Attention Mechanisms

Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, compresses key-value pairs through a shared low-rank bottleneck (cKV), achieving 81% KV-cache reduction during inference. Despite its adoption in massive production models, no prior work has studied what information this bottleneck preserves or discards, nor how it reshapes internal transformer circuits. We present the first comprehensive mechanistic interpretability study of MLA, training a 114M-parameter transformer (pretrained on a web/code/math mixture, fine-tuned on TinyStories) and analyzing its representations through SVD, attention head taxonomy, linear probing, and a disruption-attribution analysis. Our key findings are: (1) the cKV bottleneck learns a pure content representation, preserving entity identity (98% retention) while discarding positional information, validating MLA's separation of content from position via RoPE; (2) induction heads co-locate at a single layer (Layer 12), unlike their distributed formation in standard MHA; (3) a single "semantic hub" layer (Layer 15) simultaneously exhibits the highest SVD effective rank and strongest disruption-attribution score; and (4) the bottleneck is globally over-provisioned, using only 46% of its capacity on average. These findings suggest MLA does not merely compress attention passively, but reshapes how the model organizes content, position, and circuit structure. We view this as an initial data point and detail scope limitations in Section 5.

Neural scaling laws describe how loss decreases as models, data, and compute grow, but they do not answer a prior question: for a fixed task, what is the minimum model capacity required to solve it? We study this through the Entropic Bound, a spectral notion of task-intrinsic capacity for Transformers. We first prove that, in a linear attention surrogate, the intrinsic rank $r^*$ of the token-mixing operator is a tight lower bound: any rank-deficient model incurs unavoidable excess risk, and the bound is achievable at $r^*$. We further show that gradient descent recovers this rank under standard low-rank implicit-bias assumptions, confirm all three properties empirically, and show $r^*$ is recoverable from data before training. We then ask whether this transfers to real attention. A naive transfer fails, and a controlled interpolation ladder localizes the cause precisely: it is not softmax and not a rank constraint, but the input-conditioned nature of attention's mixing operator, which a static weight kernel cannot summarize. Motivated by this, we introduce an attention-native intrinsic rank -- the minimum query-key kernel rank realizing the task within the attention class -- and show that under this definition the full Entropic Bound structure (deficiency, achievability, recovery) is restored for both linear and softmax attention, with the energy effective rank as the estimator robust to softmax distortion. Finally, we map the boundary of data-only predictability: $r^*$ is exactly recoverable for linear QK attention, even without the value map at scale, while softmax attention admits only partial pre-training recovery due to nonlinear inversion and kernel-value identifiability effects. Our results reframe the Entropic Bound from a post-hoc descriptor into an attention-native capacity measure with a precisely characterized predictability frontier.

High task performance does not show whether a model retains prediction-relevant structural information in its internal representation. Temporal graph models, for example, can achieve high future-link AUC while basic graph statistics remain difficult to recover from the same representation. We identify one source of this gap in the weighted averaging used by standard attention: when an evidence pattern is repeated, the numerator and denominator grow at the same rate, so inputs with different amounts of accumulated evidence can produce the same aggregate. We propose Mass-Aware Attention (MAA), which generalizes standard L1 normalization to an Lp family. Under repetition, MAA makes the numerator and denominator scale at different rates, retaining the effective number of contributing inputs in the representation magnitude. It adds no supervision, parameters, hidden dimensions, or explicit count features, and recovers standard attention at p=1. Across four continuous-time dynamic graph models and three datasets, MAA improves future-link AUC in 11 of 12 model-dataset cells. Linear recovery from the same hidden representation increases by 4.49% on average, and preferential-attachment recovery improves in all 12 cells after family-wise correction. We also observe consistent evidence in marked temporal point processes, temporal knowledge graphs, retrieval-augmented generation, and spatio-temporal point processes. Information accessibility and task utility remain distinct: NLL improves in MTPP, ranking is largely preserved in TKG, additional information in RAG does not improve the diagnostic head, and downstream LayerNorm can erase the signal in STPP. These results position MAA as a general normalization principle for improving predictor-facing representation informativeness by controlling repetition invariance in standard attention.

