Task Switching Without Forgetting via Proximal Decoupling

In continual learning, the primary challenge is to learn new information without forgetting old knowledge. A common solution addresses this trade-off through regularization, penalizing changes to parameters critical for previous tasks. In most cases, this regularization term is directly added to the training loss and optimized with standard gradient descent, which blends learning and retention signals into a single update and does not explicitly separate essential parameters from redundant ones. As task sequences grow, this coupling can over-constrain the model, limiting forward transfer and leading to inefficient use of capacity. We propose a different approach that separates task learning from stability enforcement via operator splitting. The learning step focuses on minimizing the current task loss, while a proximal stability step applies a sparse regularizer to prune unnecessary parameters and preserve task-relevant ones. This turns the stability-plasticity into a negotiated update between two complementary operators, rather than a conflicting gradient. We provide theoretical justification for the splitting method on the continual-learning objective, and demonstrate that our proposed solver achieves state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks, improving both stability and adaptability without the need for replay buffers, Bayesian sampling, or meta-learning components.

HMR-Net: Hierarchical Modular Routing for Cross-Domain Object Detection in Aerial Images

Despite advances in object detection, aerial imagery remains a challenging domain, as models often fail to generalize across variations in spatial resolution, scene composition, and semantic label coverage. Differences in geographic context, sensor characteristics, and object distributions across datasets limit the capacity of conventional models to learn consistent and transferable representations. Shared methods trained on such data tend to impose a unified representation across fundamentally different domains, resulting in poor performance on region-specific content and less flexibility when dealing with novel object categories. To address this, we propose a novel modular learning framework that enables structured specialization in aerial detection. Our method introduces a hierarchical routing mechanism with two levels of modularity: a global expert assignment layer that uses latent geographic embeddings to route datasets to specialized processing modules, and a local scene decomposition mechanism that allocates image subregions to region-specific sub-modules. This allows our method to specialize across datasets and within complex scenes. Additionally, the framework contains a conditional expert module that uses external semantic information (e.g., category names or textual descriptions) to enable detection of novel object categories during inference, without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. By moving beyond monolithic representations, our method offers an adaptive framework for remote sensing object detection. Comprehensive evaluations on four datasets highlight improvements in multi-dataset generalization, regional specialization, and open-category detection.

DeepScan: A Training-Free Framework for Visually Grounded Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models

Humans can robustly localize visual evidence and provide grounded answers even in noisy environments by identifying critical cues and then relating them to the full context in a bottom-up manner. Inspired by this, we propose DeepScan, a training-free framework that combines Hierarchical Scanning, Refocusing, and Evidence-Enhanced Reasoning for visually grounded reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Unlike existing methods that pursue one-shot localization of complete evidence, Hierarchical Scanning performs local cue exploration and multi-scale evidence extraction to recover evidence in a bottom-up manner, effectively mitigating the impacts of distractive context. Refocusing then optimizes the localized evidence view through collaboration of LVLMs and visual experts. Finally, Evidence-Enhanced Reasoning aggregates multi-granular views via a hybrid evidence memory and yields accurate and interpretable answers. Experimental results demonstrate that DeepScan significantly boosts LVLMs in diverse visual tasks, especially in fine-grained visual understanding. It achieves 90.6% overall accuracy on V* when integrated with Qwen2.5-VL-7B. Moreover, DeepScan provides consistent improvements for LVLMs across various architectures and model scales without additional adaptation cost.

IntRec: Intent-based Retrieval with Contrastive Refinement

Retrieving user-specified objects from complex scenes remains a challenging task, especially when queries are ambiguous or involve multiple similar objects. Existing open-vocabulary detectors operate in a one-shot manner, lacking the ability to refine predictions based on user feedback. To address this, we propose IntRec, an interactive object retrieval framework that refines predictions based on user feedback. At its core is an Intent State (IS) that maintains dual memory sets for positive anchors (confirmed cues) and negative constraints (rejected hypotheses). A contrastive alignment function ranks candidate objects by maximizing similarity to positive cues while penalizing rejected ones, enabling fine-grained disambiguation in cluttered scenes. Our interactive framework provides substantial improvements in retrieval accuracy without additional supervision. On LVIS, IntRec achieves 35.4 AP, outperforming OVMR, CoDet, and CAKE by +2.3, +3.7, and +0.5, respectively. On the challenging LVIS-Ambiguous benchmark, it improves performance by +7.9 AP over its one-shot baseline after a single corrective feedback, with less than 30 ms of added latency per interaction.

Attention Retention for Continual Learning with Vision Transformers

Continual learning (CL) empowers AI systems to progressively acquire knowledge from non-stationary data streams. However, catastrophic forgetting remains a critical challenge. In this work, we identify attention drift in Vision Transformers as a primary source of catastrophic forgetting, where the attention to previously learned visual concepts shifts significantly after learning new tasks. Inspired by neuroscientific insights into the selective attention in the human visual system, we propose a novel attention-retaining framework to mitigate forgetting in CL. Our method constrains attention drift by explicitly modifying gradients during backpropagation through a two-step process: 1) extracting attention maps of the previous task using a layer-wise rollout mechanism and generating instance-adaptive binary masks, and 2) when learning a new task, applying these masks to zero out gradients associated with previous attention regions, thereby preventing disruption of learned visual concepts. For compatibility with modern optimizers, the gradient masking process is further enhanced by scaling parameter updates proportionally to maintain their relative magnitudes. Experiments and visualizations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in mitigating catastrophic forgetting and preserving visual concepts. It achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits robust generalizability across diverse CL scenarios.

