Efficient human-database interaction is a core problem in software engineering. Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) tackles this by mapping natural language questions to executable SQL queries, enabling automatic SQL synthesis and reliable interaction. Although large language models (LLMs) have advanced significantly, current approaches struggle with poor transferability to open-source LLMs, limited robustness against logic and function errors in complex queries, and inefficiencies in structured search. We introduce SQL-o1, a self-reward-driven heuristic search framework built on an agent-based architecture to enhance model reasoning capabilities. SQL-o1 leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for structured, multi-step exploration and incorporates a dynamic pruning strategy to accelerate inference without sacrificing accuracy. On the Spider and BIRD benchmarks, SQL-o1 achieves a 10.8-point execution accuracy improvement on the complex BIRD dataset, surpassing even GPT-4-based models. It exhibits strong few-shot generalization and robust cross-model transferability across open-source LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShuaiLyu0110/SQL-o1.
We present point2vec, a self-supervised method for learning point cloud representations through masked prediction of a teacher network's latent features. Building on data2vec, we investigate a limitation of applying this approach to point clouds: positional information associated with masked patches reveals the overall object shape to the student, weakening the learning task even under heavy masking. point2vec addresses this issue by passing only visible patches to the student encoder and introducing a shallow decoder to predict representations for masked patches. The teacher processes the complete point cloud to provide contextualized training targets. These targets capture global context through the teacher's self-attention, providing supervision beyond the local geometry of individual patches. This design conceals masked-patch positions from the student and reduces its computational cost during pre-training. Our ablations show that the decoder alone provides only part of the improvement; concealing positional information is key. After pre-training on ShapeNet, point2vec outperforms the evaluated self-supervised baselines on shape classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN and few-shot classification on ModelNet40, while achieving competitive part segmentation results on ShapeNetPart.
Machine learning methods often struggle with real-world applications in science and engineering due to limited or low-quality training data. In this work, the example of groundwater flow with heat transport is considered; this corresponds to an advection-diffusion process under heterogeneous flow conditions, that is, spatially distributed material parameters and heat sources. Classical numerical simulations are costly and challenging due to high spatio-temporal resolution requirements and large domains. While often computationally more efficient, purely data-driven surrogate models face difficulties, particularly in predicting the advection process, which is highly sensitive to input variations and involves long-range spatial interactions. Therefore, in this work, a Local-Global Convolutional Neural Network (LGCNN) approach is introduced. It combines a lightweight numerical surrogate for the transport process (global) with convolutional neural networks for the groundwater velocity and heat diffusion processes (local). With the LGCNN, a city-wide subsurface temperature field is modeled, involving a heterogeneous groundwater flow field and one hundred groundwater heat pump injection points forming interacting heat plumes over long distances. The model is first systematically analyzed based on random subsurface input fields. Then, the model is trained on a handful of cut-outs from a real-world subsurface map of the Munich region in Germany, and it scales to larger cut-outs without retraining. All datasets, our code, and trained models are published for reproducibility.
Foundation models have revolutionized music information retrieval, but questions remain about their ability to generalize across diverse musical traditions. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art audio foundation models across six musical corpora spanning Western popular, Greek, Turkish, and Indian classical traditions. We employ three complementary methodologies to investigate these models' cross-cultural capabilities: probing to assess inherent representations, targeted supervised fine-tuning of 1-2 layers, and multi-label few-shot learning for low-resource scenarios. Our analysis shows varying cross-cultural generalization, with larger models typically outperforming on non-Western music, though results decline for culturally distant traditions. Notably, our approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance on five out of six evaluated datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of foundation models for world music understanding. We also find that our targeted fine-tuning approach does not consistently outperform probing across all settings, suggesting foundation models already encode substantial musical knowledge. Our evaluation framework and benchmarking results contribute to understanding how far current models are from achieving universal music representations while establishing metrics for future progress.
