Qing Zhang

Lingwei Dang, Yongwei Nie, Chengjiang Long et al.

Diverse human motion prediction aims at predicting multiple possible future pose sequences from a sequence of observed poses. Previous approaches usually employ deep generative networks to model the conditional distribution of data, and then randomly sample outcomes from the distribution. While different results can be obtained, they are usually the most likely ones which are not diverse enough. Recent work explicitly learns multiple modes of the conditional distribution via a deterministic network, which however can only cover a fixed number of modes within a limited range. In this paper, we propose a novel sampling strategy for sampling very diverse results from an imbalanced multimodal distribution learned by a deep generative model. Our method works by generating an auxiliary space and smartly making randomly sampling from the auxiliary space equivalent to the diverse sampling from the target distribution. We propose a simple yet effective network architecture that implements this novel sampling strategy, which incorporates a Gumbel-Softmax coefficient matrix sampling method and an aggressive diversity promoting hinge loss function. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves both the diversity and accuracy of the samplings compared with previous state-of-the-art sampling approaches. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Droliven/diverse_sampling.

Junjin Xiao, Yandan Yang, Xinyuan Chang et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models trained via imitation learning suffer from significant performance degradation in data-scarce scenarios due to their reliance on large-scale demonstration datasets. Although reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training has proven effective in addressing data scarcity, its application to VLA models is hindered by the non-resettable nature of real-world environments. This limitation is particularly critical in high-risk domains such as industrial automation, where interactions often induce state changes that are costly or infeasible to revert. Furthermore, existing VLA approaches lack a reliable mechanism for detecting task completion, leading to redundant actions that reduce overall task success rates. To address these challenges, we propose RehearseVLA:, an RL-based post-training framework that replaces physical interaction with a low-cost world model-based virtual simulator. RehearseVLA: consists of two key components: (1) a physically-consistent world simulator that generates temporally consistent future visual observations, and (2) a vision-language model (VLM)-guided instant reflector that provides continuous reward signals and predicts action termination. This simulated environment enables VLA models to safely explore and generalize beyond their initial imitation learning distribution. Our method achieves notable performance gains with as few as five expert demonstrations per task. Experiments on complex robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that RehearseVLA: effectively overcomes the data inefficiency, safety constraints, and inefficient execution of conventional VLA models that rely on real-world interaction, offering a practical and scalable solution for post-training in resource-constrained settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/amap-cvlab/world-env.

Ling Li, Bandara Dissanayake, Tatsuya Omotezako et al.

Simulating the effects of skincare products on face is a potential new way to communicate the efficacy of skincare products in skin diagnostics and product recommendations. Furthermore, such simulations enable one to anticipate his/her skin conditions and better manage skin health. However, there is a lack of effective simulations today. In this paper, we propose the first simulation model to reveal facial pore changes after using skincare products. Our simulation pipeline consists of 2 steps: training data establishment and facial pore simulation. To establish training data, we collect face images with various pore quality indexes from short-term (8-weeks) clinical studies. People often experience significant skin fluctuations (due to natural rhythms, external stressors, etc.,), which introduces large perturbations in clinical data. To address this problem, we propose a sliding window mechanism to clean data and select representative index(es) to represent facial pore changes. Facial pore simulation stage consists of 3 modules: UNet-based segmentation module to localize facial pores; regression module to predict time-dependent warping hyperparameters; and deformation module, taking warping hyperparameters and pore segmentation labels as inputs, to precisely deform pores accordingly. The proposed simulation is able to render realistic facial pore changes. And this work will pave the way for future research in facial skin simulation and skincare product developments.

HsiaoYuan Hsu, Xiangteng He, Yuxin Peng et al.

Content-aware visual-textual presentation layout aims at arranging spatial space on the given canvas for pre-defined elements, including text, logo, and underlay, which is a key to automatic template-free creative graphic design. In practical applications, e.g., poster designs, the canvas is originally non-empty, and both inter-element relationships as well as inter-layer relationships should be concerned when generating a proper layout. A few recent works deal with them simultaneously, but they still suffer from poor graphic performance, such as a lack of layout variety or spatial non-alignment. Since content-aware visual-textual presentation layout is a novel task, we first construct a new dataset named PosterLayout, which consists of 9,974 poster-layout pairs and 905 images, i.e., non-empty canvases. It is more challenging and useful for greater layout variety, domain diversity, and content diversity. Then, we propose design sequence formation (DSF) that reorganizes elements in layouts to imitate the design processes of human designers, and a novel CNN-LSTM-based conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) is presented to generate proper layouts. Specifically, the discriminator is design-sequence-aware and will supervise the "design" process of the generator. Experimental results verify the usefulness of the new benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which achieves the best performance by generating suitable layouts for diverse canvases.

Qing Zhang, Xiaoying Zhang, Yang Liu et al.

Recommendation systems aim to predict users' feedback on items not exposed to them. Confounding bias arises due to the presence of unmeasured variables (e.g., the socio-economic status of a user) that can affect both a user's exposure and feedback. Existing methods either (1) make untenable assumptions about these unmeasured variables or (2) directly infer latent confounders from users' exposure. However, they cannot guarantee the identification of counterfactual feedback, which can lead to biased predictions. In this work, we propose a novel method, i.e., identifiable deconfounder (iDCF), which leverages a set of proxy variables (e.g., observed user features) to resolve the aforementioned non-identification issue. The proposed iDCF is a general deconfounded recommendation framework that applies proximal causal inference to infer the unmeasured confounders and identify the counterfactual feedback with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments on various real-world and synthetic datasets verify the proposed method's effectiveness and robustness.

Gang Fu, Qing Zhang, Lei Zhu et al.

This paper aims to remove specular highlights from a single object-level image. Although previous methods have made some progresses, their performance remains somewhat limited, particularly for real images with complex specular highlights. To this end, we propose a three-stage network to address them. Specifically, given an input image, we first decompose it into the albedo, shading, and specular residue components to estimate a coarse specular-free image. Then, we further refine the coarse result to alleviate its visual artifacts such as color distortion. Finally, we adjust the tone of the refined result to match that of the input as closely as possible. In addition, to facilitate network training and quantitative evaluation, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of object-level images, covering diverse objects and illumination conditions. Extensive experiments illustrate that our network is able to generalize well to unseen real object-level images, and even produce good results for scene-level images with multiple background objects and complex lighting.

