How does longer temporal context enhance multimodal narrative video processing in the brain?

Understanding how humans and artificial intelligence systems process complex narrative videos is a fundamental challenge at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning. This study investigates how the temporal context length of video clips (3--12 s clips) and the narrative-task prompting shape brain-model alignment during naturalistic movie watching. Using fMRI recordings from participants viewing full-length movies, we examine how brain regions sensitive to narrative context dynamically represent information over varying timescales and how these neural patterns align with model-derived features. We find that increasing clip duration substantially improves brain alignment for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), whereas unimodal video models show little to no gain. Further, shorter temporal windows align with perceptual and early language regions, while longer windows preferentially align higher-order integrative regions, mirrored by a layer-to-cortex hierarchy in MLLMs. Finally, narrative-task prompts (multi-scene summary, narrative summary, character motivation, and event boundary detection) elicit task-specific, region-dependent brain alignment patterns and context-dependent shifts in clip-level tuning in higher-order regions. Together, our results position long-form narrative movies as a principled testbed for probing biologically relevant temporal integration and interpretable representations in long-context MLLMs.

Linguistic properties and model scale in brain encoding: from small to compressed language models

Recent work has shown that scaling large language models (LLMs) improves their alignment with human brain activity, yet it remains unclear what drives these gains and which representational properties are responsible. Although larger models often yield better task performance and brain alignment, they are increasingly difficult to analyze mechanistically. This raises a fundamental question: what is the minimal model capacity required to capture brain-relevant representations? To address this question, we systematically investigate how constraining model scale and numerical precision affects brain alignment. We compare full-precision LLMs, small language models (SLMs), and compressed variants (quantized and pruned) by predicting fMRI responses during naturalistic language comprehension. Across model families up to 14B parameters, we find that 3B SLMs achieve brain predictivity indistinguishable from larger LLMs, whereas 1B models degrade substantially, particularly in semantic language regions. Brain alignment is remarkably robust to compression: most quantization and pruning methods preserve neural predictivity, with GPTQ as a consistent exception. Linguistic probing reveals a dissociation between task performance and brain predictivity: compression degrades discourse, syntax, and morphology, yet brain predictivity remains largely unchanged. Overall, brain alignment saturates at modest model scales and is resilient to compression, challenging common assumptions about neural scaling and motivating compact models for brain-aligned language modeling.

HistoryBankQA: Multilingual Temporal Question Answering on Historical Events

Temporal reasoning about historical events is a critical skill for NLP tasks like event extraction, historical entity linking, temporal question answering, timeline summarization, temporal event clustering and temporal natural language inference. Yet efforts on benchmarking temporal reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are rather limited. Existing temporal reasoning datasets are limited in scale, lack multilingual coverage and focus more on contemporary events. To address these limitations, we present HistoryBank, a multilingual database of 10M+ historical events extracted from Wikipedia timeline pages and article infoboxes. Our database provides unprecedented coverage in both historical depth and linguistic breadth with 10 languages. Additionally, we construct a comprehensive question answering benchmark for temporal reasoning across all languages. This benchmark covers a diverse set of 6 temporal QA reasoning tasks, and we evaluate a suite of popular language models (LLaMA-3-8B, Mistral-7B, Gemma-2-9b, Qwen3-8B, GPT4o) to assess their performance on these tasks. As expected GPT4o performs best across all answer types and languages; Gemma-2 outperforms the other small language models. Our work aims to provide a comprehensive resource for advancing multilingual and temporally-aware natural language understanding of historical events. To facilitate further research, we will make our code and datasets publicly available upon acceptance of this paper.

