ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual "Gradients"

Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, followed by complex tool-use annotations like DFS. This leads to inevitable annotation failures and low efficiency in data generation. We introduce ToolGrad, an agentic framework that inverts this paradigm. ToolGrad first constructs valid tool-use chains through an iterative process guided by textual "gradients", and then synthesizes corresponding user queries. This "answer-first" approach led to ToolGrad-5k, a dataset generated with more complex tool use, lower cost, and 100% pass rate. Experiments show that models trained on ToolGrad-5k outperform those on expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs, even on OOD benchmarks.

Frequency-Dynamic Attention Modulation for Dense Prediction

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have significantly advanced computer vision, demonstrating strong performance across various tasks. However, the attention mechanism in ViTs makes each layer function as a low-pass filter, and the stacked-layer architecture in existing transformers suffers from frequency vanishing. This leads to the loss of critical details and textures. We propose a novel, circuit-theory-inspired strategy called Frequency-Dynamic Attention Modulation (FDAM), which can be easily plugged into ViTs. FDAM directly modulates the overall frequency response of ViTs and consists of two techniques: Attention Inversion (AttInv) and Frequency Dynamic Scaling (FreqScale). Since circuit theory uses low-pass filters as fundamental elements, we introduce AttInv, a method that generates complementary high-pass filtering by inverting the low-pass filter in the attention matrix, and dynamically combining the two. We further design FreqScale to weight different frequency components for fine-grained adjustments to the target response function. Through feature similarity analysis and effective rank evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach avoids representation collapse, leading to consistent performance improvements across various models, including SegFormer, DeiT, and MaskDINO. These improvements are evident in tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Additionally, we apply our method to remote sensing detection, achieving state-of-the-art results in single-scale settings. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FDAM}{https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FDAM}.

Spatial Frequency Modulation for Semantic Segmentation

High spatial frequency information, including fine details like textures, significantly contributes to the accuracy of semantic segmentation. However, according to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, high-frequency components are vulnerable to aliasing or distortion when propagating through downsampling layers such as strided-convolution. Here, we propose a novel Spatial Frequency Modulation (SFM) that modulates high-frequency features to a lower frequency before downsampling and then demodulates them back during upsampling. Specifically, we implement modulation through adaptive resampling (ARS) and design a lightweight add-on that can densely sample the high-frequency areas to scale up the signal, thereby lowering its frequency in accordance with the Frequency Scaling Property. We also propose Multi-Scale Adaptive Upsampling (MSAU) to demodulate the modulated feature and recover high-frequency information through non-uniform upsampling This module further improves segmentation by explicitly exploiting information interaction between densely and sparsely resampled areas at multiple scales. Both modules can seamlessly integrate with various architectures, extending from convolutional neural networks to transformers. Feature visualization and analysis confirm that our method effectively alleviates aliasing while successfully retaining details after demodulation. Finally, we validate the broad applicability and effectiveness of SFM by extending it to image classification, adversarial robustness, instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation tasks. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/SFM}{https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/SFM}.

Frequency Dynamic Convolution for Dense Image Prediction

While Dynamic Convolution (DY-Conv) has shown promising performance by enabling adaptive weight selection through multiple parallel weights combined with an attention mechanism, the frequency response of these weights tends to exhibit high similarity, resulting in high parameter costs but limited adaptability. In this work, we introduce Frequency Dynamic Convolution (FDConv), a novel approach that mitigates these limitations by learning a fixed parameter budget in the Fourier domain. FDConv divides this budget into frequency-based groups with disjoint Fourier indices, enabling the construction of frequency-diverse weights without increasing the parameter cost. To further enhance adaptability, we propose Kernel Spatial Modulation (KSM) and Frequency Band Modulation (FBM). KSM dynamically adjusts the frequency response of each filter at the spatial level, while FBM decomposes weights into distinct frequency bands in the frequency domain and modulates them dynamically based on local content. Extensive experiments on object detection, segmentation, and classification validate the effectiveness of FDConv. We demonstrate that when applied to ResNet-50, FDConv achieves superior performance with a modest increase of +3.6M parameters, outperforming previous methods that require substantial increases in parameter budgets (e.g., CondConv +90M, KW +76.5M). Moreover, FDConv seamlessly integrates into a variety of architectures, including ConvNeXt, Swin-Transformer, offering a flexible and efficient solution for modern vision tasks. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FDConv.

Computation-Efficient and Recognition-Friendly 3D Point Cloud Privacy Protection

3D point cloud has been widely used in applications such as self-driving cars, robotics, CAD models, etc. To the best of our knowledge, these applications raised the issue of privacy leakage in 3D point clouds, which has not been studied well. Different from the 2D image privacy, which is related to texture and 2D geometric structure, the 3D point cloud is texture-less and only relevant to 3D geometric structure. In this work, we defined the 3D point cloud privacy problem and proposed an efficient privacy-preserving framework named PointFlowGMM that can support downstream classification and segmentation tasks without seeing the original data. Using a flow-based generative model, the point cloud is projected into a latent Gaussian mixture distributed subspace. We further designed a novel angular similarity loss to obfuscate the original geometric structure and reduce the model size from 767MB to 120MB without a decrease in recognition performance. The projected point cloud in the latent space is orthogonally rotated randomly to further protect the original geometric structure, the class-to-class relationship is preserved after rotation, thus, the protected point cloud can support the recognition task. We evaluated our model on multiple datasets and achieved comparable recognition results on encrypted point clouds compared to the original point clouds.

