Xue Yang

Yue Zhou, Xue Yang, Gefan Zhang et al.

We present an open-source toolbox, named MMRotate, which provides a coherent algorithm framework of training, inferring, and evaluation for the popular rotated object detection algorithm based on deep learning. MMRotate implements 18 state-of-the-art algorithms and supports the three most frequently used angle definition methods. To facilitate future research and industrial applications of rotated object detection-related problems, we also provide a large number of trained models and detailed benchmarks to give insights into the performance of rotated object detection. MMRotate is publicly released at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmrotate.

Yi Yu, Xue Yang, Qingyun Li et al.

With the rapidly increasing demand for oriented object detection (OOD), recent research involving weakly-supervised detectors for learning rotated box (RBox) from the horizontal box (HBox) has attracted more and more attention. In this paper, we explore a more challenging yet label-efficient setting, namely single point-supervised OOD, and present our approach called Point2RBox. Specifically, we propose to leverage two principles: 1) Synthetic pattern knowledge combination: By sampling around each labeled point on the image, we spread the object feature to synthetic visual patterns with known boxes to provide the knowledge for box regression. 2) Transform self-supervision: With a transformed input image (e.g. scaled/rotated), the output RBoxes are trained to follow the same transformation so that the network can perceive the relative size/rotation between objects. The detector is further enhanced by a few devised techniques to cope with peripheral issues, e.g. the anchor/layer assignment as the size of the object is not available in our point supervision setting. To our best knowledge, Point2RBox is the first end-to-end solution for point-supervised OOD. In particular, our method uses a lightweight paradigm, yet it achieves a competitive performance among point-supervised alternatives, 41.05%/27.62%/80.01% on DOTA/DIOR/HRSC datasets.

Guangming Cao, Xuehui Yu, Wenwen Yu et al.

Single-point annotation in oriented object detection of remote sensing scenarios is gaining increasing attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However, due to the granularity ambiguity of points, there is a significant performance gap between previous methods and those with fully supervision. In this study, we introduce P2RBox, which employs point prompt to generate rotated box (RBox) annotation for oriented object detection. P2RBox employs the SAM model to generate high-quality mask proposals. These proposals are then refined using the semantic and spatial information from annotation points. The best masks are converted into oriented boxes based on the feature directions suggested by the model. P2RBox incorporates two advanced guidance cues: Boundary Sensitive Mask guidance, which leverages semantic information, and Centrality guidance, which utilizes spatial information to reduce granularity ambiguity. This combination enhances detection capabilities significantly. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, enhancements based on the baseline were observed by integrating three different detectors. Furthermore, compared to the state-of-the-art point-annotated generative method PointOBB, P2RBox outperforms by about 29% mAP (62.43% vs 33.31%) on DOTA-v1.0 dataset, which provides possibilities for the practical application of point annotations.

Min Zhao, Bokai Yan, Xue Yang et al.

Recent image diffusion transformers achieve high-fidelity generation, but struggle to generate images beyond these scales, suffering from content repetition and quality degradation. In this work, we present UltraImage, a principled framework that addresses both issues. Through frequency-wise analysis of positional embeddings, we identify that repetition arises from the periodicity of the dominant frequency, whose period aligns with the training resolution. We introduce a recursive dominant frequency correction to constrain it within a single period after extrapolation. Furthermore, we find that quality degradation stems from diluted attention and thus propose entropy-guided adaptive attention concentration, which assigns higher focus factors to sharpen local attention for fine detail and lower ones to global attention patterns to preserve structural consistency. Experiments show that UltraImage consistently outperforms prior methods on Qwen-Image and Flux (around 4K) across three generation scenarios, reducing repetition and improving visual fidelity. Moreover, UltraImage can generate images up to 6K*6K without low-resolution guidance from a training resolution of 1328p, demonstrating its extreme extrapolation capability. Project page is available at \href{https://thu-ml.github.io/ultraimage.github.io/}{https://thu-ml.github.io/ultraimage.github.io/}.

Zi-Kai Xiao, Guo-Ye Yang, Xue Yang et al.

