AssoCiAm: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguity

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered significant attention, offering a promising pathway toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Among the essential capabilities required for AGI, creativity has emerged as a critical trait for MLLMs, with association serving as its foundation. Association reflects a model' s ability to think creatively, making it vital to evaluate and understand. While several frameworks have been proposed to assess associative ability, they often overlook the inherent ambiguity in association tasks, which arises from the divergent nature of associations and undermines the reliability of evaluations. To address this issue, we decompose ambiguity into two types-internal ambiguity and external ambiguity-and introduce AssoCiAm, a benchmark designed to evaluate associative ability while circumventing the ambiguity through a hybrid computational method. We then conduct extensive experiments on MLLMs, revealing a strong positive correlation between cognition and association. Additionally, we observe that the presence of ambiguity in the evaluation process causes MLLMs' behavior to become more random-like. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our method in ensuring more accurate and reliable evaluations. See Project Page for the data and codes.

Perceiving and Acting in First-Person: A Dataset and Benchmark for Egocentric Human-Object-Human Interactions

Learning action models from real-world human-centric interaction datasets is important towards building general-purpose intelligent assistants with efficiency. However, most existing datasets only offer specialist interaction category and ignore that AI assistants perceive and act based on first-person acquisition. We urge that both the generalist interaction knowledge and egocentric modality are indispensable. In this paper, we embed the manual-assisted task into a vision-language-action framework, where the assistant provides services to the instructor following egocentric vision and commands. With our hybrid RGB-MoCap system, pairs of assistants and instructors engage with multiple objects and the scene following GPT-generated scripts. Under this setting, we accomplish InterVLA, the first large-scale human-object-human interaction dataset with 11.4 hours and 1.2M frames of multimodal data, spanning 2 egocentric and 5 exocentric videos, accurate human/object motions and verbal commands. Furthermore, we establish novel benchmarks on egocentric human motion estimation, interaction synthesis, and interaction prediction with comprehensive analysis. We believe that our InterVLA testbed and the benchmarks will foster future works on building AI agents in the physical world.

Contrast-Prior Enhanced Duality for Mask-Free Shadow Removal

Existing shadow removal methods often rely on shadow masks, which are challenging to acquire in real-world scenarios. Exploring intrinsic image cues, such as local contrast information, presents a potential alternative for guiding shadow removal in the absence of explicit masks. However, the cue's inherent ambiguity becomes a critical limitation in complex scenes, where it can fail to distinguish true shadows from low-reflectance objects and intricate background textures. To address this motivation, we propose the Adaptive Gated Dual-Branch Attention (AGBA) mechanism. AGBA dynamically filters and re-weighs the contrast prior to effectively disentangle shadow features from confounding visual elements. Furthermore, to tackle the persistent challenge of restoring soft shadow boundaries and fine-grained details, we introduce a diffusion-based Frequency-Contrast Fusion Network (FCFN) that leverages high-frequency and contrast cues to guide the generative process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results among mask-free approaches while maintaining competitive performance relative to mask-based methods.

Component Adaptive Clustering for Generalized Category Discovery

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) tackles the challenging problem of categorizing unlabeled images into both known and novel classes within a partially labeled dataset, without prior knowledge of the number of unknown categories. Traditional methods often rely on rigid assumptions, such as predefining the number of classes, which limits their ability to handle the inherent variability and complexity of real-world data. To address these shortcomings, we propose AdaGCD, a cluster-centric contrastive learning framework that incorporates Adaptive Slot Attention (AdaSlot) into the GCD framework. AdaSlot dynamically determines the optimal number of slots based on data complexity, removing the need for predefined slot counts. This adaptive mechanism facilitates the flexible clustering of unlabeled data into known and novel categories by dynamically allocating representational capacity. By integrating adaptive representation with dynamic slot allocation, our method captures both instance-specific and spatially clustered features, improving class discovery in open-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on public and fine-grained datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework, emphasizing the advantages of leveraging spatial local information for category discovery in unlabeled image datasets.

An Explainable AI Framework for Dynamic Resource Management in Vehicular Network Slicing

Effective resource management and network slicing are essential to meet the diverse service demands of vehicular networks, including Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications (URLLC). This paper introduces an Explainable Deep Reinforcement Learning (XRL) framework for dynamic network slicing and resource allocation in vehicular networks, built upon a near-real-time RAN intelligent controller. By integrating a feature-based approach that leverages Shapley values and an attention mechanism, we interpret and refine the decisions of our reinforcementlearning agents, addressing key reliability challenges in vehicular communication systems. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach provides clear, real-time insights into the resource allocation process and achieves higher interpretability precision than a pure attention mechanism. Furthermore, the Quality of Service (QoS) satisfaction for URLLC services increased from 78.0% to 80.13%, while that for eMBB services improved from 71.44% to 73.21%.

