Yuchen Zheng

Yu Li, Yuchen Zheng, Giles Hamilton-Fletcher et al.

This paper investigates the potential of vision-language models (VLMs) to assist people with blindness and low vision (pBLV) in navigation tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art closed-source models, including GPT-4V, GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet, alongside open-source models, such as Llava-v1.6-mistral and Llava-onevision-qwen, to analyze their capabilities in foundational visual skills: counting ambient obstacles, relative spatial reasoning, and common-sense wayfinding-pertinent scene understanding. We further assess their performance in navigation scenarios, using pBLV-specific prompts designed to simulate real-world assistance tasks. Our findings reveal notable performance disparities between these models: GPT-4o consistently outperforms others across all tasks, particularly in spatial reasoning and scene understanding. In contrast, open-source models struggle with nuanced reasoning and adaptability in complex environments. Common challenges include difficulties in accurately counting objects in cluttered settings, biases in spatial reasoning, and a tendency to prioritize object details over spatial feedback, limiting their usability for pBLV in navigation tasks. Despite these limitations, VLMs show promise for wayfinding assistance when better aligned with human feedback and equipped with improved spatial reasoning. This research provides actionable insights into the strengths and limitations of current VLMs, guiding developers on effectively integrating VLMs into assistive technologies while addressing key limitations for enhanced usability.

Xiaotong Ji, Yuchen Zheng, Daiki Suehiro et al.

In this paper, we propose an optimal rejection method for rejecting ambiguous samples by a rejection function. This rejection function is trained together with a classification function under the framework of Learning-with-Rejection (LwR). The highlights of LwR are: (1) the rejection strategy is not heuristic but has a strong background from a machine learning theory, and (2) the rejection function can be trained on an arbitrary feature space which is different from the feature space for classification. The latter suggests we can choose a feature space that is more suitable for rejection. Although the past research on LwR focused only on its theoretical aspect, we propose to utilize LwR for practical pattern classification tasks. Moreover, we propose to use features from different CNN layers for classification and rejection. Our extensive experiments of notMNIST classification and character/non-character classification demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than traditional rejection strategies.

Weiwei Li, Junzhuo Liu, Yuanyuan Ren et al.

Deep learning models are known to often learn features that spuriously correlate with the class label during training but are irrelevant to the prediction task. Existing methods typically address this issue by annotating potential spurious attributes, or filtering spurious features based on some empirical assumptions (e.g., simplicity of bias). However, these methods may yield unsatisfactory performance due to the intricate and elusive nature of spurious correlations in real-world data. In this paper, we propose a data-oriented approach to mitigate the spurious correlation in deep learning models. We observe that samples that are influenced by spurious features tend to exhibit a dispersed distribution in the learned feature space. This allows us to identify the presence of spurious features. Subsequently, we obtain a bias-invariant representation by neutralizing the spurious features based on a simple grouping strategy. Then, we learn a feature transformation to eliminate the spurious features by aligning with this bias-invariant representation. Finally, we update the classifier by incorporating the learned feature transformation and obtain an unbiased model. By integrating the aforementioned identifying, neutralizing, eliminating and updating procedures, we build an effective pipeline for mitigating spurious correlation. Experiments on image and NLP debiasing benchmarks show an improvement in worst group accuracy of more than 20% compared to standard empirical risk minimization (ERM). Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/davelee-uestc/nsf_debiasing .

Tianpei Zhang, Yiming Zhu, Jufeng Zhao et al.

Deep learning techniques have revolutionized the infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF), showing remarkable efficacy on complex scenarios. However, current methods do not fully combine frequency domain features with global semantic information, which will result in suboptimal extraction of global features across modalities and insufficient preservation of local texture details. To address these issues, we propose Wavelet-Mamba (W-Mamba), which integrates wavelet transform with the state-space model (SSM). Specifically, we introduce Wavelet-SSM module, which incorporates wavelet-based frequency domain feature extraction and global information extraction through SSM, thereby effectively capturing both global and local features. Additionally, we propose a cross-modal feature attention modulation, which facilitates efficient interaction and fusion between different modalities. The experimental results indicate that our method achieves both visually compelling results and superior performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lmmh058/W-Mamba.

