Jiapei Zhang

Hanbo Bi, Zhiqiang Yuan, Chongyang Li et al.

With the widespread adoption of multi-modal communication platforms, long-form dialogues interleaving text and images have become increasingly common. Users often need to retrieve coherent dialogue fragments related to specific topics, rather than isolated utterances. We propose Fine-grained Fragment Retrieval (FFR), which locates semantically relevant multi-utterance, multi-image fragments in multi-modal long-form dialogues. We explore two settings: (1) FFR within Single-Dialogue, retrieving fragments from a given dialogue; and (2) FFR within Dialogue Corpus, retrieving from a large-scale corpus for open-domain scenarios. For (1), we introduce F2RVLM, a generation-based retrieval model trained with reinforcement learning, using multi-objective rewards and difficulty-aware curriculum sampling to enhance fragment coherence. For (2), we develop FFRS, a two-stage system combining offline fragment-level indexing with online retrieval. Specifically, each dialogue is decomposed into minimal semantic fragments encoded by a Fragment Embedding Model (FEM) into a vector database; at inference, FEM rapidly recalls Top-K candidates, and F2RVLM performs fine-grained reasoning to identify the most relevant sub-content. To support FFR, we construct MLDR, the longest multi-modal dialogue retrieval dataset to date, and a WeChat-based real-world test set. Experiments on both benchmarks demonstrate that F2RVLM and FFRS consistently achieve superior performance across single-dialogue and corpus-level FFR.

Zhiqiang Yuan, Ting Zhang, Ying Deng et al.

Approximately 200 million individuals around the world suffer from varying degrees of visual impairment, making it crucial to leverage AI technology to offer walking assistance for these people. With the recent progress of vision-language models (VLMs), applying VLMs to offer walking guidance has become popular. However, the existing methods of walking guidance are mainly based on self-curated question-answering datasets that are not publicly accessible, without a standardized benchmark for training or evaluation. Moreover, walking assistance often requires real-time streaming video analysis and the generation of concise yet informative reminders, making VLMs struggle due to excessive responses and low efficiency in inferences. In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale dataset dedicated to walking assistance, comprising 12,000 video-annotation pairs, to provide a unified benchmark for training and evaluating systems to help visually-impaired individuals walk. Furthermore, a WalkVLM model is proposed, which employs chain of thought for hierarchical planning to generate concise but informative reminders and utilizes temporal-aware adaptive prediction to reduce the temporal redundancy of reminders. Finally, we have established a solid benchmark for blind walking task and verified the advantages of WalkVLM in stream video processing for this task compared to other VLMs. Our dataset and code are available at https://walkvlm2024.github.io.

Zexi Jia, Chuanwei Huang, Yeshuang Zhu et al.

Current legal frameworks consider AI-generated works eligible for copyright protection when they meet originality requirements and involve substantial human intellectual input. However, systematic legal standards and reliable evaluation methods for AI art copyrights are lacking. Through comprehensive analysis of legal precedents, we establish three essential criteria for determining distinctive artistic style: stylistic consistency, creative uniqueness, and expressive accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce ArtBulb, an interpretable and quantifiable framework for AI art copyright judgment that combines a novel style description-based multimodal clustering method with multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We also present AICD, the first benchmark dataset for AI art copyright annotated by artists and legal experts. Experimental results demonstrate that ArtBulb outperforms existing models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our work aims to bridge the gap between the legal and technological communities and bring greater attention to the societal issue of AI art copyrights.

Zexi Jia, Chuanwei Huang, Hongyan Fei et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) often struggle with compositional reasoning due to insufficient high-quality image-text data. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel block-based diffusion approach that automatically generates counterfactual datasets without manual annotation. Our method utilizes large language models to identify entities and their spatial relationships. It then independently generates image blocks as "puzzle pieces" coherently arranged according to specified compositional rules. This process creates diverse, high-fidelity counterfactual image-text pairs with precisely controlled variations. In addition, we introduce a specialized loss function that differentiates inter-set from intra-set samples, enhancing training efficiency and reducing the need for negative samples. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning VLMs with our counterfactual datasets significantly improves visual reasoning performance. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks while using substantially less training data than existing methods.

Zhiqiang Yuan, Ting Zhang, Ying Deng et al.

