imec-DistriNet, Dept. of Computer Science, KU Leuven
Abstract:Test-Time Scaling (TTS) enhances the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computation during inference. However, existing approaches primarily rely on output-level sampling while overlooking the role of model architecture. In mainstream Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs, we observe that varying the number of activated experts yields complementary solution sets with stable accuracy, revealing a new and underexplored source of diversity. Motivated by this observation, we propose Dynamic Experts Search (DES), a TTS strategy that elevates expert activation into a controllable dimension of the search space. DES integrates two key components: (1) Dynamic MoE, which enables direct control of expert counts during inference to generate diverse reasoning trajectories without additional cost; and (2) Expert Configuration Inheritance, which preserves consistent expert counts within a reasoning path while varying them across runs, thereby balancing stability and diversity throughout the search. Extensive experiments across MoE architectures, verifiers and reasoning benchmarks (i.e., math, code and knowledge) demonstrate that DES reliably outperforms TTS baselines, enhancing accuracy and stability without additional cost. These results highlight DES as a practical and scalable form of architecture-aware TTS, illustrating how structural flexibility in modern LLMs can advance reasoning.
Abstract:This work explores the application of ensemble modeling to the multidimensional regression problem of trajectory prediction for vehicles in urban environments. As newer and bigger state-of-the-art prediction models for autonomous driving continue to emerge, an important open challenge is the problem of how to combine the strengths of these big models without the need for costly re-training. We show how, perhaps surprisingly, combining state-of-the-art deep learning models out-of-the-box (without retraining or fine-tuning) with a simple confidence-weighted average method can enhance the overall prediction. Indeed, while combining trajectory prediction models is not straightforward, this simple approach enhances performance by 10% over the best prediction model, especially in the long-tailed metrics. We show that this performance improvement holds on both the NuScenes and Argoverse datasets, and that these improvements are made across the dataset distribution. The code for our work is open source.
Abstract:Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities across various fields. These developments have led to more direct communication between humans and LLMs in various situations, such as social companionship and psychological support. However, LLMs often exhibit limitations in emotional perception and social competence during real-world conversations. These limitations partly originate from their inability to adapt their communication style and emotional expression to different social and task contexts. In this work, we introduce PersonaFuse, a novel LLM post-training framework that enables LLMs to adapt and express different personalities for varying situations. Inspired by Trait Activation Theory and the Big Five personality model, PersonaFuse employs a Mixture-of-Expert architecture that combines persona adapters with a dynamic routing network, enabling contextual trait expression. Experimental results show that PersonaFuse substantially outperforms baseline models across multiple dimensions of social-emotional intelligence. Importantly, these gains are achieved without sacrificing general reasoning ability or model safety, which remain common limitations of direct prompting and supervised fine-tuning approaches. PersonaFuse also delivers consistent improvements in downstream human-centered applications, such as mental health counseling and review-based customer service. Finally, human preference evaluations against leading LLMs, including GPT-4o and DeepSeek, demonstrate that PersonaFuse achieves competitive response quality despite its comparatively smaller model size. These findings demonstrate that PersonaFuse~offers a theoretically grounded and practical approach for developing social-emotional enhanced LLMs, marking a significant advancement toward more human-centric AI systems.
Abstract:Robotic systems demand accurate and comprehensive 3D environment perception, requiring simultaneous capture of photo-realistic appearance (optical), precise layout shape (geometric), and open-vocabulary scene understanding (semantic). Existing methods typically achieve only partial fulfillment of these requirements while exhibiting optical blurring, geometric irregularities, and semantic ambiguities. To address these challenges, we propose OmniMap. Overall, OmniMap represents the first online mapping framework that simultaneously captures optical, geometric, and semantic scene attributes while maintaining real-time performance and model compactness. At the architectural level, OmniMap employs a tightly coupled 3DGS-Voxel hybrid representation that combines fine-grained modeling with structural stability. At the implementation level, OmniMap identifies key challenges across different modalities and introduces several innovations: adaptive camera modeling for motion blur and exposure compensation, hybrid incremental representation with normal constraints, and probabilistic fusion for robust instance-level understanding. Extensive experiments show OmniMap's superior performance in rendering fidelity, geometric accuracy, and zero-shot semantic segmentation compared to state-of-the-art methods across diverse scenes. The framework's versatility is further evidenced through a variety of downstream applications, including multi-domain scene Q&A, interactive editing, perception-guided manipulation, and map-assisted navigation.
Abstract:Stylized motion generation is actively studied in computer graphics, especially benefiting from the rapid advances in diffusion models. The goal of this task is to produce a novel motion respecting both the motion content and the desired motion style, e.g., ``walking in a loop like a Monkey''. Existing research attempts to address this problem via motion style transfer or conditional motion generation. They typically embed the motion style into a latent space and guide the motion implicitly in a latent space as well. Despite the progress, their methods suffer from low interpretability and control, limited generalization to new styles, and fail to produce motions other than ``walking'' due to the strong bias in the public stylization dataset. In this paper, we propose to solve the stylized motion generation problem from a new perspective of reasoning-composition-generation, based on our observations: i) human motion can often be effectively described using natural language in a body-part centric manner, ii) LLMs exhibit a strong ability to understand and reason about human motion, and iii) human motion has an inherently compositional nature, facilitating the new motion content or style generation via effective recomposing. We thus propose utilizing body-part text space as an intermediate representation, and present SMooGPT, a fine-tuned LLM, acting as a reasoner, composer, and generator when generating the desired stylized motion. Our method executes in the body-part text space with much higher interpretability, enabling fine-grained motion control, effectively resolving potential conflicts between motion content and style, and generalizes well to new styles thanks to the open-vocabulary ability of LLMs. Comprehensive experiments and evaluations, and a user perceptual study, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, especially under the pure text-driven stylized motion generation.
