Yating Liu

Xulin Li, Yan Lu, Bin Liu et al.

Graph-based models have achieved great success in person re-identification tasks recently, which compute the graph topology structure (affinities) among different people first and then pass the information across them to achieve stronger features. But we find existing graph-based methods in the visible-infrared person re-identification task (VI-ReID) suffer from bad generalization because of two issues: 1) train-test modality balance gap, which is a property of VI-ReID task. The number of two modalities data are balanced in the training stage, but extremely unbalanced in inference, causing the low generalization of graph-based VI-ReID methods. 2) sub-optimal topology structure caused by the end-to-end learning manner to the graph module. We analyze that the well-trained input features weaken the learning of graph topology, making it not generalized enough during the inference process. In this paper, we propose a Counterfactual Intervention Feature Transfer (CIFT) method to tackle these problems. Specifically, a Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Feature Transfer (H2FT) is designed to reduce the train-test modality balance gap by two independent types of well-designed graph modules and an unbalanced scenario simulation. Besides, a Counterfactual Relation Intervention (CRI) is proposed to utilize the counterfactual intervention and causal effect tools to highlight the role of topology structure in the whole training process, which makes the graph topology structure more reliable. Extensive experiments on standard VI-ReID benchmarks demonstrate that CIFT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under various settings.

Yating Liu, Yaowei Li, Zimo Liu et al.

Text-based Person Retrieval (TPR) aims to retrieve the target person images given a textual query. The primary challenge lies in bridging the substantial gap between vision and language modalities, especially when dealing with limited large-scale datasets. In this paper, we introduce a CLIP-based Synergistic Knowledge Transfer (CSKT) approach for TPR. Specifically, to explore the CLIP's knowledge on input side, we first propose a Bidirectional Prompts Transferring (BPT) module constructed by text-to-image and image-to-text bidirectional prompts and coupling projections. Secondly, Dual Adapters Transferring (DAT) is designed to transfer knowledge on output side of Multi-Head Attention (MHA) in vision and language. This synergistic two-way collaborative mechanism promotes the early-stage feature fusion and efficiently exploits the existing knowledge of CLIP. CSKT outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches across three benchmark datasets when the training parameters merely account for 7.4% of the entire model, demonstrating its remarkable efficiency, effectiveness and generalization.

Yan Lu, Xinzhu Ma, Lei Yang et al.

Geometry plays a significant role in monocular 3D object detection. It can be used to estimate object depth by using the perspective projection between object's physical size and 2D projection in the image plane, which can introduce mathematical priors into deep models. However, this projection process also introduces error amplification, where the error of the estimated height is amplified and reflected into the projected depth. It leads to unreliable depth inferences and also impairs training stability. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Geometry Uncertainty Propagation Network (GUPNet++) by modeling geometry projection in a probabilistic manner. This ensures depth predictions are well-bounded and associated with a reasonable uncertainty. The significance of introducing such geometric uncertainty is two-fold: (1). It models the uncertainty propagation relationship of the geometry projection during training, improving the stability and efficiency of the end-to-end model learning. (2). It can be derived to a highly reliable confidence to indicate the quality of the 3D detection result, enabling more reliable detection inference. Experiments show that the proposed approach not only obtains (state-of-the-art) SOTA performance in image-based monocular 3D detection but also demonstrates superiority in efficacy with a simplified framework.

Wanghan Xu, Yuhao Zhou, Yifan Zhou et al.

Despite advances in scientific AI, a coherent framework for Scientific General Intelligence (SGI)-the ability to autonomously conceive, investigate, and reason across scientific domains-remains lacking. We present an operational SGI definition grounded in the Practical Inquiry Model (PIM: Deliberation, Conception, Action, Perception) and operationalize it via four scientist-aligned tasks: deep research, idea generation, dry/wet experiments, and experimental reasoning. SGI-Bench comprises over 1,000 expert-curated, cross-disciplinary samples inspired by Science's 125 Big Questions, enabling systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs. Results reveal gaps: low exact match (10--20%) in deep research despite step-level alignment; ideas lacking feasibility and detail; high code executability but low execution result accuracy in dry experiments; low sequence fidelity in wet protocols; and persistent multimodal comparative-reasoning challenges. We further introduce Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL), which optimizes retrieval-augmented novelty rewards at inference, enhancing hypothesis novelty without reference answer. Together, our PIM-grounded definition, workflow-centric benchmark, and empirical insights establish a foundation for AI systems that genuinely participate in scientific discovery.

Yating Liu, Yaowei Li, Xiangyuan Lan et al.

