V$^2$R-Bench: Holistically Evaluating LVLM Robustness to Fundamental Visual Variations

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) excel in various vision-language tasks. Yet, their robustness to visual variations in position, scale, orientation, and context that objects in natural scenes inevitably exhibit due to changes in viewpoint and environment remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce V$^2$R-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark framework for evaluating Visual Variation Robustness of LVLMs, which encompasses automated evaluation dataset generation and principled metrics for thorough robustness assessment. Through extensive evaluation on 21 LVLMs, we reveal a surprising vulnerability to visual variations, in which even advanced models that excel at complex vision-language tasks significantly underperform on simple tasks such as object recognition. Interestingly, these models exhibit a distinct visual position bias that contradicts theories of effective receptive fields, and demonstrate a human-like visual acuity threshold. To identify the source of these vulnerabilities, we present a systematic framework for component-level analysis, featuring a novel visualization approach for aligned visual features. Results show that these vulnerabilities stem from error accumulation in the pipeline architecture and inadequate multimodal alignment. Complementary experiments with synthetic data further demonstrate that these limitations are fundamentally architectural deficiencies, scoring the need for architectural innovations in future LVLM designs.

Surgical Gaussian Surfels: Highly Accurate Real-time Surgical Scene Rendering

Accurate geometric reconstruction of deformable tissues in monocular endoscopic video remains a fundamental challenge in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. Although recent volumetric and point primitive methods based on neural radiance fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian primitives have efficiently rendered surgical scenes, they still struggle with handling artifact-free tool occlusions and preserving fine anatomical details. These limitations stem from unrestricted Gaussian scaling and insufficient surface alignment constraints during reconstruction. To address these issues, we introduce Surgical Gaussian Surfels (SGS), which transforms anisotropic point primitives into surface-aligned elliptical splats by constraining the scale component of the Gaussian covariance matrix along the view-aligned axis. We predict accurate surfel motion fields using a lightweight Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) coupled with locality constraints to handle complex tissue deformations. We use homodirectional view-space positional gradients to capture fine image details by splitting Gaussian Surfels in over-reconstructed regions. In addition, we define surface normals as the direction of the steepest density change within each Gaussian surfel primitive, enabling accurate normal estimation without requiring monocular normal priors. We evaluate our method on two in-vivo surgical datasets, where it outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in surface geometry, normal map quality, and rendering efficiency, while remaining competitive in real-time rendering performance. We make our code available at https://github.com/aloma85/SurgicalGaussianSurfels

CALM: Unleashing the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning Ability of Language Model Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. Ideally, while LLMs should provide consistent responses to culture-independent questions across languages, we observe significant performance disparities. To address this, we explore the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning ability of Language Models (CALM) to align knowledge across languages. Specifically, for a given question, we sample multiple responses across different languages, and select the most self-consistent response as the target, leaving the remaining responses as negative examples. We then employ direct preference optimization (DPO) to align the model's knowledge across different languages. Evaluations on the MEDQA and X-CSQA datasets demonstrate CALM's effectiveness in enhancing cross-lingual knowledge question answering, both in zero-shot and retrieval augmented settings. We also found that increasing the number of languages involved in CALM training leads to even higher accuracy and consistency. We offer a qualitative analysis of how cross-lingual consistency can enhance knowledge alignment and explore the method's generalizability. The source code and data of this paper are available on GitHub.

2-Tier SimCSE: Elevating BERT for Robust Sentence Embeddings

Effective sentence embeddings that capture semantic nuances and generalize well across diverse contexts are crucial for natural language processing tasks. We address this challenge by applying SimCSE (Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings) using contrastive learning to fine-tune the minBERT model for sentiment analysis, semantic textual similarity (STS), and paraphrase detection. Our contributions include experimenting with three different dropout techniques, namely standard dropout, curriculum dropout, and adaptive dropout, to tackle overfitting, proposing a novel 2-Tier SimCSE Fine-tuning Model that combines both unsupervised and supervised SimCSE on STS task, and exploring transfer learning potential for Paraphrase and SST tasks. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of SimCSE, with the 2-Tier model achieving superior performance on the STS task, with an average test score of 0.742 across all three downstream tasks. The results of error analysis reveals challenges in handling complex sentiments and reliance on lexical overlap for paraphrase detection, highlighting areas for future research. The ablation study revealed that removing Adaptive Dropout in the Single-Task Unsupervised SimCSE Model led to improved performance on the STS task, indicating overfitting due to added parameters. Transfer learning from SimCSE models on Paraphrase and SST tasks did not enhance performance, suggesting limited transferability of knowledge from the STS task.

DISCO: DISCovering Overfittings as Causal Rules for Text Classification Models

With the rapid advancement of neural language models, the deployment of over-parameterized models has surged, increasing the need for interpretable explanations comprehensible to human inspectors. Existing post-hoc interpretability methods, which often focus on unigram features of single input textual instances, fail to capture the models' decision-making process fully. Additionally, many methods do not differentiate between decisions based on spurious correlations and those based on a holistic understanding of the input. Our paper introduces DISCO, a novel method for discovering global, rule-based explanations by identifying causal n-gram associations with model predictions. This method employs a scalable sequence mining technique to extract relevant text spans from training data, associate them with model predictions, and conduct causality checks to distill robust rules that elucidate model behavior. These rules expose potential overfitting and provide insights into misleading feature combinations. We validate DISCO through extensive testing, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods in offering comprehensive insights into complex model behaviors. Our approach successfully identifies all shortcuts manually introduced into the training data (100% detection rate on the MultiRC dataset), resulting in an 18.8% regression in model performance -- a capability unmatched by any other method. Furthermore, DISCO supports interactive explanations, enabling human inspectors to distinguish spurious causes in the rule-based output. This alleviates the burden of abundant instance-wise explanations and helps assess the model's risk when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) data.