CoCoA: Confidence- and Context-Aware Adaptive Decoding for Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Large Language Models

Faithful generation in large language models (LLMs) is challenged by knowledge conflicts between parametric memory and external context. Existing contrastive decoding methods tuned specifically to handle conflict often lack adaptability and can degrade performance in low conflict settings. We introduce CoCoA (Confidence- and Context-Aware Adaptive Decoding), a novel token-level algorithm for principled conflict resolution and enhanced faithfulness. CoCoA resolves conflict by utilizing confidence-aware measures (entropy gap and contextual peakedness) and the generalized divergence between the parametric and contextual distributions. Crucially, CoCoA maintains strong performance even in low conflict settings. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs on diverse Question Answering (QA), Summarization, and Long-Form Question Answering (LFQA) benchmarks demonstrate CoCoA's state-of-the-art performance over strong baselines like AdaCAD. It yields significant gains in QA accuracy, up to 9.2 points on average compared to the strong baseline AdaCAD, and improves factuality in summarization and LFQA by up to 2.5 points on average across key benchmarks. Additionally, it demonstrates superior sensitivity to conflict variations. CoCoA enables more informed, context-aware, and ultimately more faithful token generation.

PICore: Physics-Informed Unsupervised Coreset Selection for Data Efficient Neural Operator Training

Neural operators offer a powerful paradigm for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) that cannot be solved analytically by learning mappings between function spaces. However, there are two main bottlenecks in training neural operators: they require a significant amount of training data to learn these mappings, and this data needs to be labeled, which can only be accessed via expensive simulations with numerical solvers. To alleviate both of these issues simultaneously, we propose PICore, an unsupervised coreset selection framework that identifies the most informative training samples without requiring access to ground-truth PDE solutions. PICore leverages a physics-informed loss to select unlabeled inputs by their potential contribution to operator learning. After selecting a compact subset of inputs, only those samples are simulated using numerical solvers to generate labels, reducing annotation costs. We then train the neural operator on the reduced labeled dataset, significantly decreasing training time as well. Across four diverse PDE benchmarks and multiple coreset selection strategies, PICore achieves up to 78% average increase in training efficiency relative to supervised coreset selection methods with minimal changes in accuracy. We provide code at https://github.com/Asatheesh6561/PICore.

FlexiClip: Locality-Preserving Free-Form Character Animation

Animating clipart images with seamless motion while maintaining visual fidelity and temporal coherence presents significant challenges. Existing methods, such as AniClipart, effectively model spatial deformations but often fail to ensure smooth temporal transitions, resulting in artifacts like abrupt motions and geometric distortions. Similarly, text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models struggle to handle clipart due to the mismatch in statistical properties between natural video and clipart styles. This paper introduces FlexiClip, a novel approach designed to overcome these limitations by addressing the intertwined challenges of temporal consistency and geometric integrity. FlexiClip extends traditional B\'ezier curve-based trajectory modeling with key innovations: temporal Jacobians to correct motion dynamics incrementally, continuous-time modeling via probability flow ODEs (pfODEs) to mitigate temporal noise, and a flow matching loss inspired by GFlowNet principles to optimize smooth motion transitions. These enhancements ensure coherent animations across complex scenarios involving rapid movements and non-rigid deformations. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of FlexiClip in generating animations that are not only smooth and natural but also structurally consistent across diverse clipart types, including humans and animals. By integrating spatial and temporal modeling with pre-trained video diffusion models, FlexiClip sets a new standard for high-quality clipart animation, offering robust performance across a wide range of visual content. Project Page: https://creative-gen.github.io/flexiclip.github.io/

PromptSync: Bridging Domain Gaps in Vision-Language Models through Class-Aware Prototype Alignment and Discrimination

The potential for zero-shot generalization in vision-language (V-L) models such as CLIP has spurred their widespread adoption in addressing numerous downstream tasks. Previous methods have employed test-time prompt tuning to adapt the model to unseen domains, but they overlooked the issue of imbalanced class distributions. In this study, we explicitly address this problem by employing class-aware prototype alignment weighted by mean class probabilities obtained for the test sample and filtered augmented views. Additionally, we ensure that the class probabilities are as accurate as possible by performing prototype discrimination using contrastive learning. The combination of alignment and discriminative loss serves as a geometric regularizer, preventing the prompt representation from collapsing onto a single class and effectively bridging the distribution gap between the source and test domains. Our method, named PromptSync, synchronizes the prompts for each test sample on both the text and vision branches of the V-L model. In empirical evaluations on the domain generalization benchmark, our method outperforms previous best methods by 2.33% in overall performance, by 1% in base-to-novel generalization, and by 2.84% in cross-dataset transfer tasks.

