Hantao Zhou

Hantao Zhou, Rui Yang, Yachao Zhang et al. · tencent-ai

The detection head constitutes a pivotal component within object detectors, tasked with executing both classification and localization functions. Regrettably, the commonly used parallel head often lacks omni perceptual capabilities, such as deformation perception, global perception and cross-task perception. Despite numerous methods attempting to enhance these abilities from a single aspect, achieving a comprehensive and unified solution remains a significant challenge. In response to this challenge, we develop an innovative detection head, termed UniHead, to unify three perceptual abilities simultaneously. More precisely, our approach (1) introduces deformation perception, enabling the model to adaptively sample object features; (2) proposes a Dual-axial Aggregation Transformer (DAT) to adeptly model long-range dependencies, thereby achieving global perception; and (3) devises a Cross-task Interaction Transformer (CIT) that facilitates interaction between the classification and localization branches, thus aligning the two tasks. As a plug-and-play method, the proposed UniHead can be conveniently integrated with existing detectors. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that our UniHead can bring significant improvements to many detectors. For instance, the UniHead can obtain +2.7 AP gains in RetinaNet, +2.9 AP gains in FreeAnchor, and +2.1 AP gains in GFL. The code is available at https://github.com/zht8506/UniHead.

Longxiang Tang, Zhuotao Tian, Kai Li et al.

This study addresses the Domain-Class Incremental Learning problem, a realistic but challenging continual learning scenario where both the domain distribution and target classes vary across tasks. To handle these diverse tasks, pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are introduced for their strong generalizability. However, this incurs a new problem: the knowledge encoded in the pre-trained VLMs may be disturbed when adapting to new tasks, compromising their inherent zero-shot ability. Existing methods tackle it by tuning VLMs with knowledge distillation on extra datasets, which demands heavy computation overhead. To address this problem efficiently, we propose the Distribution-aware Interference-free Knowledge Integration (DIKI) framework, retaining pre-trained knowledge of VLMs from a perspective of avoiding information interference. Specifically, we design a fully residual mechanism to infuse newly learned knowledge into a frozen backbone, while introducing minimal adverse impacts on pre-trained knowledge. Besides, this residual property enables our distribution-aware integration calibration scheme, explicitly controlling the information implantation process for test data from unseen distributions. Experiments demonstrate that our DIKI surpasses the current state-of-the-art approach using only 0.86% of the trained parameters and requiring substantially less training time. Code is available at: https://github.com/lloongx/DIKI .

Qinglong Shi, Donghai Wang, Hantao Zhou et al.

Current large language model agents predominantly operate under a reactive paradigm, responding only to immediate user queries within short-term sessions. This limitation hinders their ability to maintain long-term user's intents and dynamically adapt to evolving external environments. In this paper, we propose a novel interaction paradigm for proactive Task-oriented Agents capable of bridging the gap between relatively static user's needs and a dynamic environment. We formalize proactivity through two key capabilities, (i) Intent-Conditioned Monitoring: The agent autonomously formulates trigger conditions based on dialog history; (ii) Event-Triggered Follow-up: The agent actively engages the user upon detecting useful environmental updates. We introduce a high-quality data synthesis pipeline to construct complex, multi-turn dialog data in a dynamic environment. Furthermore, we attempt to address the lack of evaluation criteria of task-oriented interaction in a dynamic environment by proposing a new benchmark, namely ChronosBench. We evaluated some leading close-source and open-source models at present and revealed their flaws in long-term task-oriented interaction. Furthermore, our fine-tuned model trained using synthetic data for supervised learning achieves a task completion rate of 85.19% for complex tasks including shifts in user intent, outperforming other models under test. And the result validated the effectiveness of our data-driven strategy.

Yicheng Xiao, Yue Ma, Shuyan Li et al.

In this paper, we propose SemanticAC, a semantics-assisted framework for Audio Classification to better leverage the semantic information. Unlike conventional audio classification methods that treat class labels as discrete vectors, we employ a language model to extract abundant semantics from labels and optimize the semantic consistency between audio signals and their labels. We verify that simple textual information from labels and advanced pretraining models enable more abundant semantic supervision for better performance. Specifically, we design a text encoder to capture the semantic information from the text extension of labels. Then we map the audio signals to align with the semantics of corresponding class labels via an audio encoder and a similarity calculation module so as to enforce the semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on two audio datasets, ESC-50 and US8K demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms the compared audio classification methods.

Zihao Liu, Hantao Zhou, Jiguo Li et al.

User simulators are essential for the scalable training and evaluation of interactive AI systems. However, existing approaches often rely on shallow user profiling, struggle to maintain persona consistency over long interactions, and are largely limited to English or single-domain settings. We present MUSE, a multi-domain Chinese user simulation framework designed to generate human-like, controllable, and behaviorally consistent responses. First, we propose Iterative Profile Self-Evolution (IPSE), which gradually optimizes user profiles by comparing and reasoning discrepancies between simulated trajectories and real dialogue behaviors. We then apply Role-Reversal Supervised Fine-Tuning to improve local response realism and human-like expression. To enable fine-grained behavioral alignment, we further train a specialized rubric-based reward model and incorporate it into rubric-guided multi-turn reinforcement learning, which optimizes the simulator at the dialogue level and enhances long-horizon behavioral consistency. Experiments show that MUSE consistently outperforms strong baselines in both utterance-level and session-level evaluations, generating responses that are more realistic, coherent, and persona-consistent over extended interactions.

