Accurate Tracking of Arabidopsis Root Cortex Cell Nuclei in 3D Time-Lapse Microscopy Images Based on Genetic Algorithm

Arabidopsis is a widely used model plant to gain basic knowledge on plant physiology and development. Live imaging is an important technique to visualize and quantify elemental processes in plant development. To uncover novel theories underlying plant growth and cell division, accurate cell tracking on live imaging is of utmost importance. The commonly used cell tracking software, TrackMate, adopts tracking-by-detection fashion, which applies Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) for blob detection, and Linear Assignment Problem (LAP) tracker for tracking. However, they do not perform sufficiently when cells are densely arranged. To alleviate the problems mentioned above, we propose an accurate tracking method based on Genetic algorithm (GA) using knowledge of Arabidopsis root cellular patterns and spatial relationship among volumes. Our method can be described as a coarse-to-fine method, in which we first conducted relatively easy line-level tracking of cell nuclei, then performed complicated nuclear tracking based on known linear arrangement of cell files and their spatial relationship between nuclei. Our method has been evaluated on a long-time live imaging dataset of Arabidopsis root tips, and with minor manual rectification, it accurately tracks nuclei. To the best of our knowledge, this research represents the first successful attempt to address a long-standing problem in the field of time-lapse microscopy in the root meristem by proposing an accurate tracking method for Arabidopsis root nuclei.

IAP: Improving Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models via Instance-Aware Prompting

Recent pre-trained vision-language models (PT-VLMs) often face a Multi-Domain Class-Incremental Learning (MCIL) scenario in practice, where several classes and domains of multi-modal tasks are incrementally arrived. Without access to previously learned tasks and unseen tasks, memory-constrained MCIL suffers from forward and backward forgetting. To alleviate the above challenges, parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques (PEFT), such as prompt tuning, are employed to adapt the PT-VLM to the diverse incrementally learned tasks. To achieve effective new task adaptation, existing methods only consider the effect of PEFT strategy selection, but neglect the influence of PEFT parameter setting (e.g., prompting). In this paper, we tackle the challenge of optimizing prompt designs for diverse tasks in MCIL and propose an Instance-Aware Prompting (IAP) framework. Specifically, our Instance-Aware Gated Prompting (IA-GP) module enhances adaptation to new tasks while mitigating forgetting by dynamically assigning prompts across transformer layers at the instance level. Our Instance-Aware Class-Distribution-Driven Prompting (IA-CDDP) improves the task adaptation process by determining an accurate task-label-related confidence score for each instance. Experimental evaluations across 11 datasets, using three performance metrics, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code can be found at https://github.com/FerdinandZJU/IAP.

Video SimpleQA: Towards Factuality Evaluation in Large Video Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Video Language Models (LVLMs) have highlighted their potential for multi-modal understanding, yet evaluating their factual grounding in video contexts remains a critical unsolved challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Video SimpleQA, the first comprehensive benchmark tailored for factuality evaluation of LVLMs. Our work distinguishes from existing video benchmarks through the following key features: 1) Knowledge required: demanding integration of external knowledge beyond the explicit narrative; 2) Fact-seeking question: targeting objective, undisputed events or relationships, avoiding subjective interpretation; 3) Definitive & short-form answer: Answers are crafted as unambiguous and definitively correct in a short format, enabling automated evaluation through LLM-as-a-judge frameworks with minimal scoring variance; 4) External-source verified: All annotations undergo rigorous validation against authoritative external references to ensure the reliability; 5) Temporal reasoning required: The annotated question types encompass both static single-frame understanding and dynamic temporal reasoning, explicitly evaluating LVLMs factuality under the long-context dependencies. We extensively evaluate 41 state-of-the-art LVLMs and summarize key findings as follows: 1) Current LVLMs exhibit notable deficiencies in factual adherence, particularly for open-source models. The best-performing model Gemini-1.5-Pro achieves merely an F-score of 54.4%; 2) Test-time compute paradigms show insignificant performance gains, revealing fundamental constraints for enhancing factuality through post-hoc computation; 3) Retrieval-Augmented Generation demonstrates consistent improvements at the cost of additional inference time overhead, presenting a critical efficiency-performance trade-off.