The quadratic $N\times N$ attention score matrix remains a central obstacle to extending Transformers to longer input lengths. Existing efficient attention methods usually reduce this bottleneck by either imposing sparsity, so that each query attends to only a small subset of keys, or by using low-rank/kernel sketches, so that global interactions are compressed into a lower-dimensional representation. We propose \emph{ELSAA}, an efficient low-rank and sparse approximation of attention. Importantly, ELSAA does \emph{not} decompose the learned projection or output matrices of the Transformer into sparse and low-rank factors. Instead, after dense projections produce $Q,K,V$, ELSAA approximates the induced attention score operator itself: a sparse branch captures selected high-similarity interactions, while a low-rank branch summarizes diffuse global interactions. Since the two branches can be normalized over supports with very different denominator mass, ELSAA introduces a denominator-aware fusion term that scales the sparse branch according to its estimated attention mass relative to the low-rank branch. This gives a practical framework for constructing low-rank and sparse attention outputs without materializing the full quadratic score matrix, aiming to enable longer-context training while preserving both sharp token-level interactions and broad contextual mixing.

We derive four memory-optimal inference artifacts for transformer attention using the Mathematics of Arrays (MoA), each following directly from the forward-pass Denotational Normal Form (DNF) of with the query-row index fixed to the current decode step. The artifacts are: (1)~a single-query decode DNF in which the $ψ$-reduction eliminates the $K^\top$ buffer algebraically, achieving $(d_k + nd_k+ nd_v+ d_v)\times4\,{B}$ Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) traffic result numerically verified to $\|{err}\|_\leq2\times10^{-7}$; (2)~a C/OpenACC Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) kernel with Operational Normal Form (ONF) stride arithmetic and hardware-coalesced memory access, verified to $\|\mathrm{err}\|_\infty=0$ (exact IEEE-754 floating-point arithmetic); (3)~a multi-step KV-cache with $O(d_k+d_v)$ per-step append via MoA concatenation $\#$; and (4)~Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) and Multi-Query Attention (MQA) derived via $ψ$-selection, achieving a proven $\frac {h_q} { h_{kv} }$ reduction in KV traffic. All programs are verified against PyTorch scaled_dot_product_attention.

Sequential decision making in non-stationary and partially observable environments requires rapid adaptation to latent regime changes. However, existing Transformer decision models face a structural bottleneck in the retrieval mechanism: even when reward is used for training or exposed as an input token, attention retrieval remains primarily driven by observation-derived similarity. We formalize this limitation as feedback-blind retrieval, and formally show that, on feedback-informative tasks, observation-equivalent histories with different action-reward outcomes cannot be distinguished by any observation-only attention, resulting in suboptimal choice. To address this mismatch, we propose the Utility-Augmented Transformer (UAT), a new feedback-conditioned retrieval attention architecture in which a compact utility state modulates the query, key, and value projections, allowing action-reward history to directly alter context retrieval during the forward pass. UAT also enjoys an exact zero-gate degradation property that recovers the Vanilla Transformer when feedback is uninformative. Under finite-horizon compactness and Lipschitz assumptions, we prove that UAT strictly enlarges the observation-only Transformer class and can uniformly approximate feedback-dependent decision maps. Across four non-stationary benchmarks: synthetic navigation with hidden goal shifts, non-stationary sepsis treatment, cross-market portfolio allocation, and delayed-feedback recommendation, UAT consistently improves performance over observation-only, test-time adaptation, and input-level feedback baselines, with particularly large gains in noisier regimes that require stronger adaptation.

Scaled dot product attention conflates directional alignment and vector magnitude, limiting its effectiveness as a similarity metric in Transformer models. We introduce L1 augmented attention, a simple and computationally parallelizable modification that subtracts a learned, head specific L1 distance between queries and keys from the dot product score. This hybrid similarity captures complementary geometric information. Dot product rewards directional alignment, while L1 penalizes coordinate deviations. To reduce the cost of L1 computation, we project queries and keys into low dimensional subspaces whose parameters specialize to preserve informative L1 structure. Evaluated on WikiText 2 using a compact transformer, L1 augmented attention achieves up to a 14.5% reduction in perplexity over the original transformer baseline and outperforms an RBF L2 kernel. Analysis of norm variance and learned L1 weights reveals distinct geometric roles across layers and strong head level specialization. These results demonstrate that enriching attention with L1 geometry provides a principled and effective improvement to similarity computation in modern language models, with practical benefits for both accuracy and parallel efficiency.

