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Sep 11

Adaptive Frequency Filters As Efficient Global Token Mixers

Recent vision transformers, large-kernel CNNs and MLPs have attained remarkable successes in broad vision tasks thanks to their effective information fusion in the global scope. However, their efficient deployments, especially on mobile devices, still suffer from noteworthy challenges due to the heavy computational costs of self-attention mechanisms, large kernels, or fully connected layers. In this work, we apply conventional convolution theorem to deep learning for addressing this and reveal that adaptive frequency filters can serve as efficient global token mixers. With this insight, we propose Adaptive Frequency Filtering (AFF) token mixer. This neural operator transfers a latent representation to the frequency domain via a Fourier transform and performs semantic-adaptive frequency filtering via an elementwise multiplication, which mathematically equals to a token mixing operation in the original latent space with a dynamic convolution kernel as large as the spatial resolution of this latent representation. We take AFF token mixers as primary neural operators to build a lightweight neural network, dubbed AFFNet. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed AFF token mixer and show that AFFNet achieve superior accuracy and efficiency trade-offs compared to other lightweight network designs on broad visual tasks, including visual recognition and dense prediction tasks.

Spatial-frequency channels, shape bias, and adversarial robustness

What spatial frequency information do humans and neural networks use to recognize objects? In neuroscience, critical band masking is an established tool that can reveal the frequency-selective filters used for object recognition. Critical band masking measures the sensitivity of recognition performance to noise added at each spatial frequency. Existing critical band masking studies show that humans recognize periodic patterns (gratings) and letters by means of a spatial-frequency filter (or "channel'') that has a frequency bandwidth of one octave (doubling of frequency). Here, we introduce critical band masking as a task for network-human comparison and test 14 humans and 76 neural networks on 16-way ImageNet categorization in the presence of narrowband noise. We find that humans recognize objects in natural images using the same one-octave-wide channel that they use for letters and gratings, making it a canonical feature of human object recognition. On the other hand, the neural network channel, across various architectures and training strategies, is 2-4 times as wide as the human channel. In other words, networks are vulnerable to high and low frequency noise that does not affect human performance. Adversarial and augmented-image training are commonly used to increase network robustness and shape bias. Does this training align network and human object recognition channels? Three network channel properties (bandwidth, center frequency, peak noise sensitivity) correlate strongly with shape bias (53% variance explained) and with robustness of adversarially-trained networks (74% variance explained). Adversarial training increases robustness but expands the channel bandwidth even further away from the human bandwidth. Thus, critical band masking reveals that the network channel is more than twice as wide as the human channel, and that adversarial training only increases this difference.

Frequency-aware Feature Fusion for Dense Image Prediction

Dense image prediction tasks demand features with strong category information and precise spatial boundary details at high resolution. To achieve this, modern hierarchical models often utilize feature fusion, directly adding upsampled coarse features from deep layers and high-resolution features from lower levels. In this paper, we observe rapid variations in fused feature values within objects, resulting in intra-category inconsistency due to disturbed high-frequency features. Additionally, blurred boundaries in fused features lack accurate high frequency, leading to boundary displacement. Building upon these observations, we propose Frequency-Aware Feature Fusion (FreqFusion), integrating an Adaptive Low-Pass Filter (ALPF) generator, an offset generator, and an Adaptive High-Pass Filter (AHPF) generator. The ALPF generator predicts spatially-variant low-pass filters to attenuate high-frequency components within objects, reducing intra-class inconsistency during upsampling. The offset generator refines large inconsistent features and thin boundaries by replacing inconsistent features with more consistent ones through resampling, while the AHPF generator enhances high-frequency detailed boundary information lost during downsampling. Comprehensive visualization and quantitative analysis demonstrate that FreqFusion effectively improves feature consistency and sharpens object boundaries. Extensive experiments across various dense prediction tasks confirm its effectiveness. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FreqFusion.

Learning Gabor Texture Features for Fine-Grained Recognition

Extracting and using class-discriminative features is critical for fine-grained recognition. Existing works have demonstrated the possibility of applying deep CNNs to exploit features that distinguish similar classes. However, CNNs suffer from problems including frequency bias and loss of detailed local information, which restricts the performance of recognizing fine-grained categories. To address the challenge, we propose a novel texture branch as complimentary to the CNN branch for feature extraction. We innovatively utilize Gabor filters as a powerful extractor to exploit texture features, motivated by the capability of Gabor filters in effectively capturing multi-frequency features and detailed local information. We implement several designs to enhance the effectiveness of Gabor filters, including imposing constraints on parameter values and developing a learning method to determine the optimal parameters. Moreover, we introduce a statistical feature extractor to utilize informative statistical information from the signals captured by Gabor filters, and a gate selection mechanism to enable efficient computation by only considering qualified regions as input for texture extraction. Through the integration of features from the Gabor-filter-based texture branch and CNN-based semantic branch, we achieve comprehensive information extraction. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on multiple datasets, including CUB-200-2011, NA-bird, Stanford Dogs, and GTOS-mobile. State-of-the-art performance is achieved using our approach.

