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Thanh-Toan Do

Publications and source records attributed to Thanh-Toan Do.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Efficient Temporal-aware Matryoshka Adaptation for Temporal Information Retrieval

Retrievers are a key bottleneck in temporal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems: failing to retrieve temporally relevant context can degrade downstream generation, regardless of LLM reasoning. We propose Temporal-aware Matryoshka Representation Learning (TMRL), an efficient method that equips retrievers with temporal-aware Matryoshka embeddings. TMRL leverages the nested structure of Matryoshka embeddings to introduce a temporal subspace, enhancing temporal encoding while preserving general semantic representations. Experiments show that TMRL efficiently adapts diverse standard encoder-only text embedding models, achieving competitive temporal retrieval and temporal RAG performance compared to existing Matryoshka-based adaptation and temporal retrieval methods, while enabling flexible accuracy-efficiency trade-offs.

cs.IR↗

MixLoRA-DSI: Dynamically Expandable Mixture-of-LoRA Experts for Rehearsal-Free Generative Retrieval over Dynamic Corpora

Continually updating model-based indexes in generative retrieval with new documents remains challenging, as full retraining is computationally expensive and impractical under resource constraints. We propose MixLoRA-DSI, a novel framework that combines an expandable mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation experts with a layer-wise out-of-distribution (OOD)-driven expansion strategy. Instead of allocating new experts for each new corpus, our proposed expansion strategy enables sublinear parameter growth by selectively introducing new experts only when significant number of OOD documents are detected. Experiments on NQ320k and MS MARCO Passage demonstrate that MixLoRA-DSI outperforms full-model update baselines, with minimal parameter overhead and substantially lower training costs.

cs.IR↗

Physics-Aware Video Generation via Agentic Planning and Graph-Guided Optimization

Video diffusion models (VDMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing high-fidelity, photorealistic video content. However, they fundamentally lack an intrinsic understanding of physical laws and frequently produce visually appealing but causally illogical sequences characterized by structural hallucinations and physically implausible dynamics. Injecting physical awareness via training-free test-time optimization is a promising alternative, yet existing methods rely on global gradient updates and rigid scheduling heuristics that inadvertently corrupt passive backgrounds and fail to model complex dynamic state changes. To address this, we propose PhysPlan, a novel training-free guidance framework that shifts the paradigm from stochastic visual interpolation to agentic physics simulation. First, a VLM operates as an iterative cognitive simulator, decomposing multimodal inputs into a Chain-of-Visual-Thought to create a multimodal representation of kinematic trajectories and 3D depth geometries. Second, these signals drives an object-centric test-time optimization. Unlike prior training-free methods that rely on global gradients and rigid scheduling heuristics, PhysPlan introduces Object-Centric Gradient Routing to isolate kinematic modifications and completely lock the passive environment. Furthermore, our Kinetic Intensity Profiling dynamically parameterizes framework hyperparameters to accommodate the varying severity of physical deformations. Extensive evaluations on the PhyGenBench and Physics-IQ benchmarks demonstrate that PhysPlan significantly outperforms both foundational and controllable VDM baselines, offering a promising approach for improving the physical understanding of video generation.

cs.CV↗

PhysMirror: Physics-Aware Mirror Object Generation

Synthesizing physically accurate mirror reflections remains a fundamental challenge for modern text-to-image diffusion models, which are increasingly critical for generating synthetic training data for embodied AI and robotic perception. These models typically struggle with strict geometric constraints, leading to hallucinations that degrade the utility of the synthetic data. To address this, we introduce a novel, end-to-end physics-aware generation framework namely PhysMirror that natively enforces projective geometry through explicit 3D spatial priors. Our method automatically lifts prompted objects into 3D meshes and constructs a lightweight, mathematically exact mirror scene within a simulated environment. By rendering this explicit 3D scene, we extract precise 2D conditioning elements, such as depth maps and segmentation maps, that serve as robust guiding signals for downstream diffusion models, guiding them to generate images with physically correct mirror reflections. Moreover, we introduce Mirror Consistency Score (MCS), reference-free, fully automated metric that quantifies physical correctness using dense feature matching and vanishing point convergence. Experimental results on our newly constructed MirrOB dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in reflection accuracy and physical realism, while maintaining strong text-to-image semantic alignment, providing a reliable pipeline for embodied AI data generation. The source code is released at https://duyphuc0701.github.io/PhysMirror.