Considerable efforts have been devoted to Oriented Object Detection (OOD). However, one lasting issue regarding the discontinuity in Oriented Bounding Box (OBB) representation remains unresolved, which is an inherent bottleneck for extant OOD methods. This paper endeavors to completely solve this issue in a theoretically guaranteed manner and puts an end to the ad-hoc efforts in this direction. Prior studies typically can only address one of the two cases of discontinuity: rotation and aspect ratio, and often inadvertently introduce decoding discontinuity, e.g. Decoding Incompleteness (DI) and Decoding Ambiguity (DA) as discussed in literature. Specifically, we propose a novel representation method called Continuous OBB (COBB), which can be readily integrated into existing detectors e.g. Faster-RCNN as a plugin. It can theoretically ensure continuity in bounding box regression which to our best knowledge, has not been achieved in literature for rectangle-based object representation. For fairness and transparency of experiments, we have developed a modularized benchmark based on the open-source deep learning framework Jittor's detection toolbox JDet for OOD evaluation. On the popular DOTA dataset, by integrating Faster-RCNN as the same baseline model, our new method outperforms the peer method Gliding Vertex by 1.13% mAP50 (relative improvement 1.54%), and 2.46% mAP75 (relative improvement 5.91%), without any tricks.

Yi Yu, Botao Ren, Peiyuan Zhang et al.

With the rapidly increasing demand for oriented object detection (OOD), recent research involving weakly-supervised detectors for learning OOD from point annotations has gained great attention. In this paper, we rethink this challenging task setting with the layout among instances and present Point2RBox-v2. At the core are three principles: 1) Gaussian overlap loss. It learns an upper bound for each instance by treating objects as 2D Gaussian distributions and minimizing their overlap. 2) Voronoi watershed loss. It learns a lower bound for each instance through watershed on Voronoi tessellation. 3) Consistency loss. It learns the size/rotation variation between two output sets with respect to an input image and its augmented view. Supplemented by a few devised techniques, e.g. edge loss and copy-paste, the detector is further enhanced. To our best knowledge, Point2RBox-v2 is the first approach to explore the spatial layout among instances for learning point-supervised OOD. Our solution is elegant and lightweight, yet it is expected to give a competitive performance especially in densely packed scenes: 62.61%/86.15%/34.71% on DOTA/HRSC/FAIR1M. Code is available at https://github.com/VisionXLab/point2rbox-v2.

Peiyuan Zhang, Junwei Luo, Xue Yang et al.

With the growing demand for oriented object detection (OOD), recent studies on point-supervised OOD have attracted significant interest. In this paper, we propose PointOBB-v3, a stronger single point-supervised OOD framework. Compared to existing methods, it generates pseudo rotated boxes without additional priors and incorporates support for the end-to-end paradigm. PointOBB-v3 functions by integrating three unique image views: the original view, a resized view, and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Based on the views, a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module are constructed. In the first module, a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss and a Scale-Sensitive Feature Fusion (SSFF) module are introduced to improve the model's ability to estimate object scale. To achieve precise angle predictions, the second module employs symmetry-based self-supervised learning. Additionally, we introduce an end-to-end version that eliminates the pseudo-label generation process by integrating a detector branch and introduces an Instance-Aware Weighting (IAW) strategy to focus on high-quality predictions. We conducted extensive experiments on the DIOR-R, DOTA-v1.0/v1.5/v2.0, FAIR1M, STAR, and RSAR datasets. Across all these datasets, our method achieves an average improvement in accuracy of 3.56% in comparison to previous state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/ZpyWHU/PointOBB-v3.

Yi Yu, Xue Yang, Yansheng Li et al.

Accurately estimating the orientation of visual objects with compact rotated bounding boxes (RBoxes) has become a prominent demand, which challenges existing object detection paradigms that only use horizontal bounding boxes (HBoxes). To equip the detectors with orientation awareness, supervised regression/classification modules have been introduced at the high cost of rotation annotation. Meanwhile, some existing datasets with oriented objects are already annotated with horizontal boxes or even single points. It becomes attractive yet remains open for effectively utilizing weaker single point and horizontal annotations to train an oriented object detector (OOD). We develop Wholly-WOOD, a weakly-supervised OOD framework, capable of wholly leveraging various labeling forms (Points, HBoxes, RBoxes, and their combination) in a unified fashion. By only using HBox for training, our Wholly-WOOD achieves performance very close to that of the RBox-trained counterpart on remote sensing and other areas, significantly reducing the tedious efforts on labor-intensive annotation for oriented objects. The source codes are available at https://github.com/VisionXLab/whollywood (PyTorch-based) and https://github.com/VisionXLab/whollywood-jittor (Jittor-based).