Hantao Zhou, Runze Hu, Xiu Li

Storing intermediate frame segmentations as memory for long-range context modeling, spatial-temporal memory-based methods have recently showcased impressive results in semi-supervised video object segmentation (SVOS). However, these methods face two key limitations: 1) relying on non-local pixel-level matching to read memory, resulting in noisy retrieved features for segmentation; 2) segmenting each object independently without interaction. These shortcomings make the memory-based methods struggle in similar object and multi-object segmentation. To address these issues, we propose a query modulation method, termed QMVOS. This method summarizes object features into dynamic queries and then treats them as dynamic filters for mask prediction, thereby providing high-level descriptions and object-level perception for the model. Efficient and effective multi-object interactions are realized through inter-query attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can bring significant improvements to the memory-based SVOS method and achieve competitive performance on standard SVOS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/zht8506/QMVOS.

Hantao Zhou, Rui Yang, Longxiang Tang et al.

Image assessment aims to evaluate the quality and aesthetics of images and has been applied across various scenarios, such as natural and AIGC scenes. Existing methods mostly address these sub-tasks or scenes individually. While some works attempt to develop unified image assessment models, they have struggled to achieve satisfactory performance or cover a broad spectrum of assessment scenarios. In this paper, we present \textbf{Gamma}, a \textbf{G}eneric im\textbf{A}ge assess\textbf{M}ent model using \textbf{M}ixture of \textbf{A}ssessment Experts, which can effectively assess images from diverse scenes through mixed-dataset training. Achieving unified training in image assessment presents significant challenges due to annotation biases across different datasets. To address this issue, we first propose a Mixture of Assessment Experts (MoAE) module, which employs shared and adaptive experts to dynamically learn common and specific knowledge for different datasets, respectively. In addition, we introduce a Scene-based Differential Prompt (SDP) strategy, which uses scene-specific prompts to provide prior knowledge and guidance during the learning process, further boosting adaptation for various scenes. Our Gamma model is trained and evaluated on 12 datasets spanning 6 image assessment scenarios. Extensive experiments show that our unified Gamma outperforms other state-of-the-art mixed-training methods by significant margins while covering more scenes. Codes are available at https://github.com/zht8506/Gamma.

Hantao Zhou, Longxiang Tang, Rui Yang et al.

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) aim to simulate human subjective perception of image visual quality and aesthetic appeal. Despite distinct learning objectives, they have underlying interconnectedness due to consistent human assessment perception. In this paper, we propose Unified vision-language pre-training of Quality and Aesthetics (UniQA}), to extract useful and common representations from two tasks, thereby benefiting them simultaneously. However, the lack of text in the IQA datasets and the textual noise in the IAA datasets pose severe challenges for multimodal pre-training. To address this, we (1) utilize multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate high-quality text descriptions; (2) use the generated text for IAA as metadata to purify noisy IAA data. To effectively adapt the pre-trained UniQA to downstream tasks, we further propose a lightweight adapter that utilizes versatile cues to fully exploit the extensive knowledge of the pre-trained model. UniQA demonstrates high competitiveness in various image assessment tasks, including classical IQA and IAA tasks, few-label IQA, and other downstream tasks, showing promise as a foundational assessment model. Codes are available at https://github.com/zht8506/UniQA.

Guanyi Qin, Ziyue Wang, Daiyun Shen et al.

Given an object mask, Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation (SVOS) technique aims to track and segment the object across video frames, serving as a fundamental task in computer vision. Although recent memory-based methods demonstrate potential, they often struggle with scenes involving occlusion, particularly in handling object interactions and high feature similarity. To address these issues and meet the real-time processing requirements of downstream applications, in this paper, we propose a novel bOundary Amendment video object Segmentation method with Inherent Structure refinement, hereby named OASIS. Specifically, a lightweight structure refinement module is proposed to enhance segmentation accuracy. With the fusion of rough edge priors captured by the Canny filter and stored object features, the module can generate an object-level structure map and refine the representations by highlighting boundary features. Evidential learning for uncertainty estimation is introduced to further address challenges in occluded regions. The proposed method, OASIS, maintains an efficient design, yet extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate its superior performance and competitive inference speed compared to other state-of-the-art methods, i.e., achieving the F values of 91.6 (vs. 89.7 on DAVIS-17 validation set) and G values of 86.6 (vs. 86.2 on YouTubeVOS 2019 validation set) while maintaining a competitive speed of 48 FPS on DAVIS.

Hantao Zhou, Tianying Ji, Lukas Sommerhalder et al.

Minigolf is an exemplary real-world game for examining embodied intelligence, requiring challenging spatial and kinodynamic understanding to putt the ball. Additionally, reflective reasoning is required if the feasibility of a challenge is not ensured. We introduce RoboGolf, a VLM-based framework that combines dual-camera perception with closed-loop action refinement, augmented by a reflective equilibrium loop. The core of both loops is powered by finetuned VLMs. We analyze the capabilities of the framework in an offline inference setting, relying on an extensive set of recorded trajectories. Exemplary demonstrations of the analyzed problem domain are available at https://jity16.github.io/RoboGolf/