Publications

2026
Tobias Christian Nauen, Stanislav Frolov, Brian B. Moser, Federico Raue, Ahmed Anwar, Andreas Dengel
TextTeacher: What Can Language Teach About Images?
Preprint

We use a frozen text encoder on image captions as a lightweight training-time auxiliary objective for image classifiers. The text components are drop.p.ed at inference, leaving a fast, unimodal vision model. Accuracy on ImageNet improves by up to +2.7 p.p. and downstream transfer by +1.0 p.p. on average, outperforming vision knowledge distillation at a fraction of the compute.

2026
Krzysztof Adamkiewicz, Brian Bernhard Moser, Stanislav Frolov, Tobias Christian Nauen, Federico Raue, Andreas Dengel
When Pretty Isn't Useful: Investigating Why Modern Text-to-Image Models Fail as Reliable Training Data Generators
Accepted to CVPR 2026

We show that newer text-to-image models are progressively worse as training data generators, despite better visual quality, because they collapse to a narrow aesthetic-centric distribution that diverges from real data.

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2026
Brian Bernhard Moser, Shalini Sarode, Federico Raue, Krzysztof Adamkiewicz, Arundhati Shanbhag, Joachim Folz, Tobias Christian Nauen, Andreas Dengel
PRISM: Diversifying Dataset Distillation by Decoupling Architectural Priors
TMLR

We introduce PRISM, a framework that disentangles architectural priors for dataset distillation, outperforming single-teacher setups.

2025
Brian Bernhard Moser, Tobias Christian Nauen, Arundhati Shanbhag, Federico Raue, Stanislav Frolov, Joachim Folz, Andreas Dengel
SubZeroCore: A Submodular Approach with Zero Training for Coreset Selection
arXiv

We introduce SubZeroCore, a novel, training-free coreset selection method that integrates submodular coverage and density into a single, unified objective.

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2025
Brian Bernhard Moser, Arundhati Shanbhag, Tobias Christian Nauen, Stanislav Frolov, Federico Raue, Joachim Folz, Andreas Dengel
HyperCore: Coreset Selection under Noise via Hypersphere Models
Accepted to ICPR 2026

We present HyperCore, a lightweight adaptive coreset selection framework designed for noisy environments. HyperCore utilizes per class hypersphere models and adaptively selects pruning thresholds.

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2025
Brian B. Moser, Stanislav Frolov, Tobias Christian Nauen, Federico Raue, Andreas Dengel
When 512×512 is not Enough: Local Degradation-Aware Multi-Diffusion for Extreme Image Super-Resolution
ICIP 2025

We extend pretrained super-resolution models to larger images by using local-aware prompts.

2025
Peter Bank, Christian Bayer, Paul Peter Hager, Sebastian Riedel, Tobias Christian Nauen
Stochastic Control with Signatures
SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics

This paper proposes a new method to parameterize open loop controls in stochastic optimal control problems using path signatures. We show that these controls are dense in the space of all admissible controls and establish conditions for stability of the controlled dynamics and target functional.

2025
Tobias Christian Nauen, Brian Moser, Federico Raue, Stanislav Frolov, Andreas Dengel
ForAug: Recombining Foregrounds and Backgrounds to Improve Vision Transformer Training with Bias Mitigation
arXiv

We improve the training of vision transformers by segmenting and recombining objects and backgrounds from datasets. This makes the transformers more accurate, as well as more robust.

2025
Tobias Christian Nauen, Sebastian Palacio, Federico Raue, Andreas Dengel
Which Transformer to Favor: A Comparative Analysis of Efficiency in Vision Transformers
WACV 2025

A comprehensive benchmark and analysis of more than 45 transformer models for image classification to evaluate their efficiency, considering various performance metrics. We find the optimal architectures to use and uncover that model-scaling is more efficient than image scaling.

2025
Tobias Dietz, Brian Bernhard Moser, Tobias Christian Nauen, Federico Raue, Stanislav Frolov, Andreas Dengel
A Study in Dataset Distillation for Image Super-Resolution
Accepted to ICPR 2026

We conduct the first systematic study of dataset distillation for Super-Resolution.

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2024
Tobias Christian Nauen, Sebastian Palacio, Andreas Dengel
TaylorShift: Shifting the Complexity of Self-Attention from Squared to Linear (and Back) using Taylor-Softmax
ICPR 2024 (oral)

This paper introduces TaylorShift, a novel reformulation of the attention mechanism using Taylor softmax that enables computing full token-to-token interactions in linear time. We analytically and empirically determine the crossover points where employing TaylorShift becomes more efficient than traditional attention. TaylorShift outperforms the traditional transformer architecture in 4 out of 5 tasks.

2024
Arundhati S Shanbhag, Brian Bernhard Moser, Tobias Christian Nauen, Stanislav Frolov, Federico Raue, Andreas Dengel
Just Leaf It: Accelerating Diffusion Classifiers with Hierarchical Class Pruning
arXiv

We speed up diffusion classifiers by utilizing a label hierarchy and pruning unrelated paths.

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2024
Brian Bernhard Moser, Federico Raue, Tobias Christian Nauen, Stanislav Frolov, Andreas Dengel
Distill the Best, Ignore the Rest: Improving Dataset Distillation with Loss-Value-Based Pruning
arXiv

We improve dataset distillation by distilling only a representative coreset.

2024
Sanath Budakegowdanadoddi Nagaraju, Brian Bernhard Moser, Tobias Christian Nauen, Stanislav Frolov, Federico Raue, Andreas Dengel
A Low-Resolution Image is Worth 1x1 Words: Enabling Fine Image Super-Resolution with Transformers and TaylorShift
Accepted to ICPR 2026

We utilize the TaylorShift attention mechanism for global pixel-wise-attention in image super-resolution.

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2022
Tobias Christian Nauen, Sebastian Riedel
Stochastic Optimal Control using Signatures
Master Thesis

We consider a stochastic control problem and try to solve it using the signature method.

2021
Tobias Christian Nauen, Thorben Funke, Avishek Anand
Explaining Graph Neural Networks
Bachelor Thesis

We extend and test KEdge, an interpretable-by-design approach for graph neural networks, and compare it to gradient-based attribution techniques.