Analyzing black-hole ringdowns II: data conditioning

Time series data from observations of black hole ringdown gravitational waves are often analyzed in the time domain by using damped sinusoid models with acyclic boundary conditions. Data conditioning operations, including downsampling, filtering, and the choice of data segment duration, reduce the computational cost of such analyses and can improve numerical stability. Here we analyze simulated damped sinsuoid signals to illustrate how data conditioning operations, if not carefully applied, can undesirably alter the analysis' posterior distributions. We discuss how currently implemented downsampling and filtering methods, if applied too aggressively, can introduce systematic errors and skew tests of general relativity. These issues arise because current downsampling and filtering methods do not operate identically on the data and model. Alternative downsampling and filtering methods which identically operate on the data and model may be achievable, but we argue that the current operations can still be implemented safely. We also show that our preferred anti-alias filtering technique, which has an instantaneous frequency-domain response at its roll-off frequency, preserves the structure of posterior distributions better than other commonly used filters with transient frequency-domain responses. Lastly, we highlight that exceptionally long data segments may need to be analyzed in cases where thin lines in the noise power spectral density overlap with central signal frequencies. Our findings may be broadly applicable to any analysis of truncated time domain data with acyclic boundary conditions.

Revisiting Vision Transformer from the View of Path Ensemble

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are normally regarded as a stack of transformer layers. In this work, we propose a novel view of ViTs showing that they can be seen as ensemble networks containing multiple parallel paths with different lengths. Specifically, we equivalently transform the traditional cascade of multi-head self-attention (MSA) and feed-forward network (FFN) into three parallel paths in each transformer layer. Then, we utilize the identity connection in our new transformer form and further transform the ViT into an explicit multi-path ensemble network. From the new perspective, these paths perform two functions: the first is to provide the feature for the classifier directly, and the second is to provide the lower-level feature representation for subsequent longer paths. We investigate the influence of each path for the final prediction and discover that some paths even pull down the performance. Therefore, we propose the path pruning and EnsembleScale skills for improvement, which cut out the underperforming paths and re-weight the ensemble components, respectively, to optimize the path combination and make the short paths focus on providing high-quality representation for subsequent paths. We also demonstrate that our path combination strategies can help ViTs go deeper and act as high-pass filters to filter out partial low-frequency signals. To further enhance the representation of paths served for subsequent paths, self-distillation is applied to transfer knowledge from the long paths to the short paths. This work calls for more future research to explain and design ViTs from new perspectives.

LEGNet: Lightweight Edge-Gaussian Driven Network for Low-Quality Remote Sensing Image Object Detection

Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) faces formidable challenges in complex visual environments. Aerial and satellite images inherently suffer from limitations such as low spatial resolution, sensor noise, blurred objects, low-light degradation, and partial occlusions. These degradation factors collectively compromise the feature discriminability in detection models, resulting in three key issues: (1) reduced contrast that hampers foreground-background separation, (2) structural discontinuities in edge representations, and (3) ambiguous feature responses caused by variations in illumination. These collectively weaken model robustness and deployment feasibility. To address these challenges, we propose LEGNet, a lightweight network that incorporates a novel edge-Gaussian aggregation (EGA) module specifically designed for low-quality remote sensing images. Our key innovation lies in the synergistic integration of Scharr operator-based edge priors with uncertainty-aware Gaussian modeling: (a) The orientation-aware Scharr filters preserve high-frequency edge details with rotational invariance; (b) The uncertainty-aware Gaussian layers probabilistically refine low-confidence features through variance estimation. This design enables precision enhancement while maintaining architectural simplicity. Comprehensive evaluations across four RSOD benchmarks (DOTA-v1.0, v1.5, DIOR-R, FAIR1M-v1.0) and a UAV-view dataset (VisDrone2019) demonstrate significant improvements. LEGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmark datasets while ensuring computational efficiency, making it well-suited for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices in real-world remote sensing applications. The code is available at https://github.com/lwCVer/LEGNet.

Butter: Frequency Consistency and Hierarchical Fusion for Autonomous Driving Object Detection

Hierarchical feature representations play a pivotal role in computer vision, particularly in object detection for autonomous driving. Multi-level semantic understanding is crucial for accurately identifying pedestrians, vehicles, and traffic signs in dynamic environments. However, existing architectures, such as YOLO and DETR, struggle to maintain feature consistency across different scales while balancing detection precision and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Butter, a novel object detection framework designed to enhance hierarchical feature representations for improving detection robustness. Specifically, Butter introduces two key innovations: Frequency-Adaptive Feature Consistency Enhancement (FAFCE) Component, which refines multi-scale feature consistency by leveraging adaptive frequency filtering to enhance structural and boundary precision, and Progressive Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network (PHFFNet) Module, which progressively integrates multi-level features to mitigate semantic gaps and strengthen hierarchical feature learning. Through extensive experiments on BDD100K, KITTI, and Cityscapes, Butter demonstrates superior feature representation capabilities, leading to notable improvements in detection accuracy while reducing model complexity. By focusing on hierarchical feature refinement and integration, Butter provides an advanced approach to object detection that achieves a balance between accuracy, deployability, and computational efficiency in real-time autonomous driving scenarios. Our model and implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/Aveiro-Lin/Butter, facilitating further research and validation within the autonomous driving community.

Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table

Building a scalable and real-time recommendation system is vital for many businesses driven by time-sensitive customer feedback, such as short-videos ranking or online ads. Despite the ubiquitous adoption of production-scale deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch, these general-purpose frameworks fall short of business demands in recommendation scenarios for various reasons: on one hand, tweaking systems based on static parameters and dense computations for recommendation with dynamic and sparse features is detrimental to model quality; on the other hand, such frameworks are designed with batch-training stage and serving stage completely separated, preventing the model from interacting with customer feedback in real-time. These issues led us to reexamine traditional approaches and explore radically different design choices. In this paper, we present Monolith, a system tailored for online training. Our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and production environment that reflects a marked departure from other recommendations systems. Our contributions are manifold: first, we crafted a collisionless embedding table with optimizations such as expirable embeddings and frequency filtering to reduce its memory footprint; second, we provide an production-ready online training architecture with high fault-tolerance; finally, we proved that system reliability could be traded-off for real-time learning. Monolith has successfully landed in the BytePlus Recommend product.

When Semantic Segmentation Meets Frequency Aliasing

Despite recent advancements in semantic segmentation, where and what pixels are hard to segment remains largely unexplored. Existing research only separates an image into easy and hard regions and empirically observes the latter are associated with object boundaries. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of hard pixel errors, categorizing them into three types: false responses, merging mistakes, and displacements. Our findings reveal a quantitative association between hard pixels and aliasing, which is distortion caused by the overlapping of frequency components in the Fourier domain during downsampling. To identify the frequencies responsible for aliasing, we propose using the equivalent sampling rate to calculate the Nyquist frequency, which marks the threshold for aliasing. Then, we introduce the aliasing score as a metric to quantify the extent of aliasing. While positively correlated with the proposed aliasing score, three types of hard pixels exhibit different patterns. Here, we propose two novel de-aliasing filter (DAF) and frequency mixing (FreqMix) modules to alleviate aliasing degradation by accurately removing or adjusting frequencies higher than the Nyquist frequency. The DAF precisely removes the frequencies responsible for aliasing before downsampling, while the FreqMix dynamically selects high-frequency components within the encoder block. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in semantic segmentation and low-light instance segmentation tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/Seg-Aliasing.

Deep Spatiotemporal Clutter Filtering of Transthoracic Echocardiographic Images: Leveraging Contextual Attention and Residual Learning

This study presents a deep convolutional autoencoder network for filtering reverberation clutter from transthoracic echocardiographic (TTE) image sequences. Given the spatiotemporal nature of this type of clutter, the filtering network employs 3D convolutional layers to suppress it throughout the cardiac cycle. The design of the network incorporates two key features that contribute to the effectiveness of the filter: 1) an attention mechanism for focusing on cluttered regions and leveraging contextual information, and 2) residual learning for preserving fine image structures. To train the network, a diverse set of artifact patterns was simulated and superimposed onto ultra-realistic synthetic TTE sequences from six ultrasound vendors, generating input for the filtering network. The artifact-free sequences served as ground-truth. Performance of the filtering network was evaluated using unseen synthetic and in vivo artifactual sequences. Results from the in vivo dataset confirmed the network's strong generalization capabilities, despite being trained solely on synthetic data and simulated artifacts. The suitability of the filtered sequences for downstream processing was assessed by computing segmental strain curves. A significant reduction in the discrepancy between strain profiles computed from cluttered and clutter-free segments was observed after filtering the cluttered sequences with the proposed network. The trained network processes a TTE sequence in a fraction of a second, enabling real-time clutter filtering and potentially improving the precision of clinically relevant indices derived from TTE sequences. The source code of the proposed method and example video files of the filtering results are available at: https://github.com/MahdiTabassian/Deep-Clutter-Filtering/tree/main{https://github.com/MahdiTabassian/Deep-Clutter-Filtering/tree/main}.

Transform Once: Efficient Operator Learning in Frequency Domain

Spectral analysis provides one of the most effective paradigms for information-preserving dimensionality reduction, as simple descriptions of naturally occurring signals are often obtained via few terms of periodic basis functions. In this work, we study deep neural networks designed to harness the structure in frequency domain for efficient learning of long-range correlations in space or time: frequency-domain models (FDMs). Existing FDMs are based on complex-valued transforms i.e. Fourier Transforms (FT), and layers that perform computation on the spectrum and input data separately. This design introduces considerable computational overhead: for each layer, a forward and inverse FT. Instead, this work introduces a blueprint for frequency domain learning through a single transform: transform once (T1). To enable efficient, direct learning in the frequency domain we derive a variance-preserving weight initialization scheme and investigate methods for frequency selection in reduced-order FDMs. Our results noticeably streamline the design process of FDMs, pruning redundant transforms, and leading to speedups of 3x to 10x that increase with data resolution and model size. We perform extensive experiments on learning the solution operator of spatio-temporal dynamics, including incompressible Navier-Stokes, turbulent flows around airfoils and high-resolution video of smoke. T1 models improve on the test performance of FDMs while requiring significantly less computation (5 hours instead of 32 for our large-scale experiment), with over 20% reduction in average predictive error across tasks.