Serendipitous Recommendation with Multimodal LLM

Conventional recommendation systems succeed in identifying relevant content but often fail to provide users with surprising or novel items. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) possess the world knowledge and multimodal understanding needed for serendipity, but their integration into billion-item-scale platforms presents significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical framework where fine-tuned MLLMs provide high-level guidance to conventional recommendation models, steering them towards more serendipitous suggestions. This approach leverages MLLM strengths in understanding multimodal content and user interests while retaining the efficiency of traditional models for item-level recommendation. This mitigates the complexity of applying MLLMs directly to vast action spaces. We also demonstrate a chain-of-thought strategy enabling MLLMs to discover novel user interests by first understanding video content and then identifying relevant yet unexplored interest clusters. Through live experiments within a commercial short-form video platform serving billions of users, we show that our MLLM-powered approach significantly improves both recommendation serendipity and user satisfaction.

X-GRM: Large Gaussian Reconstruction Model for Sparse-view X-rays to Computed Tomography

Computed Tomography serves as an indispensable tool in clinical workflows, providing non-invasive visualization of internal anatomical structures. Existing CT reconstruction works are limited to small-capacity model architecture, inflexible volume representation, and small-scale training data. In this paper, we present X-GRM (X-ray Gaussian Reconstruction Model), a large feedforward model for reconstructing 3D CT from sparse-view 2D X-ray projections. X-GRM employs a scalable transformer-based architecture to encode an arbitrary number of sparse X-ray inputs, where tokens from different views are integrated efficiently. Then, tokens are decoded into a new volume representation, named Voxel-based Gaussian Splatting (VoxGS), which enables efficient CT volume extraction and differentiable X-ray rendering. To support the training of X-GRM, we collect ReconX-15K, a large-scale CT reconstruction dataset containing around 15,000 CT/X-ray pairs across diverse organs, including the chest, abdomen, pelvis, and tooth etc. This combination of a high-capacity model, flexible volume representation, and large-scale training data empowers our model to produce high-quality reconstructions from various testing inputs, including in-domain and out-domain X-ray projections. Project Page: https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/X-GRM.

MonoSplat: Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Depth Foundation Models

Recent advances in generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting have demonstrated promising results in real-time high-fidelity rendering without per-scene optimization, yet existing approaches still struggle to handle unfamiliar visual content during inference on novel scenes due to limited generalizability. To address this challenge, we introduce MonoSplat, a novel framework that leverages rich visual priors from pre-trained monocular depth foundation models for robust Gaussian reconstruction. Our approach consists of two key components: a Mono-Multi Feature Adapter that transforms monocular features into multi-view representations, coupled with an Integrated Gaussian Prediction module that effectively fuses both feature types for precise Gaussian generation. Through the Adapter's lightweight attention mechanism, features are seamlessly aligned and aggregated across views while preserving valuable monocular priors, enabling the Prediction module to generate Gaussian primitives with accurate geometry and appearance. Through extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets, we convincingly demonstrate that MonoSplat achieves superior reconstruction quality and generalization capability compared to existing methods while maintaining computational efficiency with minimal trainable parameters. Codes are available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/MonoSplat.

Component-Based Fairness in Face Attribute Classification with Bayesian Network-informed Meta Learning

The widespread integration of face recognition technologies into various applications (e.g., access control and personalized advertising) necessitates a critical emphasis on fairness. While previous efforts have focused on demographic fairness, the fairness of individual biological face components remains unexplored. In this paper, we focus on face component fairness, a fairness notion defined by biological face features. To our best knowledge, our work is the first work to mitigate bias of face attribute prediction at the biological feature level. In this work, we identify two key challenges in optimizing face component fairness: attribute label scarcity and attribute inter-dependencies, both of which limit the effectiveness of bias mitigation from previous approaches. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{B}ayesian \textbf{N}etwork-informed \textbf{M}eta \textbf{R}eweighting (BNMR), which incorporates a Bayesian Network calibrator to guide an adaptive meta-learning-based sample reweighting process. During the training process of our approach, the Bayesian Network calibrator dynamically tracks model bias and encodes prior probabilities for face component attributes to overcome the above challenges. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world human face dataset. Our results show that BNMR is able to consistently outperform recent face bias mitigation baselines. Moreover, our results suggest a positive impact of face component fairness on the commonly considered demographic fairness (e.g., \textit{gender}). Our findings pave the way for new research avenues on face component fairness, suggesting that face component fairness could serve as a potential surrogate objective for demographic fairness. The code for our work is publicly available~\footnote{https://github.com/yliuaa/BNMR-FairCompFace.git}.

The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Single-Image Efficient Super-Resolution (ESR). The challenge aimed to advance the development of deep models that optimize key computational metrics, i.e., runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while achieving a PSNR of at least 26.90 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_valid}$ dataset and 26.99 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_test}$ dataset. A robust participation saw \textbf{244} registered entrants, with \textbf{43} teams submitting valid entries. This report meticulously analyzes these methods and results, emphasizing groundbreaking advancements in state-of-the-art single-image ESR techniques. The analysis highlights innovative approaches and establishes benchmarks for future research in the field.