Danli Shi, Weiyi Zhang, Jiancheng Yang et al.

Early detection of eye diseases like glaucoma, macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy is crucial for preventing vision loss. While artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models hold significant promise for addressing these challenges, existing ophthalmic foundation models primarily focus on a single modality, whereas diagnosing eye diseases requires multiple modalities. A critical yet often overlooked aspect is harnessing the multi-view information across various modalities for the same patient. Additionally, due to the long-tail nature of ophthalmic diseases, standard fully supervised or unsupervised learning approaches often struggle. Therefore, it is essential to integrate clinical text to capture a broader spectrum of diseases. We propose EyeCLIP, a visual-language foundation model developed using over 2.77 million multi-modal ophthalmology images with partial text data. To fully leverage the large multi-modal unlabeled and labeled data, we introduced a pretraining strategy that combines self-supervised reconstructions, multi-modal image contrastive learning, and image-text contrastive learning to learn a shared representation of multiple modalities. Through evaluation using 14 benchmark datasets, EyeCLIP can be transferred to a wide range of downstream tasks involving ocular and systemic diseases, achieving state-of-the-art performance in disease classification, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. EyeCLIP represents a significant advancement over previous methods, especially showcasing few-shot, even zero-shot capabilities in real-world long-tail scenarios.

Yuxuan Zhang, Qing Zhang, Yiren Song et al.

Current hair transfer methods struggle to handle diverse and intricate hairstyles, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion-based hair transfer framework, named \textit{Stable-Hair}, which robustly transfers a wide range of real-world hairstyles to user-provided faces for virtual hair try-on. To achieve this goal, our Stable-Hair framework is designed as a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we train a Bald Converter alongside stable diffusion to remove hair from the user-provided face images, resulting in bald images. In the second stage, we specifically designed a Hair Extractor and a Latent IdentityNet to transfer the target hairstyle with highly detailed and high-fidelity to the bald image. The Hair Extractor is trained to encode reference images with the desired hairstyles, while the Latent IdentityNet ensures consistency in identity and background. To minimize color deviations between source images and transfer results, we introduce a novel Latent ControlNet architecture, which functions as both the Bald Converter and Latent IdentityNet. After training on our curated triplet dataset, our method accurately transfers highly detailed and high-fidelity hairstyles to the source images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing hair transfer methods. Project page: \textcolor{red}{\url{https://xiaojiu-z.github.io/Stable-Hair.github.io/}}

Xuankai Zhang, Junjin Xiao, Shangwei Huang et al.

We present an approach for high-quality dynamic Gaussian Splatting from monocular videos. To this end, we in this work go one step further beyond previous methods to explicitly model continuous position and orientation deformation of dynamic Gaussians, using an SE(3) B-spline motion bases with a compact set of control points. To improve computational efficiency while enhancing the ability to model complex motions, an adaptive control mechanism is devised to dynamically adjust the number of motion bases and control points. Besides, we develop a soft segment reconstruction strategy to mitigate long-interval motion interference, and employ a multi-view diffusion model to provide multi-view cues for avoiding overfitting to training views. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in novel view synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/hhhddddddd/se3bsplinegs.

Zesong Jiang, Qing Zhang, Cheng Liu et al.

Open-source EDA tools are rapidly advancing, fostering collaboration, innovation, and knowledge sharing within the EDA community. However, the growing complexity of these tools, characterized by numerous design parameters and heuristics, poses a significant barrier to their widespread adoption. This complexity is particularly pronounced in integrated circuit (IC) backend designs, which place substantial demands on engineers' expertise in EDA tools. To tackle this challenge, we introduce IICPilot, an intelligent IC backend design system based on LLM technology. IICPilot automates various backend design procedures, including script generation, EDA tool invocation, design space exploration of EDA parameters, container-based computing resource allocation, and exception management. By automating these tasks, IICPilot significantly lowers the barrier to entry for open-source EDA tools. Specifically, IICPilot utilizes LangChain's multi-agent framework to efficiently handle distinct design tasks, enabling flexible enhancements independently. Moreover, IICPilot separates the backend design workflow from specific open-source EDA tools through a unified EDA calling interface. This approach allows seamless integration with different open-source EDA tools like OpenROAD and iEDA, streamlining the backend design and optimization across the EDA tools.

Jiahao Niu, Rongjia Zheng, Wenju Xu et al.

We present SGS-Intrinsic, an indoor inverse rendering framework that works well for sparse-view images. Unlike existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based methods that focus on object-centric reconstruction and fail to work under sparse view settings, our method allows to achieve high-quality geometry reconstruction and accurate disentanglement of material and illumination. The core idea is to construct a dense and geometry-consistent Gaussian semantic field guided by semantic and geometric priors, providing a reliable foundation for subsequent inverse rendering. Building upon this, we perform material-illumination disentanglement by combining a hybrid illumination model and material prior to effectively capture illumination-material interactions. To mitigate the impact of cast shadows and enhance the robustness of material recovery, we introduce illumination-invariant material constraint together with a deshadowing model. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently improves both reconstruction fidelity and inverse rendering quality over existing 3DGS-based inverse rendering approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/GrumpySloths/SGS_Intrinsic.github.io.

Rongjia Zheng, Shangwei Huang, Lei Zhu et al.

We present a generative method for texture filtering, which exhibits surprisingly good performance and generalizability. Our core idea is to empower texture filtering by taking full advantage of the strong learned image prior of pre-trained generative models. To this end, we propose to fine-tune a pre-trained generative model via a two-stage strategy. Specifically, we first conduct supervised fine-tuning on a very small set of paired images, and then perform reinforcement fine-tuning on a large-scale unlabeled dataset under the guidance of a reward function that quantifies the quality of texture removal and structure preservation. Extensive experiments show that our method clearly outperforms previous methods, and is effective to deal with previously challenging cases. Our code is available at https://github.com/OnlyZZZZ/Generative_Texture_Filtering.

Yanan Li, Christina Yi Jin, Yuan Jin et al.

