Zhuotao Tian

Xin Lai, Zhuotao Tian, Yukang Chen et al.

Although perception systems have made remarkable advancements in recent years, they still rely on explicit human instruction or pre-defined categories to identify the target objects before executing visual recognition tasks. Such systems cannot actively reason and comprehend implicit user intention. In this work, we propose a new segmentation task -- reasoning segmentation. The task is designed to output a segmentation mask given a complex and implicit query text. Furthermore, we establish a benchmark comprising over one thousand image-instruction-mask data samples, incorporating intricate reasoning and world knowledge for evaluation purposes. Finally, we present LISA: large Language Instructed Segmentation Assistant, which inherits the language generation capabilities of multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) while also possessing the ability to produce segmentation masks. We expand the original vocabulary with a <SEG> token and propose the embedding-as-mask paradigm to unlock the segmentation capability. Remarkably, LISA can handle cases involving complex reasoning and world knowledge. Also, it demonstrates robust zero-shot capability when trained exclusively on reasoning-free datasets. In addition, fine-tuning the model with merely 239 reasoning segmentation data samples results in further performance enhancement. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments show our method effectively unlocks new reasoning segmentation capabilities for multimodal LLMs. Code, models, and data are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/LISA.

Jiequan Cui, Zhisheng Zhong, Zhuotao Tian et al.

In this paper, we propose the Generalized Parametric Contrastive Learning (GPaCo/PaCo) which works well on both imbalanced and balanced data. Based on theoretical analysis, we observe that supervised contrastive loss tends to bias high-frequency classes and thus increases the difficulty of imbalanced learning. We introduce a set of parametric class-wise learnable centers to rebalance from an optimization perspective. Further, we analyze our GPaCo/PaCo loss under a balanced setting. Our analysis demonstrates that GPaCo/PaCo can adaptively enhance the intensity of pushing samples of the same class close as more samples are pulled together with their corresponding centers and benefit hard example learning. Experiments on long-tailed benchmarks manifest the new state-of-the-art for long-tailed recognition. On full ImageNet, models from CNNs to vision transformers trained with GPaCo loss show better generalization performance and stronger robustness compared with MAE models. Moreover, GPaCo can be applied to the semantic segmentation task and obvious improvements are observed on the 4 most popular benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Parametric-Contrastive-Learning.

Xin Lai, Zhuotao Tian, Xiaogang Xu et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation in semantic segmentation has been raised to alleviate the reliance on expensive pixel-wise annotations. It leverages a labeled source domain dataset as well as unlabeled target domain images to learn a segmentation network. In this paper, we observe two main issues of the existing domain-invariant learning framework. (1) Being distracted by the feature distribution alignment, the network cannot focus on the segmentation task. (2) Fitting source domain data well would compromise the target domain performance. To address these issues, we propose DecoupleNet that alleviates source domain overfitting and enables the final model to focus more on the segmentation task. Furthermore, we put forward Self-Discrimination (SD) and introduce an auxiliary classifier to learn more discriminative target domain features with pseudo labels. Finally, we propose Online Enhanced Self-Training (OEST) to contextually enhance the quality of pseudo labels in an online manner. Experiments show our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, and extensive ablation studies verify the effectiveness of each component. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/DecoupleNet.

Zhuotao Tian, Jiequan Cui, Li Jiang et al.

Semantic segmentation is still a challenging task for parsing diverse contexts in different scenes, thus the fixed classifier might not be able to well address varying feature distributions during testing. Different from the mainstream literature where the efficacy of strong backbones and effective decoder heads has been well studied, in this paper, additional contextual hints are instead exploited via learning a context-aware classifier whose content is data-conditioned, decently adapting to different latent distributions. Since only the classifier is dynamically altered, our method is model-agnostic and can be easily applied to generic segmentation models. Notably, with only negligible additional parameters and +2\% inference time, decent performance gain has been achieved on both small and large models with challenging benchmarks, manifesting substantial practical merits brought by our simple yet effective method. The implementation is available at \url{https://github.com/tianzhuotao/CAC}.

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 .

Dong Zhang, Yi Lin, Hao Chen et al.

Over the past few years, the rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision has significantly improved the performance of medical image segmentation (MedISeg). However, the diverse implementation strategies of various models have led to an extremely complex MedISeg system, resulting in a potential problem of unfair result comparisons. In this paper, we collect a series of MedISeg tricks for different model implementation phases (i.e., pre-training model, data pre-processing, data augmentation, model implementation, model inference, and result post-processing), and experimentally explore the effectiveness of these tricks on consistent baselines. With the extensive experimental results on both the representative 2D and 3D medical image datasets, we explicitly clarify the effect of these tricks. Moreover, based on the surveyed tricks, we also open-sourced a strong MedISeg repository, where each component has the advantage of plug-and-play. We believe that this milestone work not only completes a comprehensive and complementary survey of the state-of-the-art MedISeg approaches, but also offers a practical guide for addressing the future medical image processing challenges including but not limited to small dataset, class imbalance learning, multi-modality learning, and domain adaptation. The code and training weights have been released at: https://github.com/hust-linyi/seg_trick.

Bohao Peng, Zhuotao Tian, Xiaoyang Wu et al.

Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to form class-agnostic models segmenting unseen classes with only a handful of annotations. Previous methods limited to the semantic feature and prototype representation suffer from coarse segmentation granularity and train-set overfitting. In this work, we design Hierarchically Decoupled Matching Network (HDMNet) mining pixel-level support correlation based on the transformer architecture. The self-attention modules are used to assist in establishing hierarchical dense features, as a means to accomplish the cascade matching between query and support features. Moreover, we propose a matching module to reduce train-set overfitting and introduce correlation distillation leveraging semantic correspondence from coarse resolution to boost fine-grained segmentation. Our method performs decently in experiments. We achieve 50.0% mIoU on COCO dataset one-shot setting and 56.0% on five-shot segmentation, respectively. The code will be available on the project website. We hope our work can benefit broader industrial applications where novel classes with limited annotations are required to be decently identified.

Bohao Peng, Zhuotao Tian, Xiaoyang Wu et al.

Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to form class-agnostic models segmenting unseen classes with only a handful of annotations. Previous methods limited to the semantic feature and prototype representation suffer from coarse segmentation granularity and train-set overfitting. In this work, we design Hierarchically Decoupled Matching Network (HDMNet) mining pixel-level support correlation based on the transformer architecture. The self-attention modules are used to assist in establishing hierarchical dense features, as a means to accomplish the cascade matching between query and support features. Moreover, we propose a matching module to reduce train-set overfitting and introduce correlation distillation leveraging semantic correspondence from coarse resolution to boost fine-grained segmentation. Our method performs decently in experiments. We achieve $50.0\%$ mIoU on \coco~dataset one-shot setting and $56.0\%$ on five-shot segmentation, respectively.

Zhenhua Ning, Zhuotao Tian, Guangming Lu et al.

Although extensive research has been conducted on 3D point cloud segmentation, effectively adapting generic models to novel categories remains a formidable challenge. This paper proposes a novel approach to improve point cloud few-shot segmentation (PC-FSS) models. Unlike existing PC-FSS methods that directly utilize categorical information from support prototypes to recognize novel classes in query samples, our method identifies two critical aspects that substantially enhance model performance by reducing contextual gaps between support prototypes and query features. Specifically, we (1) adapt support background prototypes to match query context while removing extraneous cues that may obscure foreground and background in query samples, and (2) holistically rectify support prototypes under the guidance of query features to emulate the latter having no semantic gap to the query targets. Our proposed designs are agnostic to the feature extractor, rendering them readily applicable to any prototype-based methods. The experimental results on S3DIS and ScanNet demonstrate notable practical benefits, as our approach achieves significant improvements while still maintaining high efficiency. The code for our approach is available at https://github.com/AaronNZH/Boosting-Few-shot-3D-Point-Cloud-Segmentation-via-Query-Guided-Enhancement

Jiequan Cui, Yuhui Yuan, Zhisheng Zhong et al.

In this paper, we study the problem of class imbalance in semantic segmentation. We first investigate and identify the main challenges of addressing this issue through pixel rebalance. Then a simple and yet effective region rebalance scheme is derived based on our analysis. In our solution, pixel features belonging to the same class are grouped into region features, and a rebalanced region classifier is applied via an auxiliary region rebalance branch during training. To verify the flexibility and effectiveness of our method, we apply the region rebalance module into various semantic segmentation methods, such as Deeplabv3+, OCRNet, and Swin. Our strategy achieves consistent improvement on the challenging ADE20K and COCO-Stuff benchmark. In particular, with the proposed region rebalance scheme, state-of-the-art BEiT receives +0.7% gain in terms of mIoU on the ADE20K val set.

Jianhui Liu, Yukang Chen, Xiaoqing Ye et al.

3D scenes are dominated by a large number of background points, which is redundant for the detection task that mainly needs to focus on foreground objects. In this paper, we analyze major components of existing sparse 3D CNNs and find that 3D CNNs ignore the redundancy of data and further amplify it in the down-sampling process, which brings a huge amount of extra and unnecessary computational overhead. Inspired by this, we propose a new convolution operator named spatial pruned sparse convolution (SPS-Conv), which includes two variants, spatial pruned submanifold sparse convolution (SPSS-Conv) and spatial pruned regular sparse convolution (SPRS-Conv), both of which are based on the idea of dynamically determining crucial areas for redundancy reduction. We validate that the magnitude can serve as important cues to determine crucial areas which get rid of the extra computations of learning-based methods. The proposed modules can easily be incorporated into existing sparse 3D CNNs without extra architectural modifications. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, Waymo and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve more than 50% reduction in GFLOPs without compromising the performance.

Xiaoyang Wu, Zhuotao Tian, Xin Wen et al.

The rapid advancement of deep learning models often attributes to their ability to leverage massive training data. In contrast, such privilege has not yet fully benefited 3D deep learning, mainly due to the limited availability of large-scale 3D datasets. Merging multiple available data sources and letting them collaboratively train a single model is a potential solution. However, due to the large domain gap between 3D point cloud datasets, such mixed supervision could adversely affect the model's performance and lead to degenerated performance (i.e., negative transfer) compared to single-dataset training. In view of this challenge, we introduce Point Prompt Training (PPT), a novel framework for multi-dataset synergistic learning in the context of 3D representation learning that supports multiple pre-training paradigms. Based on this framework, we propose Prompt-driven Normalization, which adapts the model to different datasets with domain-specific prompts and Language-guided Categorical Alignment that decently unifies the multiple-dataset label spaces by leveraging the relationship between label text. Extensive experiments verify that PPT can overcome the negative transfer associated with synergistic learning and produce generalizable representations. Notably, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on each dataset using a single weight-shared model with supervised multi-dataset training. Moreover, when served as a pre-training framework, it outperforms other pre-training approaches regarding representation quality and attains remarkable state-of-the-art performance across over ten diverse downstream tasks spanning both indoor and outdoor 3D scenarios.

