Haicheng Wang

Chen Ju, Haicheng Wang, Jinxiang Liu et al.

Temporal sentence grounding aims to detect the event timestamps described by the natural language query from given untrimmed videos. The existing fully-supervised setting achieves great performance but requires expensive annotation costs; while the weakly-supervised setting adopts cheap labels but performs poorly. To pursue high performance with less annotation cost, this paper introduces an intermediate partially-supervised setting, i.e., only short-clip or even single-frame labels are available during training. To take full advantage of partial labels, we propose a novel quadruple constraint pipeline to comprehensively shape event-query aligned representations, covering intra- and inter-samples, uni- and multi-modalities. The former raises intra-cluster compactness and inter-cluster separability; while the latter enables event-background separation and event-query gather. To achieve more powerful performance with explicit grounding optimization, we further introduce a partial-full union framework, i.e., bridging with an additional fully-supervised branch, to enjoy its impressive grounding bonus, and be robust to partial annotations. Extensive experiments and ablations on Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions demonstrate the significance of partial supervision and our superior performance.

Zhongyin Zhao, Yuan Liu, Yikun Liu et al.

The rapid advancement of vision-language models has catalyzed the emergence of GUI agents, which hold immense potential for automating complex tasks, from online shopping to flight booking, thereby alleviating the burden of repetitive digital workflows. As a foundational capability, GUI grounding is typically established as a prerequisite for end-to-end task execution. It enables models to precisely locate interface elements, such as text and icons, to perform accurate operations like clicking and typing. Unlike prior works that fine-tune models already possessing strong spatial awareness (e.g., Qwen3-VL), we aim to master the full technical pipeline by starting from a base model with minimal grounding ability, such as POINTS-1.5. We introduce POINTS-GUI-G-8B, which achieves state-of-the-art performance with scores of 59.9 on ScreenSpot-Pro, 66.0 on OSWorld-G, 95.7 on ScreenSpot-v2, and 49.9 on UI-Vision. Our model's success is driven by three key factors: (1) Refined Data Engineering, involving the unification of diverse open-source datasets format alongside sophisticated strategies for augmentation, filtering, and difficulty grading; (2) Improved Training Strategies, including continuous fine-tuning of the vision encoder to enhance perceptual accuracy and maintaining resolution consistency between training and inference; and (3) Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Verifiable Rewards. While RL is traditionally used to bolster reasoning, we demonstrate that it significantly improves precision in the perception-intensive GUI grounding task. Furthermore, GUI grounding provides a natural advantage for RL, as rewards are easily verifiable and highly accurate.

Pengcheng Qiu, Chaoyi Wu, Xiaoman Zhang et al. · harvard

The development of open-source, multilingual medical language models can benefit a wide, linguistically diverse audience from different regions. To promote this domain, we present contributions from the following: First, we construct a multilingual medical corpus, containing approximately 25.5B tokens encompassing 6 main languages, termed as MMedC, enabling auto-regressive domain adaptation for general LLMs; Second, to monitor the development of multilingual medical LLMs, we propose a multilingual medical multi-choice question-answering benchmark with rationale, termed as MMedBench; Third, we have assessed a number of open-source large language models (LLMs) on our benchmark, along with those further auto-regressive trained on MMedC. Our final model, MMed-Llama 3, with only 8B parameters, achieves superior performance compared to all other open-source models on both MMedBench and English benchmarks, even rivaling GPT-4. In conclusion, in this work, we present a large-scale corpus, a benchmark and a series of models to support the development of multilingual medical LLMs.

Chen Ju, Haicheng Wang, Haozhe Cheng et al.

Vision-Language Large Models (VLMs) recently become primary backbone of AI, due to the impressive performance. However, their expensive computation costs, i.e., throughput and delay, impede potentials in the real-world scenarios. To achieve acceleration for VLMs, most existing methods focus on the model perspective: pruning, distillation, quantization, but completely overlook the data-perspective redundancy. To fill the overlook, this paper pioneers the severity of data redundancy, and designs one plug-and-play Turbo module guided by information degree to prune inefficient tokens from visual or textual data. In pursuit of efficiency-performance trade-offs, information degree takes two crucial factors into consideration: mutual redundancy and semantic value. Concretely, the former evaluates data duplication between sequential tokens; while the latter evaluates each token by its contribution to the overall semantics. As a result, tokens with high information degree carry less redundancy and stronger semantics. For VLMs' calculation, Turbo works as a user-friendly plug-in that sorts data referring to information degree, utilizing only top-level ones to save costs. Its advantages are multifaceted, e.g., being generally compatible to various VLMs across understanding and generation, simple use without re-training and trivial engineering efforts. On multiple VLMs benchmarks, we fully experiment to demonstrate the good acceleration of Turbo, under negligible performance drop.