Text-based Person Retrieval (TPR) as a multi-modal task, which aims to retrieve the target person from a pool of candidate images given a text description, has recently garnered considerable attention due to the progress of contrastive visual-language pre-trained model. Prior works leverage pre-trained CLIP to extract person visual and textual features and fully fine-tune the entire network, which have shown notable performance improvements compared to uni-modal pre-training models. However, full-tuning a large model is prone to overfitting and hinders the generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel Unified Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) method for Text-based Person Retrieval (UP-Person) to thoroughly transfer the multi-modal knowledge from CLIP. Specifically, UP-Person simultaneously integrates three lightweight PETL components including Prefix, LoRA and Adapter, where Prefix and LoRA are devised together to mine local information with task-specific information prompts, and Adapter is designed to adjust global feature representations. Additionally, two vanilla submodules are optimized to adapt to the unified architecture of TPR. For one thing, S-Prefix is proposed to boost attention of prefix and enhance the gradient propagation of prefix tokens, which improves the flexibility and performance of the vanilla prefix. For another thing, L-Adapter is designed in parallel with layer normalization to adjust the overall distribution, which can resolve conflicts caused by overlap and interaction among multiple submodules. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our UP-Person achieves state-of-the-art results across various person retrieval datasets, including CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES and RSTPReid while merely fine-tuning 4.7\% parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/Liu-Yating/UP-Person.

Yaowei Li, Xiaoyu Li, Zhaoyang Zhang et al.

Image customization, a crucial technique for industrial media production, aims to generate content that is consistent with reference images. However, current approaches conventionally separate image customization into position-aware and position-free customization paradigms and lack a universal framework for diverse customization, limiting their applications across various scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose IC-Custom, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates position-aware and position-free image customization through in-context learning. IC-Custom concatenates reference images with target images to a polyptych, leveraging DiT's multi-modal attention mechanism for fine-grained token-level interactions. We propose the In-context Multi-Modal Attention (ICMA) mechanism, which employs learnable task-oriented register tokens and boundary-aware positional embeddings to enable the model to effectively handle diverse tasks and distinguish between inputs in polyptych configurations. To address the data gap, we curated a 12K identity-consistent dataset with 8K real-world and 4K high-quality synthetic samples, avoiding the overly glossy, oversaturated look typical of synthetic data. IC-Custom supports various industrial applications, including try-on, image insertion, and creative IP customization. Extensive evaluations on our proposed ProductBench and the publicly available DreamBench demonstrate that IC-Custom significantly outperforms community workflows, closed-source models, and state-of-the-art open-source approaches. IC-Custom achieves about 73\% higher human preference across identity consistency, harmony, and text alignment metrics, while training only 0.4\% of the original model parameters. Project page: https://liyaowei-stu.github.io/project/IC_Custom

Yue Li, Xiao Li, Hao Wu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated software development, making their ability to preserve secure coding practices critical. In practice, however, many security requirements are implicit or underspecified, whereas usability requirements are explicit and high-signal. This asymmetry motivates our investigation of usability pressure as a practical attack surface: realistic usability-oriented requirements (e.g., new features, performance constraints, or simplicity demands) can cause coding LLMs to satisfy explicit usability goals while silently dropping implicit security constraints -- a form of reward hacking. We formalize this threat as UPAttack and propose U-SPLOIT, an automated framework to craft UPAttack that (i) selects tasks where a model is initially secure, (ii) synthesizes usability pressures by identifying usability rewards of insecure alternatives across three vectors (Functionality, Implementation, Trade-off), and (iii) verifies security regression via both existing test cases and dynamically generated exploit payloads. Across 75 seed scenarios (25 CWEs x 3 cases), spanning multiple languages (Python, C, and JavaScript), U-SPLOIT achieves attack success rates up to 98.1% on multiple state-of-the-art models (e.g., GPT-5.2-chat and Gemini-3-Flash-Preview).

Yating Liu, Yujie Zhang, Qi Yang et al.

Recently, the advancements in Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) have driven the demand for Dynamic Point Clouds (DPC). Unlike static point clouds, DPCs are capable of capturing temporal changes within objects or scenes, offering a more accurate simulation of the real world. While significant progress has been made in the quality assessment research of static point cloud, little study has been done on Dynamic Point Cloud Quality Assessment (DPCQA), which hinders the development of quality-oriented applications, such as interframe compression and transmission in practical scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale DPCQA database, named DPCD, which includes 15 reference DPCs and 525 distorted DPCs from seven types of lossy compression and noise distortion. By rendering these samples to Processed Video Sequences (PVS), a comprehensive subjective experiment is conducted to obtain Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) from 21 viewers for analysis. The characteristic of contents, impact of various distortions, and accuracy of MOSs are presented to validate the heterogeneity and reliability of the proposed database. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of several objective metrics on DPCD. The experiment results show that DPCQA is more challenge than that of static point cloud. The DPCD, which serves as a catalyst for new research endeavors on DPCQA, is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Olivialyt/DPCD.