Frequency-Guided Spatial Adaptation for Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment camouflaged objects which exhibit very similar patterns with the surrounding environment. Recent research works have shown that enhancing the feature representation via the frequency information can greatly alleviate the ambiguity problem between the foreground objects and the background.With the emergence of vision foundation models, like InternImage, Segment Anything Model etc, adapting the pretrained model on COD tasks with a lightweight adapter module shows a novel and promising research direction. Existing adapter modules mainly care about the feature adaptation in the spatial domain. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency-guided spatial adaptation method for COD task. Specifically, we transform the input features of the adapter into frequency domain. By grouping and interacting with frequency components located within non overlapping circles in the spectrogram, different frequency components are dynamically enhanced or weakened, making the intensity of image details and contour features adaptively adjusted. At the same time, the features that are conducive to distinguishing object and background are highlighted, indirectly implying the position and shape of camouflaged object. We conduct extensive experiments on four widely adopted benchmark datasets and the proposed method outperforms 26 state-of-the-art methods with large margins. Code will be released.

Frequency-Specific Neural Response and Cross-Correlation Analysis of Envelope Following Responses to Native Speech and Music Using Multichannel EEG Signals: A Case Study

Although native speech and music envelope following responses (EFRs) play a crucial role in auditory processing and cognition, their frequency profile, such as the dominating frequency and spectral coherence, is largely unknown. We have assumed that the auditory pathway - which transmits envelope components of speech and music to the scalp through time-varying neurophysiological processes - is a linear time-varying system, with the envelope and the multi-channel EEG responses as excitation and response, respectively. This paper investigates the transfer function of this system through two analytical techniques - time-averaged spectral responses and cross-spectral density - in the frequency domain at four different positions of the human scalp. Our findings suggest that alpha (8-11 Hz), lower gamma (53-56 Hz), and higher gamma (78-81 Hz) bands are the peak responses of the system. These frequently appearing dominant frequency responses may be the key components of familiar speech perception, maintaining attention, binding acoustic features, and memory processing. The cross-spectral density, which reflects the spatial neural coherence of the human brain, shows that 10-13 Hz, 27-29 Hz, and 62-64 Hz are common for all channel pairs. As neural coherences are frequently observed in these frequencies among native participants, we suggest that these distributed neural processes are also dominant in native speech and music perception.

Beta-Rank: A Robust Convolutional Filter Pruning Method For Imbalanced Medical Image Analysis

As deep neural networks include a high number of parameters and operations, it can be a challenge to implement these models on devices with limited computational resources. Despite the development of novel pruning methods toward resource-efficient models, it has become evident that these models are not capable of handling "imbalanced" and "limited number of data points". We proposed a novel filter pruning method by considering the input and output of filters along with the values of the filters that deal with imbalanced datasets better than others. Our pruning method considers the fact that all information about the importance of a filter may not be reflected in the value of the filter. Instead, it is reflected in the changes made to the data after the filter is applied to it. In this work, three methods are compared with the same training conditions except for the ranking values of each method, and 14 methods are compared from other papers. We demonstrated that our model performed significantly better than other methods for imbalanced medical datasets. For example, when we removed up to 58% of FLOPs for the IDRID dataset and up to 45% for the ISIC dataset, our model was able to yield an equivalent (or even superior) result to the baseline model. To evaluate FLOP and parameter reduction using our model in real-world settings, we built a smartphone app, where we demonstrated a reduction of up to 79% in memory usage and 72% in prediction time. All codes and parameters for training different models are available at https://github.com/mohofar/Beta-Rank

Benchmarking Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithms on Transformer-based Embedding Vectors

Advances in embedding models for text, image, audio, and video drive progress across multiple domains, including retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation systems, vehicle/person reidentification, and face recognition. Many applications in these domains require an efficient method to retrieve items that are close to a given query in the embedding space while satisfying a filter condition based on the item's attributes, a problem known as Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (FANNS). In this work, we present a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of FANNS methods and analyze how they are benchmarked in the literature. By doing so, we identify a key challenge in the current FANNS landscape: the lack of diverse and realistic datasets, particularly ones derived from the latest transformer-based text embedding models. To address this, we introduce a novel dataset consisting of embedding vectors for the abstracts of over 2.7 million research articles from the arXiv repository, accompanied by 11 real-world attributes such as authors and categories. We benchmark a wide range of FANNS methods on our novel dataset and find that each method has distinct strengths and limitations; no single approach performs best across all scenarios. ACORN, for example, supports various filter types and performs reliably across dataset scales but is often outperformed by more specialized methods. SeRF shows excellent performance for range filtering on ordered attributes but cannot handle categorical attributes. Filtered-DiskANN and UNG excel on the medium-scale dataset but fail on the large-scale dataset, highlighting the challenge posed by transformer-based embeddings, which are often more than an order of magnitude larger than earlier embeddings. We conclude that no universally best method exists.

