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R. Timofte

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Conference Open access Aug 2026

When Simplicity Wins: Bottleneck-Aware Context Modeling for Lightweight Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation demands a careful balance between accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, which remains difficult to achieve for high-resolution imagery. Convolutional networks effectively model local patterns but struggle with long-range dependencies, whereas Vision Transformers capture global context at a high computational cost. While recent work largely focuses on encoder design, the bottleneck stage, central to contextual aggregation and information flow, has been relatively overlooked. We propose SiConMo, a lightweight yet effective framework, implemented in two variants: an RGB-only model (SiConMo) and a GME-enhanced variant (SiConMo$_\dagger$). We show that simplicity arises from a key design principle: at very low computational budgets, the bottleneck is the most efficient stage to integrate local and global context. SiConMo integrates three complementary components: a Token Pyramid Extraction Module for hierarchical multi-scale representation, a Transformer-Branched Depthwise Convolution block for bottleneck-aware context modeling, and a Feature Merging Module that preserves spatial structure while enhancing semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on ADE20K, PASCAL Context, Cityscapes, and COCO-Stuff demonstrate that SiConMo achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy-efficiency trade-off among lightweight semantic segmentation models, highlighting simplicity as a powerful design principle.

Mian Muhammad Naeem Abid, Nancy Mehta, Zongwei Wu et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

TRaM-VSR: Importance-Aware Token Routing and Merging for One-Step Diffusion Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution (VSR) using large-scale Diffusion Transformer (DiT) priors achieves exceptional perceptual quality but is often impractical due to the quadratic computational cost of processing dense spatio-temporal token sequences. Existing efficiency-oriented methods risk irreversible detail loss and temporal flickering, a vulnerability especially pronounced in one-step diffusion models. To address this, we propose TRaM-VSR, a Token Routing and Merging framework for adaptive token allocation, leveraging both context-aware video priors and network-level priors. First, token importance is estimated by fusing motion-sensitive temporal cues with semantic text similarity, isolating dynamic objects and structural boundaries. Next, this importance is further calibrated and adjusted by an offline planner to guide routing across optimally grouped network blocks. Technically, within each routed group, structurally critical tokens are processed in a high-fidelity local stream, while less informative tokens are aggregated into a compact global stream, both modulated by network depth and aligned with the multigranular nature of diffusion models. Extensive experiments show that TRaM-VSR accelerates inference significantly while preserving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and robust temporal consistency. The code is available at https://github.com/Ree1s/TRaM-VSR.

Sicheng Gao, Zhuyun Zhou, Yixuan Liu et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

Device-First Feedback: Toward Mobile-Native LLM-Driven Neural Architecture Search

The two studies show that closed-loop GPU fine-tuning does not guarantee monotonic mobile gains, especially on harder classification tasks, and that multi-dataset, on-device measurement is needed to stress-test deployment objectives.

Saif U Din, Muhammad Hussain, R. Timofte et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

LLM-Driven Neural Network Generation with Same-Family Architecture Guidance: Disentangling Transfer and Adaptation

Large language models (LLMs) can generate neural-network modifications, but unrestricted generation is often invalid or harmful. This paper studies a narrower setting: improving a weak target model using a stronger same-family source model from a neural-network database. We propose a source-guided candidate-generation protocol with non-source controls, source-conditioned candidates, and a no-LLM hp_copy ablation under equal evaluation budgets. The protocol reports validity separately from accuracy and selects the best valid candidate only when it improves the target. On CIFAR-10, the strongest source-guided candidate reaches 0.5049 accuracy versus 0.2398 for the best non-source candidate, a +0.2651 advantage, while improving a weak target originally at 0.1254; a five-epoch check preserves the gain at 0.7686 versus 0.4839. On SVHN AlexNet with DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B, source-guided transfer reaches 0.7880 versus 0.2254, a +0.5626 advantage; a fresh repeat reaches 0.8069 versus 0.2509, a +0.5560 advantage. Direct source-recipe copy produces 0.1959 on SVHN AlexNet, matching the original target, while hp_transfer reaches 0.7880, showing that the LLM adapts rather than copies the source recipe. Family-level analysis shows the clearest positive signals for AlexNet, with 6/8 wins across SVHN, Imagenette, and CelebA-Gender, and alt_nn1, with 8/10 wins on CIFAR-10.

Kabir Baghel, R. Timofte, Dmitry Ignatov · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

Similarity-Guided Curriculum Fine-Tuning of LLMs for Neural Architecture Synthesis

A cross-dataset transfer observation on SVHN, where direct base-model generation without curriculum warmup yields 27% peak SR at substantially lower accuracy than the CIFAR-10 equivalent, is reported, consistent with the increased synthesis difficulty of the unq-family anchor architecture.

Anujaya Vijayakumar, R. Timofte, Dmitry Ignatov · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

LEMUR 2: Unlocking Neural Network Diversity for AI

This dataset defines a new basis for reproducible and data-driven AI design, advancing the emerging paradigm of LLM-driven AutoML and architectural generalization across modalities and hardware.

Tolgay Atinc Uzun, Waleed Khalid, Saif U Din et al. · 19 citations