Chao Gou

Zipeng Guo, Lichen Ma, Xiaolong Fu et al.

In web data, product images are central to boosting user engagement and advertising efficacy on e-commerce platforms, yet the intrusive elements such as watermarks and promotional text remain major obstacles to delivering clear and appealing product visuals. Although diffusion-based inpainting methods have advanced, they still face challenges in commercial settings due to unreliable object removal and limited domain-specific adaptation. To tackle these challenges, we propose Repainter, a reinforcement learning framework that integrates spatial-matting trajectory refinement with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our approach modulates attention mechanisms to emphasize background context, generating higher-reward samples and reducing unwanted object insertion. We also introduce a composite reward mechanism that balances global, local, and semantic constraints, effectively reducing visual artifacts and reward hacking. Additionally, we contribute EcomPaint-100K, a high-quality, large-scale e-commerce inpainting dataset, and a standardized benchmark EcomPaint-Bench for fair evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Repainter significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in challenging scenes with intricate compositions. We will release our code and weights upon acceptance.

Yuchen Zhou, Linkai Liu, Chao Gou

Most existing attention prediction research focuses on salient instances like humans and objects. However, the more complex interaction-oriented attention, arising from the comprehension of interactions between instances by human observers, remains largely unexplored. This is equally crucial for advancing human-machine interaction and human-centered artificial intelligence. To bridge this gap, we first collect a novel gaze fixation dataset named IG, comprising 530,000 fixation points across 740 diverse interaction categories, capturing visual attention during human observers cognitive processes of interactions. Subsequently, we introduce the zero-shot interaction-oriented attention prediction task ZeroIA, which challenges models to predict visual cues for interactions not encountered during training. Thirdly, we present the Interactive Attention model IA, designed to emulate human observers cognitive processes to tackle the ZeroIA problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed IA outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in both ZeroIA and fully supervised settings. Lastly, we endeavor to apply interaction-oriented attention to the interaction recognition task itself. Further experimental results demonstrate the promising potential to enhance the performance and interpretability of existing state-of-the-art HOI models by incorporating real human attention data from IG and attention labels generated by IA.

Yuchen Zhou, Jiamin Wu, Zichen Ren et al.

Understanding and decoding brain activity from electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience and AI, with applications in cognition, emotion recognition, diagnosis, and brain-computer interfaces. While recent EEG foundation models advance generalized decoding via unified architectures and large-scale pretraining, they adopt a scale-agnostic dense modeling paradigm inherited from NLP and vision. This design neglects a core property of neural activity: cross-scale spatiotemporal structure. EEG task patterns span a wide range of temporal and spatial scales, from short bursts to slow rhythms, and from localized cortical responses to distributed interactions. Ignoring this diversity leads to suboptimal representations and weak generalization. We propose CSBrain, a Cross-scale Spatiotemporal Brain foundation model for generalized EEG decoding. CSBrain introduces: (i) Cross-scale Spatiotemporal Tokenization (CST), which aggregates multi-scale features from localized temporal windows and anatomical brain regions into compact scale-aware tokens; and (ii) Structured Sparse Attention (SSA), which captures cross-window and cross-region dependencies, enhancing scale diversity while removing spurious correlations. CST and SSA are alternately stacked to progressively integrate multi-scale dependencies. Experiments on 11 EEG tasks across 16 datasets show that CSBrain consistently outperforms task-specific and foundation model baselines. These results establish cross-scale modeling as a key inductive bias and position CSBrain as a robust backbone for future brain-AI research.

Yaokun Li, Chao Gou, Guang Tan

Implicit neural representations, represented by Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), have dominated research in 3D computer vision by virtue of high-quality visual results and data-driven benefits. However, their realistic applications are hindered by the need for dense inputs and per-scene optimization. To solve this problem, previous methods implement generalizable NeRFs by extracting local features from sparse inputs as conditions for the NeRF decoder. However, although this way can allow feed-forward reconstruction, they suffer from the inherent drawback of yielding sub-optimal results caused by erroneous reprojected features. In this paper, we focus on this problem and aim to address it by introducing pre-trained generative priors to enable high-quality generalizable novel view synthesis. Specifically, we propose a novel Indirect Diffusion-guided NeRF framework, termed ID-NeRF, which leverages pre-trained diffusion priors as a guide for the reprojected features created by the previous paradigm. Notably, to enable 3D-consistent predictions, the proposed ID-NeRF discards the way of direct supervision commonly used in prior 3D generative models and instead adopts a novel indirect prior injection strategy. This strategy is implemented by distilling pre-trained knowledge into an imaginative latent space via score-based distillation, and an attention-based refinement module is then proposed to leverage the embedded priors to improve reprojected features extracted from sparse inputs. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets to evaluate our method, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in synthesizing novel views in a generalizable manner, especially in sparse settings.

Chao Gou, Tianyu Shen, Wenbo Zheng et al.

There has been much progress in data-driven artificial intelligence technology for medical image analysis in the last decades. However, it still remains challenging due to its distinctive complexity of acquiring and annotating image data, extracting medical domain knowledge, and explaining the diagnostic decision for medical image analysis. In this paper, we propose a data-knowledge-driven framework termed as Parallel Medical Imaging (PMI) for intelligent medical image analysis based on the methodology of interactive ACP-based parallel intelligence. In the PMI framework, computational experiments with predictive learning in a data-driven way are conducted to extract medical knowledge for diagnostic decision support. Artificial imaging systems are introduced to select and prescriptively generate medical image data in a knowledge-driven way to utilize medical domain knowledge. Through the closed-loop optimization based on parallel execution, our proposed PMI framework can boost the generalization ability and alleviate the limitation of medical interpretation for diagnostic decisions. Furthermore, we illustrate the preliminary implementation of PMI method through the case studies of mammogram analysis and skin lesion image analysis. Experimental results on several public medical image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed PMI.

Kunfeng Wang, Chao Gou, Fei-Yue Wang

In this paper, we propose a robust change detection method for intelligent visual surveillance. This method, named M4CD, includes three major steps. Firstly, a sample-based background model that integrates color and texture cues is built and updated over time. Secondly, multiple heterogeneous features (including brightness variation, chromaticity variation, and texture variation) are extracted by comparing the input frame with the background model, and a multi-source learning strategy is designed to online estimate the probability distributions for both foreground and background. The three features are approximately conditionally independent, making multi-source learning feasible. Pixel-wise foreground posteriors are then estimated with Bayes rule. Finally, the Markov random field (MRF) optimization and heuristic post-processing techniques are used sequentially to improve accuracy. In particular, a two-layer MRF model is constructed to represent pixel-based and superpixel-based contextual constraints compactly. Experimental results on the CDnet dataset indicate that M4CD is robust under complex environments and ranks among the top methods.

Yue Wu, Chao Gou, Qiang Ji

Facial landmark detection, head pose estimation, and facial deformation analysis are typical facial behavior analysis tasks in computer vision. The existing methods usually perform each task independently and sequentially, ignoring their interactions. To tackle this problem, we propose a unified framework for simultaneous facial landmark detection, head pose estimation, and facial deformation analysis, and the proposed model is robust to facial occlusion. Following a cascade procedure augmented with model-based head pose estimation, we iteratively update the facial landmark locations, facial occlusion, head pose and facial de- formation until convergence. The experimental results on benchmark databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for simultaneous facial landmark detection, head pose and facial deformation estimation, even if the images are under facial occlusion.