Drone-based object detection technology has advanced rapidly, becoming increasingly sophisticated and efficient. Recently, research trends have expanded beyond the detection of predefined objects toward the identification of specified target objects. For example, desired targets can be specified through textual prompts, enabling accurate detection of objects of interest. To address this demand, this paper proposes an efficient multimodal-based object detection model aimed at improving small object detection performance. The proposed method is built upon the YOLO-World framework and replaces the C2f layers used in the YOLOv8 backbone with attention-based A2C2f layers. This modification enables more precise representation of local features, particularly for small objects or objects with well-defined boundaries. In addition, the incorporation of attention mechanisms and parallel processing structures significantly enhances the model's computational accuracy. Comparative experiments conducted on the VisDrone dataset demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the original YOLO-World model. Specifically, precision increases from 43.0% to 45.1%, recall from 32.8% to 35.0%, the F1 score from 37.2% to 39.4%, [email protected] from 32.5% to 35.2%, and [email protected] from 18.5% to 19.9%, confirming a substantial improvement in detection accuracy. These results verify that the proposed approach provides an effective and highly accurate solution for object detection in drone-based image and video application environments.

Over the past decades, the frequency of global wildfires has been increasing steadily. Therefore, if the fire can be detected and precisely located at an early stage, the potential hazards caused by it can be minimized to the greatest extent. The machine learning methods based on satellite images, due to their ability to automatically monitor extremely remote and vast areas, have shown great potential for application in the field of wildfire detection. To address this challenge, we proposed a new model named spectral-morphological attention U-Net(SMA-UNet), which includes a spectral attention module, a residual attention UNet backbone, a channel-spatial modulator, and a pair of differentiable morphological gates. We trained and evaluated this model with two datasets. These modules, excluding the backbone, are used to detect active fire events for the first time, especially the pair of differentiable morphological gates, which is innovatively developed. The proposed model achieved the highest scores in both datasets (e.g., intersection over union 75.16% in TS-SatFire, 22.50% in Sen2Fire). By conducting ablation studies of each module, we compared their independent contributions and tested their combinations. Ultimately, the integration of these modules yields a highly robust framework that significantly improves segmentation consistency across diverse and complex environmental conditions. Future work will focus on validating the proposed architecture across large-scale, multi-regional datasets from different satellite sensors to establish its broader generalizability for global wildfire detection.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning reduces model and optimizer memory, but dense attention still makes long training sequences expensive. We combine Hierarchical Global Attention (HGA) with segment-wise backpropagation and tiered KV storage. Only the active segment remains differentiable in VRAM; older KV is detached into RAM or NVMe, and HGA loads a bounded set of exact historical tokens for each query block. On Qwen3-8B with 4-bit QLoRA and PG19, dense training on a 16 GB Quadro RTX 5000 fits 2,048 tokens but fails at 4,096, whereas HGA reaches 16,384 tokens with 15.28 GB peak VRAM. Under evaluation the same adapter runs through 131,072 tokens on this card; VRAM is not constant but grows gently with the resident chunk summaries, so RAM and NVMe capacity set the practical limit beyond these lengths. At the shared 2K training length, HGA-trained and dense-trained adapters obtain 2.7405 and 2.7383 nat under the same dense-attention readout, while the stock model obtains 2.9541. At this boundary HGA training is already marginally faster (217.75 vs. 207.02 tokens/s), and the HGA-to-dense throughput ratio improves from 1K to 2K; because HGA keeps the attended historical set per token approximately constant while dense work per token grows, we expect this lead to widen as context grows. Dense attention is used for the main quality and retrieval comparisons so that they measure the learned weights and remain compatible with standard generation frameworks. HGA can also be used for retrieval and generation; an optimized production-grade serving implementation is under development.

Vision Transformer (ViT) has been widely used as a powerful framework for modeling global dependencies among image patches. However, its core component, self-attention assigns softmax-normalized relative weights to all patches, making it difficult to evaluate the relevance between patches independently. In visual recognition, images often contain many background or redundant patches, yet self-attention cannot explicitly reject such irrelevant patches, which may introduce unnecessary information into feature aggregation. To address this limitation, Screening has been proposed in the field of language modeling, where the relevance of each token is independently evaluated based on query-key similarity and low-relevance tokens are explicitly excluded through thresholding. In this work, we propose VisionScreen, a new vision model that extends Screening mechanism to visual recognition. VisionScreen treats image patches as tokens arranged on a two-dimensional grid and extends absolute relevance estimation based on query-key similarity to the two-dimensional spatial domain. This allows each patch to selectively aggregate only content-wise and spatially relevant patches without relying on competition among patches. Experiments on image classification benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional ViT. These results suggest that Screening can be effective for visual recognition, offering an alternative to relative feature aggregation based on softmax attention.

