-labels derived from CLIP guide the representation learning process. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that CLASP consistently outperforms existing unsupervised pre-training methods, advancing the field of human-centric visual analysis.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Training-free Context-adaptive Attention for Efficient Long Context Modeling

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. These capabilities stem primarily from the self-attention mechanism, which enables modeling of long-range dependencies. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention with respect to sequence length poses significant computational and memory challenges, especially as sequence length extends to extremes. While various sparse attention and KV cache compression methods have been proposed to improve efficiency, they often suffer from limitations such as reliance on fixed patterns, inability to handle both prefilling and decoding stages, or the requirement for additional training. In this paper, we propose Training-free Context-adaptive Attention (TCA-Attention), a training-free sparse attention mechanism that selectively attends to only the informative tokens for efficient long-context inference. Our method consists of two lightweight phases: i) an offline calibration phase that determines head-specific sparsity budgets via a single forward pass, and ii) an online token selection phase that adaptively retains core context tokens using a lightweight redundancy metric. TCA-Attention provides a unified solution that accelerates both prefilling and decoding while reducing KV cache memory footprint, without requiring parameter updates or architectural changes. Theoretical analysis shows that our approach maintains bounded approximation error. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TCA-Attention achieves a 2.8$\times$ speedup and reduces KV cache by 61% at 128K context length while maintaining performance comparable to full attention across various benchmarks, offering a practical plug-and-play solution for efficient long-context inference.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

Splatwizard: A Benchmark Toolkit for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression

The recent advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has marked a significant breakthrough in real-time novel view synthesis. However, the rapid proliferation of 3DGS-based algorithms has created a pressing need for standardized and comprehensive evaluation tools, especially for compression task. Existing benchmarks often lack the specific metrics necessary to holistically assess the unique characteristics of different methods, such as rendering speed, rate distortion trade-offs memory efficiency, and geometric accuracy. To address this gap, we introduce Splatwizard, a unified benchmark toolkit designed specifically for benchmarking 3DGS compression models. Splatwizard provides an easy-to-use framework to implement new 3DGS compression model and utilize state-of-the-art techniques proposed by previous work. Besides, an integrated pipeline that automates the calculation of key performance indicators, including image-based quality metrics, chamfer distance of reconstruct mesh, rendering frame rates, and computational resource consumption is included in the framework as well. Code is available at https://github.com/splatwizard/splatwizard

cs.CV↗