Yikun Liu, Yuan Liu, Shangzhe Di et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved remarkable success in visual-language understanding, demonstrating superior high-level semantic alignment within their vision encoders. An important question thus arises: Can these encoders serve as versatile vision backbones, capable of reliably performing classic vision-centric tasks as well? To address the question, we make the following contributions: (i) we identify that the vision encoders within MLLMs exhibit deficiencies in their dense feature representations, as evidenced by their suboptimal performance on dense prediction tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation, depth estimation); (ii) we propose VersaViT, a well-rounded vision transformer that instantiates a novel multi-task framework for collaborative post-training. This framework facilitates the optimization of the vision backbone via lightweight task heads with multi-granularity supervision; (iii) extensive experiments across various downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, yielding a versatile vision backbone suited for both language-mediated reasoning and pixel-level understanding.

Haicheng Wang, Yuan Liu, Yikun Liu et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in cross-modal understanding and generation. However, the rapid growth of visual token sequences--especially in long-video and streaming scenarios--poses a major challenge to their scalability and real-world deployment. Thus, we introduce POINTS-Long, a native dual-mode MLLM featuring dynamic visual token scaling inspired by the human visual system. The model supports two complementary perception modes: focus mode and standby mode, enabling users to dynamically trade off efficiency and accuracy during inference. On fine-grained visual tasks, the focus mode retains the optimal performance, while on long-form general visual understanding, the standby mode retains 97.7-99.7% of the original accuracy using only 1/40-1/10th of the visual tokens. Moreover, POINTS-Long natively supports streaming visual understanding via a dynamically detachable KV-cache design, allowing efficient maintenance of ultra-long visual memory. Our work provides new insights into the design of future MLLMs and lays the foundation for adaptive and efficient long-form visual understanding.

Yuan Liu, Zhongyin Zhao, Le Tian et al.

High-quality labeled data is essential for training accurate document conversion models, particularly in domains with complex formats such as tables, formulas, and multi-column text. However, manual annotation is both costly and time-consuming, while automatic labeling using existing models often lacks accuracy in handling such challenging scenarios. Consequently, training student models by distilling outputs from teacher models can significantly limit their performance in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a fully automated, distillation-free framework comprising two stages for constructing high-quality document extraction datasets and models capable of handling diverse document formats and layouts. In the first stage, we introduce a method for generating large-scale, diverse synthetic data, which enables a model to extract key elements in a unified format with strong initial performance. In the second stage, we present a self-improvement approach that further adapts the model, initially trained on synthetic data, to real-world documents. Specifically, we first use the fine-tuned model to annotate real documents, then apply a suite of filtering strategies to verify annotation quality, and finally retrain the model on the verified dataset. By iteratively repeating this process, we progressively enhance both the model's conversion capabilities and the quality of the generated data. We train a public POINTS-1.5 model to obtain POINTS-Reader, which surpasses many existing public and proprietary models of comparable or larger size. Our model is available at https://github.com/Tencent/POINTS-Reader.

Haicheng Wang, Zhemeng Yu, Gabriele Spadaro et al.

Recently, Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable effectiveness for multi-modal tasks due to their abilities to generate and understand cross-modal data. However, processing long sequences of visual tokens extracted from visual backbones poses a challenge for deployment in real-time applications. To address this issue, we introduce FOLDER, a simple yet effective plug-and-play module designed to reduce the length of the visual token sequence, mitigating both computational and memory demands during training and inference. Through a comprehensive analysis of the token reduction process, we analyze the information loss introduced by different reduction strategies and develop FOLDER to preserve key information while removing visual redundancy. We showcase the effectiveness of FOLDER by integrating it into the visual backbone of several MLLMs, significantly accelerating the inference phase. Furthermore, we evaluate its utility as a training accelerator or even performance booster for MLLMs. In both contexts, FOLDER achieves comparable or even better performance than the original models, while dramatically reducing complexity by removing up to 70% of visual tokens.

Chen Ju, Haicheng Wang, Zeqian Li et al.