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning hinges on how the goal is encoded. Contrastive, metric, temporal-distance, and information-theoretic encoders differ in objective. They still share one trait. None of them sees the current state. Such a state-independent embedding cannot mark which part of the goal still needs action. The policy must then recover that cue by inverting both encoders. We propose DAGR. It refines the static embedding of any late-fusion encoder into a state-conditioned one through multi-scale gated cross-attention. A near-identity gated residual preserves the base representation. Difference-aware Goal Cross-Attention then biases the attention scores using a per-token state-goal discrepancy map. On OGBench, DAGR improves navigation. Our ablations trace the gain to the gated residual, not to the difference bias that names the method. On manipulation and puzzle tasks it matches or falls below the base. DAGR is a structured refinement, not a universal improvement.

Attention can be viewed as an online learner over context, yet existing test-time memories cannot certify that dropping a token leaves outputs unchanged or delete its influence outright. We introduce Support Vector Attention (SV-Attention), a max-margin memory whose weights are support coefficients of a one-class SVM with fixed box parameter C. Its active-set partition gives reserve tokens exactly zero weight, certifying output-preserving eviction; a reversible incremental solver deletes a token to recover the state produced by retraining without it under the same C. In fp64 experiments, decrement and refit recover identical partitions whenever the optimum is unique, and their decision functions match to a median deviation of about 10^-9 (10^-13 on learned keys); the 10^-2 worst case is confined to ill-conditioned duplicates and remains below coefficient decay in every regime. The exact path reuses the maintained KKT inverse in a custom backward. Training uses a separate stabilized batched approximation and does not carry the exact-deletion certificate; it reaches 9,125 tokens/s on a 3.22M-parameter model, while remaining 35.8 times slower than an MPS softmax reference. At matched budgets, certified selection reaches 0.86 vs. 0.32 rare-item recall and retains 0.80 vs. 0.05 deterioration hours on real MIMIC-IV streams. We also demonstrate surgical forgetting, exact editing, patient-record deletion, and a forgettable retrieval memory over real sentence embeddings. On enwik8, the hybrid obtains 2.178 BPC vs. 2.383 for a matched-state sliding-window Transformer across seven seeds (8.6% paired improvement, p=0.001); a three-seed TinyStories result is directionally positive but not significant (p=0.057).

The \textit{11th Affective Behaviour Analysis in-the-wild Competition} includes the Multi-Task Learning Challenge, where participants develop a unified framework for Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, and Action Unit Detection. The challenge lies in learning emotion-related representations that generalize across subjects while remaining robust to spurious factors such as identity, illumination, pose, and demographic variation. To aggregate features extracted by a pre-trained backbone into a compact representation for prediction, attention mechanisms selectively weight the most informative facial regions. However, these attention weights can still capture dataset-specific correlations rather than genuine affective cues. To address this limitation, we propose an attention pooling framework that combines causal supervision with cross-covariance regularization of attention components, encouraging subject-invariant attention and non-redundant representations that improve generalization. Our method achieves $CCC_{VA}=0.5123$ for VA estimation on the official validation set, together with $F_{EX}=0.3116$ and $F_{AU}=0.3974$ for expression recognition and action unit detection, respectively, resulting in an overall $P$ score (the sum of the individual task metrics) of $1.2214$.

Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT)-based models have exhibited remarkable performance in image super-resolution. However, the quadratic computational complexity of ViTs with respect to spatial resolution severely constrains their efficiency, leading to high latency and massive memory consumption. To alleviate this, various window-based attention mechanisms have been proposed; yet, they inherently compromise the long-range dependency modeling that is the primary advantage of ViTs. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Clustered Unit-level Similarity Transformer (CUST), a novel architecture that efficiently integrates global and local information. Specifically, CUST enables each patch to aggregate and attend to similar patches within a broadened regional scope outside its local window, thereby capturing extensive contextual understanding. Furthermore, it employs overlapping attention windows to capture local dependencies, while explicitly extracting high-frequency details by computing the residual difference between the original features and their downsampled-upsampled counterparts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves a practical balance between computational efficiency and restoration performance. It achieves a lower memory footprint and faster inference speed compared to recent global context or lightweight models under realistic constraints. Code is available at [https://github.com/jwgdmkj/CUST].

