Cross-Domain Transfer and Few-Shot Learning for Personal Identifiable Information Recognition

Accurate recognition of personally identifiable information (PII) is central to automated text anonymization. This paper investigates the effectiveness of cross-domain model transfer, multi-domain data fusion, and sample-efficient learning for PII recognition. Using annotated corpora from healthcare (I2B2), legal (TAB), and biography (Wikipedia), we evaluate models across four dimensions: in-domain performance, cross-domain transferability, fusion, and few-shot learning. Results show legal-domain data transfers well to biographical texts, while medical domains resist incoming transfer. Fusion benefits are domain-specific, and high-quality recognition is achievable with only 10% of training data in low-specialization domains.

GLAD: Generalizable Tuning for Vision-Language Models

Pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, show impressive zero-shot recognition ability and can be easily transferred to specific downstream tasks via prompt tuning, even with limited training data. However, existing prompt tuning methods face two main challenges: (1) In few-shot scenarios, data scarcity often leads to overfitting, making the model sensitive to changes in the input domain. (2) To mitigate overfitting, these methods typically rely on complex task-specific model architectures and sensitive hyperparameter tuning, severely restricting their general applicability. To address these issues, we propose a simpler and more general framework called GLAD (Generalizable LoRA tuning with RegulArized GraDient). We show that merely applying LoRA achieves performance in downstream tasks comparable to current state-of-the-art prompt-based methods. While LoRA is effective and easy to use, it remains susceptible to overfitting in few-shot learning scenarios. To mitigate this risk, we introduce a gradient-based regularization technique. This technique effectively steers the optimization trajectory, encouraging the model to find a more stable parameter region that is robust to variations in data distribution. Through extensive experiments conducted on 15 benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that GLAD outperforms previous tuning approaches in terms of base-to-novel class generalization, image domain generalization, and cross-dataset generalization. The code will be publicly available.

GS-Bias: Global-Spatial Bias Learner for Single-Image Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

Recent advances in test-time adaptation (TTA) for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have garnered increasing attention, particularly through the use of multiple augmented views of a single image to boost zero-shot generalization. Unfortunately, existing methods fail to strike a satisfactory balance between performance and efficiency, either due to excessive overhead of tuning text prompts or unstable benefits from handcrafted, training-free visual feature enhancement. In this paper, we present Global-Spatial Bias Learner (GS-Bias), an efficient and effective TTA paradigm that incorporates two learnable biases during TTA, unfolded as the global bias and spatial bias. Particularly, the global bias captures the global semantic features of a test image by learning consistency across augmented views, while spatial bias learns the semantic coherence between regions in the image's spatial visual representation. It is worth highlighting that these two sets of biases are directly added to the logits outputed by the pretrained VLMs, which circumvent the full backpropagation through VLM that hinders the efficiency of existing TTA methods. This endows GS-Bias with extremely high efficiency while achieving state-of-the-art performance on 15 benchmark datasets. For example, it achieves a 2.23% improvement over TPT in cross-dataset generalization and a 2.72% improvement in domain generalization, while requiring only 6.5% of TPT's memory usage on ImageNet.

NexViTAD: Few-shot Unsupervised Cross-Domain Defect Detection via Vision Foundation Models and Multi-Task Learning

This paper presents a novel few-shot cross-domain anomaly detection framework, Nexus Vision Transformer for Anomaly Detection (NexViTAD), based on vision foundation models, which effectively addresses domain-shift challenges in industrial anomaly detection through innovative shared subspace projection mechanisms and multi-task learning (MTL) module. The main innovations include: (1) a hierarchical adapter module that adaptively fuses complementary features from Hiera and DINO-v2 pre-trained models, constructing more robust feature representations; (2) a shared subspace projection strategy that enables effective cross-domain knowledge transfer through bottleneck dimension constraints and skip connection mechanisms; (3) a MTL Decoder architecture supports simultaneous processing of multiple source domains, significantly enhancing model generalization capabilities; (4) an anomaly score inference method based on Sinkhorn-K-means clustering, combined with Gaussian filtering and adaptive threshold processing for precise pixel level. Valuated on the MVTec AD dataset, NexViTAD delivers state-of-the-art performance with an AUC of 97.5%, AP of 70.4%, and PRO of 95.2% in the target domains, surpassing other recent models, marking a transformative advance in cross-domain defect detection.

Addressing Imbalanced Domain-Incremental Learning through Dual-Balance Collaborative Experts

Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL) focuses on continual learning in non-stationary environments, requiring models to adjust to evolving domains while preserving historical knowledge. DIL faces two critical challenges in the context of imbalanced data: intra-domain class imbalance and cross-domain class distribution shifts. These challenges significantly hinder model performance, as intra-domain imbalance leads to underfitting of few-shot classes, while cross-domain shifts require maintaining well-learned many-shot classes and transferring knowledge to improve few-shot class performance in old domains. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Dual-Balance Collaborative Experts (DCE) framework. DCE employs a frequency-aware expert group, where each expert is guided by specialized loss functions to learn features for specific frequency groups, effectively addressing intra-domain class imbalance. Subsequently, a dynamic expert selector is learned by synthesizing pseudo-features through balanced Gaussian sampling from historical class statistics. This mechanism navigates the trade-off between preserving many-shot knowledge of previous domains and leveraging new data to improve few-shot class performance in earlier tasks. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate DCE's state-of-the-art performance.