Vision-Language Large Models (VLMs) have become primary backbone of AI, due to the impressive performance. However, their expensive computation costs, i.e., throughput and delay, impede potentials in real-world scenarios. To achieve acceleration for VLMs, most existing methods focus on the model perspective: pruning, distillation, quantification, but completely overlook the data-perspective redundancy. To fill the overlook, this paper pioneers the severity of data redundancy, and designs one plug-and-play Turbo module guided by information degree to prune inefficient tokens from visual or textual data. In pursuit of efficiency-performance trade-offs, information degree takes two key factors into consideration: mutual redundancy and semantic value. Concretely, the former evaluates the data duplication between sequential tokens; while the latter evaluates each token by its contribution to the overall semantics. As a result, tokens with high information degree carry less redundancy and stronger semantics. For VLMs' calculation, Turbo works as a user-friendly plug-in that sorts data referring to information degree, utilizing only top-level ones to save costs. Its advantages are multifaceted, e.g., being generally compatible to various VLMs across understanding and generation, simple use without retraining and trivial engineering efforts. On multiple public VLMs benchmarks, we conduct extensive experiments to reveal the gratifying acceleration of Turbo, under negligible performance drop.

Haozhe Cheng, Cheng Ju, Haicheng Wang et al.

As one of the fundamental video tasks in computer vision, Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition (OVAR) recently gains increasing attention, with the development of vision-language pre-trainings. To enable generalization of arbitrary classes, existing methods treat class labels as text descriptions, then formulate OVAR as evaluating embedding similarity between visual samples and textual classes. However, one crucial issue is completely ignored: the class descriptions given by users may be noisy, e.g., misspellings and typos, limiting the real-world practicality of vanilla OVAR. To fill the research gap, this paper pioneers to evaluate existing methods by simulating multi-level noises of various types, and reveals their poor robustness. To tackle the noisy OVAR task, we further propose one novel DENOISER framework, covering two parts: generation and discrimination. Concretely, the generative part denoises noisy class-text names via one decoding process, i.e., propose text candidates, then utilize inter-modal and intra-modal information to vote for the best. At the discriminative part, we use vanilla OVAR models to assign visual samples to class-text names, thus obtaining more semantics. For optimization, we alternately iterate between generative and discriminative parts for progressive refinements. The denoised text classes help OVAR models classify visual samples more accurately; in return, classified visual samples help better denoising. On three datasets, we carry out extensive experiments to show our superior robustness, and thorough ablations to dissect the effectiveness of each component.

Haicheng Wang, Chen Ju, Weixiong Lin et al.

In rapidly evolving field of vision-language models (VLMs), contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) has made significant strides, becoming foundation for various downstream tasks. However, relying on one-to-one (image, text) contrastive paradigm to learn alignment from large-scale messy web data, CLIP faces a serious myopic dilemma, resulting in biases towards monotonous short texts and shallow visual expressivity. To overcome these issues, this paper advances CLIP into one novel holistic paradigm, by updating both diverse data and alignment optimization. To obtain colorful data with low cost, we use image-to-text captioning to generate multi-texts for each image, from multiple perspectives, granularities, and hierarchies. Two gadgets are proposed to encourage textual diversity. To match such (image, multi-texts) pairs, we modify the CLIP image encoder into multi-branch, and propose multi-to-multi contrastive optimization for image-text part-to-part matching. As a result, diverse visual embeddings are learned for each image, bringing good interpretability and generalization. Extensive experiments and ablations across over ten benchmarks indicate that our holistic CLIP significantly outperforms existing myopic CLIP, including image-text retrieval, open-vocabulary classification, and dense visual tasks.

Haicheng Wang, Chen Ju, Weixiong Lin et al.

Temporal sentence grounding aims to detect event timestamps described by the natural language query from given untrimmed videos. The existing fully-supervised setting achieves great results but requires expensive annotation costs; while the weakly-supervised setting adopts cheap labels but performs poorly. To pursue high performance with less annotation costs, this paper introduces an intermediate partially-supervised setting, i.e., only short-clip is available during training. To make full use of partial labels, we specially design one contrast-unity framework, with the two-stage goal of implicit-explicit progressive grounding. In the implicit stage, we align event-query representations at fine granularity using comprehensive quadruple contrastive learning: event-query gather, event-background separation, intra-cluster compactness and inter-cluster separability. Then, high-quality representations bring acceptable grounding pseudo-labels. In the explicit stage, to explicitly optimize grounding objectives, we train one fully-supervised model using obtained pseudo-labels for grounding refinement and denoising. Extensive experiments and thoroughly ablations on Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions demonstrate the significance of partial supervision, as well as our superior performance.