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have advanced video generation with high-quality, temporally coherent results. However, extending them to motion transfer, which requires following reference motion while aligning with a target prompt, remains challenging due to limited understanding of motion and structure representations within DiTs. We analyze video DiTs at the attention-head level and identify distinct heads specialized for motion and spatial structure. Based on this insight, we propose a head-aware controllable motion transfer framework that requires no parameter updates. Our method refines motion cues from motion-specialized heads via semantic correspondence guidance and preserves structure through selective feature injection. This head-level control not only enables accurate motion transfer but also provides an interpretable foundation for controllable video generation with DiTs.

Medical image classification models are ideally expected to identify diagnostically relevant regions while making predictions, yet standard classification losses rarely provide spatial supervision. Explicit supervision via anatomical shape information, such as segmentation masks of task-relevant anatomy, has been shown to guide the network toward regions relevant to the target prediction. However, obtaining such masks incurs substantial manual annotation effort and computational overhead. With the advent of segmentation foundation models that exhibit strong localization of anatomical structures across diverse imaging modalities, we leverage this capability to extract anatomical shape priors without the burden of training a dedicated segmentation model. In this paper, we propose a new framework, Locus, an anatomical attention regularization framework that leverages pretrained segmentation foundation models to guide a classifier's attention toward diagnostically meaningful anatomical structures across diverse imaging modalities. Instead of enforcing pixel-wise alignment with the foundation-model-derived mask, we introduce a regularization term that adaptively balances attention between anatomical (foreground) and background regions, penalizing the classifier when background attention dominates. We validate Locus on eight diverse medical imaging datasets spanning dermoscopy, X-ray, histopathology, and cardiac MRI, showing consistent gains in classification performance alongside improved anatomically grounded attention.

Accurate cervical cytology image classification is a key component of automated cervical cancer screening, where reliable recognition of normal, precancerous, and cancer-associated cellular patterns from Pap smear images can improve screening efficiency and diagnostic consistency. However, this task remains challenging because cervical cells exhibit complex morphology, subtle intra-class variations, and strong inter-class similarities. Existing convolution-based models capture local texture well but have limited ability to model long-range relationships, whereas attention-based models provide broader context but often lack explicit structural guidance. To address these limitations, we propose a geometry-aware classification framework for cervical cancer screening-oriented cytology image analysis, incorporating semantic abstraction and structural priors learned from pre-trained vision-language features. The method uses Gaussian expert modules to generate axis-wise priors from global semantic information, capturing structural regularities such as nuclear alignment and cellular spatial organization. These priors are embedded into an axial self-attention module to modulate similarity computation along horizontal and vertical directions, improving long-range dependency modeling and structure-sensitive feature interaction. Experiments on the Mendeley liquid-based cytology and SIPaKMeD datasets show that the proposed method achieves 99.48% accuracy on the former and 96.08% on the latter, with balanced gains in recall, precision, and overall classification performance. Visual analysis further shows that the learned priors highlight diagnostically relevant cellular regions, demonstrating the potential of the proposed framework as a screening-oriented decision-support tool for cervical cytology.