A central challenge in developing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is effectively integrating heterogeneous inputs into a cohesive reasoning engine. Current paradigms predominantly rely on modular architectures that introduce modality-specific encoders and cross-modal fusion mechanisms. However, these designs are fundamentally bottlenecked by a geometric modality gap, forcing the LLM to expend significant computational capacity on geometric reconciliation rather than deep cross-modal reasoning. In this work, we formally characterize this modality gap and theoretically demonstrate that native architectures, specifically those employing a unified vocabulary, intrinsically maintain a zero-gap state across all hidden layers. Guided by these theoretical findings, we propose \textit{One Tokenizer}, a native architecture that maps all modalities directly into a shared token space. We empirically validate this framework on a DNA--text multimodal testbed. Our extensive evaluations reveal that by achieving seamless integration within the LLM's native latent space, One Tokenizer consistently outperforms encoder-based modular counterparts, providing a fundamentally superior framework for deep biological reasoning.

Jun Zhou, Dongyang Yu, Kamran Aziz et al.

Fine-grained sentiment analysis involves extracting and organizing sentiment elements from textual data. However, existing approaches often overlook issues of category semantic inclusion and overlap, as well as inherent structural patterns within the target sequence. This study introduces a generative sentiment analysis model. To address the challenges related to category semantic inclusion and overlap, a latent category distribution variable is introduced. By reconstructing the input of a variational autoencoder, the model learns the intensity of the relationship between categories and text, thereby improving sequence generation. Additionally, a trie data structure and constrained decoding strategy are utilized to exploit structural patterns, which in turn reduces the search space and regularizes the generation process. Experimental results on the Restaurant-ACOS and Laptop-ACOS datasets demonstrate a significant performance improvement compared to baseline models. Ablation experiments further confirm the effectiveness of latent category distribution and constrained decoding strategy.

Qing Zhang, Jinguang Tong, Jing Zhang et al.

Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to improve multi-view consistency. SEGS constructs a structural energy in the PCA subspace of U-Net features and injects its gradient into the denoising process. It can be easily integrated into SDS/VSD pipelines without retraining. Experiments show that SEGS reduces the Janus Rate by about 10% on average and improves View-CS scores across multiple baselines, including DreamFusion, Magic3D, and LucidDreamer. This method effectively alleviates viewpoint artifacts while preserving appearance fidelity, providing a flexible solution for high-quality text-to-3D content generation.

Junjin Xiao, Qing Zhang, Zhan Xu et al.

Human avatar has become a novel type of 3D asset with various applications. Ideally, a human avatar should be fully customizable to accommodate different settings and environments. In this work, we introduce NECA, an approach capable of learning versatile human representation from monocular or sparse-view videos, enabling granular customization across aspects such as pose, shadow, shape, lighting and texture. The core of our approach is to represent humans in complementary dual spaces and predict disentangled neural fields of geometry, albedo, shadow, as well as an external lighting, from which we are able to derive realistic rendering with high-frequency details via volumetric rendering. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantage of our method over the state-of-the-art methods in photorealistic rendering, as well as various editing tasks such as novel pose synthesis and relighting. The code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/NECA.

Junjin Xiao, Qing Zhang, Yonewei Nie et al.

This paper presents RoGSplat, a novel approach for synthesizing high-fidelity novel views of unseen human from sparse multi-view images, while requiring no cumbersome per-subject optimization. Unlike previous methods that typically struggle with sparse views with few overlappings and are less effective in reconstructing complex human geometry, the proposed method enables robust reconstruction in such challenging conditions. Our key idea is to lift SMPL vertices to dense and reliable 3D prior points representing accurate human body geometry, and then regress human Gaussian parameters based on the points. To account for possible misalignment between SMPL model and images, we propose to predict image-aligned 3D prior points by leveraging both pixel-level features and voxel-level features, from which we regress the coarse Gaussians. To enhance the ability to capture high-frequency details, we further render depth maps from the coarse 3D Gaussians to help regress fine-grained pixel-wise Gaussians. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in novel view synthesis and cross-dataset generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/RoGSplat.

Kangcheng Zhou, Jun Jiang, Qing Zhang et al.

Interpretability is significant in computational pathology, leading to the development of multimodal information integration from histopathological image and corresponding text data.However, existing multimodal methods have limited interpretability due to the lack of high-quality dataset that support explicit reasoning and inference and simple reasoning process.To address the above problems, we introduce a novel multimodal pathology large language model with strong reasoning capabilities.To improve the generation of accurate and contextually relevant textual descriptions, we design a semantic reward strategy integrated with group relative policy optimization.We construct a high-quality pathology visual question answering (VQA) dataset, specifically designed to support complex reasoning tasks.Comprehensive experiments conducted on this dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even when trained with only 20% of the data.Our method also achieves comparable performance on downstream zero-shot image classification task compared with CLIP.

Xinbo Wang, Wenju Xu, Qing Zhang et al.

This paper presents a portrait style transfer method that generalizes well to various different domains while enabling high-quality semantic-aligned stylization on regions including hair, eyes, eyelashes, skins, lips, and background. To this end, we propose to establish dense semantic correspondence between the given input and reference portraits based on a pre-trained model and a semantic adapter, with which we obtain a warped reference semantically aligned with the input. To ensure effective yet controllable style transfer, we devise an AdaIN-Wavelet transform to balance content preservation and stylization by blending low-frequency information of the warped reference with high-frequency information of the input in the latent space. A style adapter is also designed to provide style guidance from the warped reference. With the stylized latent from AdaIN-Wavelet transform, we employ a dual-conditional diffusion model that integrates a ControlNet recording high-frequency information and the style guidance to generate the final result. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our code and trained model are available at https://github.com/wangxb29/DGPST.

Yongwei Nie, Changzhen Liu, Chengjiang Long et al.

Besides a 3D mesh, Human Mesh Recovery (HMR) methods usually need to estimate a camera for computing 2D reprojection loss. Previous approaches may encounter the following problem: both the mesh and camera are not correct but the combination of them can yield a low reprojection loss. To alleviate this problem, we define multiple RoIs (region of interest) containing the same human and propose a multiple-RoI-based HMR method. Our key idea is that with multiple RoIs as input, we can estimate multiple local cameras and have the opportunity to design and apply additional constraints between cameras to improve the accuracy of the cameras and, in turn, the accuracy of the corresponding 3D mesh. To implement this idea, we propose a RoI-aware feature fusion network by which we estimate a 3D mesh shared by all RoIs as well as local cameras corresponding to the RoIs. We observe that local cameras can be converted to the camera of the full image through which we construct a local camera consistency loss as the additional constraint imposed on local cameras. Another benefit of introducing multiple RoIs is that we can encapsulate our network into a contrastive learning framework and apply a contrastive loss to regularize the training of our network. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our multi-RoI HMR method and superiority to recent prior arts. Our code is available at https://github.com/CptDiaos/Multi-RoI.

