Increasing the Thinking Budget is Not All You Need

Recently, a new wave of thinking-capable Large Language Models has emerged, demonstrating exceptional capabilities across a wide range of reasoning benchmarks. Early studies have begun to explore how the amount of compute in terms of the length of the reasoning process, the so-called thinking budget, impacts model performance. In this work, we propose a systematic investigation of the thinking budget as a key parameter, examining its interaction with various configurations such as self-consistency, reflection, and others. Our goal is to provide an informative, balanced comparison framework that considers both performance outcomes and computational cost. Among our findings, we discovered that simply increasing the thinking budget is not the most effective use of compute. More accurate responses can instead be achieved through alternative configurations, such as self-consistency and self-reflection.

Leveraging Multi-Modal Saliency and Fusion for Gaze Target Detection

Gaze target detection (GTD) is the task of predicting where a person in an image is looking. This is a challenging task, as it requires the ability to understand the relationship between the person's head, body, and eyes, as well as the surrounding environment. In this paper, we propose a novel method for GTD that fuses multiple pieces of information extracted from an image. First, we project the 2D image into a 3D representation using monocular depth estimation. We then extract a depth-infused saliency module map, which highlights the most salient (\textit{attention-grabbing}) regions in image for the subject in consideration. We also extract face and depth modalities from the image, and finally fuse all the extracted modalities to identify the gaze target. We quantitatively evaluated our method, including the ablation analysis on three publicly available datasets, namely VideoAttentionTarget, GazeFollow and GOO-Real, and showed that it outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. This suggests that our method is a promising new approach for GTD.