From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Models

Achieving human-level intelligence requires refining the transition from the fast, intuitive System 1 to the slower, more deliberate System 2 reasoning. While System 1 excels in quick, heuristic decisions, System 2 relies on logical reasoning for more accurate judgments and reduced biases. Foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at fast decision-making but lack the depth for complex reasoning, as they have not yet fully embraced the step-by-step analysis characteristic of true System 2 thinking. Recently, reasoning LLMs like OpenAI's o1/o3 and DeepSeek's R1 have demonstrated expert-level performance in fields such as mathematics and coding, closely mimicking the deliberate reasoning of System 2 and showcasing human-like cognitive abilities. This survey begins with a brief overview of the progress in foundational LLMs and the early development of System 2 technologies, exploring how their combination has paved the way for reasoning LLMs. Next, we discuss how to construct reasoning LLMs, analyzing their features, the core methods enabling advanced reasoning, and the evolution of various reasoning LLMs. Additionally, we provide an overview of reasoning benchmarks, offering an in-depth comparison of the performance of representative reasoning LLMs. Finally, we explore promising directions for advancing reasoning LLMs and maintain a real-time \href{https://github.com/zzli2022/Awesome-Slow-Reason-System}{GitHub Repository} to track the latest developments. We hope this survey will serve as a valuable resource to inspire innovation and drive progress in this rapidly evolving field.

CE-SDWV: Effective and Efficient Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via a Semantic-Driven Word Vocabulary

Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have achieved remarkable generative performance about various concepts. With the limitation of privacy and safety in practice, the generative capability concerning NSFW (Not Safe For Work) concepts is undesirable, e.g., producing sexually explicit photos, and licensed images. The concept erasure task for T2I diffusion models has attracted considerable attention and requires an effective and efficient method. To achieve this goal, we propose a CE-SDWV framework, which removes the target concepts (e.g., NSFW concepts) of T2I diffusion models in the text semantic space by only adjusting the text condition tokens and does not need to re-train the original T2I diffusion model's weights. Specifically, our framework first builds a target concept-related word vocabulary to enhance the representation of the target concepts within the text semantic space, and then utilizes an adaptive semantic component suppression strategy to ablate the target concept-related semantic information in the text condition tokens. To further adapt the above text condition tokens to the original image semantic space, we propose an end-to-end gradient-orthogonal token optimization strategy. Extensive experiments on I2P and UnlearnCanvas benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

Resource-Constrained Federated Continual Learning: What Does Matter?

Federated Continual Learning (FCL) aims to enable sequentially privacy-preserving model training on streams of incoming data that vary in edge devices by preserving previous knowledge while adapting to new data. Current FCL literature focuses on restricted data privacy and access to previously seen data while imposing no constraints on the training overhead. This is unreasonable for FCL applications in real-world scenarios, where edge devices are primarily constrained by resources such as storage, computational budget, and label rate. We revisit this problem with a large-scale benchmark and analyze the performance of state-of-the-art FCL approaches under different resource-constrained settings. Various typical FCL techniques and six datasets in two incremental learning scenarios (Class-IL and Domain-IL) are involved in our experiments. Through extensive experiments amounting to a total of over 1,000+ GPU hours, we find that, under limited resource-constrained settings, existing FCL approaches, with no exception, fail to achieve the expected performance. Our conclusions are consistent in the sensitivity analysis. This suggests that most existing FCL methods are particularly too resource-dependent for real-world deployment. Moreover, we study the performance of typical FCL techniques with resource constraints and shed light on future research directions in FCL.

SimC3D: A Simple Contrastive 3D Pretraining Framework Using RGB Images

The 3D contrastive learning paradigm has demonstrated remarkable performance in downstream tasks through pretraining on point cloud data. Recent advances involve additional 2D image priors associated with 3D point clouds for further improvement. Nonetheless, these existing frameworks are constrained by the restricted range of available point cloud datasets, primarily due to the high costs of obtaining point cloud data. To this end, we propose SimC3D, a simple but effective 3D contrastive learning framework, for the first time, pretraining 3D backbones from pure RGB image data. SimC3D performs contrastive 3D pretraining with three appealing properties. (1) Pure image data: SimC3D simplifies the dependency of costly 3D point clouds and pretrains 3D backbones using solely RBG images. By employing depth estimation and suitable data processing, the monocular synthesized point cloud shows great potential for 3D pretraining. (2) Simple framework: Traditional multi-modal frameworks facilitate 3D pretraining with 2D priors by utilizing an additional 2D backbone, thereby increasing computational expense. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that the primary benefit of the 2D modality stems from the incorporation of locality information. Inspired by this insightful observation, SimC3D directly employs 2D positional embeddings as a stronger contrastive objective, eliminating the necessity for 2D backbones and leading to considerable performance improvements. (3) Strong performance: SimC3D outperforms previous approaches that leverage ground-truth point cloud data for pretraining in various downstream tasks. Furthermore, the performance of SimC3D can be further enhanced by combining multiple image datasets, showcasing its significant potential for scalability. The code will be available at https://github.com/Dongjiahua/SimC3D.

