POPEN: Preference-Based Optimization and Ensemble for LVLM-Based Reasoning Segmentation

Existing LVLM-based reasoning segmentation methods often suffer from imprecise segmentation results and hallucinations in their text responses. This paper introduces POPEN, a novel framework designed to address these issues and achieve improved results. POPEN includes a preference-based optimization method to finetune the LVLM, aligning it more closely with human preferences and thereby generating better text responses and segmentation results. Additionally, POPEN introduces a preference-based ensemble method for inference, which integrates multiple outputs from the LVLM using a preference-score-based attention mechanism for refinement. To better adapt to the segmentation task, we incorporate several task-specific designs in our POPEN framework, including a new approach for collecting segmentation preference data with a curriculum learning mechanism, and a novel preference optimization loss to refine the segmentation capability of the LVLM. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in reasoning segmentation, exhibiting minimal hallucination in text responses and the highest segmentation accuracy compared to previous advanced methods like LISA and PixelLM. Project page is https://lanyunzhu.site/POPEN/

Breaking the Box: Enhancing Remote Sensing Image Segmentation with Freehand Sketches

This work advances zero-shot interactive segmentation for remote sensing imagery through three key contributions. First, we propose a novel sketch-based prompting method, enabling users to intuitively outline objects, surpassing traditional point or box prompts. Second, we introduce LTL-Sensing, the first dataset pairing human sketches with remote sensing imagery, setting a benchmark for future research. Third, we present LTL-Net, a model featuring a multi-input prompting transport module tailored for freehand sketches. Extensive experiments show our approach significantly improves segmentation accuracy and robustness over state-of-the-art methods like SAM, fostering more intuitive human-AI collaboration in remote sensing analysis and enhancing its applications.

Syllables to Scenes: Literary-Guided Free-Viewpoint 3D Scene Synthesis from Japanese Haiku

In the era of the metaverse, where immersive technologies redefine human experiences, translating abstract literary concepts into navigable 3D environments presents a fundamental challenge in preserving semantic and emotional fidelity. This research introduces HaikuVerse, a novel framework for transforming poetic abstraction into spatial representation, with Japanese Haiku serving as an ideal test case due to its sophisticated encapsulation of profound emotions and imagery within minimal text. While existing text-to-3D methods struggle with nuanced interpretations, we present a literary-guided approach that synergizes traditional poetry analysis with advanced generative technologies. Our framework centers on two key innovations: (1) Hierarchical Literary-Criticism Theory Grounded Parsing (H-LCTGP), which captures both explicit imagery and implicit emotional resonance through structured semantic decomposition, and (2) Progressive Dimensional Synthesis (PDS), a multi-stage pipeline that systematically transforms poetic elements into coherent 3D scenes through sequential diffusion processes, geometric optimization, and real-time enhancement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HaikuVerse significantly outperforms conventional text-to-3D approaches in both literary fidelity and visual quality, establishing a new paradigm for preserving cultural heritage in immersive digital spaces. Project website at: https://syllables-to-scenes.github.io/

Let Human Sketches Help: Empowering Challenging Image Segmentation Task with Freehand Sketches

Sketches, with their expressive potential, allow humans to convey the essence of an object through even a rough contour. For the first time, we harness this expressive potential to improve segmentation performance in challenging tasks like camouflaged object detection (COD). Our approach introduces an innovative sketch-guided interactive segmentation framework, allowing users to intuitively annotate objects with freehand sketches (drawing a rough contour of the object) instead of the traditional bounding boxes or points used in classic interactive segmentation models like SAM. We demonstrate that sketch input can significantly improve performance in existing iterative segmentation methods, outperforming text or bounding box annotations. Additionally, we introduce key modifications to network architectures and a novel sketch augmentation technique to fully harness the power of sketch input and further boost segmentation accuracy. Remarkably, our model' s output can be directly used to train other neural networks, achieving results comparable to pixel-by-pixel annotations--while reducing annotation time by up to 120 times, which shows great potential in democratizing the annotation process and enabling model training with less reliance on resource-intensive, laborious pixel-level annotations. We also present KOSCamo+, the first freehand sketch dataset for camouflaged object detection. The dataset, code, and the labeling tool will be open sourced.

Not Every Patch is Needed: Towards a More Efficient and Effective Backbone for Video-based Person Re-identification

This paper proposes a new effective and efficient plug-and-play backbone for video-based person re-identification (ReID). Conventional video-based ReID methods typically use CNN or transformer backbones to extract deep features for every position in every sampled video frame. Here, we argue that this exhaustive feature extraction could be unnecessary, since we find that different frames in a ReID video often exhibit small differences and contain many similar regions due to the relatively slight movements of human beings. Inspired by this, a more selective, efficient paradigm is explored in this paper. Specifically, we introduce a patch selection mechanism to reduce computational cost by choosing only the crucial and non-repetitive patches for feature extraction. Additionally, we present a novel network structure that generates and utilizes pseudo frame global context to address the issue of incomplete views resulting from sparse inputs. By incorporating these new designs, our backbone can achieve both high performance and low computational cost. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that our approach reduces the computational cost by 74\% compared to ViT-B and 28\% compared to ResNet50, while the accuracy is on par with ViT-B and outperforms ResNet50 significantly.