A striking feature of the human visual system is that it ingests visual information through a series of local foveated glimpses, rather than a single global computation. This makes human vision distinctly different from most popular computer vision models in use today, which input images globally and in a single shot. A natural question therefore is whether local, sequential vision models may provide any fundamental computational benefits in addition to being biologically more plausible than global models. In this work, we investigate this question from the perspective of visual state tracking and length generalization. Inspired by recent studies of length generalization in language models, we study the behavior of vision models trained on simple vision tasks that require the aggregation of local information across an image. Our experiments reveal that, similar to language models, vision models can learn to exploit global shortcuts and thereby fail to generalize over task length or complexity. We also show that recurrent vision policies based on strictly local perception can mitigate these failures, thereby allowing models to generalize on these tasks. Our results show that local attention may be an essential overlooked requirement for robust compositional generalization.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to map multimodal inputs to robot actions. However, most existing approaches struggle to cover complex dynamic scenarios due to treating all visual tokens uniformly and reasoning with human-selected factors, which lack mechanisms to emphasize task-critical evidence and ignore underlying factors. To address this issue, we propose LEEVLA, a VLA architecture for seeing what matters in Latent Environment Evolution that explicitly guides the model toward informative regions while preserving the structured evolution of latent world representations. To identify salient and instruction-relevant regions, we introduce drift-guided dynamic prioritization (DGDP), which combines dynamic position prioritization (DPP) with semantic drift guidance (SDG) to guide the VLA agent where to attend during training. On top of this, we introduce structured feature flow generation (SFFG), which models how these prioritized features should evolve in latent space via prototype-to-periphery (P2P) prediction, and a mutual-neighborhood contrastive (MC) loss to maintain topological consistency among neighborhoods. Together, DGDP and SFFG form a task-aware "where-how" training framework. Extensive experiments on VLA benchmarks show that LEEVLA consistently outperforms prior methods, confirming that explicit task-evidence guidance and structured latent reasoning are both crucial for scalable VLA. Our code is available at https://github.com/LyuQi127/LEEVLA.

Accurate station-level demand forecasting is essential for the efficient operation of bike-sharing systems, yet it remains challenging due to complex spatio-temporal dependencies and the large scale of urban networks. This paper presents STAGformer, a Spatio-Temporal Agent Graph Transformer that achieves efficient global modeling with linear computational complexity. The model introduces a two-step agent attention mechanism, where a small set of learnable spatial and temporal agent tokens first aggregate global information and then broadcast it back to individual stations and time steps, effectively capturing long-range interactions while reducing the quadratic cost of standard self-attention to O(NT). STAGformer integrates four core modules: a spatio-temporal encoder that fuses dynamic node features with external contextual factors (weather, time, points of interest), a graph propagation module for spatial neighbor aggregation, a temporal convolution module for local pattern extraction, and the agent attention module for global dependency modeling. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets -- NYC Citi-Bike and Chicago Divvy-Bike -- demonstrate that STAGformer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple prediction horizons, achieving significant improvements in both RMSE and MAE. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each component, with the agent attention mechanism proving critical for modeling global spatio-temporal dependencies.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful backbones for recommender systems by reformulating recommendation as a token-level generation task. Despite their promise, we identify a pervasive yet underexplored issue: $\textit{Length Bias}$. Because items are represented by textual descriptions of varying lengths, LLM-based recommenders can be systematically biased in two ways. On the input side, longer item descriptions occupy more tokens in the context and thus receive disproportionately large aggregate attention mass during user preference modeling. On the output side, decoding based on summed autoregressive log-likelihood score inherently disfavors long items. Worse still, conventional length normalization can introduce an additional bias and even degrade recommendation performance. To address this problem, we propose $\textbf{LBR}$ ($\textbf{L}$ength $\textbf{B}$ias $\textbf{R}$eduction), a lightweight and model-agnostic framework for mitigating length bias in LLM-based recommendation. LBR mitigates input-side bias via Length-Aware Attention Calibration, which incorporates a length-dependent offset into attention logits to neutralize attention skew. For the output side, LBR introduces Effective Information Length Normalization, replacing naive token count with an information-theoretic length surrogate derived from the branching structure of the prefix tree. Extensive experiments on three real-world Amazon datasets and two representative LLM-based recommenders demonstrate that LBR substantially alleviates length bias while consistently improving recommendation accuracy and fairness, with negligible additional training and inference overhead (with an average NDCG@5 gain of 16.82%). The code is available at https://github.com/Void-JackLee/LBR.

