Weiying Xie

Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Weiying Xie et al.

Accurately and timely detecting multiscale small objects that contain tens of pixels from remote sensing images (RSI) remains challenging. Most of the existing solutions primarily design complex deep neural networks to learn strong feature representations for objects separated from the background, which often results in a heavy computation burden. In this article, we propose an accurate yet fast object detection method for RSI, named SuperYOLO, which fuses multimodal data and performs high-resolution (HR) object detection on multiscale objects by utilizing the assisted super resolution (SR) learning and considering both the detection accuracy and computation cost. First, we utilize a symmetric compact multimodal fusion (MF) to extract supplementary information from various data for improving small object detection in RSI. Furthermore, we design a simple and flexible SR branch to learn HR feature representations that can discriminate small objects from vast backgrounds with low-resolution (LR) input, thus further improving the detection accuracy. Moreover, to avoid introducing additional computation, the SR branch is discarded in the inference stage, and the computation of the network model is reduced due to the LR input. Experimental results show that, on the widely used VEDAI RS dataset, SuperYOLO achieves an accuracy of 75.09% (in terms of mAP50 ), which is more than 10% higher than the SOTA large models, such as YOLOv5l, YOLOv5x, and RS designed YOLOrs. Meanwhile, the parameter size and GFLOPs of SuperYOLO are about 18 times and 3.8 times less than YOLOv5x. Our proposed model shows a favorable accuracy and speed tradeoff compared to the state-of-the-art models. The code will be open-sourced at https://github.com/icey-zhang/SuperYOLO.

Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Weiying Xie et al.

Considering the computation complexity, we propose a Guided Hybrid Quantization with One-to-one Self-Teaching (GHOST}) framework. More concretely, we first design a structure called guided quantization self-distillation (GQSD), which is an innovative idea for realizing lightweight through the synergy of quantization and distillation. The training process of the quantization model is guided by its full-precision model, which is time-saving and cost-saving without preparing a huge pre-trained model in advance. Second, we put forward a hybrid quantization (HQ) module to obtain the optimal bit width automatically under a constrained condition where a threshold for distribution distance between the center and samples is applied in the weight value search space. Third, in order to improve information transformation, we propose a one-to-one self-teaching (OST) module to give the student network a ability of self-judgment. A switch control machine (SCM) builds a bridge between the student network and teacher network in the same location to help the teacher to reduce wrong guidance and impart vital knowledge to the student. This distillation method allows a model to learn from itself and gain substantial improvement without any additional supervision. Extensive experiments on a multimodal dataset (VEDAI) and single-modality datasets (DOTA, NWPU, and DIOR) show that object detection based on GHOST outperforms the existing detectors. The tiny parameters (<9.7 MB) and Bit-Operations (BOPs) (<2158 G) compared with any remote sensing-based, lightweight or distillation-based algorithms demonstrate the superiority in the lightweight design domain. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/icey-zhang/GHOST.

Jitao Ma, Weiying Xie, Yunsong Li et al.

Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) is widely used in Earth observation and deep space exploration. A major challenge for HAD is the complex background of the input hyperspectral images (HSIs), resulting in anomalies confused in the background. On the other hand, the lack of labeled samples for HSIs leads to poor generalization of existing HAD methods. This paper starts the first attempt to study a new and generalizable background learning problem without labeled samples. We present a novel solution BSDM (background suppression diffusion model) for HAD, which can simultaneously learn latent background distributions and generalize to different datasets for suppressing complex background. It is featured in three aspects: (1) For the complex background of HSIs, we design pseudo background noise and learn the potential background distribution in it with a diffusion model (DM). (2) For the generalizability problem, we apply a statistical offset module so that the BSDM adapts to datasets of different domains without labeling samples. (3) For achieving background suppression, we innovatively improve the inference process of DM by feeding the original HSIs into the denoising network, which removes the background as noise. Our work paves a new background suppression way for HAD that can improve HAD performance without the prerequisite of manually labeled data. Assessments and generalization experiments of four HAD methods on several real HSI datasets demonstrate the above three unique properties of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/majitao-xd/BSDM-HAD.

Jun Yue, Leyuan Fang, Pedram Ghamisi et al.