Yixin Chen, Zhuotao Tian, Pengguang Chen et al.

We revisit the one- and two-stage detector distillation tasks and present a simple and efficient semantic-aware framework to fill the gap between them. We address the pixel-level imbalance problem by designing the category anchor to produce a representative pattern for each category and regularize the topological distance between pixels and category anchors to further tighten their semantic bonds. We name our method SEA (SEmantic-aware Alignment) distillation given the nature of abstracting dense fine-grained information by semantic reliance to well facilitate distillation efficacy. SEA is well adapted to either detection pipeline and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the challenging COCO object detection task on both one- and two-stage detectors. Its superior performance on instance segmentation further manifests the generalization ability. Both 2x-distilled RetinaNet and FCOS with ResNet50-FPN outperform their corresponding 3x ResNet101-FPN teacher, arriving 40.64 and 43.06 AP, respectively. Code will be made publicly available.

Tong Shao, Zhuotao Tian, Hang Zhao et al.

CLIP, as a vision-language model, has significantly advanced Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS) with its zero-shot capabilities. Despite its success, its application to OVSS faces challenges due to its initial image-level alignment training, which affects its performance in tasks requiring detailed local context. Our study delves into the impact of CLIP's [CLS] token on patch feature correlations, revealing a dominance of "global" patches that hinders local feature discrimination. To overcome this, we propose CLIPtrase, a novel training-free semantic segmentation strategy that enhances local feature awareness through recalibrated self-correlation among patches. This approach demonstrates notable improvements in segmentation accuracy and the ability to maintain semantic coherence across objects.Experiments show that we are 22.3% ahead of CLIP on average on 9 segmentation benchmarks, outperforming existing state-of-the-art training-free methods.The code are made publicly available at: https://github.com/leaves162/CLIPtrase.

Wei Li, Renshan Zhang, Rui Shao et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced in robotic manipulation, yet practical deployment remains hindered by two key limitations: 1) perceptual redundancy, where irrelevant visual inputs are processed inefficiently, and 2) superficial instruction-vision alignment, which hampers semantic grounding of actions. In this paper, we propose SemanticVLA, a novel VLA framework that performs Semantic-Aligned Sparsification and Enhancement for Efficient Robotic Manipulation. Specifically: 1) To sparsify redundant perception while preserving semantic alignment, Semantic-guided Dual Visual Pruner (SD-Pruner) performs: Instruction-driven Pruner (ID-Pruner) extracts global action cues and local semantic anchors in SigLIP; Spatial-aggregation Pruner (SA-Pruner) compacts geometry-rich features into task-adaptive tokens in DINOv2. 2) To exploit sparsified features and integrate semantics with spatial geometry, Semantic-complementary Hierarchical Fuser (SH-Fuser) fuses dense patches and sparse tokens across SigLIP and DINOv2 for coherent representation. 3) To enhance the transformation from perception to action, Semantic-conditioned Action Coupler (SA-Coupler) replaces the conventional observation-to-DoF approach, yielding more efficient and interpretable behavior modeling for manipulation tasks. Extensive experiments on simulation and real-world tasks show that SemanticVLA sets a new SOTA in both performance and efficiency. SemanticVLA surpasses OpenVLA on LIBERO benchmark by 21.1% in success rate, while reducing training cost and inference latency by 3.0-fold and 2.7-fold.SemanticVLA is open-sourced and publicly available at https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/SemanticVLA

Senqiao Yang, Yukang Chen, Zhuotao Tian et al.

Recent advancements in vision-language models have enhanced performance by increasing the length of visual tokens, making them much longer than text tokens and significantly raising computational costs. However, we observe that the visual tokens generated by popular vision encoders, such as CLIP and SigLIP, contain significant redundancy. To address this, we introduce VisionZip, a simple yet effective method that selects a set of informative tokens for input to the language model, reducing visual token redundancy and improving efficiency while maintaining model performance. The proposed VisionZip can be widely applied to image and video understanding tasks and is well-suited for multi-turn dialogues in real-world scenarios, where previous methods tend to underperform. Experimental results show that VisionZip outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by at least 5% performance gains across nearly all settings. Moreover, our method significantly enhances model inference speed, improving the prefilling time by 8x and enabling the LLaVA-Next 13B model to infer faster than the LLaVA-Next 7B model while achieving better results. Furthermore, we analyze the causes of this redundancy and encourage the community to focus on extracting better visual features rather than merely increasing token length. Our code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/VisionZip .

Tong Shao, Yusen Fu, Guoying Sun et al.

Although Diffusion Transformer (DiT) has emerged as a predominant architecture for image and video generation, its iterative denoising process results in slow inference, which hinders broader applicability and development. Caching-based methods achieve training-free acceleration, while suffering from considerable computational error. Existing methods typically incorporate error correction strategies such as pruning or prediction to mitigate it. However, their fixed caching strategy fails to adapt to the complex error variations during denoising, which limits the full potential of error correction. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel fidelity-optimization plugin for existing error correction methods via cumulative error minimization, named CEM. CEM predefines the error to characterize the sensitivity of model to acceleration jointly influenced by timesteps and cache intervals. Guided by this prior, we formulate a dynamic programming algorithm with cumulative error approximation for strategy optimization, which achieves the caching error minimization, resulting in a substantial improvement in generation fidelity. CEM is model-agnostic and exhibits strong generalization, which is adaptable to arbitrary acceleration budgets. It can be seamlessly integrated into existing error correction frameworks and quantized models without introducing any additional computational overhead. Extensive experiments conducted on nine generation models and quantized methods across three tasks demonstrate that CEM significantly improves generation fidelity of existing acceleration models, and outperforms the original generation performance on FLUX.1-dev, PixArt-$α$, StableDiffusion1.5 and Hunyuan. Our code is released publicly at https://github.com/leaves162/CEM.