Junxiao Xue, Pavel Smirnov, Ziao Li et al.

We propose a real-time 3D human pose estimation and motion analysis method termed RePose for rehabilitation training. It is capable of real-time monitoring and evaluation of patients'motion during rehabilitation, providing immediate feedback and guidance to assist patients in executing rehabilitation exercises correctly. Firstly, we introduce a unified pipeline for end-to-end real-time human pose estimation and motion analysis using RGB video input from multiple cameras which can be applied to the field of rehabilitation training. The pipeline can help to monitor and correct patients'actions, thus aiding them in regaining muscle strength and motor functions. Secondly, we propose a fast tracking method for medical rehabilitation scenarios with multiple-person interference, which requires less than 1ms for tracking for a single frame. Additionally, we modify SmoothNet for real-time posture estimation, effectively reducing pose estimation errors and restoring the patient's true motion state, making it visually smoother. Finally, we use Unity platform for real-time monitoring and evaluation of patients' motion during rehabilitation, and to display the muscle stress conditions to assist patients with their rehabilitation training.

Leyi Li, Chenyu Du, Jiafei Sun et al.

Computational thinking (CT) is increasingly promoted as a core literacy, yet learners and teachers face challenges in connecting abstract program logic to meaningful outcomes. We design and evaluate RoboBlockly Studio, an integrated interactive system that combines block-based programming, a conversational AI teaching agent, and embodied robot execution. RoboBlockly Studio creates a tight iterative loop of authoring, running, observing, and revising. Informed by interviews with five programming teachers, the system was designed to support four goals: (1) preserving learner agency in computational thinking, (2) making program behavior transparent and interpretable, (3) grounding programming in embodied, classroom-aligned tasks, and (4) scaffolding reflection through pedagogically grounded AI dialogue. We deployed RoboBlockly Studio with 32 high school students, observing how robot and AI feedback influenced students' interactions with code, reflections on problem-solving strategies, and understanding of CT concepts. We discuss design insights and implications for creating interactive, embodied learning environments that integrate AI and robotics to support CT learning in computing education.

Junjin Xiao, Dongyang Li, Yandan Yang et al.

This paper tackles spatial perception and manipulation challenges in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. To address depth ambiguity from monocular input, we leverage a pre-trained multi-view diffusion model to synthesize latent novel views and propose a Geometry-Guided Gated Transformer (G3T) that aligns multi-view features under 3D geometric guidance while adaptively filtering occlusion noise. To improve action learning efficiency, we introduce Action Manifold Learning (AML), which directly predicts actions on the valid action manifold, bypassing inefficient regression of unstructured targets like noise or velocity. Experiments on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-robot tasks show our method achieves superior success rate and robustness over SOTA baselines. Project page: https://junjxiao.github.io/Multi-view-VLA.github.io/.

Xuankai Zhang, Junjin Xiao, Qing Zhang

This paper presents a unified framework that allows high-quality dynamic Gaussian Splatting from both defocused and motion-blurred monocular videos. Due to the significant difference between the formation processes of defocus blur and motion blur, existing methods are tailored for either one of them, lacking the ability to simultaneously deal with both of them. Although the two can be jointly modeled as blur kernel-based convolution, the inherent difficulty in estimating accurate blur kernels greatly limits the progress in this direction. In this work, we go a step further towards this direction. Particularly, we propose to estimate per-pixel reliable blur kernels using a blur prediction network that exploits blur-related scene and camera information and is subject to a blur-aware sparsity constraint. Besides, we introduce a dynamic Gaussian densification strategy to mitigate the lack of Gaussians for incomplete regions, and boost the performance of novel view synthesis by incorporating unseen view information to constrain scene optimization. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in generating photorealistic novel view synthesis from defocused and motion-blurred monocular videos. Our code is available at https://github.com/hhhddddddd/dydeblur.

Hang Guo, Qing Zhang, Zixuan Gao et al.

Accurate prediction of placental diseases via whole slide images (WSIs) is critical for preventing severe maternal and fetal complications. However, WSI analysis presents significant computational challenges due to the massive data volume. Existing WSI classification methods encounter critical limitations: (1) inadequate patch selection strategies that either compromise performance or fail to sufficiently reduce computational demands, and (2) the loss of global histological context resulting from patch-level processing approaches. To address these challenges, we propose an Efficient multimodal framework for Patient-level placental disease Diagnosis, named EmmPD. Our approach introduces a two-stage patch selection module that combines parameter-free and learnable compression strategies, optimally balancing computational efficiency with critical feature preservation. Additionally, we develop a hybrid multimodal fusion module that leverages adaptive graph learning to enhance pathological feature representation and incorporates textual medical reports to enrich global contextual understanding. Extensive experiments conducted on both a self-constructed patient-level Placental dataset and two public datasets demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art diagnostic performance. The code is available at https://github.com/ECNU-MultiDimLab/EmmPD.

Qing Zhang, Guoquan Pei, Yan Wang

Medical Hyperspectral Imaging (MHSI) has emerged as a promising tool for enhanced disease diagnosis, particularly in computational pathology, offering rich spectral information that aids in identifying subtle biochemical properties of tissues. Despite these advantages, effectively fusing both spatial-dimensional and spectral-dimensional information from MHSIs remains challenging due to its high dimensionality and spectral redundancy inherent characteristics. To solve the above challenges, we propose a novel spatial-spectral omni-fusion network for hyperspectral image segmentation, named as Omni-Fuse. Here, we introduce abundant cross-dimensional feature fusion operations, including a cross-dimensional enhancement module that refines both spatial and spectral features through bidirectional attention mechanisms, a spectral-guided spatial query selection to select the most spectral-related spatial feature as the query, and a two-stage cross-dimensional decoder which dynamically guide the model to focus on the selected spatial query. Despite of numerous attention blocks, Omni-Fuse remains efficient in execution. Experiments on two microscopic hyperspectral image datasets show that our approach can significantly improve the segmentation performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods, with over 5.73 percent improvement in DSC. Code available at: https://github.com/DeepMed-Lab-ECNU/Omni-Fuse.