Recently, great progress has been made in video generation technology, attracting the widespread attention of scholars. To apply this technology to downstream applications under resource-constrained conditions, researchers usually fine-tune the pre-trained models based on parameter-efficient tuning methods such as Adapter or Lora. Although these methods can transfer the knowledge from the source domain to the target domain, fewer training parameters lead to poor fitting ability, and the knowledge from the source domain may lead to the inference process deviating from the target domain. In this paper, we argue that under constrained resources, training a smaller video generation model from scratch using only million-level samples can outperform parameter-efficient tuning on larger models in downstream applications: the core lies in the effective utilization of data and curriculum strategy. Take animated sticker generation (ASG) as a case study, we first construct a discrete frame generation network for stickers with low frame rates, ensuring that its parameters meet the requirements of model training under constrained resources. In order to provide data support for models trained from scratch, we come up with a dual-mask based data utilization strategy, which manages to improve the availability and expand the diversity of limited data. To facilitate convergence under dual-mask situation, we propose a difficulty-adaptive curriculum learning method, which decomposes the sample entropy into static and adaptive components so as to obtain samples from easy to difficult. The experiment demonstrates that our resource-efficient dual-mask training framework is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to efficient-parameter tuning methods such as I2V-Adapter and SimDA, verifying the feasibility of our method on downstream tasks under constrained resources. Code will be available.

Hanbo Bi, Zhiqiang Yuan, Zexi Jia et al.

Traditional dialogue retrieval aims to select the most appropriate utterance or image from recent dialogue history. However, they often fail to meet users' actual needs for revisiting semantically coherent content scattered across long-form conversations. To fill this gap, we define the Fine-grained Fragment Retrieval (FFR) task, requiring models to locate query-relevant fragments, comprising both utterances and images, from multimodal long-form dialogues. As a foundation for FFR, we construct MLDR, the longest-turn multimodal dialogue retrieval dataset to date, averaging 25.45 turns per dialogue, with each naturally spanning three distinct topics. To evaluate generalization in real-world scenarios, we curate and annotate a WeChat-based test set comprising real-world multimodal dialogues with an average of 75.38 turns. Building on these resources, we explore existing generation-based Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on FFR and observe that they often retrieve incoherent utterance-image fragments. While optimized for generating responses from visual-textual inputs, these models lack explicit supervision to ensure semantic coherence within retrieved fragments. To this end, we propose F2RVLM, a generative retrieval model trained in a two-stage paradigm: (1) supervised fine-tuning to inject fragment-level retrieval knowledge, and (2) GRPO-based reinforcement learning with multi-objective rewards promoting semantic precision, relevance, and contextual coherence. To handle varying intra-fragment complexity, from locally dense to sparsely distributed, we introduce difficulty-aware curriculum sampling that ranks training instances by model-predicted difficulty and gradually exposes the model to harder samples. This boosts reasoning ability in long, multi-turn contexts. F2RVLM outperforms popular VLMs in both in-domain and real-domain settings, demonstrating superior retrieval performance.

Chongyang Li, Zhiqiang Yuan, Jiapei Zhang et al.

Approximately 283 million people worldwide live with visual impairments, motivating increasing research into leveraging Visual Language Models (VLMs) to develop effective walking assistance systems for blind and low vision individuals. However, existing VLMs in walking assistant task often have outputs that contain considerable redundancy and extraneous details, adversely affecting users' ability to accurately assess their surroundings. Moreover, these models typically lack the capability to proactively assess environmental risks and adaptively trigger reminders based on the appropriate scene, leading to excessive temporal redundancy. To mitigate output and temporal redundancy, we propose WalkVLM-LR, a walking assistance model with less redundancy. To reduce output redundancy, we introduce four human-preference-based custom reward functions within the GRPO-based reasoning framework to optimize the output in terms of conciseness, fluency, keyword density, and accuracy, thereby producing more informative and streamlined outputs. To minimize temporal redundancy, we incorporate an environment awareness discriminator, which shares the visual encoder with the VLMs to reduce redundant computations and enhance discriminative efficiency, to make WalkVLM-LR assess scene risk levels and minimize unnecessary reminders. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all evaluation metrics compared with other models, particularly in output conciseness and less temporal redundancy.