cs.CV↗

CPAM: Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation for Zero-Shot Real Image Editing

Editing natural images using textual descriptions in text-to-image diffusion models remains a significant challenge, particularly in achieving consistent generation and handling complex, non-rigid objects. Existing methods often struggle to preserve textures and identity, require extensive fine-tuning, and exhibit limitations in editing specific spatial regions or objects while retaining background details. This paper proposes Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation (CPAM), a novel zero-shot framework for complicated, non-rigid real image editing. Specifically, we propose a preservation adaptation module that adjusts self-attention mechanisms to preserve and independently control the object and background effectively. This ensures that the objects' shapes, textures, and identities are maintained while keeping the background undistorted during the editing process using the mask guidance technique. Additionally, we develop a localized extraction module to mitigate the interference with the non-desired modified regions during conditioning in cross-attention mechanisms. We also introduce various mask-guidance strategies to facilitate diverse image manipulation tasks in a simple manner. CPAM can be seamlessly integrated with multiple diffusion backbones, including SD1.5, SD2.1, and SDXL, demonstrating strong generalization across different model architectures. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Image Manipulation BenchmArk (IMBA), a robust benchmark dataset specifically designed for real image editing, demonstrate that our proposed method is the preferred choice among human raters, outperforming existing state-of-the-art editing techniques. The source code and data will be publicly released at the project page: https://vdkhoi20.github.io/CPAM

cs.CV↗

ShowFlow: From Robust Single Concept to Condition-Free Multi-Concept Generation

Customizing image generation remains a core challenge in controllable image synthesis. For single-concept generation, maintaining both identity preservation and prompt alignment is challenging. In multi-concept scenarios, relying solely on a prompt without additional conditions like layout boxes or semantic masks, often leads to identity loss and concept omission. In this paper, we introduce ShowFlow, a comprehensive framework designed to tackle these challenges. We propose ShowFlow-S for single-concept image generation, and ShowFlow-M for handling multiple concepts. ShowFlow-S introduces a KronA-WED adapter, which integrates a Kronecker adapter with weight and embedding decomposition, and together with a novel Semantic-Aware Attention Regularization (SAR) training objective to enhance single-concept generation. Building on this foundation, ShowFlow-M directly reuses robust models learned by ShowFlow-S to support multi-concept generation without extra conditions, incorporating a Subject-Adaptive Matching Attention (SAMA) and a Layout Consistency guidance as the plug-and-play module. Extensive experiments and user studies validate ShowFlow's effectiveness, highlighting its potential in real-world applications like advertising and virtual dressing. Our source code will be publicly available at: https://htrvu.github.io/showflow.

cs.CV↗

People-Centred Medical Image Analysis via Fairness-Aware Human-AI Cooperation

Machine learning models for medical image analysis often exhibit subgroup-dependent performance, which impacts how decisions should be allocated between automated systems and human experts under limited resources. Prior work on AI fairness and human-AI cooperation, including learning to defer (L2D) and learning to complement (L2C), typically addresses these problems in isolation. We propose People-Centred Medical Image Analysis (PecMan), a framework for fairness-aware human-AI co-operative classification that jointly models subgroup-dependent reliability, decision allocation, and collaborative prediction. PecMan combines subgroup-specialised predictors with a gating and consolidation mechanism that dynamically assigns cases to automated models, human experts, or their combination, without requiring sensitive attributes at test time. We also introduce the FairHAI benchmark for evaluating trade-offs between predictive accuracy, subgroup equity, and human involvement. In addition, we provide a theoretical analysis of multi-agent gating via selection regret and characterise fairness-coverage trade-offs under input-dependent allocation. Experiments across multiple medical imaging datasets demonstrate that PecMan achieves consistently improved trade-offs compared to methods that address fairness or human-AI cooperation separately.