Correlation Debiasing for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation in Videos

Dynamic scene graph generation (SGG) from videos requires not only comprehensive understanding of objects across the scenes that are prone to temporal fluctuations but also a model the temporal motions and interactions with different objects. Moreover, the long-tailed distribution of visual relationships is the crucial bottleneck of most dynamic SGG methods, since most of them focus on capturing spatio-temporal context using complex architectures, which leads to the generation of biased scene graphs. To address these challenges, we propose FloCoDe: Flow-aware temporal consistency and Correlation Debiasing with uncertainty attenuation for unbiased dynamic scene graphs. FloCoDe employs feature warping using flow to detect temporally consistent objects across the frames. In addition, it uses correlation debiasing to learn the unbiased relation representation for long-tailed classes. Moreover, to attenuate the predictive uncertainties, it uses a mixture of sigmoidal cross-entropy loss and contrastive loss to incorporate label correlations to identify the commonly co-occurring relations and help debias the long-tailed ones. Extensive experimental evaluation shows a performance gain as high as 4.1% showing the superiority of generating more unbiased scene graphs.

RePoseDM: Recurrent Pose Alignment and Gradient Guidance for Pose Guided Image Synthesis

Pose-guided person image synthesis task requires re-rendering a reference image, which should have a photorealistic appearance and flawless pose transfer. Since person images are highly structured, existing approaches require dense connections for complex deformations and occlusions because these are generally handled through multi-level warping and masking in latent space. But the feature maps generated by convolutional neural networks do not have equivariance, and hence even the multi-level warping does not have a perfect pose alignment. Inspired by the ability of the diffusion model to generate photorealistic images from the given conditional guidance, we propose recurrent pose alignment to provide pose-aligned texture features as conditional guidance. Moreover, we propose gradient guidance from pose interaction fields, which output the distance from the valid pose manifold given a target pose as input. This helps in learning plausible pose transfer trajectories that result in photorealism and undistorted texture details. Extensive results on two large-scale benchmarks and a user study demonstrate the ability of our proposed approach to generate photorealistic pose transfer under challenging scenarios. Additionally, we prove the efficiency of gradient guidance in pose-guided image generation on the HumanArt dataset with fine-tuned stable diffusion.

SegDA: Maximum Separable Segment Mask with Pseudo Labels for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to solve the problem of label scarcity of the target domain by transferring the knowledge from the label rich source domain. Usually, the source domain consists of synthetic images for which the annotation is easily obtained using the well known computer graphics techniques. However, obtaining annotation for real world images (target domain) require lot of manual annotation effort and is very time consuming because it requires per pixel annotation. To address this problem we propose SegDA module to enhance transfer performance of UDA methods by learning the maximum separable segment representation. This resolves the problem of identifying visually similar classes like pedestrian/rider, sidewalk/road etc. We leveraged Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) classifier inspired from Neural Collapse for maximal separation between segment classes. This causes the source domain pixel representation to collapse to a single vector forming a simplex vertices which are aligned to the maximal separable ETF classifier. We use this phenomenon to propose the novel architecture for domain adaptation of segment representation for target domain. Additionally, we proposed to estimate the noise in labelling the target domain images and update the decoder for noise correction which encourages the discovery of pixels for classes not identified in pseudo labels. We have used four UDA benchmarks simulating synthetic-to-real, daytime-to-nighttime, clear-to-adverse weather scenarios. Our proposed approach outperforms +2.2 mIoU on GTA -> Cityscapes, +2.0 mIoU on Synthia -> Cityscapes, +5.9 mIoU on Cityscapes -> DarkZurich, +2.6 mIoU on Cityscapes -> ACDC.