On-device learning at the edge enables low-latency, private personalization with improved long-term robustness and reduced maintenance costs. Yet, achieving scalable, low-power end-to-end on-chip learning, especially from real-world sequential data with a limited number of examples, is an open challenge. Indeed, accelerators supporting error backpropagation optimize for learning performance at the expense of inference efficiency, while simplified learning algorithms often fail to reach acceptable accuracy targets. In this work, we present Chameleon, leveraging three key contributions to solve these challenges. (i) A unified learning and inference architecture supports few-shot learning (FSL), continual learning (CL) and inference at only 0.5% area overhead to the inference logic. (ii) Long temporal dependencies are efficiently captured with temporal convolutional networks (TCNs), enabling the first demonstration of end-to-end on-chip FSL and CL on sequential data and inference on 16-kHz raw audio. (iii) A dual-mode, matrix-multiplication-free compute array allows either matching the power consumption of state-of-the-art inference-only keyword spotting (KWS) accelerators or enabling $4.3\times$ higher peak GOPS. Fabricated in 40-nm CMOS, Chameleon sets new accuracy records on Omniglot for end-to-end on-chip FSL (96.8%, 5-way 1-shot, 98.8%, 5-way 5-shot) and CL (82.2% final accuracy for learning 250 classes with 10 shots), while maintaining an inference accuracy of 93.3% on the 12-class Google Speech Commands dataset at an extreme-edge power budget of 3.1 $\mu$W.
Cross-view geo-localization determines the location of a query image, captured by a drone or ground-based camera, by matching it to a geo-referenced satellite image. While traditional approaches focus on image-level localization, many applications, such as search-and-rescue, infrastructure inspection, and precision delivery, demand object-level accuracy. This enables users to prompt a specific object with a single click on a drone image to retrieve precise geo-tagged information of the object. However, variations in viewpoints, timing, and imaging conditions pose significant challenges, especially when identifying visually similar objects in extensive satellite imagery. To address these challenges, we propose an Object-level Cross-view Geo-localization Network (OCGNet). It integrates user-specified click locations using Gaussian Kernel Transfer (GKT) to preserve location information throughout the network. This cue is dually embedded into the feature encoder and feature matching blocks, ensuring robust object-specific localization. Additionally, OCGNet incorporates a Location Enhancement (LE) module and a Multi-Head Cross Attention (MHCA) module to adaptively emphasize object-specific features or expand focus to relevant contextual regions when necessary. OCGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on a public dataset, CVOGL. It also demonstrates few-shot learning capabilities, effectively generalizing from limited examples, making it suitable for diverse applications (https://github.com/ZheyangH/OCGNet).
Metadata extraction is essential for cataloging and preserving datasets, enabling effective research discovery and reproducibility, especially given the current exponential growth in scientific research. While Masader (Alyafeai et al.,2021) laid the groundwork for extracting a wide range of metadata attributes from Arabic NLP datasets' scholarly articles, it relies heavily on manual annotation. In this paper, we present MOLE, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically extract metadata attributes from scientific papers covering datasets of languages other than Arabic. Our schema-driven methodology processes entire documents across multiple input formats and incorporates robust validation mechanisms for consistent output. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark to evaluate the research progress on this task. Through systematic analysis of context length, few-shot learning, and web browsing integration, we demonstrate that modern LLMs show promising results in automating this task, highlighting the need for further future work improvements to ensure consistent and reliable performance. We release the code: https://github.com/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE and dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE for the research community.
Recently, Vision-Language foundation models like CLIP and ALIGN, which are pre-trained on large-scale data have shown remarkable zero-shot generalization to diverse datasets with different classes and even domains. In this work, we take a step further and analyze whether these models can be adapted to target datasets having very different distributions and classes compared to what these models have been trained on, using only a few labeled examples from the target dataset. In such scenarios, finetuning large pretrained models is challenging due to problems of overfitting as well as loss of generalization, and has not been well explored in prior literature. Since, the pre-training data of such models are unavailable, it is difficult to comprehend the performance on various downstream datasets. First, we try to answer the question: Given a target dataset with a few labelled examples, can we estimate whether further fine-tuning can enhance the performance compared to zero-shot evaluation? by analyzing the common vision-language embedding space. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel prompt-tuning method, PromptMargin for adapting such large-scale VLMs directly on the few target samples. PromptMargin effectively tunes the text as well as visual prompts for this task, and has two main modules: 1) Firstly, we use a selective augmentation strategy to complement the few training samples in each task; 2) Additionally, to ensure robust training in the presence of unfamiliar class names, we increase the inter-class margin for improved class discrimination using a novel Multimodal Margin Regularizer. Extensive experiments and analysis across fifteen target benchmark datasets, with varying degrees of distribution shifts from natural images, shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework over the existing state-of-the-art approaches applied to this setting. github.com/debarshigit/PromptMargin.
