Jinliang Lin

Peirong Zhang, Yidan Zhang, Luxiao Xu et al.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models(MLLMs) have led to remarkable progress in visual grounding, enabling fine-grained cross-modal alignment between textual queries and image regions. However, transferring such capabilities to remote sensing imagery remains challenging, as targets are often extremely small within kilometer-scale scenes, and queries typically involve intricate geospatial relations such as relative positions, spatial hierarchies, or contextual dependencies across distant objects. To address these challenges, we propose GeoViS, a Geospatially Rewarded Visual Search framework that reformulates remote sensing visual grounding as a progressive search-and-reasoning process. Rather than directly predicting the target location in a single step, GeoViS actively explores the global image through a tree-structured sequence of visual cues, integrating multimodal perception, spatial reasoning, and reward-guided exploration to refine geospatial hypotheses iteratively. This design enables the model to detect subtle small-scale targets while maintaining holistic scene awareness. Extensive experiments on five remote sensing grounding benchmarks demonstrate that GeoViS achieves precise geospatial understanding and consistently surpasses existing methods across key visual grounding metrics, highlighting its strong cross-domain generalization and interpretability.

Hao Ruan, Jinliang Lin, Yingxin Lai et al.

Natural Language-Guided Drones (NLGD) provide a novel paradigm for tasks such as target matching and navigation. However, the wide field of view and complex compositional semantics in drone scenarios pose challenges for vision-language understanding. Mainstream Vision-Language Models (VLMs) emphasize global alignment while lacking fine-grained semantics, and existing hierarchical methods depend on precise entity partitioning and strict containment, limiting effectiveness in dynamic environments. To address this, we propose the Hierarchical Cross-Granularity Contrastive and Matching learning (HCCM) framework with two components: (1) Region-Global Image-Text Contrastive Learning (RG-ITC), which avoids precise scene partitioning and captures hierarchical local-to-global semantics by contrasting local visual regions with global text and vice versa; (2) Region-Global Image-Text Matching (RG-ITM), which dispenses with rigid constraints and instead evaluates local semantic consistency within global cross-modal representations, enhancing compositional reasoning. Moreover, drone text descriptions are often incomplete or ambiguous, destabilizing alignment. HCCM introduces a Momentum Contrast and Distillation (MCD) mechanism to improve robustness. Experiments on GeoText-1652 show HCCM achieves state-of-the-art Recall@1 of 28.8% (image retrieval) and 14.7% (text retrieval). On the unseen ERA dataset, HCCM demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization with 39.93% mean recall (mR), outperforming fine-tuned baselines.

Zhuofan Xie, Zishan Lin, Jinliang Lin et al.

Active Learning (AL) reduces annotation costs in medical imaging by selecting only the most informative samples for labeling, but suffers from cold-start when labeled data are scarce. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) address the cold-start problem via zero-shot predictions, yet their temperature-scaled softmax outputs treat text-image similarities as deterministic scores while ignoring inherent uncertainty, leading to overconfidence. This overconfidence misleads sample selection, wasting annotation budgets on uninformative cases. To overcome these limitations, the Similarity-as-Evidence (SaE) framework calibrates text-image similarities by introducing a Similarity Evidence Head (SEH), which reinterprets the similarity vector as evidence and parameterizes a Dirichlet distribution over labels. In contrast to a standard softmax that enforces confident predictions even under weak signals, the Dirichlet formulation explicitly quantifies lack of evidence (vacuity) and conflicting evidence (dissonance), thereby mitigating overconfidence caused by rigid softmax normalization. Building on this, SaE employs a dual-factor acquisition strategy: high-vacuity samples (e.g., rare diseases) are prioritized in early rounds to ensure coverage, while high-dissonance samples (e.g., ambiguous diagnoses) are prioritized later to refine boundaries, providing clinically interpretable selection rationales. Experiments on ten public medical imaging datasets with a 20% label budget show that SaE attains state-of-the-art macro-averaged accuracy of 82.57%. On the representative BTMRI dataset, SaE also achieves superior calibration, with a negative log-likelihood (NLL) of 0.425.