Wanchang Yu, Qing Zhang, Rongjia Zheng et al.

We present a diffusion-based portrait shadow removal approach that can robustly produce high-fidelity results. Unlike previous methods, we cast shadow removal as diffusion-based inpainting. To this end, we first train a shadow-independent structure extraction network on a real-world portrait dataset with various synthetic lighting conditions, which allows to generate a shadow-independent structure map including facial details while excluding the unwanted shadow boundaries. The structure map is then used as condition to train a structure-guided inpainting diffusion model for removing shadows in a generative manner. Finally, to restore the fine-scale details (e.g., eyelashes, moles and spots) that may not be captured by the structure map, we take the gradients inside the shadow regions as guidance and train a detail restoration diffusion model to refine the shadow removal result. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets show that our method clearly outperforms existing methods, and is effective to avoid previously common issues such as facial identity tampering, shadow residual, color distortion, structure blurring, and loss of details. Our code is available at https://github.com/wanchang-yu/Structure-Guided-Diffusion-for-Portrait-Shadow-Removal.

Junhao Lin, Lei Zhu, Jiaxing Shen et al.

With the rapid development of depth sensor, more and more RGB-D videos could be obtained. Identifying the foreground in RGB-D videos is a fundamental and important task. However, the existing salient object detection (SOD) works only focus on either static RGB-D images or RGB videos, ignoring the collaborating of RGB-D and video information. In this paper, we first collect a new annotated RGB-D video SOD (ViDSOD-100) dataset, which contains 100 videos within a total of 9,362 frames, acquired from diverse natural scenes. All the frames in each video are manually annotated to a high-quality saliency annotation. Moreover, we propose a new baseline model, named attentive triple-fusion network (ATF-Net), for RGB-D video salient object detection. Our method aggregates the appearance information from an input RGB image, spatio-temporal information from an estimated motion map, and the geometry information from the depth map by devising three modality-specific branches and a multi-modality integration branch. The modality-specific branches extract the representation of different inputs, while the multi-modality integration branch combines the multi-level modality-specific features by introducing the encoder feature aggregation (MEA) modules and decoder feature aggregation (MDA) modules. The experimental findings conducted on both our newly introduced ViDSOD-100 dataset and the well-established DAVSOD dataset highlight the superior performance of the proposed ATF-Net. This performance enhancement is demonstrated both quantitatively and qualitatively, surpassing the capabilities of current state-of-the-art techniques across various domains, including RGB-D saliency detection, video saliency detection, and video object segmentation. Our data and our code are available at github.com/jhl-Det/RGBD_Video_SOD.

Yongwei Nie, Mingxian Fan, Chengjiang Long et al.

Human Mesh Recovery (HMR) is the task of estimating a parameterized 3D human mesh from an image. There is a kind of methods first training a regression model for this problem, then further optimizing the pretrained regression model for any specific sample individually at test time. However, the pretrained model may not provide an ideal optimization starting point for the test-time optimization. Inspired by meta-learning, we incorporate the test-time optimization into training, performing a step of test-time optimization for each sample in the training batch before really conducting the training optimization over all the training samples. In this way, we obtain a meta-model, the meta-parameter of which is friendly to the test-time optimization. At test time, after several test-time optimization steps starting from the meta-parameter, we obtain much higher HMR accuracy than the test-time optimization starting from the simply pretrained regression model. Furthermore, we find test-time HMR objectives are different from training-time objectives, which reduces the effectiveness of the learning of the meta-model. To solve this problem, we propose a dual-network architecture that unifies the training-time and test-time objectives. Our method, armed with meta-learning and the dual networks, outperforms state-of-the-art regression-based and optimization-based HMR approaches, as validated by the extensive experiments. The codes are available at https://github.com/fmx789/Meta-HMR.

Lingwei Dang, Yongwei Nie, Chengjiang Long et al.

Human motion prediction is a challenging task due to the stochasticity and aperiodicity of future poses. Recently, graph convolutional network has been proven to be very effective to learn dynamic relations among pose joints, which is helpful for pose prediction. On the other hand, one can abstract a human pose recursively to obtain a set of poses at multiple scales. With the increase of the abstraction level, the motion of the pose becomes more stable, which benefits pose prediction too. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Network (MSR-GCN) for human pose prediction task in the manner of end-to-end. The GCNs are used to extract features from fine to coarse scale and then from coarse to fine scale. The extracted features at each scale are then combined and decoded to obtain the residuals between the input and target poses. Intermediate supervisions are imposed on all the predicted poses, which enforces the network to learn more representative features. Our proposed approach is evaluated on two standard benchmark datasets, i.e., the Human3.6M dataset and the CMU Mocap dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Droliven/MSRGCN.

Zhian Liu, Yongwei Nie, Chengjiang Long et al.

In this paper, we propose $\text{HF}^2$-VAD, a Hybrid framework that integrates Flow reconstruction and Frame prediction seamlessly to handle Video Anomaly Detection. Firstly, we design the network of ML-MemAE-SC (Multi-Level Memory modules in an Autoencoder with Skip Connections) to memorize normal patterns for optical flow reconstruction so that abnormal events can be sensitively identified with larger flow reconstruction errors. More importantly, conditioned on the reconstructed flows, we then employ a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE), which captures the high correlation between video frame and optical flow, to predict the next frame given several previous frames. By CVAE, the quality of flow reconstruction essentially influences that of frame prediction. Therefore, poorly reconstructed optical flows of abnormal events further deteriorate the quality of the final predicted future frame, making the anomalies more detectable. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/LiUzHiAn/hf2vad}{https://github.com/LiUzHiAn/hf2vad}.

Yixing Zhu, Qing Zhang, Wenju Xu et al.

We present YOEO, an approach for object erasure. Unlike recent diffusion-based methods which struggle to erase target objects without generating unexpected content within the masked regions due to lack of sufficient paired training data and explicit constraint on content generation, our method allows to produce high-quality object erasure results free of unwanted objects or artifacts while faithfully preserving the overall context coherence to the surrounding content. We achieve this goal by training an object erasure diffusion model on unpaired data containing only large-scale real-world images, under the supervision of a sundries detector and a context coherence loss that are built upon an entity segmentation model. To enable more efficient training and inference, a diffusion distillation strategy is employed to train for a few-step erasure diffusion model. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art object erasure methods. Code will be available at https://zyxunh.github.io/YOEO-ProjectPage/.

