Yun Fu

Xu Ma, Xiyang Dai, Yue Bai et al.

Recent studies have drawn attention to the untapped potential of the "star operation" (element-wise multiplication) in network design. While intuitive explanations abound, the foundational rationale behind its application remains largely unexplored. Our study attempts to reveal the star operation's ability to map inputs into high-dimensional, non-linear feature spaces -- akin to kernel tricks -- without widening the network. We further introduce StarNet, a simple yet powerful prototype, demonstrating impressive performance and low latency under compact network structure and efficient budget. Like stars in the sky, the star operation appears unremarkable but holds a vast universe of potential. Our work encourages further exploration across tasks, with codes available at https://github.com/ma-xu/Rewrite-the-Stars.

Yi Xu, Yun Fu

Trajectory prediction plays an important role in various applications, including autonomous driving, robotics, and scene understanding. Existing approaches mainly focus on developing compact neural networks to increase prediction precision on public datasets, typically employing a standardized input duration. However, a notable issue arises when these models are evaluated with varying observation lengths, leading to a significant performance drop, a phenomenon we term the Observation Length Shift. To address this issue, we introduce a general and effective framework, the FlexiLength Network (FLN), to enhance the robustness of existing trajectory prediction techniques against varying observation periods. Specifically, FLN integrates trajectory data with diverse observation lengths, incorporates FlexiLength Calibration (FLC) to acquire temporal invariant representations, and employs FlexiLength Adaptation (FLA) to further refine these representations for more accurate future trajectory predictions. Comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets, ie, ETH/UCY, nuScenes, and Argoverse 1, demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our proposed FLN framework.

Wenqing Wang, Yun Fu

Text-to-3D generation is a valuable technology in virtual reality and digital content creation. While recent works have pushed the boundaries of text-to-3D generation, producing high-fidelity 3D objects with inefficient prompts and simulating their physics-grounded motion accurately still remain unsolved challenges. To address these challenges, we present an innovative framework that utilizes the Large Language Model (LLM)-refined prompts and diffusion priors-guided Gaussian Splatting (GS) for generating 3D models with accurate appearances and geometric structures. We also incorporate a continuum mechanics-based deformation map and color regularization to synthesize vivid physics-grounded motion for the generated 3D Gaussians, adhering to the conservation of mass and momentum. By integrating text-to-3D generation with physics-grounded motion synthesis, our framework renders photo-realistic 3D objects that exhibit physics-aware motion, accurately reflecting the behaviors of the objects under various forces and constraints across different materials. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves high-quality 3D generations with realistic physics-grounded motion.

Qihua Dong, Luis Figueroa, Handong Zhao et al.

Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation are critical tasks for assessing the integration of language understanding and image comprehension, serving as benchmarks for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose a new strategy, CoT Referring, which enhances model reasoning across modalities through a structured, chain-of-thought training data structure. Our approach systematically parses textual structures to a sequential referring step, where in each step it identifies relationships and ensures consistent reference alignment, thereby improving accuracy in complex query scenarios. We restructure the training data to enforce a new output form, providing new annotations for existing datasets and compiling an evaluation benchmark from existing resources. This benchmark is designed explicitly for complex referring cases. We also integrate detection and segmentation capabilities into a unified MLLM framework, training it with a novel adaptive weighted loss to optimize performance. Experimental results on our curated benchmark and RefCOCO/+/g demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with a notable increase of 2.5%+ over baseline models.