Tengyun Ma, Jiaqi Yao, Daojing He et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for diverse applications. However, their uniform token processing paradigm introduces critical vulnerabilities in instruction handling, particularly when exposed to adversarial scenarios. In this work, we identify and propose a novel class of vulnerabilities, termed Tool-Completion Attack (TCA), which exploits function-calling mechanisms to subvert model behavior. To evaluate LLM robustness against such threats, we introduce the Tool-Completion benchmark, a comprehensive security assessment framework, which reveals that even state-of-the-art models remain susceptible to TCA, with surprisingly high attack success rates. To address these vulnerabilities, we introduce Context-Aware Hierarchical Learning (CAHL), a sophisticated mechanism that dynamically balances semantic comprehension with role-specific instruction constraints. CAHL leverages the contextual correlations between different instruction segments to establish a robust, context-aware instruction hierarchy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAHL significantly enhances LLM robustness against both conventional attacks and the proposed TCA, exhibiting strong generalization capabilities in zero-shot evaluations while still preserving model performance on generic tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/S2AILab/CAHL.

Yijun Liu, Jiequan Cui, Zhuotao Tian et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) often suffer from the overconfidence issue, where incorrect predictions are made with high confidence scores, hindering the applications in critical systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Typicalness-Aware Learning (TAL) to address this issue and improve failure detection performance. We observe that, with the cross-entropy loss, model predictions are optimized to align with the corresponding labels via increasing logit magnitude or refining logit direction. However, regarding atypical samples, the image content and their labels may exhibit disparities. This discrepancy can lead to overfitting on atypical samples, ultimately resulting in the overconfidence issue that we aim to address. To tackle the problem, we have devised a metric that quantifies the typicalness of each sample, enabling the dynamic adjustment of the logit magnitude during the training process. By allowing atypical samples to be adequately fitted while preserving reliable logit direction, the problem of overconfidence can be mitigated. TAL has been extensively evaluated on benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate its superiority over existing failure detection methods. Specifically, TAL achieves a more than 5% improvement on CIFAR100 in terms of the Area Under the Risk-Coverage Curve (AURC) compared to the state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/liuyijungoon/TAL.

Xurui Zhou, Gongwei Chen, Yuquan Xie et al.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents require effective use of historical context to perform sequential navigation tasks. While incorporating past actions and observations can improve decision making, naive use of full history leads to excessive computational overhead and distraction from irrelevant information. To address this, we introduce HiconAgent, a GUI agent trained with History Context-aware Policy Optimization (HCPO) for efficient and effective utilization of historical information. HCPO optimizes history usage in both sampling and policy updates through two complementary components: (1) Dynamic Context Sampling (DCS) presents the agent with variable length histories during sampling, enabling adaptive use of the most relevant context; (2) Anchor-guided History Compression (AHC) refines the policy update phase with a dual branch strategy where the compressed branch removes history observations while keeping history actions as information flow anchors. The compressed and uncompressed branches are coupled through a history-enhanced alignment loss to enforce consistent history usage while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on mainstream GUI navigation benchmarks demonstrate strong performance. Despite being smaller, HiconAgent-3B outperforms GUI-R1-7B by +8.46 percent grounding accuracy and +11.32 percent step success rate on GUI-Odyssey, while achieving comparable results on AndroidControl and AITW with up to 2.47x computational speedup and 60 percent FLOPs reduction.

Jiequan Cui, Beier Zhu, Qingshan Xu et al.

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard -- RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

Junjie Wang, Bin Chen, Yulin Li et al.

Dense visual prediction tasks have been constrained by their reliance on predefined categories, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where visual concepts are unbounded. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown promise in open-vocabulary tasks, their direct application to dense prediction often leads to suboptimal performance due to limitations in local feature representation. In this work, we present our observation that CLIP's image tokens struggle to effectively aggregate information from spatially or semantically related regions, resulting in features that lack local discriminability and spatial consistency. To address this issue, we propose DeCLIP, a novel framework that enhances CLIP by decoupling the self-attention module to obtain ``content'' and ``context'' features respectively. The ``content'' features are aligned with image crop representations to improve local discriminability, while ``context'' features learn to retain the spatial correlations under the guidance of vision foundation models, such as DINO. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeCLIP significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks, including object detection and semantic segmentation. Code is available at \textcolor{magenta}{https://github.com/xiaomoguhz/DeCLIP}.

Bin Kang, Bin Chen, Junjie Wang et al.

Existing Visual Language Models (VLMs) suffer structural limitations where a few low contribution tokens may excessively capture global semantics, dominating the information aggregation process and suppressing the discriminative features in text-driven image retrieval tasks. To address this, we introduce \textbf{CalibCLIP}, a training-free method designed to calibrate the suppressive effect of dominant tokens. Specifically, in the visual space, we propose the Contrastive Visual Enhancer (CVE), which decouples visual features into target and low information regions. Subsequently, it identifies dominant tokens and dynamically suppresses their representations.In the textual space, we introduce the Discriminative Concept Calibrator (DCC), which aims to differentiate between general and discriminative concepts within the text query. By mitigating the challenges posed by generic concepts and improving the representations of discriminative concepts, DCC strengthens the differentiation among similar samples. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across seven benchmarks spanning three image retrieval tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of CalibCLIP. Code is available at: https://github.com/kangbin98/CalibCLIP

Jiequan Cui, Zhuotao Tian, Zhisheng Zhong et al.