Yating Liu, Yan Lu

Unsupervised remote sensing change detection aims to monitor and analyze changes from multi-temporal remote sensing images in the same geometric region at different times, without the need for labeled training data. Previous unsupervised methods attempt to achieve style transfer across multi-temporal remote sensing images through reconstruction by a generator network, and then capture the unreconstructable areas as the changed regions. However, it often leads to poor performance due to generator overfitting. In this paper, we propose a novel Consistency Change Detection Framework (CCDF) to address this challenge. Specifically, we introduce a Cycle Consistency (CC) module to reduce the overfitting issues in the generator-based reconstruction. Additionally, we propose a Semantic Consistency (SC) module to enable detail reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.

Yuzhen Zhao, Yating Liu, Marc Hoffmann

This paper addresses the nonparametric estimation of the drift function over a compact domain for a time-homogeneous diffusion process, based on high-frequency discrete observations from $N$ independent trajectories. We propose a neural network-based estimator and derive a non-asymptotic convergence rate, decomposed into a training error, an approximation error, and a diffusion-related term scaling as ${\log N}/{N}$. For compositional drift functions, we establish an explicit rate. In the numerical experiments, we consider a drift function with local fluctuations generated by a double-layer compositional structure featuring local oscillations, and show that the empirical convergence rate becomes independent of the input dimension $d$. Compared to the $B$-spline method, the neural network estimator achieves better convergence rates and more effectively captures local features, particularly in higher-dimensional settings.

Yating Liu, Zimo Liu, Xiangyuan Lan et al.

Text-based person retrieval (TPR) has gained significant attention as a fine-grained and challenging task that closely aligns with practical applications. Tailoring CLIP to person domain is now a emerging research topic due to the abundant knowledge of vision-language pretraining, but challenges still remain during fine-tuning: (i) Previous full-model fine-tuning in TPR is computationally expensive and prone to overfitting.(ii) Existing parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) for TPR lacks of fine-grained feature extraction. To address these issues, we propose Domain-Aware Mixture-of-Adapters (DM-Adapter), which unifies Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) and PETL to enhance fine-grained feature representations while maintaining efficiency. Specifically, Sparse Mixture-of-Adapters is designed in parallel to MLP layers in both vision and language branches, where different experts specialize in distinct aspects of person knowledge to handle features more finely. To promote the router to exploit domain information effectively and alleviate the routing imbalance, Domain-Aware Router is then developed by building a novel gating function and injecting learnable domain-aware prompts. Extensive experiments show that our DM-Adapter achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous methods by a significant margin.

Yating Liu, Yujie Zhang, Ziyu Shan et al.

In recent years, No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment (NR-PCQA) research has achieved significant progress. However, existing methods mostly seek a direct mapping function from visual data to the Mean Opinion Score (MOS), which is contradictory to the mechanism of practical subjective evaluation. To address this, we propose a novel language-driven PCQA method named CLIP-PCQA. Considering that human beings prefer to describe visual quality using discrete quality descriptions (e.g., "excellent" and "poor") rather than specific scores, we adopt a retrieval-based mapping strategy to simulate the process of subjective assessment. More specifically, based on the philosophy of CLIP, we calculate the cosine similarity between the visual features and multiple textual features corresponding to different quality descriptions, in which process an effective contrastive loss and learnable prompts are introduced to enhance the feature extraction. Meanwhile, given the personal limitations and bias in subjective experiments, we further covert the feature similarities into probabilities and consider the Opinion Score Distribution (OSD) rather than a single MOS as the final target. Experimental results show that our CLIP-PCQA outperforms other State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) approaches.

Yeo Jin Jung, Yating Liu, Zixuan Wu et al.

Conformal prediction provides distribution-free prediction sets with finite-sample conditional guarantees. We build upon the RKHS-based framework of Gibbs et al. (2023), which leverages families of covariate shifts to provide approximate conditional conformal prediction intervals, an approach with strong theoretical promise, but with prohibitive computational cost. To bridge this gap, we develop a stable and efficient algorithm that computes the full solution path of the regularized RKHS conformal optimization problem, at essentially the same cost as a single kernel quantile fit. Our path-tracing framework simultaneously tunes hyperparameters, providing smoothness control and data-adaptive calibration. To extend the method to high-dimensional settings, we further integrate our approach with low-rank latent embeddings that capture conditional validity in a data-driven latent space. Empirically, our method provides reliable conditional coverage across a variety of modern black-box predictors, improving the interval length of Gibbs et al. (2023) by 30%, while achieving a 40-fold speedup.