Vin Bhaskara, Haicheng Wang

Local prediction-error-based curiosity rewards focus on the current transition without considering the world model's cumulative prediction error across all visited transitions. We introduce Curiosity-Critic, which grounds its intrinsic reward in the improvement of this cumulative objective, and show that it reduces to a tractable per-step form: the difference between the current prediction error and the asymptotic error baseline of the current state transition. We estimate this baseline online with a learned critic co-trained alongside the world model; regressing a single scalar, the critic converges well before the world model saturates, redirecting exploration toward learnable transitions without oracle knowledge of the noise floor. The reward is higher for learnable transitions and collapses toward the baseline for stochastic ones, effectively separating epistemic (reducible) from aleatoric (irreducible) prediction error online. Prior prediction-error curiosity formulations, from Schmidhuber (1991) to learned-feature-space variants, emerge as special cases corresponding to specific approximations of this baseline. Experiments on a stochastic grid world show that Curiosity-Critic outperforms prediction-error and visitation-count baselines in convergence speed and final world model accuracy.

Shujian Yang, Shiyao Cui, Chuanrui Hu et al.

Detecting toxic content using language models is important but challenging. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in understanding Chinese, recent studies show that simple character substitutions in toxic Chinese text can easily confuse the state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs. In this paper, we highlight the multimodal nature of Chinese language as a key challenge for deploying LLMs in toxic Chinese detection. First, we propose a taxonomy of 3 perturbation strategies and 8 specific approaches in toxic Chinese content. Then, we curate a dataset based on this taxonomy, and benchmark 9 SOTA LLMs (from both the US and China) to assess if they can detect perturbed toxic Chinese text. Additionally, we explore cost-effective enhancement solutions like in-context learning (ICL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Our results reveal two important findings. (1) LLMs are less capable of detecting perturbed multimodal Chinese toxic contents. (2) ICL or SFT with a small number of perturbed examples may cause the LLMs "overcorrect'': misidentify many normal Chinese contents as toxic.

Weixiong Lin, Chen Ju, Haicheng Wang et al.

Widely observed data scaling laws, in which error falls off as a power of the training size, demonstrate the diminishing returns of unselective data expansion. Hence, data governance is proposed to downsize datasets through pruning non-informative samples. Yet, isolating the impact of a specific sample on overall model performance is challenging, due to the vast computation required for tryout all sample combinations. Current data governors circumvent this complexity by estimating sample contributions through heuristic-derived scalar scores, thereby discarding low-value ones. Despite thorough sample sieving, retained samples contain substantial undesired tokens intrinsically, underscoring the potential for further compression and purification. In this work, we upgrade data governance from a 'sieving' approach to a 'juicing' one. Instead of scanning for least-flawed samples, our dual-branch DataJuicer applies finer-grained intra-sample governance. It squeezes out informative tokens and boosts image-text alignments. Specifically, the vision branch retains salient image patches and extracts relevant object classes, while the text branch incorporates these classes to enhance captions. Consequently, DataJuicer yields more refined datasets through finer-grained governance. Extensive experiments across datasets demonstrate that DataJuicer significantly outperforms existing DataSieve in image-text retrieval, classification, and dense visual reasoning.

Axel Delaval, Shujian Yang, Haicheng Wang et al.

Detecting toxic content using language models is crucial yet challenging. While substantial progress has been made in English, toxicity detection in French remains underdeveloped, primarily due to the lack of culturally relevant, large-scale datasets. In this work, we introduce TOXIFRENCH, a new public benchmark of 53,622 French online comments, constructed via a semi-automated annotation pipeline that reduces manual labeling to only 10% through high-confidence LLM-based pre-annotation and human verification. Then, we benchmark a broad range of models and uncover a counterintuitive insight: Small Language Models (SLMs) outperform many larger models in robustness and generalization under the toxicity detection task. Motivated by this finding, we propose a novel Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fine-tuning strategy using a dynamic weighted loss that progressively emphasizes the model's final decision, significantly improving faithfulness. Our fine-tuned 4B model achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving its F1 score by 13% over its baseline and outperforming LLMs such as GPT-40 and Gemini-2.5. Further evaluation on a cross-lingual toxicity benchmark demonstrates strong multilingual ability, suggesting that our methodology can be effectively extended to other languages and safety-critical classification tasks.

Kai Zhang, Martin Danelljan, Yawei Li et al.

This paper reviews the AIM 2020 challenge on efficient single image super-resolution with focus on the proposed solutions and results. The challenge task was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor x4 based on a set of prior examples of low and corresponding high resolution images. The goal is to devise a network that reduces one or several aspects such as runtime, parameter count, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption while at least maintaining PSNR of MSRResNet. The track had 150 registered participants, and 25 teams submitted the final results. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single image super-resolution.