FRCRN: Boosting Feature Representation using Frequency Recurrence for Monaural Speech Enhancement

Convolutional recurrent networks (CRN) integrating a convolutional encoder-decoder (CED) structure and a recurrent structure have achieved promising performance for monaural speech enhancement. However, feature representation across frequency context is highly constrained due to limited receptive fields in the convolutions of CED. In this paper, we propose a convolutional recurrent encoder-decoder (CRED) structure to boost feature representation along the frequency axis. The CRED applies frequency recurrence on 3D convolutional feature maps along the frequency axis following each convolution, therefore, it is capable of catching long-range frequency correlations and enhancing feature representations of speech inputs. The proposed frequency recurrence is realized efficiently using a feedforward sequential memory network (FSMN). Besides the CRED, we insert two stacked FSMN layers between the encoder and the decoder to model further temporal dynamics. We name the proposed framework as Frequency Recurrent CRN (FRCRN). We design FRCRN to predict complex Ideal Ratio Mask (cIRM) in complex-valued domain and optimize FRCRN using both time-frequency-domain and time-domain losses. Our proposed approach achieved state-of-the-art performance on wideband benchmark datasets and achieved 2nd place for the real-time fullband track in terms of Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and Word Accuracy (WAcc) in the ICASSP 2022 Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) challenge (https://github.com/alibabasglab/FRCRN).

Frequency-Adaptive Dilated Convolution for Semantic Segmentation

Dilated convolution, which expands the receptive field by inserting gaps between its consecutive elements, is widely employed in computer vision. In this study, we propose three strategies to improve individual phases of dilated convolution from the view of spectrum analysis. Departing from the conventional practice of fixing a global dilation rate as a hyperparameter, we introduce Frequency-Adaptive Dilated Convolution (FADC), which dynamically adjusts dilation rates spatially based on local frequency components. Subsequently, we design two plug-in modules to directly enhance effective bandwidth and receptive field size. The Adaptive Kernel (AdaKern) module decomposes convolution weights into low-frequency and high-frequency components, dynamically adjusting the ratio between these components on a per-channel basis. By increasing the high-frequency part of convolution weights, AdaKern captures more high-frequency components, thereby improving effective bandwidth. The Frequency Selection (FreqSelect) module optimally balances high- and low-frequency components in feature representations through spatially variant reweighting. It suppresses high frequencies in the background to encourage FADC to learn a larger dilation, thereby increasing the receptive field for an expanded scope. Extensive experiments on segmentation and object detection consistently validate the efficacy of our approach. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FADC.

Earth-Adapter: Bridge the Geospatial Domain Gaps with Mixture of Frequency Adaptation

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is a technique that allows us to adapt powerful Foundation Models (FMs) to diverse downstream tasks while preserving and unleashing their inherent capabilities. However, we have observed that existing PEFT methods, which are often designed with natural imagery in mind, struggle when applied to Remote Sensing (RS) scenarios. This is primarily due to their inability to handle artifact influences, a problem particularly severe in RS image features. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Earth-Adapter, the first PEFT method specifically designed for RS artifacts conquering. Earth-Adapter introduces a novel Mixture of Frequency Adaptation process that combines a Mixture of Adapter (MoA) with Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT). By utilizing DFT, Earth-Adapter can decompose features into different frequency components, precisely separating artifacts from original features. The MoA then dynamically assigns weights to each adapter expert, allowing for the combination of features across various frequency domains. These simple-yet-effective approaches enable Earth-Adapter to more efficiently overcome the disturbances caused by artifacts than previous PEFT methods, significantly enhancing the FMs' performance on RS scenarios. Experiments on Domain Adaptation (DA), and Domain Generalization (DG) semantic segmentation benchmarks showcase the Earth-Adapter's effectiveness. Compared with baseline Rein, Earth-Adapter significantly improves 9.0% mIoU in DA and 3.1% mIoU in DG benchmarks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/VisionXLab/Earth-Adapter.

Moirai-MoE: Empowering Time Series Foundation Models with Sparse Mixture of Experts

Time series foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance as zero-shot forecasters. However, achieving effectively unified training on time series remains an open challenge. Existing approaches introduce some level of model specialization to account for the highly heterogeneous nature of time series data. For instance, Moirai pursues unified training by employing multiple input/output projection layers, each tailored to handle time series at a specific frequency. Similarly, TimesFM maintains a frequency embedding dictionary for this purpose. We identify two major drawbacks to this human-imposed frequency-level model specialization: (1) Frequency is not a reliable indicator of the underlying patterns in time series. For example, time series with different frequencies can display similar patterns, while those with the same frequency may exhibit varied patterns. (2) Non-stationarity is an inherent property of real-world time series, leading to varied distributions even within a short context window of a single time series. Frequency-level specialization is too coarse-grained to capture this level of diversity. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Moirai-MoE, using a single input/output projection layer while delegating the modeling of diverse time series patterns to the sparse mixture of experts (MoE) within Transformers. With these designs, Moirai-MoE reduces reliance on human-defined heuristics and enables automatic token-level specialization. Extensive experiments on 39 datasets demonstrate the superiority of Moirai-MoE over existing foundation models in both in-distribution and zero-shot scenarios. Furthermore, this study conducts comprehensive model analyses to explore the inner workings of time series MoE foundation models and provides valuable insights for future research.