Abstract:In this paper, we tackle the task of online video temporal grounding (OnVTG), which requires the model to locate events related to a given text query within a video stream. Unlike regular video temporal grounding, OnVTG requires the model to make predictions without observing future frames. As online videos are streaming inputs and can go on indefinitely, it is impractical and inefficient to store all historical inputs. The existing OnVTG models employ memory to store recent historical video frame features and predict scores indicating whether the current frame corresponds to the start or end time of the target event. However, these methods lack effective event modeling and cannot retain long-term historical information, leading to low performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose a hierarchical event memory for OnVTG. We propose an event-based OnVTG framework that makes predictions based on event proposals that model event-level information with various durations. To preserve historically valuable event information, we introduce a hierarchical event memory that retains historical events, allowing the model to access both recent and long-term information. To enable the real-time prediction, we further propose a future prediction branch that predicts whether the target event will occur shortly and further regresses the start time of the event. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the TACoS, ActivityNet Captions, and MAD datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/minghangz/OnVTG.
Abstract:Visual imitation learning (VIL) provides an efficient and intuitive strategy for robotic systems to acquire novel skills. Recent advancements in foundation models, particularly Vision Language Models (VLMs), have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual and linguistic reasoning for VIL tasks. Despite this progress, existing approaches primarily utilize these models for learning high-level plans from human demonstrations, relying on pre-defined motion primitives for executing physical interactions, which remains a major bottleneck for robotic systems. In this work, we present FMimic, a novel paradigm that harnesses foundation models to directly learn generalizable skills at even fine-grained action levels, using only a limited number of human videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our FMimic delivers strong performance with a single human video, and significantly outperforms all other methods with five videos. Furthermore, our method exhibits significant improvements of over 39% and 29% in RLBench multi-task experiments and real-world manipulation tasks, respectively, and exceeds baselines by more than 34% in high-precision tasks and 47% in long-horizon tasks.
Abstract:In recent years, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS)-based scene representation demonstrates significant potential in real-time rendering and training efficiency. However, most existing methods primarily focus on single-map reconstruction, while the registration and fusion of multiple 3D-GS sub-maps remain underexplored. Existing methods typically rely on manual intervention to select a reference sub-map as a template and use point cloud matching for registration. Moreover, hard-threshold filtering of 3D-GS primitives often degrades rendering quality after fusion. In this paper, we present a novel approach for automated 3D-GS sub-map alignment and fusion, eliminating the need for manual intervention while enhancing registration accuracy and fusion quality. First, we extract geometric skeletons across multiple scenes and leverage ellipsoid-aware convolution to capture 3D-GS attributes, facilitating robust scene registration. Second, we introduce a multi-factor Gaussian fusion strategy to mitigate the scene element loss caused by rigid thresholding. Experiments on the ScanNet-GSReg and our Coord datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in registration and fusion. For registration, it achieves a 41.9\% reduction in RRE on complex scenes, ensuring more precise pose estimation. For fusion, it improves PSNR by 10.11 dB, highlighting superior structural preservation. These results confirm its ability to enhance scene alignment and reconstruction fidelity, ensuring more consistent and accurate 3D scene representation for robotic perception and autonomous navigation.
Abstract:The performance of large language models (LLMs) is closely tied to their training data, which can include copyrighted material or private information, raising legal and ethical concerns. Additionally, LLMs face criticism for dataset contamination and internalizing biases. To address these issues, the Pre-Training Data Detection (PDD) task was proposed to identify if specific data was included in an LLM's pre-training corpus. However, existing PDD methods often rely on superficial features like prediction confidence and loss, resulting in mediocre performance. To improve this, we introduce NA-PDD, a novel algorithm analyzing differential neuron activation patterns between training and non-training data in LLMs. This is based on the observation that these data types activate different neurons during LLM inference. We also introduce CCNewsPDD, a temporally unbiased benchmark employing rigorous data transformations to ensure consistent time distributions between training and non-training data. Our experiments demonstrate that NA-PDD significantly outperforms existing methods across three benchmarks and multiple LLMs.
Abstract:Text-to-image generation has greatly advanced content creation, yet accurately rendering visual text remains a key challenge due to blurred glyphs, semantic drift, and limited style control. Existing methods often rely on pre-rendered glyph images as conditions, but these struggle to retain original font styles and color cues, necessitating complex multi-branch designs that increase model overhead and reduce flexibility. To address these issues, we propose a segmentation-guided framework that uses pixel-level visual text masks -- rich in glyph shape, color, and spatial detail -- as unified conditional inputs. Our method introduces two core components: (1) a fine-tuned bilingual segmentation model for precise text mask extraction, and (2) a streamlined diffusion model augmented with adaptive glyph conditioning and a region-specific loss to preserve textual fidelity in both content and style. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the AnyText benchmark, significantly surpassing prior methods in both Chinese and English settings. To enable more rigorous evaluation, we also introduce two new benchmarks: GlyphMM-benchmark for testing layout and glyph consistency in complex typesetting, and MiniText-benchmark for assessing generation quality in small-scale text regions. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in both scenarios, particularly excelling at small text rendering and complex layout preservation, validating its strong generalization and deployment readiness.