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of 1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and 2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decomposed formulation of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL/DKL in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property. This modification ensures that the $\mathbf{w}$MSE component is always effective during training, providing extra constructive cues. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to mitigate bias from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Improved Kullback-Leibler (IKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. The proposed approach achieves new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard -- RobustBench and competitive performance on knowledge distillation, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

Xiaoliu Luo, Zhuotao Tian, Taiping Zhang et al.

In this work, we revisit the prior mask guidance proposed in ``Prior Guided Feature Enrichment Network for Few-Shot Segmentation''. The prior mask serves as an indicator that highlights the region of interests of unseen categories, and it is effective in achieving better performance on different frameworks of recent studies. However, the current method directly takes the maximum element-to-element correspondence between the query and support features to indicate the probability of belonging to the target class, thus the broader contextual information is seldom exploited during the prior mask generation. To address this issue, first, we propose the Context-aware Prior Mask (CAPM) that leverages additional nearby semantic cues for better locating the objects in query images. Second, since the maximum correlation value is vulnerable to noisy features, we take one step further by incorporating a lightweight Noise Suppression Module (NSM) to screen out the unnecessary responses, yielding high-quality masks for providing the prior knowledge. Both two contributions are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit, and the new model named PFENet++ significantly outperforms the baseline PFENet as well as all other competitors on three challenging benchmarks PASCAL-5$^i$, COCO-20$^i$ and FSS-1000. The new state-of-the-art performance is achieved without compromising the efficiency, manifesting the potential for being a new strong baseline in few-shot semantic segmentation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/luoxiaoliu/PFENet2Plus.

Jiequan Cui, Shu Liu, Zhuotao Tian et al.

Deep learning algorithms face great challenges with long-tailed data distribution which, however, is quite a common case in real-world scenarios. Previous methods tackle the problem from either the aspect of input space (re-sampling classes with different frequencies) or loss space (re-weighting classes with different weights), suffering from heavy over-fitting to tail classes or hard optimization during training. To alleviate these issues, we propose a more fundamental perspective for long-tailed recognition, i.e., from the aspect of parameter space, and aims to preserve specific capacity for classes with low frequencies. From this perspective, the trivial solution utilizes different branches for the head, medium, and tail classes respectively, and then sums their outputs as the final results is not feasible. Instead, we design the effective residual fusion mechanism -- with one main branch optimized to recognize images from all classes, another two residual branches are gradually fused and optimized to enhance images from medium+tail classes and tail classes respectively. Then the branches are aggregated into final results by additive shortcuts. We test our method on several benchmarks, i.e., long-tailed version of CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Places, ImageNet, and iNaturalist 2018. Experimental results manifest the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/ResLT.

Zhuotao Tian, Xin Lai, Li Jiang et al.

Training semantic segmentation models requires a large amount of finely annotated data, making it hard to quickly adapt to novel classes not satisfying this condition. Few-Shot Segmentation (FS-Seg) tackles this problem with many constraints. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark, called Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation (GFS-Seg), to analyze the generalization ability of simultaneously segmenting the novel categories with very few examples and the base categories with sufficient examples. It is the first study showing that previous representative state-of-the-art FS-Seg methods fall short in GFS-Seg and the performance discrepancy mainly comes from the constrained setting of FS-Seg. To make GFS-Seg tractable, we set up a GFS-Seg baseline that achieves decent performance without structural change on the original model. Then, since context is essential for semantic segmentation, we propose the Context-Aware Prototype Learning (CAPL) that significantly improves performance by 1) leveraging the co-occurrence prior knowledge from support samples, and 2) dynamically enriching contextual information to the classifier, conditioned on the content of each query image. Both two contributions are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit. Extensive experiments on Pascal-VOC and COCO manifest the effectiveness of CAPL, and CAPL generalizes well to FS-Seg by achieving competitive performance. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/GFS-Seg.

Zhuotao Tian, Hengshuang Zhao, Michelle Shu et al.

State-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods require sufficient labeled data to achieve good results and hardly work on unseen classes without fine-tuning. Few-shot segmentation is thus proposed to tackle this problem by learning a model that quickly adapts to new classes with a few labeled support samples. Theses frameworks still face the challenge of generalization ability reduction on unseen classes due to inappropriate use of high-level semantic information of training classes and spatial inconsistency between query and support targets. To alleviate these issues, we propose the Prior Guided Feature Enrichment Network (PFENet). It consists of novel designs of (1) a training-free prior mask generation method that not only retains generalization power but also improves model performance and (2) Feature Enrichment Module (FEM) that overcomes spatial inconsistency by adaptively enriching query features with support features and prior masks. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO prove that the proposed prior generation method and FEM both improve the baseline method significantly. Our PFENet also outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin without efficiency loss. It is surprising that our model even generalizes to cases without labeled support samples. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jia-Research-Lab/PFENet/.

Peng Wang, Xilin Tao, Siyi Yao et al.