PeriodWave: Multi-Period Flow Matching for High-Fidelity Waveform Generation

Recently, universal waveform generation tasks have been investigated conditioned on various out-of-distribution scenarios. Although GAN-based methods have shown their strength in fast waveform generation, they are vulnerable to train-inference mismatch scenarios such as two-stage text-to-speech. Meanwhile, diffusion-based models have shown their powerful generative performance in other domains; however, they stay out of the limelight due to slow inference speed in waveform generation tasks. Above all, there is no generator architecture that can explicitly disentangle the natural periodic features of high-resolution waveform signals. In this paper, we propose PeriodWave, a novel universal waveform generation model. First, we introduce a period-aware flow matching estimator that can capture the periodic features of the waveform signal when estimating the vector fields. Additionally, we utilize a multi-period estimator that avoids overlaps to capture different periodic features of waveform signals. Although increasing the number of periods can improve the performance significantly, this requires more computational costs. To reduce this issue, we also propose a single period-conditional universal estimator that can feed-forward parallel by period-wise batch inference. Additionally, we utilize discrete wavelet transform to losslessly disentangle the frequency information of waveform signals for high-frequency modeling, and introduce FreeU to reduce the high-frequency noise for waveform generation. The experimental results demonstrated that our model outperforms the previous models both in Mel-spectrogram reconstruction and text-to-speech tasks. All source code will be available at https://github.com/sh-lee-prml/PeriodWave.

Spectral-Refiner: Fine-Tuning of Accurate Spatiotemporal Neural Operator for Turbulent Flows

Recent advancements in operator-type neural networks have shown promising results in approximating the solutions of spatiotemporal Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). However, these neural networks often entail considerable training expenses, and may not always achieve the desired accuracy required in many scientific and engineering disciplines. In this paper, we propose a new Spatiotemporal Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO) that learns maps between Bochner spaces, and a new learning framework to address these issues. This new paradigm leverages wisdom from traditional numerical PDE theory and techniques to refine the pipeline of commonly adopted end-to-end neural operator training and evaluations. Specifically, in the learning problems for the turbulent flow modeling by the Navier-Stokes Equations (NSE), the proposed architecture initiates the training with a few epochs for SFNO, concluding with the freezing of most model parameters. Then, the last linear spectral convolution layer is fine-tuned without the frequency truncation. The optimization uses a negative Sobolev norm for the first time as the loss in operator learning, defined through a reliable functional-type a posteriori error estimator whose evaluation is almost exact thanks to the Parseval identity. This design allows the neural operators to effectively tackle low-frequency errors while the relief of the de-aliasing filter addresses high-frequency errors. Numerical experiments on commonly used benchmarks for the 2D NSE demonstrate significant improvements in both computational efficiency and accuracy, compared to end-to-end evaluation and traditional numerical PDE solvers.

HiFi-SR: A Unified Generative Transformer-Convolutional Adversarial Network for High-Fidelity Speech Super-Resolution

The application of generative adversarial networks (GANs) has recently advanced speech super-resolution (SR) based on intermediate representations like mel-spectrograms. However, existing SR methods that typically rely on independently trained and concatenated networks may lead to inconsistent representations and poor speech quality, especially in out-of-domain scenarios. In this work, we propose HiFi-SR, a unified network that leverages end-to-end adversarial training to achieve high-fidelity speech super-resolution. Our model features a unified transformer-convolutional generator designed to seamlessly handle both the prediction of latent representations and their conversion into time-domain waveforms. The transformer network serves as a powerful encoder, converting low-resolution mel-spectrograms into latent space representations, while the convolutional network upscales these representations into high-resolution waveforms. To enhance high-frequency fidelity, we incorporate a multi-band, multi-scale time-frequency discriminator, along with a multi-scale mel-reconstruction loss in the adversarial training process. HiFi-SR is versatile, capable of upscaling any input speech signal between 4 kHz and 32 kHz to a 48 kHz sampling rate. Experimental results demonstrate that HiFi-SR significantly outperforms existing speech SR methods across both objective metrics and ABX preference tests, for both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios (https://github.com/modelscope/ClearerVoice-Studio).