cs.LG↗

Rethinking Output Alignment For 1-bit Post-Training Quantization of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance across a wide range of NLP tasks, but their massive sizes hinder deployment on resource-constrained devices. To reduce their computational and memory burden, various compression techniques have been proposed, including quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation. Among these, post-training quantization (PTQ) is widely adopted for its efficiency, as it requires no retraining and only a small dataset for calibration, enabling low-cost deployment. Recent advances for post-training quantization have demonstrated that even near 4-bit methods can maintain most of the original model performance. However, 1-bit quantization remains particularly challenging. A common strategy in 1-bit quantization is to determine binary weights by matching full-precision parameters, following a weight-driven criterion. However, this objective is not directly aligned with the quantized model's objective, which is to preserve the model's output behavior under the impact of quantization. A natural alternative is to adopt output-driven criteria that minimize discrepancies in model outputs using calibration data. Surprisingly, naive output-driven approaches often perform even worse in the 1-bit regime. In this paper, we show that this failure arises from two fundamental issues: error accumulation across layers and, more critically, \emph{anisotropic distortion} of the representation space. Based on these insights, we propose a novel PTQ method for 1-bit LLMs that explicitly addresses these issues while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing 1-bit PTQ methods.

cs.LG↗

Sharpness-Aware Minimization in Logit Space Efficiently Enhances Direct Preference Optimization

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a popular algorithm for aligning pretrained large language models with human preferences, owing to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO suffers from the recently identified squeezing effect (also known as likelihood displacement), where the probability of preferred responses decreases unintentionally during training. To understand and mitigate this phenomenon, we develop a theoretical framework that models the coordinate-wise dynamics in logit space. Our analysis reveals that negative-gradient updates cause residuals to expand rapidly along high-curvature directions, which underlies the squeezing effect, whereas Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) can suppress this behavior through its curvature-regularization effect. Building on this insight, we investigate logits-SAM, a computationally efficient variant that perturbs only the output layer with negligible overhead. Extensive experiments on Pythia-2.8B, Mistral-7B, and Gemma-2B-IT across multiple datasets and benchmarks demonstrate that logits-SAM consistently improves the effectiveness of DPO and integrates seamlessly with other DPO variants. Code is available at https://github.com/RitianLuo/logits-sam-dpo.

cs.LG↗

Gradient-Aligned Calibration for Post-Training Quantization of Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in image synthesis by progressively estimating a smooth transition from a Gaussian distribution of noise to a real image. Unfortunately, their practical deployment is limited by slow inference speed, high memory usage, and the computational demands of the noise estimation process. Post-training quantization (PTQ) emerges as a promising solution to accelerate sampling and reduce memory overhead for diffusion models. Existing PTQ methods for diffusion models typically apply uniform weights to calibration samples across timesteps, which is sub-optimal since data at different timesteps may contribute differently to the diffusion process. Additionally, due to varying activation distributions and gradients across timesteps, a uniform quantization approach is sub-optimal. Each timestep requires a different gradient direction for optimal quantization, and treating them equally can lead to conflicting gradients that degrade performance. In this paper, we propose a novel PTQ method that addresses these challenges by assigning appropriate weights to calibration samples. Specifically, our approach learns to assign optimal weights to calibration samples to align the quantized model's gradients across timesteps, facilitating the quantization process. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, LSUN-Bedrooms, and ImageNet demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to other PTQ methods for diffusion models.

cs.LG↗

Layer-Wise High-Impact Parameter Ratio Optimization in Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, but their massive parameter counts create substantial computational and memory challenges during deployment. Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate these challenges with minimal overhead. While existing PTQ methods can effectively quantize LLMs, they experience substantial accuracy loss at extremely low bit-widths, primarily due to high-impact parameters that significantly influence quantization performance. Several approaches address these issues by identifying and retaining the high-impact parameters in FP16 format. However, they apply fixed ratios of high-impact parameters across all layers, overlooking layer-wise sensitivity variations. In this paper, we propose a quadratic optimization framework that determines layer-specific ratios of high-impact parameters while considering inter-layer dependencies. We quantize high-impact parameters to moderate bit-widths, which often result in negligible performance degradation in quantized LLMs, while the remaining parameters can be quantized to extremely low bit-widths. Under the same resource-constrained budget, this allows for preserving more high-impact parameters than methods that keep selecting a few in FP16 format. Additionally, the proposed framework allows us to leverage an advanced quantization method that often requires extensive learnable parameters solely for high-impact parameters, while applying a computationally efficient method to the rest. Our approach achieves an effective balance between computational efficiency and model accuracy while maintaining high performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