Self-destructive behaviors are linked to complex psychological states and can be challenging to diagnose. These behaviors may be even harder to identify within subcultural groups due to their unique expressions. As large language models (LLMs) are applied across various fields, some researchers have begun exploring their application for detecting self-destructive behaviors. Motivated by this, we investigate self-destructive behavior detection within subcultures using current LLM-based methods. However, these methods have two main challenges: (1) Knowledge Lag: Subcultural slang evolves rapidly, faster than LLMs' training cycles; and (2) Semantic Misalignment: it is challenging to grasp the specific and nuanced expressions unique to subcultures. To address these issues, we proposed Subcultural Alignment Solver (SAS), a multi-agent framework that incorporates automatic retrieval and subculture alignment, significantly enhancing the performance of LLMs in detecting self-destructive behavior. Our experimental results show that SAS outperforms the current advanced multi-agent framework OWL. Notably, it competes well with fine-tuned LLMs. We hope that SAS will advance the field of self-destructive behavior detection in subcultural contexts and serve as a valuable resource for future researchers.

Bohao Peng, Xiaoyang Wu, Li Jiang et al.

The booming of 3D recognition in the 2020s began with the introduction of point cloud transformers. They quickly overwhelmed sparse CNNs and became state-of-the-art models, especially in 3D semantic segmentation. However, sparse CNNs are still valuable networks, due to their efficiency treasure, and ease of application. In this work, we reexamine the design distinctions and test the limits of what a sparse CNN can achieve. We discover that the key credit to the performance difference is adaptivity. Specifically, we propose two key components, i.e., adaptive receptive fields (spatially) and adaptive relation, to bridge the gap. This exploration led to the creation of Omni-Adaptive 3D CNNs (OA-CNNs), a family of networks that integrates a lightweight module to greatly enhance the adaptivity of sparse CNNs at minimal computational cost. Without any self-attention modules, OA-CNNs favorably surpass point transformers in terms of accuracy in both indoor and outdoor scenes, with much less latency and memory cost. Notably, it achieves 76.1%, 78.9%, and 70.6% mIoU on ScanNet v2, nuScenes, and SemanticKITTI validation benchmarks respectively, while maintaining at most 5x better speed than transformer counterparts. This revelation highlights the potential of pure sparse CNNs to outperform transformer-related networks.

Senqiao Yang, Tianyuan Qu, Xin Lai et al.

While LISA effectively bridges the gap between segmentation and large language models to enable reasoning segmentation, it poses certain limitations: unable to distinguish different instances of the target region, and constrained by the pre-defined textual response formats. In this work, we introduce LISA++, an update to the existing LISA model, focusing on improving core functionalities while keeping the base architecture intact. The main enhancements in LISA++ include: \textbf{1) Enhanced Segmentation}: The instance segmentation ability has been added, providing a more detailed scene analysis along with the existing multi-region semantic segmentation. \textbf{2) More Natural Conversation}: Improved capability for multi-turn dialogue, with the ability to incorporate segmentation results directly into text responses, i.e., Segmentation in Dialogue (SiD). These improvements are achieved by curating the existing samples of generic segmentation datasets, aimed specifically at enhancing the segmentation and conversational skills without structural change and additional data sources. Comparative analysis with the original LISA model shows significant advancements in these areas, positioning LISA++ as a notable upgrade in visual understanding and interaction. LISA++'s adaptability and improved features highlight the versatility of the mask-as-embedding paradigm proposed by LISA, and the potential as a foundational model for diverse applications.

Yunxin Li, Zhenyu Liu, Zitao Li et al.

Reasoning lies at the heart of intelligence, shaping the ability to make decisions, draw conclusions, and generalize across domains. In artificial intelligence, as systems increasingly operate in open, uncertain, and multimodal environments, reasoning becomes essential for enabling robust and adaptive behavior. Large Multimodal Reasoning Models (LMRMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm, integrating modalities such as text, images, audio, and video to support complex reasoning capabilities and aiming to achieve comprehensive perception, precise understanding, and deep reasoning. As research advances, multimodal reasoning has rapidly evolved from modular, perception-driven pipelines to unified, language-centric frameworks that offer more coherent cross-modal understanding. While instruction tuning and reinforcement learning have improved model reasoning, significant challenges remain in omni-modal generalization, reasoning depth, and agentic behavior. To address these issues, we present a comprehensive and structured survey of multimodal reasoning research, organized around a four-stage developmental roadmap that reflects the field's shifting design philosophies and emerging capabilities. First, we review early efforts based on task-specific modules, where reasoning was implicitly embedded across stages of representation, alignment, and fusion. Next, we examine recent approaches that unify reasoning into multimodal LLMs, with advances such as Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) and multimodal reinforcement learning enabling richer and more structured reasoning chains. Finally, drawing on empirical insights from challenging benchmarks and experimental cases of OpenAI O3 and O4-mini, we discuss the conceptual direction of native large multimodal reasoning models (N-LMRMs), which aim to support scalable, agentic, and adaptive reasoning and planning in complex, real-world environments.

Bohao Peng, Zhuotao Tian, Shu Liu et al.

Continual learning has gained increasing importance as it facilitates the acquisition and refinement of scalable knowledge and skills in language models. However, existing methods typically encounter strict limitations and challenges in real-world scenarios, such as reliance on experience replay, optimization constraints, and inference task-ID. In this study, we introduce the Scalable Language Model (SLM) to overcome these limitations within a more challenging and generalized setting, representing a significant advancement toward practical applications for continual learning. Specifically, we propose the Joint Adaptive Re-Parameterization (JARe), integrated with Dynamic Task-related Knowledge Retrieval (DTKR), to enable adaptive adjustment of language models based on specific downstream tasks. This approach leverages the task distribution within the vector space, aiming to achieve a smooth and effortless continual learning process. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on diverse backbones and benchmarks, achieving effective continual learning in both full-set and few-shot scenarios with minimal forgetting. Moreover, while prior research primarily focused on a single task type such as classification, our study goes beyond, with the large language model, i.e., LLaMA-2, to explore the effects across diverse domains and task types, such that a single language model can be decently scaled to broader applications.