In safety-critical traffic scenarios, answering complex questions relies on minute, localized visual cues. However, standard Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) tend to over-attend to backgrounds, overwhelming crucial small objects during visual-language alignment, a failure mode we term 'critical evidence dilution.' Furthermore, existing visual question answering (VQA) datasets rarely expose this flaw, as they lack large-scale, distractor-heavy evaluations that require pinpointing local evidence. To bridge this evaluation and architecture gap, we introduce the Fine-Grained Traffic Reasoning Benchmark (FGTR-Bench) and the Text-Guided Small-Object Reasoning MLLM (TSR-MLLM). FGTR-Bench comprises 40,236 single-image Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) created via multi-agent generation, consistency checks, and expert audits, alongside a disjoint 4,947-sample blind test split. To resolve evidence dilution, TSR-MLLM, built on Qwen3-VL-4B, uses a query-conditioned Text-Guided Small-Object Focus (TG-SOF) map. Applied once at the decoder boundary, the map adds sparse Top-K gated residuals to the most question-relevant vision slots while leaving text tokens unchanged. Together with lightweight decoder adaptation, TSR-MLLM preserves single-pass inference without external detectors or image re-encoding. Under matched settings, TSR-MLLM outperforms the strongest 4B baseline by 2.1 points on FGTR-Bench (74.1% overall), with larger gains on evidence-local tracks. Furthermore, it remains competitive on DriveQA-V (CARLA Signs) under greedy decoding without task-specific fine-tuning.

Close-up rendering, zooming into a scene well beyond any training camera, is important for virtual production and interactive 3D content, yet remains an open challenge. 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity, real-time novel view synthesis, but its rendering quality degrades at close range. Recent diffusion-based methods that enhance the rendering by conditioning on reference images from the training set produce significant artifacts in this setting. We analyze this failure and identify its root cause: the scale gap between the close-up and reference views. We show that the features in reference-conditioned enhancement models are not scale-invariant, causing cross-view attention to retrieve incorrect correspondences when the same content appears at different scales, and that this mismatch cannot be corrected in latent space because the VAE encoder is not scale-equivariant. Building on this analysis we introduce MACRO, Multi-plane Attention for Closeup Render Optimization, a training-free method for high-quality close-up novel view synthesis from 3DGS. MACRO resolves the scale gap by leveraging the scene's known 3D structure: it decomposes the close-up into depth planes, crops and resizes references in image space to match the scale of each plane before encoding, and applies a depth-aware attention mask so each token attends only to scale-matched references. The method requires no architectural changes or additional training. We further contribute two new close-up novel view synthesis benchmarks, the first standardized evaluation protocol for this setting, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both, outperforming existing 3DGS and diffusion-based methods on both reconstruction and perceptual metrics. Project page: https://nitzanhod.github.io/MACRO

Modern sequence models have a striking capacity for in-context learning (ICL); they can perform new tasks based only on examples given in the prompt. Understanding how this ability emerges requires theory that captures important properties of natural data. Linear regression has served as a useful sandbox for ICL theory, but existing work has largely focused on prompts with independent examples. In this work, we extend this setting to sequentially correlated data, a basic feature of real sequences. We present a solvable model based on linear attention and test our predictions on realistic transformer architectures. We identify two distinct effects: First, when the query token is independent of the context, within-context correlations induce an effective context length: correlated prompts behave like shorter i.i.d. prompts. Second, when the query is also correlated with its context, test error is reduced, particularly for softmax attention when compared to linear attention. These results suggest that correlated prompts alter not only the effective sample size of in-context learning, but also which attention architectures are best matched to the task.

Text-to-image diffusion models fail to generate correct object counts in dense scenes, where overlapping instances collapse into indistinguishable structures despite appearing visually plausible. We identify this as instance ownership collapse: tokens from overlapping objects interact freely through attention, while heavily occluded instances receive weak supervision due to their small visible areas. We address this through layout-aware attention biases that softly bias token interactions toward region-consistent grouping and suppress cross-instance leakage, paired with an amodal-balanced loss that amplifies gradients for occluded objects based on their occlusion level. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce OverlapDepth-45K, a benchmark of densely overlapping scenes with amodal supervision. Our approach substantially improves count accuracy and prevents instance merging while preserving image quality. Project page: https://bachngoh.github.io/AIBL

Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) generates natural-language descriptions of semantic changes between paired remote sensing images (RSIs), supporting applications such as urban planning, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. Although recent methods achieve strong captioning accuracy, most overlook computational efficiency and inference speed, which are essential for real-time deployment in practice. To this end, we propose LBTCap, a lightweight RSICC framework built on a bilateral Transformer that jointly models pre- and post-change features for efficient processing of paired RSIs. Specifically, we introduce a bilateral attention mechanism for paired inputs: the two temporal images are projected into separate queries and keys by the same query and key matrices shared across the two images, the value is formed from their concatenation, and the two resulting attention maps are combined by a learnable, structurally bilateral weighting instead of a fixed subtraction. This design keeps both temporal branches explicit while remaining compact, and, together with a truncated backbone and grouped-query attention, LBTCap uses only 39.99M parameters, of which the change-aware encoder accounts for just 2.78M. Extensive experiments on two public RSICC datasets show that LBTCap matches or closely approaches the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods while using far fewer parameters and running at markedly higher inference speed, with the benefit of the bilateral formulation most pronounced in the low-resource setting, demonstrating a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off for practical RSICC.