Adaptive Layer-Wise Transformations for Post-Training Quantization of Large Language Models

Large language models require significant computational resources for deployment, making quantization essential for practical applications. However, the main obstacle to effective quantization lies in systematic outliers in activations and weights, which cause substantial LLM performance degradation, especially at low-bit settings. While existing transformation-based methods like affine and rotation transformations successfully mitigate outliers, they apply the homogeneous transformation setting, i.e., using the same transformation types across all layers, ignoring the heterogeneous distribution characteristics within LLMs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive transformation selection framework that systematically determines optimal transformations on a per-layer basis. To this end, we first formulate transformation selection as a differentiable optimization problem to achieve the accurate transformation type for each layer. However, searching for optimal layer-wise transformations for every model is computationally expensive. To this end, we establish the connection between weight distribution kurtosis and accurate transformation type. Specifically, we propose an outlier-guided layer selection method using robust $z$-score normalization that achieves comparable performance to differentiable search with significantly reduced overhead. Comprehensive experiments on LLaMA family models demonstrate that our adaptive approach consistently outperforms the widely-used fixed transformation settings. For example, our method achieves an improvement of up to 4.58 perplexity points and a 2.11% gain in average six-task zero-shot accuracy under aggressive W3A3K2V2 quantization settings for the LLaMA-3-8B model compared to the current best existing method, FlatQuant, demonstrating the necessity of heterogeneous transformation selection for optimal LLM quantization.

cs.LG↗

Maximising the Utility of Validation Sets for Imbalanced Noisy-label Meta-learning

Meta-learning is an effective method to handle imbalanced and noisy-label learning, but it depends on a validation set containing randomly selected, manually labelled and balanced distributed samples. The random selection and manual labelling and balancing of this validation set is not only sub-optimal for meta-learning, but it also scales poorly with the number of classes. Hence, recent meta-learning papers have proposed ad-hoc heuristics to automatically build and label this validation set, but these heuristics are still sub-optimal for meta-learning. In this paper, we analyse the meta-learning algorithm and propose new criteria to characterise the utility of the validation set, based on: 1) the informativeness of the validation set; 2) the class distribution balance of the set; and 3) the correctness of the labels of the set. Furthermore, we propose a new imbalanced noisy-label meta-learning (INOLML) algorithm that automatically builds a validation set by maximising its utility using the criteria above. Our method shows significant improvements over previous meta-learning approaches and sets the new state-of-the-art on several benchmarks.

cs.LG↗

Sharpness-Aware Data Generation for Zero-shot Quantization

Zero-shot quantization aims to learn a quantized model from a pre-trained full-precision model with no access to original real training data. The common idea in zero-shot quantization approaches is to generate synthetic data for quantizing the full-precision model. While it is well-known that deep neural networks with low sharpness have better generalization ability, none of the previous zero-shot quantization works considers the sharpness of the quantized model as a criterion for generating training data. This paper introduces a novel methodology that takes into account quantized model sharpness in synthetic data generation to enhance generalization. Specifically, we first demonstrate that sharpness minimization can be attained by maximizing gradient matching between the reconstruction loss gradients computed on synthetic and real validation data, under certain assumptions. We then circumvent the problem of the gradient matching without real validation set by approximating it with the gradient matching between each generated sample and its neighbors. Experimental evaluations on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art techniques in low-bit quantization settings.

cs.LG↗

Towards the Identifiability in Noisy Label Learning: A Multinomial Mixture Modelling Approach

