Reducing Class-Wise Performance Disparity via Margin Regularization

Deep neural networks often exhibit substantial disparities in class-wise accuracy, even when trained on class-balanced data, posing concerns for reliable deployment. While prior efforts have explored empirical remedies, a theoretical understanding of such performance disparities in classification remains limited. In this work, we present Margin Regularization for Performance Disparity Reduction (MR$^2$), a theoretically principled regularization for classification by dynamically adjusting margins in both the logit and representation spaces. Our analysis establishes a margin-based, class-sensitive generalization bound that reveals how per-class feature variability contributes to error, motivating the use of larger margins for hard classes. Guided by this insight, MR$^2$ optimizes per-class logit margins proportional to feature spread and penalizes excessive representation margins to enhance intra-class compactness. Experiments on seven datasets, including ImageNet, and diverse pre-trained backbones (MAE, MoCov2, CLIP) demonstrate that MR$^2$ not only improves overall accuracy but also significantly boosts hard class performance without trading off easy classes, thus reducing performance disparity. Code is available at: https://github.com/BeierZhu/MR2

AMA: Adaptive Memory via Multi-Agent Collaboration

The rapid evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents has necessitated robust memory systems to support cohesive long-term interaction and complex reasoning. Benefiting from the strong capabilities of LLMs, recent research focus has shifted from simple context extension to the development of dedicated agentic memory systems. However, existing approaches typically rely on rigid retrieval granularity, accumulation-heavy maintenance strategies, and coarse-grained update mechanisms. These design choices create a persistent mismatch between stored information and task-specific reasoning demands, while leading to the unchecked accumulation of logical inconsistencies over time. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Memory via Multi-Agent Collaboration (AMA), a novel framework that leverages coordinated agents to manage memory across multiple granularities. AMA employs a hierarchical memory design that dynamically aligns retrieval granularity with task complexity. Specifically, the Constructor and Retriever jointly enable multi-granularity memory construction and adaptive query routing. The Judge verifies the relevance and consistency of retrieved content, triggering iterative retrieval when evidence is insufficient or invoking the Refresher upon detecting logical conflicts. The Refresher then enforces memory consistency by performing targeted updates or removing outdated entries. Extensive experiments on challenging long-context benchmarks show that AMA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while reducing token consumption by approximately 80% compared to full-context methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in maintaining retrieval precision and long-term memory consistency.

Parallel Diffusion Solver via Residual Dirichlet Policy Optimization

Diffusion models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art generative performance but suffer from high sampling latency due to their sequential denoising nature. Existing solver-based acceleration methods often face significant image quality degradation under a low-latency budget, primarily due to accumulated truncation errors arising from the inability to capture high-curvature trajectory segments. In this paper, we propose the Ensemble Parallel Direction solver (dubbed as EPD-Solver), a novel ODE solver that mitigates these errors by incorporating multiple parallel gradient evaluations in each step. Motivated by the geometric insight that sampling trajectories are largely confined to a low-dimensional manifold, EPD-Solver leverages the Mean Value Theorem for vector-valued functions to approximate the integral solution more accurately. Importantly, since the additional gradient computations are independent, they can be fully parallelized, preserving low-latency sampling nature. We introduce a two-stage optimization framework. Initially, EPD-Solver optimizes a small set of learnable parameters via a distillation-based approach. We further propose a parameter-efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) fine-tuning scheme that reformulates the solver as a stochastic Dirichlet policy. Unlike traditional methods that fine-tune the massive backbone, our RL approach operates strictly within the low-dimensional solver space, effectively mitigating reward hacking while enhancing performance in complex text-to-image (T2I) generation tasks. In addition, our method is flexible and can serve as a plugin (EPD-Plugin) to improve existing ODE samplers.

DEPO: Dual-Efficiency Preference Optimization for LLM Agents

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their reasoning and decision-making abilities when deployed as agents. Richer reasoning, however, often comes at the cost of longer chain of thought (CoT), hampering interaction efficiency in real-world scenarios. Nevertheless, there still lacks systematic definition of LLM agent efficiency, hindering targeted improvements. To this end, we introduce dual-efficiency, comprising (i) step-level efficiency, which minimizes tokens per step, and (ii) trajectory-level efficiency, which minimizes the number of steps to complete a task. Building on this definition, we propose DEPO, a dual-efficiency preference optimization method that jointly rewards succinct responses and fewer action steps. Experiments on WebShop and BabyAI show that DEPO cuts token usage by up to 60.9% and steps by up to 26.9%, while achieving up to a 29.3% improvement in performance. DEPO also generalizes to three out-of-domain math benchmarks and retains its efficiency gains when trained on only 25% of the data. Our project page is at https://opencausalab.github.io/DEPO.