Few-shot classification of hyperspectral images (HSI) faces the challenge of scarce labeled samples. Self-Supervised learning (SSL) and Few-Shot Learning (FSL) offer promising avenues to address this issue. However, existing methods often struggle to adapt to the spatial geometric diversity of HSIs and lack sufficient spectral prior knowledge. To tackle these challenges, we propose a method, Spectral-Spatial Self-Supervised Learning for Few-Shot Hyperspectral Image Classification (S4L-FSC), aimed at improving the performance of few-shot HSI classification. Specifically, we first leverage heterogeneous datasets to pretrain a spatial feature extractor using a designed Rotation-Mirror Self-Supervised Learning (RM-SSL) method, combined with FSL. This approach enables the model to learn the spatial geometric diversity of HSIs using rotation and mirroring labels as supervisory signals, while acquiring transferable spatial meta-knowledge through few-shot learning. Subsequently, homogeneous datasets are utilized to pretrain a spectral feature extractor via a combination of FSL and Masked Reconstruction Self-Supervised Learning (MR-SSL). The model learns to reconstruct original spectral information from randomly masked spectral vectors, inferring spectral dependencies. In parallel, FSL guides the model to extract pixel-level discriminative features, thereby embedding rich spectral priors into the model. This spectral-spatial pretraining method, along with the integration of knowledge from heterogeneous and homogeneous sources, significantly enhances model performance. Extensive experiments on four HSI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed S4L-FSC approach for few-shot HSI classification.
Medical imaging is a cornerstone of modern healthcare, driving advancements in diagnosis, treatment planning, and patient care. Among its various tasks, segmentation remains one of the most challenging problem due to factors such as data accessibility, annotation complexity, structural variability, variation in medical imaging modalities, and privacy constraints. Despite recent progress, achieving robust generalization and domain adaptation remains a significant hurdle, particularly given the resource-intensive nature of some proposed models and their reliance on domain expertise. This survey explores cutting-edge advancements in medical image segmentation, focusing on methodologies such as Generative AI, Few-Shot Learning, Foundation Models, and Universal Models. These approaches offer promising solutions to longstanding challenges. We provide a comprehensive overview of the theoretical foundations, state-of-the-art techniques, and recent applications of these methods. Finally, we discuss inherent limitations, unresolved issues, and future research directions aimed at enhancing the practicality and accessibility of segmentation models in medical imaging. We are maintaining a \href{https://github.com/faresbougourzi/Awesome-DL-for-Medical-Imaging-Segmentation}{GitHub Repository} to continue tracking and updating innovations in this field.
The recently proposed Novel Category Discovery (NCD) adapt paradigm of transductive learning hinders its application in more real-world scenarios. In fact, few labeled data in part of new categories can well alleviate this burden, which coincides with the ease that people can label few of new category data. Therefore, this paper presents a new setting in which a trained agent is able to flexibly switch between the tasks of identifying examples of known (labelled) classes and clustering novel (completely unlabeled) classes as the number of query examples increases by leveraging knowledge learned from only a few (handful) support examples. Drawing inspiration from the discovery of novel categories using prior-based clustering algorithms, we introduce a novel framework that further relaxes its assumptions to the real-world open set level by unifying the concept of model adaptability in few-shot learning. We refer to this setting as Few-Shot Novel Category Discovery (FSNCD) and propose Semi-supervised Hierarchical Clustering (SHC) and Uncertainty-aware K-means Clustering (UKC) to examine the model's reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments and detailed analysis on five commonly used datasets demonstrate that our methods can achieve leading performance levels across different task settings and scenarios.
Intelligent spectrum management is crucial for improving spectrum efficiency and achieving secure utilization of spectrum resources. However, existing intelligent spectrum management methods, typically based on small-scale models, suffer from notable limitations in recognition accuracy, convergence speed, and generalization, particularly in the complex and dynamic spectrum environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel spectrum foundation model, termed SpectrumFM, establishing a new paradigm for spectrum management. SpectrumFM features an innovative encoder architecture that synergistically exploits the convolutional neural networks and the multi-head self-attention mechanisms to enhance feature extraction and enable robust representation learning. The model is pre-trained via two novel self-supervised learning tasks, namely masked reconstruction and next-slot signal prediction, which leverage large-scale in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data to achieve comprehensive and transferable spectrum representations. Furthermore, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy is proposed to enable SpectrumFM to adapt to various downstream spectrum management tasks, including automatic modulation classification (AMC), wireless technology classification (WTC), spectrum sensing (SS), and anomaly detection (AD). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpectrumFM achieves superior performance in terms of accuracy, robustness, adaptability, few-shot learning efficiency, and convergence speed, consistently outperforming conventional methods across multiple benchmarks. Specifically, SpectrumFM improves AMC accuracy by up to 12.1% and WTC accuracy by 9.3%, achieves an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.97 in SS at -4 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and enhances AD performance by over 10%.
