Zhiqiang Wei

Chengyu Zheng, Ning song, Ruoyu Zhang et al.

Image-text retrieval in remote sensing aims to provide flexible information for data analysis and application. In recent years, state-of-the-art methods are dedicated to ``scale decoupling'' and ``semantic decoupling'' strategies to further enhance the capability of representation. However, these previous approaches focus on either the disentangling scale or semantics but ignore merging these two ideas in a union model, which extremely limits the performance of cross-modal retrieval models. To address these issues, we propose a novel Scale-Semantic Joint Decoupling Network (SSJDN) for remote sensing image-text retrieval. Specifically, we design the Bidirectional Scale Decoupling (BSD) module, which exploits Salience Feature Extraction (SFE) and Salience-Guided Suppression (SGS) units to adaptively extract potential features and suppress cumbersome features at other scales in a bidirectional pattern to yield different scale clues. Besides, we design the Label-supervised Semantic Decoupling (LSD) module by leveraging the category semantic labels as prior knowledge to supervise images and texts probing significant semantic-related information. Finally, we design a Semantic-guided Triple Loss (STL), which adaptively generates a constant to adjust the loss function to improve the probability of matching the same semantic image and text and shorten the convergence time of the retrieval model. Our proposed SSJDN outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in numerical experiments conducted on four benchmark remote sensing datasets.

Chengxi Han, Xiaoyu Su, Zhiqiang Wei et al.

The remote sensing image change detection task is an essential method for large-scale monitoring. We propose HSANet, a network that uses hierarchical convolution to extract multi-scale features. It incorporates hybrid self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms to learn and fuse global and cross-scale information. This enables HSANet to capture global context at different scales and integrate cross-scale features, refining edge details and improving detection performance. We will also open-source our model code: https://github.com/ChengxiHAN/HSANet.

Wenda Zhang, Hongyu Jin, Siyi Wang et al.

Speech Emotion Recognition models typically use single categorical labels, overlooking the inherent ambiguity of human emotions. Ambiguous Emotion Recognition addresses this by representing emotions as probability distributions, but progress is limited by unreliable ground-truth distributions inferred from sparse human annotations. This paper explores whether Large Audio-Language Models (ALMs) can mitigate the annotation bottleneck by generating high-quality synthetic annotations. We introduce a framework leveraging ALMs to create Synthetic Perceptual Proxies, augmenting human annotations to improve ground-truth distribution reliability. We validate these proxies through statistical analysis of their alignment with human distributions and evaluate their impact by fine-tuning ALMs with the augmented emotion distributions. Furthermore, to address class imbalance and enable unbiased evaluation, we propose DiME-Aug, a Distribution-aware Multimodal Emotion Augmentation strategy. Experiments on IEMOCAP and MSP-Podcast show that synthetic annotations enhance emotion distribution, especially in low-ambiguity regions where annotation agreement is high. However, benefits diminish for highly ambiguous emotions with greater human disagreement. This work provides the first evidence that ALMs could address annotation scarcity in ambiguous emotion recognition, but highlights the need for more advanced prompting or generation strategies to handle highly ambiguous cases.

Zhou Chen, Zhiqiang Wei, Yuqi Bai et al.

Model routing allocates queries to the suitable model, improving system performance while reducing costs. However, existing routing methods face practical limitations that hinder scalability in large-scale applications and struggle to keep up with the rapid growth of the large language model (LLM) ecosystem. To tackle these challenges, we propose TagRouter, a training-free model routing method designed to optimize the synergy among multiple LLMs for open-domain text generation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that TagRouter outperforms 13 baseline methods, increasing the accept rate of system by 6.15% and reducing costs by 17.20%, achieving optimal cost-efficiency. Our findings provides the LLM community with an efficient and scalable solution for model ensembling, offering users an evolvable "super model."

Yi Zhai, Zhiqiang Wei, Ruohan Li et al.

While combining large language models (LLMs) with evolutionary algorithms (EAs) shows promise for solving complex optimization problems, current approaches typically evolve individual solutions, often incurring high LLM call costs. We introduce \(X\)-evolve, a paradigm-shifting method that instead evolves solution spaces \(X\) (sets of individual solutions) - subsets of the overall search space \(S\). In \(X\)-evolve, LLMs generate tunable programs wherein certain code snippets, designated as parameters, define a tunable solution space. A score-based search algorithm then efficiently explores this parametrically defined space, guided by feedback from objective function scores. This strategy enables broader and more efficient exploration, which can potentially accelerate convergence at a much lower search cost, requiring up to two orders of magnitude fewer LLM calls than prior leading methods. We demonstrate \(X\)-evolve's efficacy across three distinct hard optimization problems. For the cap set problem, we discover a larger partial admissible set, establishing a new tighter asymptotic lower bound for the cap set constant (\(C \ge 2.2203\)). In information theory, we uncover a larger independent set for the 15-vertex cycle graph (\(\mathcal{C}_{15}^{\boxtimes 5}\), size 19,946), thereby raising the known lower bound on its Shannon capacity. Furthermore, for the NP-hard online bin packing problem, we generate heuristics that consistently outperform standard strategies across established benchmarks. By evolving solution spaces, our method considerably improves search effectiveness, making it possible to tackle high-dimensional problems that were previously computationally prohibitive.

Jialu Shi, Zhiqiang Wei, Jie Nie et al.