In recent years, supervised learning has been widely used in various tasks of optical remote sensing image understanding, including remote sensing image classification, pixel-wise segmentation, change detection, and object detection. The methods based on supervised learning need a large amount of high-quality training data and their performance highly depends on the quality of the labels. However, in practical remote sensing applications, it is often expensive and time-consuming to obtain large-scale data sets with high-quality labels, which leads to a lack of sufficient supervised information. In some cases, only coarse-grained labels can be obtained, resulting in the lack of exact supervision. In addition, the supervised information obtained manually may be wrong, resulting in a lack of accurate supervision. Therefore, remote sensing image understanding often faces the problems of incomplete, inexact, and inaccurate supervised information, which will affect the breadth and depth of remote sensing applications. In order to solve the above-mentioned problems, researchers have explored various tasks in remote sensing image understanding under weak supervision. This paper summarizes the research progress of weakly supervised learning in the field of remote sensing, including three typical weakly supervised paradigms: 1) Incomplete supervision, where only a subset of training data is labeled; 2) Inexact supervision, where only coarse-grained labels of training data are given; 3) Inaccurate supervision, where the labels given are not always true on the ground.

Weiying Xie, Yusi Zhang, Tianlin Hui et al.

Multimodal object detection offers a promising prospect to facilitate robust detection in various visual conditions. However, existing two-stream backbone networks are challenged by complex fusion and substantial parameter increments. This is primarily due to large data distribution biases of multimodal homogeneous information. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal object detector, named Low-rank Modal Adaptors (LMA) with a shared backbone. The shared parameters enhance the consistency of homogeneous information, while lightweight modal adaptors focus on modality unique features. Furthermore, we design an adaptive rank allocation strategy to adapt to the varying heterogeneity at different feature levels. When applied to two multimodal object detection datasets, experiments validate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, on DroneVehicle, LMA attains a 10.4% accuracy improvement over the state-of-the-art method with a 149M-parameters reduction. The code is available at https://github.com/zyszxhy/FoRA. Our work was submitted to ACM MM in April 2024, but was rejected. We will continue to refine our work and paper writing next, mainly including proof of theory and multi-task applications of FoRA.

DaiXun Li, Weiying Xie, ZiXuan Wang et al.

With the rapid development of imaging sensor technology in the field of remote sensing, multi-modal remote sensing data fusion has emerged as a crucial research direction for land cover classification tasks. While diffusion models have made great progress in generative models and image classification tasks, existing models primarily focus on single-modality and single-client control, that is, the diffusion process is driven by a single modal in a single computing node. To facilitate the secure fusion of heterogeneous data from clients, it is necessary to enable distributed multi-modal control, such as merging the hyperspectral data of organization A and the LiDAR data of organization B privately on each base station client. In this study, we propose a multi-modal collaborative diffusion federated learning framework called FedDiff. Our framework establishes a dual-branch diffusion model feature extraction setup, where the two modal data are inputted into separate branches of the encoder. Our key insight is that diffusion models driven by different modalities are inherently complementary in terms of potential denoising steps on which bilateral connections can be built. Considering the challenge of private and efficient communication between multiple clients, we embed the diffusion model into the federated learning communication structure, and introduce a lightweight communication module. Qualitative and quantitative experiments validate the superiority of our framework in terms of image quality and conditional consistency.

DaiXun Li, Weiying Xie, Yunsong Li et al.

Multi-satellite, multi-modality in-orbit fusion is a challenging task as it explores the fusion representation of complex high-dimensional data under limited computational resources. Deep neural networks can reveal the underlying distribution of multi-modal remote sensing data, but the in-orbit fusion of multimodal data is more difficult because of the limitations of different sensor imaging characteristics, especially when the multimodal data follows non-independent identically distribution (Non-IID) distributions. To address this problem while maintaining classification performance, this paper proposes a manifold-driven multi-modality fusion framework, FedFusion, which randomly samples local data on each client to jointly estimate the prominent manifold structure of shallow features of each client and explicitly compresses the feature matrices into a low-rank subspace through cascading and additive approaches, which is used as the feature input of the subsequent classifier. Considering the physical space limitations of the satellite constellation, we developed a multimodal federated learning module designed specifically for manifold data in a deep latent space. This module achieves iterative updating of the sub-network parameters of each client through global weighted averaging, constructing a framework that can represent compact representations of each client. The proposed framework surpasses existing methods in terms of performance on three multimodal datasets, achieving a classification average accuracy of 94.35$\%$ while compressing communication costs by a factor of 4. Furthermore, extensive numerical evaluations of real-world satellite images were conducted on the orbiting edge computing architecture based on Jetson TX2 industrial modules, which demonstrated that FedFusion significantly reduced training time by 48.4 minutes (15.18%) while optimizing accuracy.}

Xin Zhang, Jiawei Du, Yunsong Li et al.