Doodle Your Keypoints: Sketch-Based Few-Shot Keypoint Detection

Keypoint detection, integral to modern machine perception, faces challenges in few-shot learning, particularly when source data from the same distribution as the query is unavailable. This gap is addressed by leveraging sketches, a popular form of human expression, providing a source-free alternative. However, challenges arise in mastering cross-modal embeddings and handling user-specific sketch styles. Our proposed framework overcomes these hurdles with a prototypical setup, combined with a grid-based locator and prototypical domain adaptation. We also demonstrate success in few-shot convergence across novel keypoints and classes through extensive experiments.

No time to train! Training-Free Reference-Based Instance Segmentation

The performance of image segmentation models has historically been constrained by the high cost of collecting large-scale annotated data. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) alleviates this original problem through a promptable, semantics-agnostic, segmentation paradigm and yet still requires manual visual-prompts or complex domain-dependent prompt-generation rules to process a new image. Towards reducing this new burden, our work investigates the task of object segmentation when provided with, alternatively, only a small set of reference images. Our key insight is to leverage strong semantic priors, as learned by foundation models, to identify corresponding regions between a reference and a target image. We find that correspondences enable automatic generation of instance-level segmentation masks for downstream tasks and instantiate our ideas via a multi-stage, training-free method incorporating (1) memory bank construction; (2) representation aggregation and (3) semantic-aware feature matching. Our experiments show significant improvements on segmentation metrics, leading to state-of-the-art performance on COCO FSOD (36.8% nAP), PASCAL VOC Few-Shot (71.2% nAP50) and outperforming existing training-free approaches on the Cross-Domain FSOD benchmark (22.4% nAP).

Hierarchical Multi-Label Contrastive Learning for Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction Across Organisms

Recent advances in AI for science have highlighted the power of contrastive learning in bridging heterogeneous biological data modalities. Building on this paradigm, we propose HIPPO (HIerarchical Protein-Protein interaction prediction across Organisms), a hierarchical contrastive framework for protein-protein interaction(PPI) prediction, where protein sequences and their hierarchical attributes are aligned through multi-tiered biological representation matching. The proposed approach incorporates hierarchical contrastive loss functions that emulate the structured relationship among functional classes of proteins. The framework adaptively incorporates domain and family knowledge through a data-driven penalty mechanism, enforcing consistency between the learned embedding space and the intrinsic hierarchy of protein functions. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that HIPPO achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods and showing robustness in low-data regimes. Notably, the model demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability to other species without retraining, enabling reliable PPI prediction and functional inference even in less characterized or rare organisms where experimental data are limited. Further analysis reveals that hierarchical feature fusion is critical for capturing conserved interaction determinants, such as binding motifs and functional annotations. This work advances cross-species PPI prediction and provides a unified framework for interaction prediction in scenarios with sparse or imbalanced multi-species data.

EVA: Mixture-of-Experts Semantic Variant Alignment for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) investigates compositional generalization capacity to recognize unknown state-object pairs based on learned primitive concepts. Existing CZSL methods typically derive primitives features through a simple composition-prototype mapping, which is suboptimal for a set of individuals that can be divided into distinct semantic subsets. Moreover, the all-to-one cross-modal primitives matching neglects compositional divergence within identical states or objects, limiting fine-grained image-composition alignment. In this study, we propose EVA, a Mixture-of-Experts Semantic Variant Alignment framework for CZSL. Specifically, we introduce domain-expert adaption, leveraging multiple experts to achieve token-aware learning and model high-quality primitive representations. To enable accurate compositional generalization, we further present semantic variant alignment to select semantically relevant representation for image-primitives matching. Our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art CZSL methods on three popular benchmarks in both closed- and open-world settings, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed insight.

ChordPrompt: Orchestrating Cross-Modal Prompt Synergy for Multi-Domain Incremental Learning in CLIP

Continual learning (CL) empowers pre-trained vision-language models to adapt effectively to novel or previously underrepresented data distributions without comprehensive retraining, enhancing their adaptability and efficiency. While vision-language models like CLIP show great promise, they struggle to maintain performance across domains in incremental learning scenarios. Existing prompt learning methods face two main limitations: 1) they primarily focus on class-incremental learning scenarios, lacking specific strategies for multi-domain task incremental learning; 2) most current approaches employ single-modal prompts, neglecting the potential benefits of cross-modal information exchange. To address these challenges, we propose the \ChordPrompt framework, which facilitates a harmonious interplay between visual and textual prompts. \ChordPrompt introduces cross-modal prompts to leverage interactions between visual and textual information. Our approach also employs domain-adaptive text prompts to select appropriate prompts for continual adaptation across multiple domains. Comprehensive experiments on multi-domain incremental learning benchmarks demonstrate that \ChordPrompt outperforms state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot generalization and downstream task performance.