Diffusion Probabilistic Model Made Slim

Despite the recent visually-pleasing results achieved, the massive computational cost has been a long-standing flaw for diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs), which, in turn, greatly limits their applications on resource-limited platforms. Prior methods towards efficient DPM, however, have largely focused on accelerating the testing yet overlooked their huge complexity and sizes. In this paper, we make a dedicated attempt to lighten DPM while striving to preserve its favourable performance. We start by training a small-sized latent diffusion model (LDM) from scratch, but observe a significant fidelity drop in the synthetic images. Through a thorough assessment, we find that DPM is intrinsically biased against high-frequency generation, and learns to recover different frequency components at different time-steps. These properties make compact networks unable to represent frequency dynamics with accurate high-frequency estimation. Towards this end, we introduce a customized design for slim DPM, which we term as Spectral Diffusion (SD), for light-weight image synthesis. SD incorporates wavelet gating in its architecture to enable frequency dynamic feature extraction at every reverse steps, and conducts spectrum-aware distillation to promote high-frequency recovery by inverse weighting the objective based on spectrum magni tudes. Experimental results demonstrate that, SD achieves 8-18x computational complexity reduction as compared to the latent diffusion models on a series of conditional and unconditional image generation tasks while retaining competitive image fidelity.

Frequency Dynamic Convolution for Dense Image Prediction

While Dynamic Convolution (DY-Conv) has shown promising performance by enabling adaptive weight selection through multiple parallel weights combined with an attention mechanism, the frequency response of these weights tends to exhibit high similarity, resulting in high parameter costs but limited adaptability. In this work, we introduce Frequency Dynamic Convolution (FDConv), a novel approach that mitigates these limitations by learning a fixed parameter budget in the Fourier domain. FDConv divides this budget into frequency-based groups with disjoint Fourier indices, enabling the construction of frequency-diverse weights without increasing the parameter cost. To further enhance adaptability, we propose Kernel Spatial Modulation (KSM) and Frequency Band Modulation (FBM). KSM dynamically adjusts the frequency response of each filter at the spatial level, while FBM decomposes weights into distinct frequency bands in the frequency domain and modulates them dynamically based on local content. Extensive experiments on object detection, segmentation, and classification validate the effectiveness of FDConv. We demonstrate that when applied to ResNet-50, FDConv achieves superior performance with a modest increase of +3.6M parameters, outperforming previous methods that require substantial increases in parameter budgets (e.g., CondConv +90M, KW +76.5M). Moreover, FDConv seamlessly integrates into a variety of architectures, including ConvNeXt, Swin-Transformer, offering a flexible and efficient solution for modern vision tasks. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FDConv.

A Closer Look at Fourier Spectrum Discrepancies for CNN-generated Images Detection

CNN-based generative modelling has evolved to produce synthetic images indistinguishable from real images in the RGB pixel space. Recent works have observed that CNN-generated images share a systematic shortcoming in replicating high frequency Fourier spectrum decay attributes. Furthermore, these works have successfully exploited this systematic shortcoming to detect CNN-generated images reporting up to 99% accuracy across multiple state-of-the-art GAN models. In this work, we investigate the validity of assertions claiming that CNN-generated images are unable to achieve high frequency spectral decay consistency. We meticulously construct a counterexample space of high frequency spectral decay consistent CNN-generated images emerging from our handcrafted experiments using DCGAN, LSGAN, WGAN-GP and StarGAN, where we empirically show that this frequency discrepancy can be avoided by a minor architecture change in the last upsampling operation. We subsequently use images from this counterexample space to successfully bypass the recently proposed forensics detector which leverages on high frequency Fourier spectrum decay attributes for CNN-generated image detection. Through this study, we show that high frequency Fourier spectrum decay discrepancies are not inherent characteristics for existing CNN-based generative models--contrary to the belief of some existing work--, and such features are not robust to perform synthetic image detection. Our results prompt re-thinking of using high frequency Fourier spectrum decay attributes for CNN-generated image detection. Code and models are available at https://keshik6.github.io/Fourier-Discrepancies-CNN-Detection/

Image Super-resolution Via Latent Diffusion: A Sampling-space Mixture Of Experts And Frequency-augmented Decoder Approach

The recent use of diffusion prior, enhanced by pre-trained text-image models, has markedly elevated the performance of image super-resolution (SR). To alleviate the huge computational cost required by pixel-based diffusion SR, latent-based methods utilize a feature encoder to transform the image and then implement the SR image generation in a compact latent space. Nevertheless, there are two major issues that limit the performance of latent-based diffusion. First, the compression of latent space usually causes reconstruction distortion. Second, huge computational cost constrains the parameter scale of the diffusion model. To counteract these issues, we first propose a frequency compensation module that enhances the frequency components from latent space to pixel space. The reconstruction distortion (especially for high-frequency information) can be significantly decreased. Then, we propose to use Sample-Space Mixture of Experts (SS-MoE) to achieve more powerful latent-based SR, which steadily improves the capacity of the model without a significant increase in inference costs. These carefully crafted designs contribute to performance improvements in largely explored 4x blind super-resolution benchmarks and extend to large magnification factors, i.e., 8x image SR benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/amandaluof/moe_sr.