Dataset pruning aims to construct a coreset capable of achieving performance comparable to the original, full dataset. Most existing dataset pruning methods rely on snapshot-based criteria to identify representative samples, often resulting in poor generalization across various pruning and cross-architecture scenarios. Recent studies have addressed this issue by expanding the scope of training dynamics considered, including factors such as forgetting event and probability change, typically using an averaging approach. However, these works struggle to integrate a broader range of training dynamics without overlooking well-generalized samples, which may not be sufficiently highlighted in an averaging manner. In this study, we propose a novel dataset pruning method termed as Temporal Dual-Depth Scoring (TDDS), to tackle this problem. TDDS utilizes a dual-depth strategy to achieve a balance between incorporating extensive training dynamics and identifying representative samples for dataset pruning. In the first depth, we estimate the series of each sample's individual contributions spanning the training progress, ensuring comprehensive integration of training dynamics. In the second depth, we focus on the variability of the sample-wise contributions identified in the first depth to highlight well-generalized samples. Extensive experiments conducted on CIFAR and ImageNet datasets verify the superiority of TDDS over previous SOTA methods. Specifically on CIFAR-100, our method achieves 54.51% accuracy with only 10% training data, surpassing random selection by 7.83% and other comparison methods by at least 12.69%.

Daixun Li, Weiying Xie, Jiaqing Zhang et al.

High-dimensional images, known for their rich semantic information, are widely applied in remote sensing and other fields. The spatial information in these images reflects the object's texture features, while the spectral information reveals the potential spectral representations across different bands. Currently, the understanding of high-dimensional images remains limited to a single-domain perspective with performance degradation. Motivated by the masking texture effect observed in the human visual system, we present a multi-domain diffusion-driven feature learning network (MDFL) , a scheme to redefine the effective information domain that the model really focuses on. This method employs diffusion-based posterior sampling to explicitly consider joint information interactions between the high-dimensional manifold structures in the spectral, spatial, and frequency domains, thereby eliminating the influence of masking texture effects in visual models. Additionally, we introduce a feature reuse mechanism to gather deep and raw features of high-dimensional data. We demonstrate that MDFL significantly improves the feature extraction performance of high-dimensional data, thereby providing a powerful aid for revealing the intrinsic patterns and structures of such data. The experimental results on three multi-modal remote sensing datasets show that MDFL reaches an average overall accuracy of 98.25%, outperforming various state-of-the-art baseline schemes. The code will be released, contributing to the computer vision community.

Daixun Li, Weiying Xie, Mingxiang Cao et al.

Multimodal image fusion and semantic segmentation are critical for autonomous driving. Despite advancements, current models often struggle with segmenting densely packed elements due to a lack of comprehensive fusion features for guidance during training. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) allows precise control during fine-tuning through its flexible prompting encoder, its potential remains largely unexplored in the context of multimodal segmentation for natural images. In this paper, we introduce SAM into multimodal image segmentation for the first time, proposing a novel framework that combines Latent Space Token Generation (LSTG) and Fusion Mask Prompting (FMP) modules. This approach transforms the training methodology for multimodal segmentation from a traditional black-box approach to a controllable, prompt-based mechanism. Specifically, we obtain latent space features for both modalities through vector quantization and embed them into a cross-attention-based inter-domain fusion module to establish long-range dependencies between modalities. We then use these comprehensive fusion features as prompts to guide precise pixel-level segmentation. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms SAM and SAM2 in multimodal autonomous driving scenarios, achieving an average improvement of 4.1$\%$ over the state-of-the-art method in segmentation mIoU, and the performance is also optimized in other multi-modal visual scenes.

Shuran Ma, Weiying Xie, Daixun Li et al.

The rapid development of multimedia has provided a large amount of data with different distributions for visual tasks, forming different domains. Federated Learning (FL) can efficiently use this diverse data distributed on different client media in a decentralized manner through model sharing. However, in open-world scenarios, there is a challenge: global models may struggle to predict well on entirely new domain data captured by certain media, which were not encountered during training. Existing methods still rely on strong statistical correlations between samples and labels to address this issue, which can be misleading, as some features may establish spurious short-cut correlations with the predictions. To comprehensively address this challenge, we introduce FedCD (Cross-Domain Invariant Federated Learning), an overall optimization framework at both the local and global levels. We introduce the Spurious Correlation Intervener (SCI), which employs invariance theory to locally generate interventers for features in a self-supervised manner to reduce the model's susceptibility to spurious correlated features. Our approach requires no sharing of data or features, only the gradients related to the model. Additionally, we develop the simple yet effective Risk Extrapolation Aggregation strategy (REA), determining aggregation coefficients through mathematical optimization to facilitate global causal invariant predictions. Extensive experiments and ablation studies highlight the effectiveness of our approach. In both classification and object detection generalization tasks, our method outperforms the baselines by an average of at least 1.45% in Acc, 4.8% and 1.27% in mAP50.

Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Weiying Xie et al.

In multimodal land cover classification (MLCC), a common challenge is the redundancy in data distribution, where irrelevant information from multiple modalities can hinder the effective integration of their unique features. To tackle this, we introduce the Multimodal Informative Vit (MIVit), a system with an innovative information aggregate-distributing mechanism. This approach redefines redundancy levels and integrates performance-aware elements into the fused representation, facilitating the learning of semantics in both forward and backward directions. MIVit stands out by significantly reducing redundancy in the empirical distribution of each modality's separate and fused features. It employs oriented attention fusion (OAF) for extracting shallow local features across modalities in horizontal and vertical dimensions, and a Transformer feature extractor for extracting deep global features through long-range attention. We also propose an information aggregation constraint (IAC) based on mutual information, designed to remove redundant information and preserve complementary information within embedded features. Additionally, the information distribution flow (IDF) in MIVit enhances performance-awareness by distributing global classification information across different modalities' feature maps. This architecture also addresses missing modality challenges with lightweight independent modality classifiers, reducing the computational load typically associated with Transformers. Our results show that MIVit's bidirectional aggregate-distributing mechanism between modalities is highly effective, achieving an average overall accuracy of 95.56% across three multimodal datasets. This performance surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in MLCC. The code for MIVit is accessible at https://github.com/icey-zhang/MIViT.

Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Weiying Xie et al.

Accurate cloud recognition and warning are crucial for various applications, including in-flight support, weather forecasting, and climate research. However, recent deep learning algorithms have predominantly focused on detecting cloud regions in satellite imagery, with insufficient attention to the specificity required for accurate cloud recognition. This limitation inspired us to develop the novel FY-4A-Himawari-8 (FYH) dataset, which includes nine distinct cloud categories and uses precise domain adaptation methods to align 70,419 image-label pairs in terms of projection, temporal resolution, and spatial resolution, thereby facilitating the training of supervised deep learning networks. Given the complexity and diversity of cloud formations, we have thoroughly analyzed the challenges inherent to cloud recognition tasks, examining the intricate characteristics and distribution of the data. To effectively address these challenges, we designed a Distribution-aware Interactive-Attention Network (DIAnet), which preserves pixel-level details through a high-resolution branch and a parallel multi-resolution cross-branch. We also integrated a distribution-aware loss (DAL) to mitigate the imbalance across cloud categories. An Interactive Attention Module (IAM) further enhances the robustness of feature extraction combined with spatial and channel information. Empirical evaluations on the FYH dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms other cloud recognition networks, achieving superior performance in terms of mean Intersection over Union (mIoU). The code for implementing DIAnet is available at https://github.com/icey-zhang/DIAnet.

Jitao Ma, Weiying Xie, Yunsong Li

Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) aims to localize pixel points whose spectral features differ from the background. HAD is essential in scenarios of unknown or camouflaged target features, such as water quality monitoring, crop growth monitoring and camouflaged target detection, where prior information of targets is difficult to obtain. Existing HAD methods aim to objectively detect and distinguish background and anomalous spectra, which can be achieved almost effortlessly by human perception. However, the underlying processes of human visual perception are thought to be quite complex. In this paper, we analyze hyperspectral image (HSI) features under human visual perception, and transfer the solution process of HAD to the more robust feature space for the first time. Specifically, we propose a small target aware detector (STAD), which introduces saliency maps to capture HSI features closer to human visual perception. STAD not only extracts more anomalous representations, but also reduces the impact of low-confidence regions through a proposed small target filter (STF). Furthermore, considering the possibility of HAD algorithms being applied to edge devices, we propose a full connected network to convolutional network knowledge distillation strategy. It can learn the spectral and spatial features of the HSI while lightening the network. We train the network on the HAD100 training set and validate the proposed method on the HAD100 test set. Our method provides a new solution space for HAD that is closer to human visual perception with high confidence. Sufficient experiments on real HSI with multiple method comparisons demonstrate the excellent performance and unique potential of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/majitao-xd/STAD-HAD.

Mingxiang Cao, Weiying Xie, Xin Zhang et al.