Senqiao Yang, Zhuotao Tian, Li Jiang et al.

This paper introduces Unified Language-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation (ULDA), a novel task setting that enables a single model to adapt to diverse target domains without explicit domain-ID knowledge. We identify the constraints in the existing language-driven zero-shot domain adaptation task, particularly the requirement for domain IDs and domain-specific models, which may restrict flexibility and scalability. To overcome these issues, we propose a new framework for ULDA, consisting of Hierarchical Context Alignment (HCA), Domain Consistent Representation Learning (DCRL), and Text-Driven Rectifier (TDR). These components work synergistically to align simulated features with target text across multiple visual levels, retain semantic correlations between different regional representations, and rectify biases between simulated and real target visual features, respectively. Our extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that this framework achieves competitive performance in both settings, surpassing even the model that requires domain-ID, showcasing its superiority and generalization ability. The proposed method is not only effective but also maintains practicality and efficiency, as it does not introduce additional computational costs during inference. Our project page is https://senqiaoyang.com/project/ULDA .

Junchao Huang, Xinting Hu, Shaoshuai Shi et al.

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved image generation and editing, but extending these capabilities to 3D assets remains challenging, especially for fine-grained edits that require multi-view consistency. Existing methods typically restrict editing to predetermined viewing angles, severely limiting their flexibility and practical applications. We introduce Edit360, a tuning-free framework that extends 2D modifications to multi-view consistent 3D editing. Built upon video diffusion models, Edit360 enables user-specific editing from arbitrary viewpoints while ensuring structural coherence across all views. The framework selects anchor views for 2D modifications and propagates edits across the entire 360-degree range. To achieve this, Edit360 introduces a novel Anchor-View Editing Propagation mechanism, which effectively aligns and merges multi-view information within the latent and attention spaces of diffusion models. The resulting edited multi-view sequences facilitate the reconstruction of high-quality 3D assets, enabling customizable 3D content creation.

Yabing Wang, Zhuotao Tian, Qingpei Guo et al.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a challenging multimodal task that retrieves a target image based on a reference image and accompanying modification text. Due to the high cost of annotating CIR triplet datasets, zero-shot (ZS) CIR has gained traction as a promising alternative. Existing studies mainly focus on projection-based methods, which map an image to a single pseudo-word token. However, these methods face three critical challenges: (1) insufficient pseudo-word token representation capacity, (2) discrepancies between training and inference phases, and (3) reliance on large-scale synthetic data. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage framework where the training is accomplished from mapping to composing. In the first stage, we enhance image-to-pseudo-word token learning by introducing a visual semantic injection module and a soft text alignment objective, enabling the token to capture richer and fine-grained image information. In the second stage, we optimize the text encoder using a small amount of synthetic triplet data, enabling it to effectively extract compositional semantics by combining pseudo-word tokens with modification text for accurate target image retrieval. The strong visual-to-pseudo mapping established in the first stage provides a solid foundation for the second stage, making our approach compatible with both high- and low-quality synthetic data, and capable of achieving significant performance gains with only a small amount of synthetic data. Extensive experiments were conducted on three public datasets, achieving superior performance compared to existing approaches.

Yabing Wang, Zhuotao Tian, Qingpei Guo et al.

Visual Grounding aims to localize the referring object in an image given a natural language expression. Recent advancements in DETR-based visual grounding methods have attracted considerable attention, as they directly predict the coordinates of the target object without relying on additional efforts, such as pre-generated proposal candidates or pre-defined anchor boxes. However, existing research primarily focuses on designing stronger multi-modal decoder, which typically generates learnable queries by random initialization or by using linguistic embeddings. This vanilla query generation approach inevitably increases the learning difficulty for the model, as it does not involve any target-related information at the beginning of decoding. Furthermore, they only use the deepest image feature during the query learning process, overlooking the importance of features from other levels. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, called RefFormer. It consists of the query adaption module that can be seamlessly integrated into CLIP and generate the referential query to provide the prior context for decoder, along with a task-specific decoder. By incorporating the referential query into the decoder, we can effectively mitigate the learning difficulty of the decoder, and accurately concentrate on the target object. Additionally, our proposed query adaption module can also act as an adapter, preserving the rich knowledge within CLIP without the need to tune the parameters of the backbone network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on five visual grounding benchmarks.

Junchao Huang, Xinting Hu, Boyao Han et al.

Autoregressive video diffusion models have proved effective for world modeling and interactive scene generation, with Minecraft gameplay as a representative application. To faithfully simulate play, a model must generate natural content while exploring new scenes and preserve spatial consistency when revisiting explored areas. Under limited computation budgets, it must compress and exploit historical cues within a finite context window, which exposes a trade-off: Temporal-only memory lacks long-term spatial consistency, whereas adding spatial memory strengthens consistency but may degrade new scene generation quality when the model over-relies on insufficient spatial context. We present Memory Forcing, a learning framework that pairs training protocols with a geometry-indexed spatial memory. Hybrid Training exposes distinct gameplay regimes, guiding the model to rely on temporal memory during exploration and incorporate spatial memory for revisits. Chained Forward Training extends autoregressive training with model rollouts, where chained predictions create larger pose variations and encourage reliance on spatial memory for maintaining consistency. Point-to-Frame Retrieval efficiently retrieves history by mapping currently visible points to their source frames, while Incremental 3D Reconstruction maintains and updates an explicit 3D cache. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Memory Forcing achieves superior long-term spatial consistency and generative quality across diverse environments, while maintaining computational efficiency for extended sequences.