Tree-of-Table: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Enhanced Large-Scale Table Understanding

The ubiquity and value of tables as semi-structured data across various domains necessitate advanced methods for understanding their complexity and vast amounts of information. Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in advancing the natural language understanding frontier, their application to large-scale tabular data presents significant challenges, specifically regarding table size and complex intricate relationships. Existing works have shown promise with small-scale tables but often flounder when tasked with the complex reasoning required by larger, interconnected tables found in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce "Tree-of-Table", a novel approach designed to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities over large and complex tables. Our method employs Table Condensation and Decomposition to distill and reorganize relevant data into a manageable format, followed by the construction of a hierarchical Table-Tree that facilitates tree-structured reasoning. Through a meticulous Table-Tree Execution process, we systematically unravel the tree-structured reasoning chain to derive the solutions. Experiments across diverse datasets, including WikiTQ, TableFact, FeTaQA, and BIRD, demonstrate that Tree-of-Table sets a new benchmark with superior performance, showcasing remarkable efficiency and generalization capabilities in large-scale table reasoning.

Img2CAD: Conditioned 3D CAD Model Generation from Single Image with Structured Visual Geometry

In this paper, we propose Img2CAD, the first approach to our knowledge that uses 2D image inputs to generate CAD models with editable parameters. Unlike existing AI methods for 3D model generation using text or image inputs often rely on mesh-based representations, which are incompatible with CAD tools and lack editability and fine control, Img2CAD enables seamless integration between AI-based 3D reconstruction and CAD software. We have identified an innovative intermediate representation called Structured Visual Geometry (SVG), characterized by vectorized wireframes extracted from objects. This representation significantly enhances the performance of generating conditioned CAD models. Additionally, we introduce two new datasets to further support research in this area: ABC-mono, the largest known dataset comprising over 200,000 3D CAD models with rendered images, and KOCAD, the first dataset featuring real-world captured objects alongside their ground truth CAD models, supporting further research in conditioned CAD model generation.

Hybrid Mamba for Few-Shot Segmentation

Many few-shot segmentation (FSS) methods use cross attention to fuse support foreground (FG) into query features, regardless of the quadratic complexity. A recent advance Mamba can also well capture intra-sequence dependencies, yet the complexity is only linear. Hence, we aim to devise a cross (attention-like) Mamba to capture inter-sequence dependencies for FSS. A simple idea is to scan on support features to selectively compress them into the hidden state, which is then used as the initial hidden state to sequentially scan query features. Nevertheless, it suffers from (1) support forgetting issue: query features will also gradually be compressed when scanning on them, so the support features in hidden state keep reducing, and many query pixels cannot fuse sufficient support features; (2) intra-class gap issue: query FG is essentially more similar to itself rather than to support FG, i.e., query may prefer not to fuse support features but their own ones from the hidden state, yet the success of FSS relies on the effective use of support information. To tackle them, we design a hybrid Mamba network (HMNet), including (1) a support recapped Mamba to periodically recap the support features when scanning query, so the hidden state can always contain rich support information; (2) a query intercepted Mamba to forbid the mutual interactions among query pixels, and encourage them to fuse more support features from the hidden state. Consequently, the support information is better utilized, leading to better performance. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two public benchmarks, showing the superiority of HMNet. The code is available at https://github.com/Sam1224/HMNet.

SAM2-Adapter: Evaluating & Adapting Segment Anything 2 in Downstream Tasks: Camouflage, Shadow, Medical Image Segmentation, and More

The advent of large models, also known as foundation models, has significantly transformed the AI research landscape, with models like Segment Anything (SAM) achieving notable success in diverse image segmentation scenarios. Despite its advancements, SAM encountered limitations in handling some complex low-level segmentation tasks like camouflaged object and medical imaging. In response, in 2023, we introduced SAM-Adapter, which demonstrated improved performance on these challenging tasks. Now, with the release of Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), a successor with enhanced architecture and a larger training corpus, we reassess these challenges. This paper introduces SAM2-Adapter, the first adapter designed to overcome the persistent limitations observed in SAM2 and achieve new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in specific downstream tasks including medical image segmentation, camouflaged (concealed) object detection, and shadow detection. SAM2-Adapter builds on the SAM-Adapter's strengths, offering enhanced generalizability and composability for diverse applications. We present extensive experimental results demonstrating SAM2-Adapter's effectiveness. We show the potential and encourage the research community to leverage the SAM2 model with our SAM2-Adapter for achieving superior segmentation outcomes. Code, pre-trained models, and data processing protocols are available at http://tianrun-chen.github.io/SAM-Adaptor/

xLSTM-UNet can be an Effective 2D & 3D Medical Image Segmentation Backbone with Vision-LSTM (ViL) better than its Mamba Counterpart

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViT) have been pivotal in biomedical image segmentation, yet their ability to manage long-range dependencies remains constrained by inherent locality and computational overhead. To overcome these challenges, in this technical report, we first propose xLSTM-UNet, a UNet structured deep learning neural network that leverages Vision-LSTM (xLSTM) as its backbone for medical image segmentation. xLSTM is a recently proposed as the successor of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and have demonstrated superior performance compared to Transformers and State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba in Neural Language Processing (NLP) and image classification (as demonstrated in Vision-LSTM, or ViL implementation). Here, xLSTM-UNet we designed extend the success in biomedical image segmentation domain. By integrating the local feature extraction strengths of convolutional layers with the long-range dependency capturing abilities of xLSTM, xLSTM-UNet offers a robust solution for comprehensive image analysis. We validate the efficacy of xLSTM-UNet through experiments. Our findings demonstrate that xLSTM-UNet consistently surpasses the performance of leading CNN-based, Transformer-based, and Mamba-based segmentation networks in multiple datasets in biomedical segmentation including organs in abdomen MRI, instruments in endoscopic images, and cells in microscopic images. With comprehensive experiments performed, this technical report highlights the potential of xLSTM-based architectures in advancing biomedical image analysis in both 2D and 3D. The code, models, and datasets are publicly available at http://tianrun-chen.github.io/xLSTM-UNet/