Multi-modal fusion holds great promise for integrating information from different modalities. However, due to a lack of consideration for modal consistency, existing multi-modal fusion methods in the field of remote sensing still face challenges of incomplete semantic information and low computational efficiency in their fusion designs. Inspired by the observation that the visual language pre-training model CLIP can effectively extract strong semantic information from visual features, we propose M$^3$amba, a novel end-to-end CLIP-driven Mamba model for multi-modal fusion to address these challenges. Specifically, we introduce CLIP-driven modality-specific adapters in the fusion architecture to avoid the bias of understanding specific domains caused by direct inference, making the original CLIP encoder modality-specific perception. This unified framework enables minimal training to achieve a comprehensive semantic understanding of different modalities, thereby guiding cross-modal feature fusion. To further enhance the consistent association between modality mappings, a multi-modal Mamba fusion architecture with linear complexity and a cross-attention module Cross-SS2D are designed, which fully considers effective and efficient information interaction to achieve complete fusion. Extensive experiments have shown that M$^3$amba has an average performance improvement of at least 5.98\% compared with the state-of-the-art methods in multi-modal hyperspectral image classification tasks in the remote sensing field, while also demonstrating excellent training efficiency, achieving a double improvement in accuracy and efficiency. The code is released at https://github.com/kaka-Cao/M3amba.

Long Gao, Yunhe Zhang, Yan Jiang et al.

Hyperspectral object tracking holds great promise due to the rich spectral information and fine-grained material distinctions in hyperspectral images, which are beneficial in challenging scenarios. While existing hyperspectral trackers have made progress by either transforming hyperspectral data into false-color images or incorporating modality fusion strategies, they often fail to capture the intrinsic spectral information, temporal dependencies, and cross-depth interactions. To address these limitations, a new hyperspectral object tracking network equipped with Mamba (HyMamba), is proposed. It unifies spectral, cross-depth, and temporal modeling through state space modules (SSMs). The core of HyMamba lies in the Spectral State Integration (SSI) module, which enables progressive refinement and propagation of spectral features with cross-depth and temporal spectral information. Embedded within each SSI, the Hyperspectral Mamba (HSM) module is introduced to learn spatial and spectral information synchronously via three directional scanning SSMs. Based on SSI and HSM, HyMamba constructs joint features from false-color and hyperspectral inputs, and enhances them through interaction with original spectral features extracted from raw hyperspectral images. Extensive experiments conducted on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that HyMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance. For instance, it achieves 73.0\% of the AUC score and 96.3\% of the DP@20 score on the HOTC2020 dataset. The code will be released at https://github.com/lgao001/HyMamba.

Jiaqing Zhang, Mingxiang Cao, Weiying Xie et al.

Multimodal image fusion and object detection are crucial for autonomous driving. While current methods have advanced the fusion of texture details and semantic information, their complex training processes hinder broader applications. Addressing this challenge, we introduce E2E-MFD, a novel end-to-end algorithm for multimodal fusion detection. E2E-MFD streamlines the process, achieving high performance with a single training phase. It employs synchronous joint optimization across components to avoid suboptimal solutions tied to individual tasks. Furthermore, it implements a comprehensive optimization strategy in the gradient matrix for shared parameters, ensuring convergence to an optimal fusion detection configuration. Our extensive testing on multiple public datasets reveals E2E-MFD's superior capabilities, showcasing not only visually appealing image fusion but also impressive detection outcomes, such as a 3.9% and 2.0% mAP50 increase on horizontal object detection dataset M3FD and oriented object detection dataset DroneVehicle, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code is released at https://github.com/icey-zhang/E2E-MFD.

Li Xu, Gang He, Jinjia Zhou et al.

In most video platforms, such as Youtube, and TikTok, the played videos usually have undergone multiple video encodings such as hardware encoding by recording devices, software encoding by video editing apps, and single/multiple video transcoding by video application servers. Previous works in compressed video restoration typically assume the compression artifacts are caused by one-time encoding. Thus, the derived solution usually does not work very well in practice. In this paper, we propose a new method, temporal spatial auxiliary network (TSAN), for transcoded video restoration. Our method considers the unique traits between video encoding and transcoding, and we consider the initial shallow encoded videos as the intermediate labels to assist the network to conduct self-supervised attention training. In addition, we employ adjacent multi-frame information and propose the temporal deformable alignment and pyramidal spatial fusion for transcoded video restoration. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method is superior to that of the previous techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/icecherylXuli/TSAN.

Yidan Liu, Jun Yue, Shaobo Xia et al.

As a newly emerging advance in deep generative models, diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many fields, including computer vision, natural language processing, and molecule design. The remote sensing (RS) community has also noticed the powerful ability of diffusion models and quickly applied them to a variety of tasks for image processing. Given the rapid increase in research on diffusion models in the field of RS, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive review of existing diffusion model-based RS papers, to help researchers recognize the potential of diffusion models and provide some directions for further exploration. Specifically, this article first introduces the theoretical background of diffusion models, and then systematically reviews the applications of diffusion models in RS, including image generation, enhancement, and interpretation. Finally, the limitations of existing RS diffusion models and worthy research directions for further exploration are discussed and summarized.