Zhenhua Ning, Zhuotao Tian, Shaoshuai Shi et al.

Recent advances in point cloud perception have demonstrated remarkable progress in scene understanding through vision-language alignment leveraging large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods may still encounter challenges in handling complex instructions that require accurate spatial reasoning, even if the 3D point cloud data provides detailed spatial cues such as size and position for identifying the targets. To tackle this issue, we propose Relevant Reasoning Segmentation (R$^2$S), a reasoning-based segmentation framework. The framework emulates human cognitive processes by decomposing spatial reasoning into two sequential stages: first identifying relevant elements, then processing instructions guided by their associated visual priors. Furthermore, acknowledging the inadequacy of existing datasets in complex reasoning tasks, we introduce 3D ReasonSeg, a reasoning-based segmentation dataset comprising 25,185 training samples and 3,966 validation samples with precise annotations. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the R$^2$S and 3D ReasonSeg effectively endow 3D point cloud perception with stronger spatial reasoning capabilities, and we hope that they can serve as a new baseline and benchmark for future work.

Chengyao Wang, Li Jiang, Xiaoyang Wu et al.

Self-supervised 3D representation learning aims to learn effective representations from large-scale unlabeled point clouds. Most existing approaches adopt point discrimination as the pretext task, which assigns matched points in two distinct views as positive pairs and unmatched points as negative pairs. However, this approach often results in semantically identical points having dissimilar representations, leading to a high number of false negatives and introducing a "semantic conflict" problem. To address this issue, we propose GroupContrast, a novel approach that combines segment grouping and semantic-aware contrastive learning. Segment grouping partitions points into semantically meaningful regions, which enhances semantic coherence and provides semantic guidance for the subsequent contrastive representation learning. Semantic-aware contrastive learning augments the semantic information extracted from segment grouping and helps to alleviate the issue of "semantic conflict". We conducted extensive experiments on multiple 3D scene understanding tasks. The results demonstrate that GroupContrast learns semantically meaningful representations and achieves promising transfer learning performance.

Li Jiang, Shaoshuai Shi, Zhuotao Tian et al.

Rapid progress in 3D semantic segmentation is inseparable from the advances of deep network models, which highly rely on large-scale annotated data for training. To address the high cost and challenges of 3D point-level labeling, we present a method for semi-supervised point cloud semantic segmentation to adopt unlabeled point clouds in training to boost the model performance. Inspired by the recent contrastive loss in self-supervised tasks, we propose the guided point contrastive loss to enhance the feature representation and model generalization ability in semi-supervised setting. Semantic predictions on unlabeled point clouds serve as pseudo-label guidance in our loss to avoid negative pairs in the same category. Also, we design the confidence guidance to ensure high-quality feature learning. Besides, a category-balanced sampling strategy is proposed to collect positive and negative samples to mitigate the class imbalance problem. Extensive experiments on three datasets (ScanNet V2, S3DIS, and SemanticKITTI) show the effectiveness of our semi-supervised method to improve the prediction quality with unlabeled data.

Xin Lai, Zhuotao Tian, Li Jiang et al.

Semantic segmentation has made tremendous progress in recent years. However, satisfying performance highly depends on a large number of pixel-level annotations. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the semi-supervised segmentation problem where only a small set of labeled data is provided with a much larger collection of totally unlabeled images. Nevertheless, due to the limited annotations, models may overly rely on the contexts available in the training data, which causes poor generalization to the scenes unseen before. A preferred high-level representation should capture the contextual information while not losing self-awareness. Therefore, we propose to maintain the context-aware consistency between features of the same identity but with different contexts, making the representations robust to the varying environments. Moreover, we present the Directional Contrastive Loss (DC Loss) to accomplish the consistency in a pixel-to-pixel manner, only requiring the feature with lower quality to be aligned towards its counterpart. In addition, to avoid the false-negative samples and filter the uncertain positive samples, we put forward two sampling strategies. Extensive experiments show that our simple yet effective method surpasses current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin and also generalizes well with extra image-level annotations.

Zhuotao Tian, Hengshuang Zhao, Michelle Shu et al.

Albeit intensively studied, false prediction and unclear boundaries are still major issues of salient object detection. In this paper, we propose a Region Refinement Network (RRN), which recurrently filters redundant information and explicitly models boundary information for saliency detection. Different from existing refinement methods, we propose a Region Refinement Module (RRM) that optimizes salient region prediction by incorporating supervised attention masks in the intermediate refinement stages. The module only brings a minor increase in model size and yet significantly reduces false predictions from the background. To further refine boundary areas, we propose a Boundary Refinement Loss (BRL) that adds extra supervision for better distinguishing foreground from background. BRL is parameter free and easy to train. We further observe that BRL helps retain the integrity in prediction by refining the boundary. Extensive experiments on saliency detection datasets show that our refinement module and loss bring significant improvement to the baseline and can be easily applied to different frameworks. We also demonstrate that our proposed model generalizes well to portrait segmentation and shadow detection tasks.