Large-scale pre-trained models have achieved remarkable success in language and image tasks, leading an increasing number of studies to explore the application of pre-trained image models, such as CLIP, in the domain of few-shot action recognition (FSAR). However, current methods generally suffer from several problems: 1) Direct fine-tuning often undermines the generalization capability of the pre-trained model; 2) The exploration of task-specific information is insufficient in the visual tasks; 3) The semantic order information is typically overlooked during text modeling; 4) Existing cross-modal alignment techniques ignore the temporal coupling of multimodal information. To address these, we propose Task-Adapter++, a parameter-efficient dual adaptation method for both image and text encoders. Specifically, to make full use of the variations across different few-shot learning tasks, we design a task-specific adaptation for the image encoder so that the most discriminative information can be well noticed during feature extraction. Furthermore, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate detailed sequential sub-action descriptions for each action class, and introduce semantic order adapters into the text encoder to effectively model the sequential relationships between these sub-actions. Finally, we develop an innovative fine-grained cross-modal alignment strategy that actively maps visual features to reside in the same temporal stage as semantic descriptions. Extensive experiments fully demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 benchmarks consistently. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Jaulin-Bage/Task-Adapter-pp.
Stress haunts people in modern society, which may cause severe health issues if left unattended. With social media becoming an integral part of daily life, leveraging social media to detect stress has gained increasing attention. While the majority of the work focuses on classifying stress states and stress categories, this study introduce a new task aimed at estimating more specific stressors (like exam, writing paper, etc.) through users' posts on social media. Unfortunately, the diversity of stressors with many different classes but a few examples per class, combined with the consistent arising of new stressors over time, hinders the machine understanding of stressors. To this end, we cast the stressor estimation problem within a practical scenario few-shot learning setting, and propose a novel meta-learning based stressor estimation framework that is enhanced by a meta-knowledge inheritance mechanism. This model can not only learn generic stressor context through meta-learning, but also has a good generalization ability to estimate new stressors with little labeled data. A fundamental breakthrough in our approach lies in the inclusion of the meta-knowledge inheritance mechanism, which equips our model with the ability to prevent catastrophic forgetting when adapting to new stressors. The experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with the baselines. Additionally, we construct a social media-based stressor estimation dataset that can help train artificial intelligence models to facilitate human well-being. The dataset is now public at \href{https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/xinwangcs/stressor-cause-of-mental-health-problem-dataset}{\underline{Kaggle}} and \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/XinWangcs/Stressor}{\underline{Hugging Face}}.
Gradient-based optimization drives the unprecedented performance of modern deep neural network models across diverse applications. Adaptive algorithms have accelerated neural network training due to their rapid convergence rates; however, they struggle to find ``flat minima" reliably, resulting in suboptimal generalization compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD). By revisiting various adaptive algorithms' mechanisms, we propose the Frankenstein optimizer, which combines their advantages. The proposed Frankenstein dynamically adjusts first- and second-momentum coefficients according to the optimizer's current state to directly maintain consistent learning dynamics and immediately reflect sudden gradient changes. Extensive experiments across several research domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, few-shot learning, and scientific simulations show that Frankenstein surpasses existing adaptive algorithms and SGD empirically regarding convergence speed and generalization performance. Furthermore, this research deepens our understanding of adaptive algorithms through centered kernel alignment analysis and loss landscape visualization during the learning process. Code is available at https://github.com/acctouhou/Frankenstein_optimizer
With its powerful visual-language alignment capability, CLIP performs well in zero-shot and few-shot learning tasks. However, we found in experiments that CLIP's logits suffer from serious inter-class confusion problems in downstream tasks, and the ambiguity between categories seriously affects the accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method called Logits DeConfusion, which effectively learns and eliminates inter-class confusion in logits by combining our Multi-level Adapter Fusion (MAF) module with our Inter-Class Deconfusion (ICD) module. Our MAF extracts features from different levels and fuses them uniformly to enhance feature representation. Our ICD learnably eliminates inter-class confusion in logits with a residual structure. Experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the classification performance and alleviate the inter-class confusion problem. The code is available at https://github.com/LiShuo1001/LDC.
Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) have become one of the fundamental architectural component in point cloud analysis due to its effective feature learning mechanism. However, when processing complex geometric structures in point clouds, MLPs' fixed activation functions struggle to efficiently capture local geometric features, while suffering from poor parameter efficiency and high model redundancy. In this paper, we propose PointKAN, which applies Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to point cloud analysis tasks to investigate their efficacy in hierarchical feature representation. First, we introduce a Geometric Affine Module (GAM) to transform local features, improving the model's robustness to geometric variations. Next, in the Local Feature Processing (LFP), a parallel structure extracts both group-level features and global context, providing a rich representation of both fine details and overall structure. Finally, these features are combined and processed in the Global Feature Processing (GFP). By repeating these operations, the receptive field gradually expands, enabling the model to capture complete geometric information of the point cloud. To overcome the high parameter counts and computational inefficiency of standard KANs, we develop Efficient-KANs in the PointKAN-elite variant, which significantly reduces parameters while maintaining accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that PointKAN outperforms PointMLP on benchmark datasets such as ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN, and ShapeNetPart, with particularly strong performance in Few-shot Learning task. Additionally, PointKAN achieves substantial reductions in parameter counts and computational complexity (FLOPs). This work highlights the potential of KANs-based architectures in 3D vision and opens new avenues for research in point cloud understanding.
Given a single labeled example, in-context segmentation aims to segment corresponding objects. This setting, known as one-shot segmentation in few-shot learning, explores the segmentation model's generalization ability and has been applied to various vision tasks, including scene understanding and image/video editing. While recent Segment Anything Models have achieved state-of-the-art results in interactive segmentation, these approaches are not directly applicable to in-context segmentation. In this work, we propose the Dual Consistency SAM (DC-SAM) method based on prompt-tuning to adapt SAM and SAM2 for in-context segmentation of both images and videos. Our key insights are to enhance the features of the SAM's prompt encoder in segmentation by providing high-quality visual prompts. When generating a mask prior, we fuse the SAM features to better align the prompt encoder. Then, we design a cycle-consistent cross-attention on fused features and initial visual prompts. Next, a dual-branch design is provided by using the discriminative positive and negative prompts in the prompt encoder. Furthermore, we design a simple mask-tube training strategy to adopt our proposed dual consistency method into the mask tube. Although the proposed DC-SAM is primarily designed for images, it can be seamlessly extended to the video domain with the support of SAM2. Given the absence of in-context segmentation in the video domain, we manually curate and construct the first benchmark from existing video segmentation datasets, named In-Context Video Object Segmentation (IC-VOS), to better assess the in-context capability of the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves 55.5 (+1.4) mIoU on COCO-20i, 73.0 (+1.1) mIoU on PASCAL-5i, and a J&F score of 71.52 on the proposed IC-VOS benchmark. Our source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/zaplm/DC-SAM.
The practical application of AI tools for specific computer vision tasks relies on the "small-data regime" of hundreds to thousands of labeled samples. This small-data regime is vital for applications requiring expensive expert annotations, such as ecological monitoring, medical diagnostics or industrial quality control. We find, however, that computer vision research has ignored the small data regime as evaluations increasingly focus on zero- and few-shot learning. We use the Natural World Tasks (NeWT) benchmark to compare multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and vision-only methods across varying training set sizes. MLLMs exhibit early performance plateaus, while vision-only methods improve throughout the small-data regime, with performance gaps widening beyond 10 training examples. We provide the first comprehensive comparison between these approaches in small-data contexts and advocate for explicit small-data evaluations in AI research to better bridge theoretical advances with practical deployments.
Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable visual and linguistic capabilities, achieving impressive performance in various tasks such as image recognition and object localization. However, their effectiveness in fine-grained tasks remains an open question. In everyday scenarios, individuals encountering design materials, such as magazines, typography tutorials, research papers, or branding content, may wish to identify aesthetically pleasing fonts used in the text. Given their multimodal capabilities and free accessibility, many VLMs are often considered potential tools for font recognition. This raises a fundamental question: Do VLMs truly possess the capability to recognize fonts? To investigate this, we introduce the Font Recognition Benchmark (FRB), a compact and well-structured dataset comprising 15 commonly used fonts. FRB includes two versions: (i) an easy version, where 10 sentences are rendered in different fonts, and (ii) a hard version, where each text sample consists of the names of the 15 fonts themselves, introducing a stroop effect that challenges model perception. Through extensive evaluation of various VLMs on font recognition tasks, we arrive at the following key findings: (i) Current VLMs exhibit limited font recognition capabilities, with many state-of-the-art models failing to achieve satisfactory performance. (ii) Few-shot learning and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting provide minimal benefits in improving font recognition accuracy across different VLMs. (iii) Attention analysis sheds light on the inherent limitations of VLMs in capturing semantic features.