Jiayuan Tian, Jie Lei, Jiaqing Zhang et al.

With recent advancements in aerospace technology, the volume of unlabeled remote sensing image (RSI) data has increased dramatically. Effectively leveraging this data through self-supervised learning (SSL) is vital in the field of remote sensing. However, current methodologies, particularly contrastive learning (CL), a leading SSL method, encounter specific challenges in this domain. Firstly, CL often mistakenly identifies geographically adjacent samples with similar semantic content as negative pairs, leading to confusion during model training. Secondly, as an instance-level discriminative task, it tends to neglect the essential fine-grained features and complex details inherent in unstructured RSIs. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce SwiMDiff, a novel self-supervised pre-training framework designed for RSIs. SwiMDiff employs a scene-wide matching approach that effectively recalibrates labels to recognize data from the same scene as false negatives. This adjustment makes CL more applicable to the nuances of remote sensing. Additionally, SwiMDiff seamlessly integrates CL with a diffusion model. Through the implementation of pixel-level diffusion constraints, we enhance the encoder's ability to capture both the global semantic information and the fine-grained features of the images more comprehensively. Our proposed framework significantly enriches the information available for downstream tasks in remote sensing. Demonstrating exceptional performance in change detection and land-cover classification tasks, SwiMDiff proves its substantial utility and value in the field of remote sensing.

Shuhan Dong, Yunsong Li, Weiying Xie et al.

Multimodal object detection leverages diverse modal information to enhance the accuracy and robustness of detectors. By learning long-term dependencies, Transformer can effectively integrate multimodal features in the feature extraction stage, which greatly improves the performance of multimodal object detection. However, current methods merely stack Transformer-guided fusion techniques without exploring their capability to extract features at various depth layers of network, thus limiting the improvements in detection performance. In this paper, we introduce an accurate and efficient object detection method named SeaDATE. Initially, we propose a novel dual attention Feature Fusion (DTF) module that, under Transformer's guidance, integrates local and global information through a dual attention mechanism, strengthening the fusion of modal features from orthogonal perspectives using spatial and channel tokens. Meanwhile, our theoretical analysis and empirical validation demonstrate that the Transformer-guided fusion method, treating images as sequences of pixels for fusion, performs better on shallow features' detail information compared to deep semantic information. To address this, we designed a contrastive learning (CL) module aimed at learning features of multimodal samples, remedying the shortcomings of Transformer-guided fusion in extracting deep semantic features, and effectively utilizing cross-modal information. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the FLIR, LLVIP, and M3FD datasets have proven our method to be effective, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance.

Yidan Liu, Weiying Xie, Kai Jiang et al.

The majority of existing hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) methods use the low-rank representation (LRR) model to separate the background and anomaly components, where the anomaly component is optimized by handcrafted sparse priors (e.g., $\ell_{2,1}$-norm). However, this may not be ideal since they overlook the spatial structure present in anomalies and make the detection result largely dependent on manually set sparsity. To tackle these problems, we redefine the optimization criterion for the anomaly component in the LRR model with a self-supervised network called self-supervised anomaly prior (SAP). This prior is obtained by the pretext task of self-supervised learning, which is customized to learn the characteristics of hyperspectral anomalies. Specifically, this pretext task is a classification task to distinguish the original hyperspectral image (HSI) and the pseudo-anomaly HSI, where the pseudo-anomaly is generated from the original HSI and designed as a prism with arbitrary polygon bases and arbitrary spectral bands. In addition, a dual-purified strategy is proposed to provide a more refined background representation with an enriched background dictionary, facilitating the separation of anomalies from complex backgrounds. Extensive experiments on various hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that the proposed SAP offers a more accurate and interpretable solution than other advanced HAD methods.

Kai Jiang, Jiaxing Huang, Weiying Xie et al.

Camera-only Bird's Eye View (BEV) has demonstrated great potential in environment perception in a 3D space. However, most existing studies were conducted under a supervised setup which cannot scale well while handling various new data. Unsupervised domain adaptive BEV, which effective learning from various unlabelled target data, is far under-explored. In this work, we design DA-BEV, the first domain adaptive camera-only BEV framework that addresses domain adaptive BEV challenges by exploiting the complementary nature of image-view features and BEV features. DA-BEV introduces the idea of query into the domain adaptation framework to derive useful information from image-view and BEV features. It consists of two query-based designs, namely, query-based adversarial learning (QAL) and query-based self-training (QST), which exploits image-view features or BEV features to regularize the adaptation of the other. Extensive experiments show that DA-BEV achieves superior domain adaptive BEV perception performance consistently across multiple datasets and tasks such as 3D object detection and 3D scene segmentation.