Zhan Jin, Yu Luo, Yizhou Zhang et al.

Conventional pixel-wise loss functions fail to enforce topological constraints in coronary vessel segmentation, producing fragmented vascular trees despite high pixel-level accuracy. We present ARIADNE, a two-stage framework coupling preference-aligned perception with RL-based diagnostic reasoning for topologically coherent stenosis detection. The perception module employs DPO to fine-tune the Sa2VA vision-language foundation model using Betti number constraints as preference signals, aligning the policy toward geometrically complete vessel structures rather than pixel-wise overlap metrics. The reasoning module formulates stenosis localization as a Markov Decision Process with an explicit rejection mechanism that autonomously defers ambiguous anatomical candidates such as bifurcations and vessel crossings, shifting from coverage maximization to reliability optimization. On 1,400 clinical angiograms, ARIADNE achieves state-of-the-art centerline Dice of 0.838, reduces false positives by 41% compared to geometric baselines. External validation on multi-center benchmarks ARCADE and XCAD confirms generalization across acquisition protocols. This represents the first application of DPO for topological alignment in medical imaging, demonstrating that preference-based learning over structural constraints mitigates topological violations while maintaining diagnostic sensitivity in interventional cardiology workflows.

Chenxi Zhang, Ziliang Gan, Liyun Zhu et al.

The financial domain poses substantial challenges for vision-language models (VLMs) due to specialized chart formats and knowledge-intensive reasoning requirements. However, existing financial benchmarks are largely single-turn and rely on a narrow set of question formats, limiting comprehensive evaluation in realistic application scenarios. To address this gap, we propose FinMTM, a multi-turn multimodal benchmark that expands diversity along both data and task dimensions. On the data side, we curate and annotate 11{,}133 bilingual (Chinese and English) financial QA pairs grounded in financial visuals, including candlestick charts, statistical plots, and report figures. On the task side, FinMTM covers single- and multiple-choice questions, multi-turn open-ended dialogues, and agent-based tasks. We further design task-specific evaluation protocols, including a set-overlap scoring rule for multiple-choice questions, a weighted combination of turn-level and session-level scores for multi-turn dialogues, and a composite metric that integrates planning quality with final outcomes for agent tasks. Extensive experimental evaluation of 22 VLMs reveal their limitations in fine-grained visual perception, long-context reasoning, and complex agent workflows.

Qing Zhang, Xuesong Li, Jing Zhang

What does it mean for a visual system to truly understand affordance? We argue that this understanding hinges on two complementary capacities: geometric perception, which identifies the structural parts of objects that enable interaction, and interaction perception, which models how an agent's actions engage with those parts. To test this hypothesis, we conduct a systematic probing of Visual Foundation Models (VFMs). We find that models like DINO inherently encode part-level geometric structures, while generative models like Flux contain rich, verb-conditioned spatial attention maps that serve as implicit interaction priors. Crucially, we demonstrate that these two dimensions are not merely correlated but are composable elements of affordance. By simply fusing DINO's geometric prototypes with Flux's interaction maps in a training-free and zero-shot manner, we achieve affordance estimation competitive with weakly-supervised methods. This final fusion experiment confirms that geometric and interaction perception are the fundamental building blocks of affordance understanding in VFMs, providing a mechanistic account of how perception grounds action.

Qing Zhang, Haocheng Lv, Jie Liu et al.

With the rise of large-scale language models (LLMs), it is currently popular and effective to convert multimodal information into text descriptions for multimodal multi-hop question answering. However, we argue that the current methods of multi-modal multi-hop question answering still mainly face two challenges: 1) The retrieved evidence containing a large amount of redundant information, inevitably leads to a significant drop in performance due to irrelevant information misleading the prediction. 2) The reasoning process without interpretable reasoning steps makes the model difficult to discover the logical errors for handling complex questions. To solve these problems, we propose a unified LLMs-based approach but without heavily relying on them due to the LLM's potential errors, and innovatively treat multimodal multi-hop question answering as a joint entailment tree generation and question answering problem. Specifically, we design a multi-task learning framework with a focus on facilitating common knowledge sharing across interpretability and prediction tasks while preventing task-specific errors from interfering with each other via mixture of experts. Afterward, we design an iterative feedback mechanism to further enhance both tasks by feeding back the results of the joint training to the LLM for regenerating entailment trees, aiming to iteratively refine the potential answer. Notably, our method has won the first place in the official leaderboard of WebQA (since April 10, 2024), and achieves competitive results on MultimodalQA.

Chenxi Zhang, Qing Zhang, Jiayun Wu et al.

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to identify objects that blend seamlessly into their surroundings. The inherent visual complexity of camouflaged objects, including their low contrast with the background, diverse textures, and subtle appearance variations, often obscures semantic cues, making accurate segmentation highly challenging. Existing methods primarily rely on visual features, which are insufficient to handle the variability and intricacy of camouflaged objects, leading to unstable object perception and ambiguous segmentation results. To tackle these limitations, we introduce a novel task, class-guided camouflaged object detection (CGCOD), which extends traditional COD task by incorporating object-specific class knowledge to enhance detection robustness and accuracy. To facilitate this task, we present a new dataset, CamoClass, comprising real-world camouflaged objects with class annotations. Furthermore, we propose a multi-stage framework, CGNet, which incorporates a plug-and-play class prompt generator and a simple yet effective class-guided detector. This establishes a new paradigm for COD, bridging the gap between contextual understanding and class-guided detection. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our flexible framework in improving the performance of proposed and existing detectors by leveraging class-level textual information.

Qing Zhang, Cheng Liu, Bo Liu et al.