InsTaG: Learning Personalized 3D Talking Head from Few-Second Video

Despite exhibiting impressive performance in synthesizing lifelike personalized 3D talking heads, prevailing methods based on radiance fields suffer from high demands for training data and time for each new identity. This paper introduces InsTaG, a 3D talking head synthesis framework that allows a fast learning of realistic personalized 3D talking head from few training data. Built upon a lightweight 3DGS person-specific synthesizer with universal motion priors, InsTaG achieves high-quality and fast adaptation while preserving high-level personalization and efficiency. As preparation, we first propose an Identity-Free Pre-training strategy that enables the pre-training of the person-specific model and encourages the collection of universal motion priors from long-video data corpus. To fully exploit the universal motion priors to learn an unseen new identity, we then present a Motion-Aligned Adaptation strategy to adaptively align the target head to the pre-trained field, and constrain a robust dynamic head structure under few training data. Experiments demonstrate our outstanding performance and efficiency under various data scenarios to render high-quality personalized talking heads.

TdAttenMix: Top-Down Attention Guided Mixup

CutMix is a data augmentation strategy that cuts and pastes image patches to mixup training data. Existing methods pick either random or salient areas which are often inconsistent to labels, thus misguiding the training model. By our knowledge, we integrate human gaze to guide cutmix for the first time. Since human attention is driven by both high-level recognition and low-level clues, we propose a controllable Top-down Attention Guided Module to obtain a general artificial attention which balances top-down and bottom-up attention. The proposed TdATttenMix then picks the patches and adjust the label mixing ratio that focuses on regions relevant to the current label. Experimental results demonstrate that our TdAttenMix outperforms existing state-of-the-art mixup methods across eight different benchmarks. Additionally, we introduce a new metric based on the human gaze and use this metric to investigate the issue of image-label inconsistency. Project page: \url{https://github.com/morning12138/TdAttenMix}

Discovering an Image-Adaptive Coordinate System for Photography Processing

Curve & Lookup Table (LUT) based methods directly map a pixel to the target output, making them highly efficient tools for real-time photography processing. However, due to extreme memory complexity to learn full RGB space mapping, existing methods either sample a discretized 3D lattice to build a 3D LUT or decompose into three separate curves (1D LUTs) on the RGB channels. Here, we propose a novel algorithm, IAC, to learn an image-adaptive Cartesian coordinate system in the RGB color space before performing curve operations. This end-to-end trainable approach enables us to efficiently adjust images with a jointly learned image-adaptive coordinate system and curves. Experimental results demonstrate that this simple strategy achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in various photography processing tasks, including photo retouching, exposure correction, and white-balance editing, while also maintaining a lightweight design and fast inference speed.

Emergence of Painting Ability via Recognition-Driven Evolution

From Paleolithic cave paintings to Impressionism, human painting has evolved to depict increasingly complex and detailed scenes, conveying more nuanced messages. This paper attempts to emerge this artistic capability by simulating the evolutionary pressures that enhance visual communication efficiency. Specifically, we present a model with a stroke branch and a palette branch that together simulate human-like painting. The palette branch learns a limited colour palette, while the stroke branch parameterises each stroke using B\'ezier curves to render an image, subsequently evaluated by a high-level recognition module. We quantify the efficiency of visual communication by measuring the recognition accuracy achieved with machine vision. The model then optimises the control points and colour choices for each stroke to maximise recognition accuracy with minimal strokes and colours. Experimental results show that our model achieves superior performance in high-level recognition tasks, delivering artistic expression and aesthetic appeal, especially in abstract sketches. Additionally, our approach shows promise as an efficient bit-level image compression technique, outperforming traditional methods.

Paleoinspired Vision: From Exploring Colour Vision Evolution to Inspiring Camera Design

The evolution of colour vision is captivating, as it reveals the adaptive strategies of extinct species while simultaneously inspiring innovations in modern imaging technology. In this study, we present a simplified model of visual transduction in the retina, introducing a novel opsin layer. We quantify evolutionary pressures by measuring machine vision recognition accuracy on colour images shaped by specific opsins. Building on this, we develop an evolutionary conservation optimisation algorithm to reconstruct the spectral sensitivity of opsins, enabling mutation-driven adaptations to to more effectively spot fruits or predators. This model condenses millions of years of evolution within seconds on GPU, providing an experimental framework to test long-standing hypotheses in evolutionary biology , such as vision of early mammals, primate trichromacy from gene duplication, retention of colour blindness, blue-shift of fish rod and multiple rod opsins with bioluminescence. Moreover, the model enables speculative explorations of hypothetical species, such as organisms with eyes adapted to the conditions on Mars. Our findings suggest a minimalist yet effective approach to task-specific camera filter design, optimising the spectral response function to meet application-driven demands. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.