Yuzhen Zhao, Jiarong Fan, Yating Liu

We study a supervised multiclass classification problem for diffusion processes, where each class is characterized by a distinct drift function and trajectories are observed at discrete times. Extending the one-dimensional multiclass framework of Denis et al. (2024) to multidimensional diffusions, we propose a neural network-based plug-in classifier that estimates the drift functions for each class from independent sample paths and assigns labels based on a Bayes-type decision rule. Under standard regularity assumptions, we establish convergence rates for the excess misclassification risk, explicitly capturing the effects of drift estimation error and time discretization. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves faster convergence and improved classification performance compared to Denis et al. (2024) in the one-dimensional setting, remains effective in higher dimensions when the underlying drift functions admit a compositional structure, and consistently outperforms direct neural network classifiers trained end-to-end on trajectories without exploiting the diffusion model structure.

Zixuan Wu, So Won Jeong, Yating Liu et al.

With promising empirical performance across a wide range of applications, synthetic data augmentation appears a viable solution to data scarcity and the demands of increasingly data-intensive models. Its effectiveness lies in expanding the training set in a way that reduces estimator variance while introducing only minimal bias. Controlling this bias is therefore critical: effective data augmentation should generate diverse samples from the same underlying distribution as the training set, with minimal shifts. In this paper, we propose conformal data augmentation, a principled data filtering framework that leverages the power of conformal prediction to produce diverse synthetic data while filtering out poor-quality generations with provable risk control. Our method is simple to implement, requires no access to internal model logits, nor large-scale model retraining. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple tasks, including topic prediction, sentiment analysis, image classification, and fraud detection, showing consistent performance improvements of up to 40% in F1 score over unaugmented baselines, and 4% over other filtered augmentation baselines.

Yang Zou, Zhaoshuai Qi, Yating Liu et al.

Object pose estimation, which plays a vital role in robotics, augmented reality, and autonomous driving, has been of great interest in computer vision. Existing studies either require multi-stage pose regression or rely on 2D-3D feature matching. Though these approaches have shown promising results, they rely heavily on appearance information, requiring complex input (i.e., multi-view reference input, depth, or CAD models) and intricate pipeline (i.e., feature extraction-SfM-2D to 3D matching-PnP). We propose AxisPose, a model-free, matching-free, single-shot solution for robust 6D pose estimation, which fundamentally diverges from the existing paradigm. Unlike existing methods that rely on 2D-3D or 2D-2D matching using 3D techniques, such as SfM and PnP, AxisPose directly infers a robust 6D pose from a single view by leveraging a diffusion model to learn the latent axis distribution of objects without reference views. Specifically, AxisPose constructs an Axis Generation Module (AGM) to capture the latent geometric distribution of object axes through a diffusion model. The diffusion process is guided by injecting the gradient of geometric consistency loss into the noise estimation to maintain the geometric consistency of the generated tri-axis. With the generated tri-axis projection, AxisPose further adopts a Triaxial Back-projection Module (TBM) to recover the 6D pose from the object tri-axis. The proposed AxisPose achieves robust performance at the cross-instance level (i.e., one model for N instances) using only a single view as input without reference images, with great potential for generalization to unseen-object level.

Xulin Li, Yan Lu, Bin Liu et al.

Clothes-invariant feature extraction is critical to the clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID). It can provide discriminative identity features and eliminate the negative effects caused by the confounder--clothing changes. But we argue that there exists a strong spurious correlation between clothes and human identity, that restricts the common likelihood-based ReID method P(Y|X) to extract clothes-irrelevant features. In this paper, we propose a new Causal Clothes-Invariant Learning (CCIL) method to achieve clothes-invariant feature learning by modeling causal intervention P(Y|do(X)). This new causality-based model is inherently invariant to the confounder in the causal view, which can achieve the clothes-invariant features and avoid the barrier faced by the likelihood-based methods. Extensive experiments on three CC-ReID benchmarks, including PRCC, LTCC, and VC-Clothes, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves a new state of the art.

Yan Lu, Xinzhu Ma, Lei Yang et al.

Geometry Projection is a powerful depth estimation method in monocular 3D object detection. It estimates depth dependent on heights, which introduces mathematical priors into the deep model. But projection process also introduces the error amplification problem, in which the error of the estimated height will be amplified and reflected greatly at the output depth. This property leads to uncontrollable depth inferences and also damages the training efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Geometry Uncertainty Projection Network (GUP Net) to tackle the error amplification problem at both inference and training stages. Specifically, a GUP module is proposed to obtains the geometry-guided uncertainty of the inferred depth, which not only provides high reliable confidence for each depth but also benefits depth learning. Furthermore, at the training stage, we propose a Hierarchical Task Learning strategy to reduce the instability caused by error amplification. This learning algorithm monitors the learning situation of each task by a proposed indicator and adaptively assigns the proper loss weights for different tasks according to their pre-tasks situation. Based on that, each task starts learning only when its pre-tasks are learned well, which can significantly improve the stability and efficiency of the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The overall model can infer more reliable object depth than existing methods and outperforms the state-of-the-art image-based monocular 3D detectors by 3.74% and 4.7% AP40 of the car and pedestrian categories on the KITTI benchmark.