anchor
HAIF-GS: Hierarchical and Induced Flow-Guided Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Scene
Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from monocular videos remains a fundamental challenge in 3D vision. While 3DGaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves real-time rendering in static settings, extending it to dynamic scenes is challenging due to the difficulty of learning structured and temporally consistent motion representations.
Connecting Neural Models Latent Geometries with Relative Geodesic Representations
Neural models learn representations of high-dimensional data on low-dimensional manifolds. Multiple factors, including stochasticities in the training process, model architectures, and additional inductive biases, may induce different representations, even when learning the same task on the same data. However, it has recently been shown that when a latent structure is shared between distinct latent spaces, relative distances between representations can be preserved, up to distortions. Building on this idea, we demonstrate that exploiting the differential-geometric structure of latent spaces of neural models, it is possible to capture precisely the transformations between representational spaces trained on similar data distributions. Specifically, we assume that distinct neural models parametrize approximately the same underlying manifold, and introduce a representation based on the pullback metric that captures the intrinsic structure of the latent space, while scaling efficiently to large models.
PandaPose: 3DHuman Pose Lifting from a Single Image via Propagating 2DPose Prior to 3DAnchor Space
Existing methods typically establish a direct joint-to-joint mapping from 2D to 3D poses based on 2D features. This formulation suffers from two fundamental limitations: inevitable error propagation from input predicted 2D pose to 3D predictions and inherent difficulties in handling self-occlusion cases. In this paper, we propose PandaPose, a 3D human pose lifting approach via propagating 2D pose prior to 3D anchor space as the unified intermediate representation. Specifically, our 3D anchor space comprises: (1) Joint-wise 3D anchors in the canonical coordinate system, providing accurate and robust priors to mitigate 2D pose estimation inaccuracies.
Reconstructing Heterogeneous Biomolecules via Hierarchical Gaussian Mixtures and Part Discovery
Cryo-EM is a transformational paradigm in molecular biology where computa-1 tional methods are used to infer 3D molecular structure at atomic resolution from2 extremely noisy 2D electron microscope images. At the forefront of research is3 how to model the structure when the imaged particles exhibit non-rigid conforma-4 tional flexibility and compositional variation where parts are sometimes missing.5 We introduce a novel 3D reconstruction framework with a hierarchical Gaussian6 mixture model, inspired in part by Gaussian Splatting for 4D scene reconstruction.7 In particular, the structure of the model is grounded in an initial process that infers8 a part-based segmentation of the particle, providing essential inductive bias in9 order to handle both conformational and compositional variability. The framework,10 called CryoSPIRE, is shown to reveal biologically meaningful structures on com-11 plex experimental datasets, and establishes a new state-of-the-art on CryoBench, a12 benchmark for cryo-EM heterogeneity methods.
3b6d18473eb525df8008868f1390cc8c-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf
Spurious correlations occur when models rely on non-essential features that coincidentally co-vary with target labels, leading to incorrect reasoning under distribution shift. We consider spurious correlations in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) pretrained on extensive and diverse datasets without explicit task supervision. We develop a benchmark by sourcing GPT-4o errors on real-world visual-question-answering (VQA) benchmarks, then curating a subset through LVLM-human annotation and synthetic counterfactual evaluation to identify errors caused by spurious correlations. This process yields SpuriVerse, a novel benchmark comprised of 124 distinct types of spurious correlations extracted from real-world datasets, each containing 1 realistic and 10 synthetic VQA samples for a total of 1364 multiple choice questions. We evaluate 15 open and closed-source LVLMs on SpuriVerse, finding that even state-of-the-art closed-source models struggle significantly, achieving at best only 35.0% accuracy. Fine-tuning on synthetic examples that emphasize the spurious correlation improves performance to 78.4%, suggesting that training on diverse spurious patterns generalizes to unseen situations: models appear to learn to avoid "shortcuts" and attend to the overall image context.
KVCOMM: Online Cross-context KV-cache Communication for Efficient LLM-based Multi-agent Systems
Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly adopted for complex language processing tasks that require communication and coordination among agents. However, these systems often suffer substantial overhead from repeated reprocessing of overlapping contexts across agents. In typical pipelines, once an agent receives a message from its predecessor, the full context-including prior turns-must be reprocessed from scratch, leading to inefficient processing. While key-value (KV) caching is an effective solution for avoiding redundant computation in single-agent settings where prefixes remain unchanged, it cannot be directly reused in multi-agent scenarios due to diverging prefixes introduced by agent-specific context extensions. We identify that the core challenge lies in the offset variance of KV-caches across agents.