Learning from noisy labels (LNL) is crucial in deep learning, in which one of the approaches is to identify clean-label samples from poorly-annotated datasets. Such an identification is challenging because the conventional LNL problem, which assumes only one noisy label per instance, is non-identifiable, i.e., clean labels cannot be estimated theoretically without additional heuristics. This paper presents a novel data-driven approach that addresses this issue without requiring any heuristics about clean samples. We discover that the LNL problem becomes identifiable if there are at least $2C - 1$ i.i.d. noisy labels per instance, where $C$ is the number of classes. Our finding relies on the assumption of i.i.d. noisy labels and multinomial mixture modelling, making it easier to interpret than previous studies that require full-rank noisy-label transition matrices. To fulfil this condition without additional manual annotations, we propose a method that automatically generates additional i.i.d. noisy labels through nearest neighbours. These noisy labels are then used in the Expectation-Maximisation algorithm to infer clean labels. Our method demonstrably estimates clean labels accurately across various label noise benchmarks, including synthetic, web-controlled, and real-world datasets. Furthermore, the model trained with our method performs competitively with many state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

Improving Personalized Image Generation through Social Context Feedback

Personalized image generation, where reference images of one or more subjects are used to generate their image according to a scene description, has gathered significant interest in the community. However, such generated images suffer from three major limitations -- complex activities, such as $<$man, pushing, motorcycle$>$ are not generated properly with incorrect human poses, reference human identities are not preserved, and generated human gaze patterns are unnatural/inconsistent with the scene description. In this work, we propose to overcome these shortcomings through feedback-based fine-tuning of existing personalized generation methods, wherein, state-of-art detectors of pose, human-object-interaction, human facial recognition and human gaze-point estimation are used to refine the diffusion model. We also propose timestep-based inculcation of different feedback modules, depending upon whether the signal is low-level (such as human pose), or high-level (such as gaze point). The images generated in this manner show an improvement in the generated interactions, facial identities and image quality over three benchmark datasets.

cs.CV↗

Smart Glasses for CVI: Co-Designing Extended Reality Solutions to Support Environmental Perception by People with Cerebral Visual Impairment

Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI) is the set to be the leading cause of vision impairment, yet remains underrepresented in assistive technology research. Unlike ocular conditions, CVI affects higher-order visual processing-impacting object recognition, facial perception, and attention in complex environments. This paper presents a co-design study with two adults with CVI investigating how smart glasses, i.e. head-mounted extended reality displays, can support understanding and interaction with the immediate environment. Guided by the Double Diamond design framework, we conducted a two-week diary study, two ideation workshops, and ten iterative development sessions using the Apple Vision Pro. Our findings demonstrate that smart glasses can meaningfully address key challenges in locating objects, reading text, recognising people, engaging in conversations, and managing sensory stress. With the rapid advancement of smart glasses and increasing recognition of CVI as a distinct form of vision impairment, this research addresses a timely and under-explored intersection of technology and need.

cs.HC↗

PromptDSI: Prompt-based Rehearsal-free Continual Learning for Document Retrieval

Differentiable Search Index (DSI) utilizes pre-trained language models to perform indexing and document retrieval via end-to-end learning without relying on external indexes. However, DSI requires full re-training to index new documents, causing significant computational inefficiencies. Continual learning (CL) offers a solution by enabling the model to incrementally update without full re-training. Existing CL solutions in document retrieval rely on memory buffers or generative models for rehearsal, which is infeasible when accessing previous training data is restricted due to privacy concerns. To this end, we introduce PromptDSI, a prompt-based, rehearsal-free continual learning approach for document retrieval. PromptDSI follows the Prompt-based Continual Learning (PCL) framework, using learnable prompts to efficiently index new documents without accessing previous documents or queries. To improve retrieval latency, we remove the initial forward pass of PCL, which otherwise greatly increases training and inference time, with a negligible trade-off in performance. Additionally, we introduce a novel topic-aware prompt pool that employs neural topic embeddings as fixed keys, eliminating the instability of prompt key optimization while maintaining competitive performance with existing PCL prompt pools. In a challenging rehearsal-free continual learning setup, we demonstrate that PromptDSI variants outperform rehearsal-based baselines, match the strong cache-based baseline in mitigating forgetting, and significantly improving retrieval performance on new corpora.

cs.IR↗