ShapeFormer: Shapelet Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Multivariate time series classification (MTSC) has attracted significant research attention due to its diverse real-world applications. Recently, exploiting transformers for MTSC has achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, existing methods focus on generic features, providing a comprehensive understanding of data, but they ignore class-specific features crucial for learning the representative characteristics of each class. This leads to poor performance in the case of imbalanced datasets or datasets with similar overall patterns but differing in minor class-specific details. In this paper, we propose a novel Shapelet Transformer (ShapeFormer), which comprises class-specific and generic transformer modules to capture both of these features. In the class-specific module, we introduce the discovery method to extract the discriminative subsequences of each class (i.e. shapelets) from the training set. We then propose a Shapelet Filter to learn the difference features between these shapelets and the input time series. We found that the difference feature for each shapelet contains important class-specific features, as it shows a significant distinction between its class and others. In the generic module, convolution filters are used to extract generic features that contain information to distinguish among all classes. For each module, we employ the transformer encoder to capture the correlation between their features. As a result, the combination of two transformer modules allows our model to exploit the power of both types of features, thereby enhancing the classification performance. Our experiments on 30 UEA MTSC datasets demonstrate that ShapeFormer has achieved the highest accuracy ranking compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/xuanmay2701/shapeformer.

Chirp Localization via Fine-Tuned Transformer Model: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Spectrograms are pivotal in time-frequency signal analysis, widely used in audio processing and computational neuroscience. Chirp-like patterns in electroencephalogram (EEG) spectrograms (marked by linear or exponential frequency sweep) are key biomarkers for seizure dynamics, but automated tools for their detection, localization, and feature extraction are lacking. This study bridges this gap by fine-tuning a Vision Transformer (ViT) model on synthetic spectrograms, augmented with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to boost adaptability. We generated 100000 synthetic spectrograms with chirp parameters, creating the first large-scale benchmark for chirp localization. These spectrograms mimic neural chirps using linear or exponential frequency sweep, Gaussian noise, and smoothing. A ViT model, adapted for regression, predicted chirp parameters. LoRA fine-tuned the attention layers, enabling efficient updates to the pre-trained backbone. Training used MSE loss and the AdamW optimizer, with a learning rate scheduler and early stopping to curb overfitting. Only three features were targeted: Chirp Start Time (Onset Time), Chirp Start Frequency (Onset Frequency), and Chirp End Frequency (Offset Frequency). Performance was evaluated via Pearson correlation between predicted and actual labels. Results showed strong alignment: 0.9841 correlation for chirp start time, with stable inference times (137 to 140s) and minimal bias in error distributions. This approach offers a tool for chirp analysis in EEG time-frequency representation, filling a critical methodological void.

Spatial Frequency Modulation for Semantic Segmentation

High spatial frequency information, including fine details like textures, significantly contributes to the accuracy of semantic segmentation. However, according to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, high-frequency components are vulnerable to aliasing or distortion when propagating through downsampling layers such as strided-convolution. Here, we propose a novel Spatial Frequency Modulation (SFM) that modulates high-frequency features to a lower frequency before downsampling and then demodulates them back during upsampling. Specifically, we implement modulation through adaptive resampling (ARS) and design a lightweight add-on that can densely sample the high-frequency areas to scale up the signal, thereby lowering its frequency in accordance with the Frequency Scaling Property. We also propose Multi-Scale Adaptive Upsampling (MSAU) to demodulate the modulated feature and recover high-frequency information through non-uniform upsampling This module further improves segmentation by explicitly exploiting information interaction between densely and sparsely resampled areas at multiple scales. Both modules can seamlessly integrate with various architectures, extending from convolutional neural networks to transformers. Feature visualization and analysis confirm that our method effectively alleviates aliasing while successfully retaining details after demodulation. Finally, we validate the broad applicability and effectiveness of SFM by extending it to image classification, adversarial robustness, instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/SFM.

Task-Generalized Adaptive Cross-Domain Learning for Multimodal Image Fusion

Multimodal Image Fusion (MMIF) aims to integrate complementary information from different imaging modalities to overcome the limitations of individual sensors. It enhances image quality and facilitates downstream applications such as remote sensing, medical diagnostics, and robotics. Despite significant advancements, current MMIF methods still face challenges such as modality misalignment, high-frequency detail destruction, and task-specific limitations. To address these challenges, we propose AdaSFFuse, a novel framework for task-generalized MMIF through adaptive cross-domain co-fusion learning. AdaSFFuse introduces two key innovations: the Adaptive Approximate Wavelet Transform (AdaWAT) for frequency decoupling, and the Spatial-Frequency Mamba Blocks for efficient multimodal fusion. AdaWAT adaptively separates the high- and low-frequency components of multimodal images from different scenes, enabling fine-grained extraction and alignment of distinct frequency characteristics for each modality. The Spatial-Frequency Mamba Blocks facilitate cross-domain fusion in both spatial and frequency domains, enhancing this process. These blocks dynamically adjust through learnable mappings to ensure robust fusion across diverse modalities. By combining these components, AdaSFFuse improves the alignment and integration of multimodal features, reduces frequency loss, and preserves critical details. Extensive experiments on four MMIF tasks -- Infrared-Visible Image Fusion (IVF), Multi-Focus Image Fusion (MFF), Multi-Exposure Image Fusion (MEF), and Medical Image Fusion (MIF) -- demonstrate AdaSFFuse's superior fusion performance, ensuring both low computational cost and a compact network, offering a strong balance between performance and efficiency. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Zhen-yu-Liu/AdaSFFuse.