Quanqing Ma, Jiaen Chen, Peng Wang et al.

Remote sensing Water Body Change Detection (WBCD) aims to detect water body surface changes from bi-temporal images of the same geographic area. Recently, the scarcity of high spatial resolution datasets for WBCD restricts its application in urban and rural regions, which require more accurate positioning. Meanwhile, previous deep learning-based methods fail to comprehensively exploit the spatial semantic and structural information in deep features in the change detection networks. To resolve these concerns, we first propose a new dataset, HSRW-CD, with a spatial resolution higher than 3 meters for WBCD. Specifically, it contains a large number of image pairs, widely covering various water body types. Besides, a Spatial Semantics and Continuity Perception (SSCP) attention module is designed to fully leverage both the spatial semantics and structure of deep features in the WBCD networks, significantly improving the discrimination capability for water body. The proposed SSCP has three components: the Multi-Semantic spatial Attention (MSA), the Structural Relation-aware Global Attention (SRGA), and the Channel-wise Self-Attention (CSA). The MSA enhances the spatial semantics of water body features and provides precise spatial semantic priors for the CSA. Then, the SRGA further extracts spatial structure to learn the spatial continuity of the water body. Finally, the CSA utilizes the spatial semantic and structural priors from the MSA and SRGA to compute the similarity across channels. Specifically designed as a plug-and-play module for water body deep features, the proposed SSCP allows integration into existing WBCD models. Numerous experiments conducted on the proposed HSRW-CD and Water-CD datasets validate the effectiveness and generalization of the SSCP. The code of this work and the HSRW-CD dataset will be accessed at https://github.com/QingMa1/SSCP.

Yuchen Zheng, Yuxin Jing, Jufeng Zhao et al.

Drone-based target detection presents inherent challenges, such as the high density and overlap of targets in drone-based images, as well as the blurriness of targets under varying lighting conditions, which complicates identification. Traditional methods often struggle to recognize numerous densely packed small targets under complex background. To address these challenges, we propose LAM-YOLO, an object detection model specifically designed for drone-based. First, we introduce a light-occlusion attention mechanism to enhance the visibility of small targets under different lighting conditions. Meanwhile, we incroporate incorporate Involution modules to improve interaction among feature layers. Second, we utilize an improved SIB-IoU as the regression loss function to accelerate model convergence and enhance localization accuracy. Finally, we implement a novel detection strategy that introduces two auxiliary detection heads for identifying smaller-scale targets.Our quantitative results demonstrate that LAM-YOLO outperforms methods such as Faster R-CNN, YOLOv9, and YOLOv10 in terms of mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 on the VisDrone2019 public dataset. Compared to the original YOLOv8, the average precision increases by 7.1\%. Additionally, the proposed SIB-IoU loss function shows improved faster convergence speed during training and improved average precision over the traditional loss function.

Takato Otsuzuki, Hideaki Hayashi, Yuchen Zheng et al.

In convolutional neural networks (CNNs), pooling operations play important roles such as dimensionality reduction and deformation compensation. In general, max pooling, which is the most widely used operation for local pooling, is performed independently for each kernel. However, the deformation may be spatially smooth over the neighboring kernels. This means that max pooling is too flexible to compensate for actual deformations. In other words, its excessive flexibility risks canceling the essential spatial differences between classes. In this paper, we propose regularized pooling, which enables the value selection direction in the pooling operation to be spatially smooth across adjacent kernels so as to compensate only for actual deformations. The results of experiments on handwritten character images and texture images showed that regularized pooling not only improves recognition accuracy but also accelerates the convergence of learning compared with conventional pooling operations.