Fault-tolerant deep learning accelerator is the basis for highly reliable deep learning processing and critical to deploy deep learning in safety-critical applications such as avionics and robotics. Since deep learning is known to be computing- and memory-intensive, traditional fault-tolerant approaches based on redundant computing will incur substantial overhead including power consumption and chip area. To this end, we propose to characterize deep learning vulnerability difference across both neurons and bits of each neuron, and leverage the vulnerability difference to enable selective protection of the deep learning processing components from the perspective of architecture layer and circuit layer respectively. At the same time, we observe the correlation between model quantization and bit protection overhead of the underlying processing elements of deep learning accelerators, and propose to reduce the bit protection overhead by adding additional quantization constrain without compromising the model accuracy. Finally, we employ Bayesian optimization strategy to co-optimize the correlated cross-layer design parameters at algorithm layer, architecture layer, and circuit layer to minimize the hardware resource consumption while fulfilling multiple user constraints including reliability, accuracy, and performance of the deep learning processing at the same time.

Jing Yang, Pratusha Bhuvana Prasad, Qing Zhang et al.

Accurately measuring the geometry and spatially-varying reflectance of real-world objects is a complex task due to their intricate shapes formed by concave features, hollow engravings and diverse surfaces, resulting in inter-reflection and occlusion when photographed. Moreover, issues like lens flare and overexposure can arise from interference from secondary reflections and limitations of hardware even in professional studios. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using polarized reflectance field capture and a comprehensive statistical analysis algorithm to obtain highly accurate surface normals (within 0.1mm/px) and spatially-varying reflectance data, including albedo, specular separation, roughness, and anisotropy parameters for realistic rendering and analysis. Our algorithm removes image artifacts via analytical modeling and further employs both an initial step and an optimization step computed on the whole image collection to further enhance the precision of per-pixel surface reflectance and normal measurement. We showcase the captured shapes and reflectance of diverse objects with a wide material range, spanning from highly diffuse to highly glossy - a challenge unaddressed by prior techniques. Our approach enhances downstream applications by offering precise measurements for realistic rendering and provides a valuable training dataset for emerging research in inverse rendering. We will release the polarized reflectance fields of several captured objects with this work.

Qing Zhang, Hang Guo, Siyuan Yang et al.

Pathological cell semantic segmentation is a fundamental technology in computational pathology, essential for applications like cancer diagnosis and effective treatment. Given that multiple cell types exist across various organs, with subtle differences in cell size and shape, multi-organ, multi-class cell segmentation is particularly challenging. Most existing methods employ multi-branch frameworks to enhance feature extraction, but often result in complex architectures. Moreover, reliance on visual information limits performance in multi-class analysis due to intricate textural details. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-OrgaN multi-Class cell semantic segmentation method with a single brancH (MONCH) that leverages vision-language input. Specifically, we design a hierarchical feature extraction mechanism to provide coarse-to-fine-grained features for segmenting cells of various shapes, including high-frequency, convolutional, and topological features. Inspired by the synergy of textual and multi-grained visual features, we introduce a progressive prompt decoder to harmonize multimodal information, integrating features from fine to coarse granularity for better context capture. Extensive experiments on the PanNuke dataset, which has significant class imbalance and subtle cell size and shape variations, demonstrate that MONCH outperforms state-of-the-art cell segmentation methods and vision-language models. Codes and implementations will be made publicly available.

Qing Zhang, Bing Xu, Xudong Zhang et al.

The remarkable performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) highly relies on crafted prompts. However, manual prompt engineering is a laborious process, creating a core bottleneck for practical application of LLMs. This phenomenon has led to the emergence of a new research area known as Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO), which develops rapidly in recent years. Existing APO methods such as those based on evolutionary algorithms or trial-and-error approaches realize an efficient and accurate prompt optimization to some extent. However, those researches focus on a single model or algorithm for the generation strategy and optimization process, which limits their performance when handling complex tasks. To address this, we propose a novel framework called Ensemble Learning based Prompt Optimization (ELPO) to achieve more accurate and robust results. Motivated by the idea of ensemble learning, ELPO conducts voting mechanism and introduces shared generation strategies along with different search methods for searching superior prompts. Moreover, ELPO creatively presents more efficient algorithms for the prompt generation and search process. Experimental results demonstrate that ELPO outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods across different tasks, e.g., improving F1 score by 7.6 on ArSarcasm dataset.

Qing Zhang, Jing Huang, Mingyang Xu et al.

While mainstream robotics pursues metric precision and flawless performance, this paper explores the creative potential of a deliberately "lo-fi" approach. We present the "Semantic Glitch," a soft flying robotic art installation whose physical form, a 3D pixel style cloud, is a "physical glitch" derived from digital archaeology. We detail a novel autonomous pipeline that rejects conventional sensors like LiDAR and SLAM, relying solely on the qualitative, semantic understanding of a Multimodal Large Language Model to navigate. By authoring a bio-inspired personality for the robot through a natural language prompt, we create a "narrative mind" that complements the "weak," historically, loaded body. Our analysis begins with a 13-minute autonomous flight log, and a follow-up study statistically validates the framework's robustness for authoring quantifiably distinct personas. The combined analysis reveals emergent behaviors, from landmark-based navigation to a compelling "plan to execution" gap, and a character whose unpredictable, plausible behavior stems from a lack of precise proprioception. This demonstrates a lo-fi framework for creating imperfect companions whose success is measured in character over efficiency.

Qing Zhang, Jinguang Tong, Jie Hong et al.

Text-to-3D generation often suffers from the Janus problem, where objects look correct from the front but collapse into duplicated or distorted geometry from other angles. We attribute this failure to viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors, which propagates into 3D optimization. To address this, we propose Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free, plug-and-play framework that enforces multi-view consistency entirely at sampling time. SEGS defines a structural energy in a PCA subspace of intermediate U-Net features and injects its gradients into the denoising trajectory, steering geometry toward the intended viewpoint while preserving appearance fidelity. Integrated seamlessly into SDS/VSD pipelines, SEGS significantly reduces Janus artifacts, achieving improved geometric alignment and viewpoint consistency without retraining or weight modification.

Qing Zhang, Alex Deng, Michelle Du et al.

Evaluation plays a crucial role in the development of ranking algorithms on search and recommender systems. It enables online platforms to create user-friendly features that drive commercial success in a steady and effective manner. The online environment is particularly conducive to applying causal inference techniques, such as randomized controlled experiments (known as A/B test), which are often more challenging to implement in fields like medicine and public policy. However, businesses face unique challenges when it comes to effective A/B test. Specifically, achieving sufficient statistical power for conversion-based metrics can be time-consuming, especially for significant purchases like booking accommodations. While offline evaluations are quicker and more cost-effective, they often lack accuracy and are inadequate for selecting candidates for A/B test. To address these challenges, we developed interleaving and counterfactual evaluation methods to facilitate rapid online assessments for identifying the most promising candidates for A/B tests. Our approach not only increased the sensitivity of experiments by a factor of up to 100 (depending on the approach and metrics) compared to traditional A/B testing but also streamlined the experimental process. The practical insights gained from usage in production can also benefit organizations with similar interests.