The Complexity of Finding Local Optima in Contrastive Learning
Contrastive learning is a powerful technique for discovering meaningful data representations by optimizing objectives based on $\textit{contrastive information}$, often given as a set of weighted triplets $\{(x_i, y_i^+, z_{i}^-)\}_{i = 1}^m$ indicating that an anchor $x_i$ is more similar to a positive example $y_i$ than to a negative example $z_i$. The goal is to find representations (e.g., embeddings in $\mathbb{R}^d$ or a tree metric) where anchors are placed closer to positive than to negative examples. While finding $\textit{global}$ optima of contrastive objectives is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard, the complexity of finding $\text{\textit{local}}$ optima---representations that do not improve by local search algorithms such as gradient-based methods---remains open. Our work settles the complexity of finding local optima in various contrastive learning problems by proving $\mathsf{PLS}$-hardness in discrete settings (e.g., maximize satisfied triplets) and $\mathsf{CLS}$-hardness in continuous settings (e.g., minimize Triplet Loss), where $\mathsf{PLS}$ (Polynomial Local Search) and $\mathsf{CLS}$ (Continuous Local Search) are well-studied complexity classes capturing local search dynamics in discrete and continuous optimization, respectively.
On the Construction and Implications of Low-Loss Valleys in LoRA-based Bayesian Inference
Dold, Daniel, Sommer, Emanuel, Kobialka, Julius, Dürr, Oliver, Rügamer, David
While parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like low-rank adaptation (LoRA) are standard for large language models, principled estimation of epistemic uncertainty remains challenging. Recent results in the LoRA regime suggest that discrete multi-mode approaches such as deep ensembles offer little benefit over single-mode methods. This contradicts broader observations in deep learning, where ensembling independent optima typically improves generalization, and linking these modes through continuous low-loss valleys further enhances Bayesian model averaging (BMA). Whether such structure exists in the LoRA space and whether it yields functional diversity missed by local or discrete methods has not been studied. We introduce LoRA-Curve, a segmented Bézier curve parameterization in the LoRA space, with two variants: a free configuration that jointly optimizes all control points, and an anchored configuration that connects independently fine-tuned LoRA optima. We prove pathwise continuity and Lipschitz regularity of the loss along the curve and empirically show, across reasoning and classification benchmarks with Qwen2.5 7B, that linear interpolation encounters loss barriers, while our anchored multi-segment curves connect independent optima through continuous low-loss valleys. Combined with flat-minima perturbations and a Jensen-Shannon divergence regularizer, LoRA-Curve yields measurably higher mutual information of the predictive distribution without sacrificing performance, and links continuous parameter-space traversal to functional diversity.
Learning to Extrapolate to New Tasks: A Relational Approach to Task Extrapolation
Ousherovitch, Adam, Wang, Yixin
Modern learning systems excel at interpolation but struggle to generalize to unseen tasks outside the training distribution's support. This failure occurs even in simple settings, such as handling task parameters beyond the training range, and persists despite advances in foundation models. To this end, we develop the Relational Task Extrapolator (RTE), an algorithm designed to enable systematic extrapolation to novel tasks. The key observation is that extrapolation is inherently relational: extrapolating to unseen tasks requires learning how tasks transform into one another. If a model learns the transformation between tasks A and B during training, it can apply that same transformation to relate known tasks to unseen ones at test time. RTE operationalizes this idea by decomposing each target task into a known anchor task and a transformation linking the anchor and target. It then learns a relational operator, mapping an anchor-transformation pair to predictions for the target task. We instantiate RTE across multiple task extrapolation regimes in function prediction, e.g. where target tasks use out-of-range parameters (parameter extrapolation), have greater compositional depth (length extrapolation), and/or recombine function primitives in unseen ways (compositional extrapolation). We further extend RTE to sequence prediction, integrating it into fine-tuning algorithms for foundation models. Across empirical studies, we find that RTE substantially outperforms existing approaches on extrapolation to novel, unseen tasks.