Transformer architectures have shown strong potential in time series forecasting, where multi-head self-attention is widely used to capture temporal dependencies across historical timestamps. However, standard self-attention has quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to the look-back length. This cost may limit its use in resource-constrained or high-throughput forecasting systems, where fast and memory-efficient inference is important. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, we observe that self-attention maps in time series forecasting often contain redundant patterns across different timestamps. This phenomenon can be related to the repeated temporal patterns and relatively stable temporal correlations in many real-world time series. Motivated by this observation, we propose Self-Gating Attention (SGA), a plug-and-play attention mechanism that represents the attention score with a shared learnable matrix and an input-dependent residual component. The shared matrix captures common attention patterns, while the residual component captures input-dependent variations. In this way, SGA avoids the query and key projections used in standard attention score computation, leading to linear time and score-matrix memory complexity with respect to the look-back length. We integrate SGA into several forecasting backbones and compare it with standard self-attention and lightweight attention variants on nine publicly available real-world datasets covering electricity, finance, weather, medical monitoring, human activity, and climate records. The results show that SGA improves inference efficiency on public benchmarks while maintaining competitive forecasting performance against state-of-the-art attention mechanisms. These benchmark results provide deployment-oriented evidence.

Understanding human visual attention on a scene over time has applications in domains such as interface design and inferring cognitive states. Modeling visual scanpaths has historically relied on specialized architectures with hand-crafted priors. While these architectures can model fixation sequences, their rigid structural biases restrict easy extendability and flexible conditioning. For instance, integrating task-specific instructions or adapting to distinct viewer identities requires custom, disjoint architectural additions. We frame scanpath prediction purely as a discrete sequence modeling task. By mapping coordinates into a text vocabulary, we leverage the pretrained representations of Vision-Language Models. This framing absorbs diverse factors of variation: simple prompting allows for global conditioning, such as providing viewer identities to capture personalized biases, or task-specific objectives like visual search. The framework can also integrate per-fixation attributes, such as individual fixation durations, alongside spatial locations. The autoregressive alignment enables the scalable, exact computation of per-fixation log-likelihoods, directly equivalent to the commonly used Information Gain (IG) metric. Our model, DeepGaze3.5-VL, establishes a new state-of-the-art across multiple datasets, achieving 2.18 bits of IG on MIT1003, a 46% improvement over DeepGaze III. This advantage persists even when baselines use identical high-capacity vision encoders. Beyond predictive performance, our generative framework serves as a powerful computational tool for direct behavioral interventions, allowing for controlled in-silico simulations that would be experimentally difficult or impossible to conduct in vivo. We demonstrate this ability by performing controlled interventions on the durations of pre-saccadic fixations, recovering known oculomotor phenomena purely from data.

Segmentation of biomarkers in medical images is frequently viewed as a first step towards medical image analysis in any bioinformatics or biomedical application. Despite progress, existing methods still struggle to capture information at multiple scales and to perform upsampling effectively across different datasets. These shortcomings often result in suboptimal generalization capabilities. Recently, architectures belonging to the Nested-UNet family excel in capturing multiscale contextual information and upsample them effectively. In this work, We propose a novel Nested-UNet architecture that effectively captures multi-scale contextual information. It includes inner and outer attention units to enhance focus during upsampling, along with channel-wise feature recalibration using squeeze-and-excitation modules, leading to improved segmentation performance. Additionally, the architecture integrates an edge-aware loss to emphasize boundary accuracy by assigning greater importance to edge regions. Tested extensively on three publicly available benchmark datasets. Our method demonstrates a generalization performance superior to existing Nested-UNet methods. Code: https://github.com/saadwazir/histosegplusplus