Federated Incremental Named Entity Recognition

Federated Named Entity Recognition (FNER) boosts model training within each local client by aggregating the model updates of decentralized local clients, without sharing their private data. However, existing FNER methods assume fixed entity types and local clients in advance, leading to their ineffectiveness in practical applications. In a more realistic scenario, local clients receive new entity types continuously, while new local clients collecting novel data may irregularly join the global FNER training. This challenging setup, referred to here as Federated Incremental NER, renders the global model suffering from heterogeneous forgetting of old entity types from both intra-client and inter-client perspectives. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Local-Global Forgetting Defense (LGFD) model. Specifically, to address intra-client forgetting, we develop a structural knowledge distillation loss to retain the latent space's feature structure and a pseudo-label-guided inter-type contrastive loss to enhance discriminative capability over different entity types, effectively preserving previously learned knowledge within local clients. To tackle inter-client forgetting, we propose a task switching monitor that can automatically identify new entity types under privacy protection and store the latest old global model for knowledge distillation and pseudo-labeling. Experiments demonstrate significant improvement of our LGFD model over comparison methods.

Continual LLaVA: Continual Instruction Tuning in Large Vision-Language Models

Instruction tuning constitutes a prevalent technique for tailoring Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) to meet individual task requirements. To date, most of the existing approaches are confined to single-task adaptation, whereas the requirements in real-world scenarios are inherently varied and continually evolving. Thus an ideal LVLM should sustain continual instruction tuning in the face of stream-task distributions (i.e., different domains, emerging capabilities, and new datasets) while minimizing the forgetting of previously acquired knowledge. To achieve this, we propose a new benchmark for COntinuAl inStruction Tuning on LVLMs (COAST), which encompasses the aforementioned domain-incremental, capability-incremental, and dataset-incremental configurations. In terms of methodology, we propose Continual LLaVA, a rehearsal-free method tailored for continual instruction tuning in LVLMs. To circumvent the additional overhead associated with experience replay, we freeze LVLMs and construct the dual increment embeddings for each input instruction to facilitate parameter-efficient tuning. Specifically, the increment embeddings can be decomposed into two principal components: 1) intrinsic increment embeddings to encode task-specific characteristics. To achieve this, we set up a low-rank pool containing candidate embeddings, from which we select the relevant ones based on their similarity with the user instructions; 2) contextual increment embeddings to investigate the inter-dependencies across tasks. In this regard, the low-rank embeddings chosen in the previous tasks are aggregated via learnable weighted sum to provide complementary hints. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed Continual LLaVA outperforms previous methods by significantly reducing the forgetting during the continual instruction tuning process.

How to Continually Adapt Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Flexible Customization?

Custom diffusion models (CDMs) have attracted widespread attention due to their astonishing generative ability for personalized concepts. However, most existing CDMs unreasonably assume that personalized concepts are fixed and cannot change over time. Moreover, they heavily suffer from catastrophic forgetting and concept neglect on old personalized concepts when continually learning a series of new concepts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Concept-Incremental text-to-image Diffusion Model (CIDM), which can resolve catastrophic forgetting and concept neglect to learn new customization tasks in a concept-incremental manner. Specifically, to surmount the catastrophic forgetting of old concepts, we develop a concept consolidation loss and an elastic weight aggregation module. They can explore task-specific and task-shared knowledge during training, and aggregate all low-rank weights of old concepts based on their contributions during inference. Moreover, in order to address concept neglect, we devise a context-controllable synthesis strategy that leverages expressive region features and noise estimation to control the contexts of generated images according to user conditions. Experiments validate that our CIDM surpasses existing custom diffusion models. The source codes are available at https://github.com/JiahuaDong/CIFC.