Rongjia Zheng, Qing Zhang, Chengjiang Long et al.

Recent methods have shown that pre-trained diffusion models can be fine-tuned to enable generative inverse rendering by learning image-conditioned noise-to-intrinsic mapping. Despite their remarkable progress, they struggle to robustly produce high-quality results as the noise-to-intrinsic paradigm essentially utilizes noisy images with deteriorated structure and appearance for intrinsic prediction, while it is common knowledge that structure and appearance information in an image are crucial for inverse rendering. To address this issue, we present DNF-Intrinsic, a robust yet efficient inverse rendering approach fine-tuned from a pre-trained diffusion model, where we propose to take the source image rather than Gaussian noise as input to directly predict deterministic intrinsic properties via flow matching. Moreover, we design a generative renderer to constrain that the predicted intrinsic properties are physically faithful to the source image. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method clearly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Chenxi Zhang, Jiayun Wu, Qing Zhang et al.

Camouflaged object detection (COD) primarily focuses on learning subtle yet discriminative representations from complex scenes. Existing methods predominantly follow the parametric feedforward architecture based on static visual representation modeling. However, they lack explicit mechanisms for acquiring historical context, limiting their adaptation and effectiveness in handling challenging camouflage scenes. In this paper, we propose a recall-augmented COD architecture, namely RetroMem, which dynamically modulates camouflage pattern perception and inference by integrating relevant historical knowledge into the process. Specifically, RetroMem employs a two-stage training paradigm consisting of a learning stage and a recall stage to construct, update, and utilize memory representations effectively. During the learning stage, we design a dense multi-scale adapter (DMA) to improve the pretrained encoder's capability to capture rich multi-scale visual information with very few trainable parameters, thereby providing foundational inferences. In the recall stage, we propose a dynamic memory mechanism (DMM) and an inference pattern reconstruction (IPR). These components fully leverage the latent relationships between learned knowledge and current sample context to reconstruct the inference of camouflage patterns, thereby significantly improving the model's understanding of camouflage scenes. Extensive experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate that our RetroMem significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Yujing Lu, Ling Zhong, Jing Yang et al.

Chart Question Answering (CQA) evaluates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on visual understanding and reasoning over chart data. However, existing benchmarks mostly test surface-level parsing, such as reading labels and legends, while overlooking deeper scientific reasoning. We propose DomainCQA, a framework for constructing domain-specific CQA benchmarks that emphasize both visual comprehension and knowledge-intensive reasoning. It integrates complexity-aware chart selection, multitier QA generation, and expert validation. Applied to astronomy, DomainCQA yields AstroChart, a benchmark of 1,690 QA pairs over 482 charts, exposing persistent weaknesses in fine-grained perception, numerical reasoning, and domain knowledge integration across 21 MLLMs. Fine-tuning on AstroChart improves performance across fundamental and advanced tasks. Pilot QA sets in biochemistry, economics, medicine, and social science further demonstrate DomainCQA's generality. Together, our results establish DomainCQA as a unified pipeline for constructing and augmenting domain-specific chart reasoning benchmarks.

Qing Zhang, Jinguang Tong, Jing Zhang et al.

Despite recent advances in text-to-3D generation techniques, current methods often suffer from geometric inconsistencies, commonly referred to as the Janus Problem. This paper identifies the root cause of the Janus Problem: viewpoint generation bias in diffusion models, which creates a significant gap between the actual generated viewpoint and the expected one required for optimizing the 3D model. To address this issue, we propose a tuning-free approach called the Attention and CLIP Guidance (ACG) mechanism. ACG enhances desired viewpoints by adaptively controlling cross-attention maps, employs CLIP-based view-text similarities to filter out erroneous viewpoints, and uses a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy with staged prompts to progressively refine 3D generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the Janus Problem without compromising generation speed, establishing ACG as an efficient, plug-and-play component for existing text-to-3D frameworks.

Yongwei Nie, Hao Huang, Chengjiang Long et al.

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) has been extensively studied under the settings of One-Class Classification (OCC) and Weakly-Supervised learning (WS), which however both require laborious human-annotated normal/abnormal labels. In this paper, we study Unsupervised VAD (UVAD) that does not depend on any label by combining OCC and WS into a unified training framework. Specifically, we extend OCC to weighted OCC (wOCC) and propose a wOCC-WS interleaving training module, where the two models automatically generate pseudo-labels for each other. We face two challenges to make the combination effective: (1) Models' performance fluctuates occasionally during the training process due to the inevitable randomness of the pseudo labels. (2) Thresholds are needed to divide pseudo labels, making the training depend on the accuracy of user intervention. For the first problem, we propose to use wOCC requiring soft labels instead of OCC trained with hard zero/one labels, as soft labels exhibit high consistency throughout different training cycles while hard labels are prone to sudden changes. For the second problem, we repeat the interleaving training module multiple times, during which we propose an adaptive thresholding strategy that can progressively refine a rough threshold to a relatively optimal threshold, which reduces the influence of user interaction. A benefit of employing OCC and WS methods to compose a UVAD method is that we can incorporate the most recent OCC or WS model into our framework. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed UVAD framework.

Qing Zhang, Hao Jiang, Yongwei Nie et al.

We present a simple but effective technique to smooth out textures while preserving the prominent structures. Our method is built upon a key observation -- the coarsest level in a Gaussian pyramid often naturally eliminates textures and summarizes the main image structures. This inspires our central idea for texture filtering, which is to progressively upsample the very low-resolution coarsest Gaussian pyramid level to a full-resolution texture smoothing result with well-preserved structures, under the guidance of each fine-scale Gaussian pyramid level and its associated Laplacian pyramid level. We show that our approach is effective to separate structure from texture of different scales, local contrasts, and forms, without degrading structures or introducing visual artifacts. We also demonstrate the applicability of our method on various applications including detail enhancement, image abstraction, HDR tone mapping, inverse halftoning, and LDR image enhancement.