Kai Jiang, Jiaxing Huang, Weiying Xie et al.

Large-vocabulary object detectors (LVDs) aim to detect objects of many categories, which learn super objectness features and can locate objects accurately while applied to various downstream data. However, LVDs often struggle in recognizing the located objects due to domain discrepancy in data distribution and object vocabulary. At the other end, recent vision-language foundation models such as CLIP demonstrate superior open-vocabulary recognition capability. This paper presents KGD, a Knowledge Graph Distillation technique that exploits the implicit knowledge graphs (KG) in CLIP for effectively adapting LVDs to various downstream domains. KGD consists of two consecutive stages: 1) KG extraction that employs CLIP to encode downstream domain data as nodes and their feature distances as edges, constructing KG that inherits the rich semantic relations in CLIP explicitly; and 2) KG encapsulation that transfers the extracted KG into LVDs to enable accurate cross-domain object classification. In addition, KGD can extract both visual and textual KG independently, providing complementary vision and language knowledge for object localization and object classification in detection tasks over various downstream domains. Experiments over multiple widely adopted detection benchmarks show that KGD outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently by large margins.

Mingxiang Cao, Weiying Xie, Jie Lei et al.

Deep learning has driven significant progress in object detection using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Existing methods, while achieving promising results, often struggle to effectively integrate local and global information, particularly direction-aware features. This paper proposes SAR-Net, a novel framework specifically designed for global fusion of direction-aware information in SAR object detection. SAR-Net leverages two key innovations: the Unity Compensation Mechanism (UCM) and the Direction-aware Attention Module (DAM). UCM facilitates the establishment of complementary relationships among features across different scales, enabling efficient global information fusion and transmission. Additionally, DAM, through bidirectional attention polymerization, captures direction-aware information, effectively eliminating background interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SAR-Net, achieving state-of-the-art results on aircraft (SAR-AIRcraft-1.0) and ship datasets (SSDD, HRSID), confirming its generalization capability and robustness.

Weiying Xie, Zixuan Wang, Jitao Ma et al.

Distributed deep learning has recently been attracting more attention in remote sensing (RS) applications due to the challenges posed by the increased amount of open data that are produced daily by Earth observation programs. However, the high communication costs of sending model updates among multiple nodes are a significant bottleneck for scalable distributed learning. Gradient sparsification has been validated as an effective gradient compression (GC) technique for reducing communication costs and thus accelerating the training speed. Existing state-of-the-art gradient sparsification methods are mostly based on the "larger-absolute-more-important" criterion, ignoring the importance of small gradients, which is generally observed to affect the performance. Inspired by informative representation of manifold structures from neighborhood information, we propose a simple yet effective dynamic gradient compression scheme leveraging neighborhood statistics indicator for RS image interpretation, termed RS-DGC. We first enhance the interdependence between gradients by introducing the gradient neighborhood to reduce the effect of random noise. The key component of RS-DGC is a Neighborhood Statistical Indicator (NSI), which can quantify the importance of gradients within a specified neighborhood on each node to sparsify the local gradients before gradient transmission in each iteration. Further, a layer-wise dynamic compression scheme is proposed to track the importance changes of each layer in real time. Extensive downstream tasks validate the superiority of our method in terms of intelligent interpretation of RS images. For example, we achieve an accuracy improvement of 0.51% with more than 50 times communication compression on the NWPU-RESISC45 dataset using VGG-19 network.

Wenjin Guo, Donglai Liu, Weiying Xie et al.

Neural network training is a memory- and compute-intensive task. Quantization, which enables low-bitwidth formats in training, can significantly mitigate the workload. To reduce quantization error, recent methods have developed new data formats and additional pre-processing operations on quantizers. However, it remains quite challenging to achieve high accuracy and efficiency simultaneously. In this paper, we explore sub-8-bit integer training from its essence of gradient descent optimization. Our integer training framework includes two components: ShiftQuant to realize accurate gradient estimation, and L1 normalization to smoothen the loss landscape. ShiftQuant attains performance that approaches the theoretical upper bound of group quantization. Furthermore, it liberates group quantization from inefficient memory rearrangement. The L1 normalization facilitates the implementation of fully quantized normalization layers with impressive convergence accuracy. Our method frees sub-8-bit integer training from pre-processing and supports general devices. This framework achieves negligible accuracy loss across various neural networks and tasks ($0.92\%$ on 4-bit ResNets, $0.61\%$ on 6-bit Transformers). The prototypical implementation of ShiftQuant achieves more than $1.85\times/15.3\%$ performance improvement on CPU/GPU compared to its FP16 counterparts, and $33.9\%$ resource consumption reduction on FPGA than the FP16 counterparts. The proposed fully-quantized L1 normalization layers achieve more than $35.54\%$ improvement in throughout on CPU compared to traditional L2 normalization layers. Moreover, theoretical analysis verifies the advancement of our method.