ProtoAnomalyNCD: Prototype Learning for Multi-class Novel Anomaly Discovery in Industrial Scenarios

Existing industrial anomaly detection methods mainly determine whether an anomaly is present. However, real-world applications also require discovering and classifying multiple anomaly types. Since industrial anomalies are semantically subtle and current methods do not sufficiently exploit image priors, direct clustering approaches often perform poorly. To address these challenges, we propose ProtoAnomalyNCD, a prototype-learning-based framework for discovering unseen anomaly classes of multiple types that can be integrated with various anomaly detection methods. First, to suppress background clutter, we leverage Grounded SAM with text prompts to localize object regions as priors for the anomaly classification network. Next, because anomalies usually appear as subtle and fine-grained patterns on the product, we introduce an Anomaly-Map-Guided Attention block. Within this block, we design a Region Guidance Factor that helps the attention module distinguish among background, object regions, and anomalous regions. By using both localized product regions and anomaly maps as priors, the module enhances anomalous features while suppressing background noise and preserving normal features for contrastive learning. Finally, under a unified prototype-learning framework, ProtoAnomalyNCD discovers and clusters unseen anomaly classes while simultaneously enabling multi-type anomaly classification. We further extend our method to detect unseen outliers, achieving task-level unification. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on the MVTec AD, MTD, and Real-IAD datasets.

LithoSeg: A Coarse-to-Fine Framework for High-Precision Lithography Segmentation

Accurate segmentation and measurement of lithography scanning electron microscope (SEM) images are crucial for ensuring precise process control, optimizing device performance, and advancing semiconductor manufacturing yield. Lithography segmentation requires pixel-level delineation of groove contours and consistent performance across diverse pattern geometries and process window. However, existing methods often lack the necessary precision and robustness, limiting their practical applicability. To overcome this challenge, we propose LithoSeg, a coarse-to-fine network tailored for lithography segmentation. In the coarse stage, we introduce a Human-in-the-Loop Bootstrapping scheme for the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to attain robustness with minimal supervision. In the subsequent fine stage, we recast 2D segmentation as 1D regression problem by sampling groove-normal profiles using the coarse mask and performing point-wise refinement with a lightweight MLP. LithoSeg outperforms previous approaches in both segmentation accuracy and metrology precision while requiring less supervision, offering promising prospects for real-world applications.

Unsupervised Integrated-Circuit Defect Segmentation via Image-Intrinsic Normality

Modern Integrated-Circuit(IC) manufacturing introduces diverse, fine-grained defects that depress yield and reliability. Most industrial defect segmentation compares a test image against an external normal set, a strategy that is brittle for IC imagery where layouts vary across products and accurate alignment is difficult. We observe that defects are predominantly local, while each image still contains rich, repeatable normal patterns. We therefore propose an unsupervised IC defect segmentation framework that requires no external normal support. A learnable normal-information extractor aggregates representative normal features from the test image, and a coherence loss enforces their association with normal regions. Guided by these features, a decoder reconstructs only normal content; the reconstruction residual then segments defects. Pseudo-anomaly augmentation further stabilizes training. Experiments on datasets from three IC process stages show consistent improvements over existing approaches and strong robustness to product variability.

Why 1 + 1 < 1 in Visual Token Pruning: Beyond Naive Integration via Multi-Objective Balanced Covering

Existing visual token pruning methods target prompt alignment and visual preservation with static strategies, overlooking the varying relative importance of these objectives across tasks, which leads to inconsistent performance. To address this, we derive the first closed-form error bound for visual token pruning based on the Hausdorff distance, uniformly characterizing the contributions of both objectives. Moreover, leveraging $\epsilon$-covering theory, we reveal an intrinsic trade-off between these objectives and quantify their optimal attainment levels under a fixed budget. To practically handle this trade-off, we propose Multi-Objective Balanced Covering (MoB), which reformulates visual token pruning as a bi-objective covering problem. In this framework, the attainment trade-off reduces to budget allocation via greedy radius trading. MoB offers a provable performance bound and linear scalability with respect to the number of input visual tokens, enabling adaptation to challenging pruning scenarios. Extensive experiments show that MoB preserves 96.4% of performance for LLaVA-1.5-7B using only 11.1% of the original visual tokens and accelerates LLaVA-Next-7B by 1.3-1.5$\times$ with negligible performance loss. Additionally, evaluations on Qwen2-VL and Video-LLaVA confirm that MoB integrates seamlessly into advanced MLLMs and diverse vision-language tasks.

Fractional Correspondence Framework in Detection Transformer

The Detection Transformer (DETR), by incorporating the Hungarian algorithm, has significantly simplified the matching process in object detection tasks. This algorithm facilitates optimal one-to-one matching of predicted bounding boxes to ground-truth annotations during training. While effective, this strict matching process does not inherently account for the varying densities and distributions of objects, leading to suboptimal correspondences such as failing to handle multiple detections of the same object or missing small objects. To address this, we propose the Regularized Transport Plan (RTP). RTP introduces a flexible matching strategy that captures the cost of aligning predictions with ground truths to find the most accurate correspondences between these sets. By utilizing the differentiable Sinkhorn algorithm, RTP allows for soft, fractional matching rather than strict one-to-one assignments. This approach enhances the model's capability to manage varying object densities and distributions effectively. Our extensive evaluations on the MS-COCO and VOC benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. RTP-DETR, surpassing the performance of the Deform-DETR and the recently introduced DINO-DETR, achieving absolute gains in mAP of +3.8% and +1.7%, respectively.