Detail++: Training-Free Detail Enhancer for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

Unsupervised Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Preference Optimization

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning greatly improves the interpretability and problem-solving abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing approaches are focused on text CoT, limiting their ability to leverage visual cues. Visual CoT remains underexplored, and the only work is based on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) that relies on extensive labeled bounding-box data and is hard to generalize to unseen cases. In this paper, we introduce Unsupervised Visual CoT (UV-CoT), a novel framework for image-level CoT reasoning via preference optimization. UV-CoT performs preference comparisons between model-generated bounding boxes (one is preferred and the other is dis-preferred), eliminating the need for bounding-box annotations. We get such preference data by introducing an automatic data generation pipeline. Given an image, our target MLLM (e.g., LLaVA-1.5-7B) generates seed bounding boxes using a template prompt and then answers the question using each bounded region as input. An evaluator MLLM (e.g., OmniLLM-12B) ranks the responses, and these rankings serve as supervision to train the target MLLM with UV-CoT by minimizing negative log-likelihood losses. By emulating human perception--identifying key regions and reasoning based on them--UV-CoT can improve visual comprehension, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks where textual descriptions alone fall short. Our experiments on six datasets demonstrate the superiority of UV-CoT, compared to the state-of-the-art textual and visual CoT methods. Our zero-shot testing on four unseen datasets shows the strong generalization of UV-CoT. The code is available in https://github.com/kesenzhao/UV-CoT.

Project-Probe-Aggregate: Efficient Fine-Tuning for Group Robustness

While image-text foundation models have succeeded across diverse downstream tasks, they still face challenges in the presence of spurious correlations between the input and label. To address this issue, we propose a simple three-step approach,Project-Probe-Aggregate (PPA), that enables parameter-efficient fine-tuning for foundation models without relying on group annotations. Building upon the failure-based debiasing scheme, our method, PPA, improves its two key components: minority samples identification and the robust training algorithm. Specifically, we first train biased classifiers by projecting image features onto the nullspace of class proxies from text encoders. Next, we infer group labels using the biased classifier and probe group targets with prior correction. Finally, we aggregate group weights of each class to produce the debiased classifier. Our theoretical analysis shows that our PPA enhances minority group identification and is Bayes optimal for minimizing the balanced group error, mitigating spurious correlations. Extensive experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our PPA: it outperforms the state-of-the-art by an average worst-group accuracy while requiring less than 0.01% tunable parameters without training group labels.

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard -- RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

StyleStudio: Text-Driven Style Transfer with Selective Control of Style Elements

Text-driven style transfer aims to merge the style of a reference image with content described by a text prompt. Recent advancements in text-to-image models have improved the nuance of style transformations, yet significant challenges remain, particularly with overfitting to reference styles, limiting stylistic control, and misaligning with textual content. In this paper, we propose three complementary strategies to address these issues. First, we introduce a cross-modal Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) mechanism for better integration of style and text features, enhancing alignment. Second, we develop a Style-based Classifier-Free Guidance (SCFG) approach that enables selective control over stylistic elements, reducing irrelevant influences. Finally, we incorporate a teacher model during early generation stages to stabilize spatial layouts and mitigate artifacts. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate significant improvements in style transfer quality and alignment with textual prompts. Furthermore, our approach can be integrated into existing style transfer frameworks without fine-tuning.

Devils in Middle Layers of Large Vision-Language Models: Interpreting, Detecting and Mitigating Object Hallucinations via Attention Lens

Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) significantly undermine their reliability, motivating researchers to explore the causes of hallucination. However, most studies primarily focus on the language aspect rather than the visual. In this paper, we address how LVLMs process visual information and whether this process causes hallucination. Firstly, we use the attention lens to identify the stages at which LVLMs handle visual data, discovering that the middle layers are crucial. Moreover, we find that these layers can be further divided into two stages: "visual information enrichment" and "semantic refinement" which respectively propagate visual data to object tokens and interpret it through text. By analyzing attention patterns during the visual information enrichment stage, we find that real tokens consistently receive higher attention weights than hallucinated ones, serving as a strong indicator of hallucination. Further examination of multi-head attention maps reveals that hallucination tokens often result from heads interacting with inconsistent objects. Based on these insights, we propose a simple inference-time method that adjusts visual attention by integrating information across various heads. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this approach effectively mitigates hallucinations in mainstream LVLMs without additional training costs.