Haozhi Shi, Weiying Xie, Hangyu Ye et al.

Federated Learning (FL) presents significant potential for collaborative optimization without data sharing. Since synthetic data is sent to the server, leveraging the popular concept of dataset distillation, this FL framework protects real data privacy while alleviating data heterogeneity. However, such methods are still challenged by the redundant information and noise in entire spatial-domain designs, which inevitably increases the communication burden. In this paper, we propose a novel Frequency-Domain aware FL method with high-energy concentration (FedFD) to address this problem. Our FedFD is inspired by the discovery that the discrete cosine transform predominantly distributes energy to specific regions, referred to as high-energy concentration. The principle behind FedFD is that low-energy like high-frequency components usually contain redundant information and noise, thus filtering them helps reduce communication costs and optimize performance. Our FedFD is mathematically formulated to preserve the low-frequency components using a binary mask, facilitating an optimal solution through frequency-domain distribution alignment. In particular, real data-driven synthetic classification is imposed into the loss to enhance the quality of the low-frequency components. On five image and speech datasets, FedFD achieves superior performance than state-of-the-art methods while reducing communication costs. For example, on the CIFAR-10 dataset with Dirichlet coefficient $α= 0.01$, FedFD achieves a minimum reduction of 37.78\% in the communication cost, while attaining a 10.88\% performance gain.

Long Gao, Yunhe Zhang, Langkun Chen et al.

Object tracking based on hyperspectral video attracts increasing attention to the rich material and motion information in the hyperspectral videos. The prevailing hyperspectral methods adapt pretrained RGB-based object tracking networks for hyperspectral tasks by fine-tuning the entire network on hyperspectral datasets, which achieves impressive results in challenging scenarios. However, the performance of hyperspectral trackers is limited by the loss of spectral information during the transformation, and fine-tuning the entire pretrained network is inefficient for practical applications. To address the issues, a new hyperspectral object tracking method, hyperspectral adapter for tracking (HyA-T), is proposed in this work. The hyperspectral adapter for the self-attention (HAS) and the hyperspectral adapter for the multilayer perceptron (HAM) are proposed to generate the adaption information and to transfer the multi-head self-attention (MSA) module and the multilayer perceptron (MLP) in pretrained network for the hyperspectral object tracking task by augmenting the adaption information into the calculation of the MSA and MLP. Additionally, the hyperspectral enhancement of input (HEI) is proposed to augment the original spectral information into the input of the tracking network. The proposed methods extract spectral information directly from the hyperspectral images, which prevent the loss of the spectral information. Moreover, only the parameters in the proposed methods are fine-tuned, which is more efficient than the existing methods. Extensive experiments were conducted on four datasets with various spectral bands, verifing the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The HyA-T achieves state-of-the-art performance on all the datasets.

Ruofan Jia, Weiying Xie, Jie Lei et al.

While large pre-trained models have achieved impressive performance across AI tasks, their deployment in privacy-sensitive and distributed environments remains challenging. Federated learning (FL) offers a viable solution by enabling decentralized fine-tuning without data sharing, but real-world applications face significant obstacles due to heterogeneous client resources in compute and memory. To address this, we propose HeteroTune, a novel federated fine-tuning paradigm for large, heterogeneous models operating under limited communication and computation budgets. The core of our method lies in a novel architecture, DeMA (Dense Mixture of Adapters), which enables flexible and efficient aggregation of heterogeneous models by preserving their full representational capacity while facilitating seamless cross-model knowledge fusion. We further introduce CMGA (Cross-Model Gradient Alignment), a lightweight yet effective mechanism that enhances training stability by harmonizing gradient directions across heterogeneous client models during aggregation, mitigating update conflicts and promoting more consistent convergence in federated settings. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence showing that HeteroTune achieves state-of-the-art performance and efficiency across diverse tasks and model architectures. For example, on LLaMA models, it reduces communication overhead by 99.5%, cuts peak memory usage by ~50%, and improves performance by 4.61%.