Croc: Pretraining Large Multimodal Models with Cross-Modal Comprehension

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, existing research primarily focuses on tuning language and image instructions, ignoring the critical pretraining phase where models learn to process textual and visual modalities jointly. In this paper, we propose a new pretraining paradigm for LMMs to enhance the visual comprehension capabilities of LLMs by introducing a novel cross-modal comprehension stage. Specifically, we design a dynamically learnable prompt token pool and employ the Hungarian algorithm to replace part of the original visual tokens with the most relevant prompt tokens. Then, we conceptualize visual tokens as analogous to a "foreign language" for the LLMs and propose a mixed attention mechanism with bidirectional visual attention and unidirectional textual attention to comprehensively enhance the understanding of visual tokens. Meanwhile, we integrate a detailed caption generation task, leveraging rich descriptions to further facilitate LLMs in understanding visual semantic information. After pretraining on 1.5 million publicly accessible data, we present a new foundation model called Croc. Experimental results demonstrate that Croc achieves new state-of-the-art performance on massive vision-language benchmarks. To support reproducibility and facilitate further research, we release the training code and pre-trained model weights at https://github.com/deepglint/Croc.

QUIDS: Query Intent Generation via Dual Space Modeling

Query understanding is a crucial component of Information Retrieval (IR), aimed at identifying the underlying search intent of textual queries. However, most existing approaches oversimplify this task into query classification or clustering, which fails to fully capture the nuanced intent behind the query. In this paper, we address the task of query intent generation: to automatically generate detailed and precise intent descriptions for search queries using relevant and irrelevant documents given a query. These intent descriptions can help users understand why the search engine considered the top-ranked documents relevant, and provide more transparency to the retrieval process. We propose a dual-space model that uses semantic relevance and irrelevance information in the returned documents to explain the understanding of the query intent. Specifically, in the encoding process, we project, separate, and distinguish relevant and irrelevant documents in the representation space. Then, we introduce a semantic decoupling model in the novel disentangling space, where the semantics of irrelevant information are removed from the relevant space, ensuring that only the essential and relevant intent is captured. This process refines the understanding of the query and provides more accurate explanations for the search results. Experiments on benchmark data demonstrate that our methods produce high-quality query intent descriptions, outperforming existing methods for this task, as well as state-of-the-art query-based summarization methods. A token-level visualization of attention scores reveals that our model effectively reduces the focus on irrelevant intent topics. Our findings open up promising research and application directions for query intent generation, particularly in exploratory search.

LoMA: Lossless Compressed Memory Attention

Large Language Models (LLMs) face limitations due to the high demand on GPU memory and computational resources when handling long contexts. While sparsify the Key-Value (KV) cache of transformer model is a typical strategy to alleviate resource usage, it unavoidably results in the loss of information. We introduce Lossless Compressed Memory Attention (LoMA), a novel approach that enables lossless compression of the KV cache, thereby reducing the memory and computational demands during autoregressive generation. LoMA incorporates a specialized training or fine-tuning precedure alongside an autoregressive generation algorithm optimized for the compressed context. Our method compresses the KV cache after every $tc$ generated tokens with a compression ratio of $c$ and a target compressed length $t$, and this process occurs within a single inference pass without dependency on auxiliary models. We engineered an efficient training scheme involving specific inputs, attention masks, and position identifiers to instill this compression capability. Experimental validation has demonstrated that LoMA significantly reducing computational consumption and memory usage through achieving lossless KV cache compression.

DoNet: Deep De-overlapping Network for Cytology Instance Segmentation

Cell instance segmentation in cytology images has significant importance for biology analysis and cancer screening, while remains challenging due to 1) the extensive overlapping translucent cell clusters that cause the ambiguous boundaries, and 2) the confusion of mimics and debris as nuclei. In this work, we proposed a De-overlapping Network (DoNet) in a decompose-and-recombined strategy. A Dual-path Region Segmentation Module (DRM) explicitly decomposes the cell clusters into intersection and complement regions, followed by a Semantic Consistency-guided Recombination Module (CRM) for integration. To further introduce the containment relationship of the nucleus in the cytoplasm, we design a Mask-guided Region Proposal Strategy (MRP) that integrates the cell attention maps for inner-cell instance prediction. We validate the proposed approach on ISBI2014 and CPS datasets. Experiments show that our proposed DoNet significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) cell instance segmentation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/DeepDoNet/DoNet.

Explainable Information Retrieval: A Survey

Explainable information retrieval is an emerging research area aiming to make transparent and trustworthy information retrieval systems. Given the increasing use of complex machine learning models in search systems, explainability is essential in building and auditing responsible information retrieval models. This survey fills a vital gap in the otherwise topically diverse literature of explainable information retrieval. It categorizes and discusses recent explainability methods developed for different application domains in information retrieval, providing a common framework and unifying perspectives. In addition, it reflects on the common concern of evaluating explanations and highlights open challenges and opportunities.