The self-supervised contrastive learning strategy has attracted considerable attention due to its exceptional ability in representation learning. However, current contrastive learning tends to learn global coarse-grained representations of the image that benefit generic object recognition, whereas such coarse-grained features are insufficient for fine-grained visual recognition. In this paper, we incorporate subtle local fine-grained feature learning into global self-supervised contrastive learning through a pure self-supervised global-local fine-grained contrastive learning framework. Specifically, a novel pretext task called local discrimination (LoDisc) is proposed to explicitly supervise the self-supervised model's focus toward local pivotal regions, which are captured by a simple but effective location-wise mask sampling strategy. We show that the LoDisc pretext task can effectively enhance fine-grained clues in important local regions and that the global-local framework further refines the fine-grained feature representations of images. Extensive experimental results on different fine-grained object recognition tasks demonstrate that the proposed method can lead to a decent improvement in different evaluation settings. The proposed method is also effective for general object recognition tasks.

Zhiqiang Wei, Lianqing Zheng, Jianan Liu et al.

Accurate 3D semantic occupancy perception is essential for autonomous driving in complex environments with diverse and irregular objects. While vision-centric methods suffer from geometric inaccuracies, LiDAR-based approaches often lack rich semantic information. To address these limitations, MS-Occ, a novel multi-stage LiDAR-camera fusion framework which includes middle-stage fusion and late-stage fusion, is proposed, integrating LiDAR's geometric fidelity with camera-based semantic richness via hierarchical cross-modal fusion. The framework introduces innovations at two critical stages: (1) In the middle-stage feature fusion, the Gaussian-Geo module leverages Gaussian kernel rendering on sparse LiDAR depth maps to enhance 2D image features with dense geometric priors, and the Semantic-Aware module enriches LiDAR voxels with semantic context via deformable cross-attention; (2) In the late-stage voxel fusion, the Adaptive Fusion (AF) module dynamically balances voxel features across modalities, while the High Classification Confidence Voxel Fusion (HCCVF) module resolves semantic inconsistencies using self-attention-based refinement. Experiments on two large-scale benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. On nuScenes-OpenOccupancy, MS-Occ achieves an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 32.1% and a mean IoU (mIoU) of 25.3%, surpassing the state-of-the-art by +0.7% IoU and +2.4% mIoU. Furthermore, on the SemanticKITTI benchmark, our method achieves a new state-of-the-art mIoU of 24.08%, robustly validating its generalization capabilities.Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each individual module, highlighting substantial improvements in the perception of small objects and reinforcing the practical value of MS-Occ for safety-critical autonomous driving scenarios.

Yang Yu, Qingxuan Lv, Yuezun Li et al.

Phytoplankton, a crucial component of aquatic ecosystems, requires efficient monitoring to understand marine ecological processes and environmental conditions. Traditional phytoplankton monitoring methods, relying on non-in situ observations, are time-consuming and resource-intensive, limiting timely analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce PhyTracker, an intelligent in situ tracking framework designed for automatic tracking of phytoplankton. PhyTracker overcomes significant challenges unique to phytoplankton monitoring, such as constrained mobility within water flow, inconspicuous appearance, and the presence of impurities. Our method incorporates three innovative modules: a Texture-enhanced Feature Extraction (TFE) module, an Attention-enhanced Temporal Association (ATA) module, and a Flow-agnostic Movement Refinement (FMR) module. These modules enhance feature capture, differentiate between phytoplankton and impurities, and refine movement characteristics, respectively. Extensive experiments on the PMOT dataset validate the superiority of PhyTracker in phytoplankton tracking, and additional tests on the MOT dataset demonstrate its general applicability, outperforming conventional tracking methods. This work highlights key differences between phytoplankton and traditional objects, offering an effective solution for phytoplankton monitoring.

Zhigang Wang, Hangyu Yang, Ning Wang et al.

In the last decade, Convolutional Neural Network with a multi-layer architecture has advanced rapidly. However, training its complex network is very space-consuming, since a lot of intermediate data are preserved across layers, especially when processing high-dimension inputs with a big batch size. That poses great challenges to the limited memory capacity of current accelerators (e.g., GPUs). Existing efforts mitigate such bottleneck by external auxiliary solutions with additional hardware costs, and internal modifications with potential accuracy penalty. Differently, our analysis reveals that computations intra- and inter-layers exhibit the spatial-temporal weak dependency and even complete independency features. That inspires us to break the traditional layer-by-layer (column) dataflow rule. Now operations are novelly re-organized into rows throughout all convolution layers. This lightweight design allows a majority of intermediate data to be removed without any loss of accuracy. We particularly study the weak dependency between two consecutive rows. For the resulting skewed memory consumption, we give two solutions with different favorite scenarios. Evaluations on two representative networks confirm the effectiveness. We also validate that our middle dataflow optimization can be smoothly embraced by existing works for better memory reduction.

Haixia Bi, Jing Yao, Zhiqiang Wei et al.

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification has been investigated vigorously in various remote sensing applications. However, it is still a challenging task nowadays. One significant barrier lies in the speckle effect embedded in the PolSAR imaging process, which greatly degrades the quality of the images and further complicates the classification. To this end, we present a novel PolSAR image classification method, which removes speckle noise via low-rank (LR) feature extraction and enforces smoothness priors via Markov random field (MRF). Specifically, we employ the mixture of Gaussian-based robust LR matrix factorization to simultaneously extract discriminative features and remove complex noises. Then, a classification map is obtained by applying convolutional neural network with data augmentation on the extracted features, where local consistency is implicitly involved, and the insufficient label issue is alleviated. Finally, we refine the classification map by MRF to enforce contextual smoothness. We conduct experiments on two benchmark PolSAR datasets. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves promising classification performance and preferable spatial consistency.