Chen Chen, Zhirui Wang, Taowei Sheng et al.

Existing vision-based 3D occupancy prediction methods are inherently limited in accuracy due to their exclusive reliance on street-view imagery, neglecting the potential benefits of incorporating satellite views. We propose SA-Occ, the first Satellite-Assisted 3D occupancy prediction model, which leverages GPS & IMU to integrate historical yet readily available satellite imagery into real-time applications, effectively mitigating limitations of ego-vehicle perceptions, involving occlusions and degraded performance in distant regions. To address the core challenges of cross-view perception, we propose: 1) Dynamic-Decoupling Fusion, which resolves inconsistencies in dynamic regions caused by the temporal asynchrony between satellite and street views; 2) 3D-Proj Guidance, a module that enhances 3D feature extraction from inherently 2D satellite imagery; and 3) Uniform Sampling Alignment, which aligns the sampling density between street and satellite views. Evaluated on Occ3D-nuScenes, SA-Occ achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially among single-frame methods, with a 39.05% mIoU (a 6.97% improvement), while incurring only 6.93 ms of additional latency per frame. Our code and newly curated dataset are available at https://github.com/chenchen235/SA-Occ.

Qingyun Li, Shuran Ma, Junwei Luo et al.

With Transformers achieving outstanding performance on individual remote sensing (RS) tasks, we are now approaching the realization of a unified model that excels across multiple tasks through multi-task learning (MTL). Compared to single-task approaches, MTL methods offer improved generalization, enhanced scalability, and greater practical applicability. Recently, vision language models (VLMs) have achieved promising results in RS image understanding, grounding, and ultra-high-resolution (UHR) image reasoning, respectively. Moreover, the unified text-based interface demonstrates significant potential for MTL. Hence, in this work, we present RSCoVLM, a simple yet flexible VLM baseline for RS MTL. Firstly, we create the data curation engine, including data acquisition, offline processing and integrating, as well as online loading and weighting. This data engine effectively addresses complex RS data enviroment and generates flexible vision-language conversations. Furthermore, we propose a unified dynamic-resolution strategy to address the diverse image scales inherent in RS imagery. For UHR images, we introduce the Zoom-in Chain mechanism together with its corresponding dataset, LRS-VQA-Zoom. The strategies are flexible and effectively mitigate the computational burdens. Additionally, we significantly enhance the model's object detection capability and propose a novel evaluation protocol that ensures fair comparison between VLMs and conventional detection models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RSCoVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks, outperforming existing RS VLMs and even rivaling specialized expert models. All the training and evaluating tools, model weights, and datasets have been fully open-sourced to support reproducibility. We expect that this baseline will promote further progress toward general-purpose RS models.

Xiaoxing Hu, Kaicheng Yang, Ziyang Gong et al.

The original CLIP text encoder is limited by a maximum input length of 77 tokens, which hampers its ability to effectively process long texts and perform fine-grained semantic understanding. In addition, the CLIP text encoder lacks support for multilingual inputs. All these limitations significantly restrict its applicability across a broader range of tasks. Recent studies have attempted to replace the CLIP text encoder with an LLM-based embedder to enhance its ability in processing long texts, multilingual understanding, and fine-grained semantic comprehension. However, because the representation spaces of LLMs and the vision-language space of CLIP are pretrained independently without alignment priors, direct alignment using contrastive learning can disrupt the intrinsic vision-language alignment in the CLIP image encoder, leading to an underutilization of the knowledge acquired during pre-training. To address this challenge, we propose ProCLIP, a curriculum learning-based progressive vision-language alignment framework to effectively align the CLIP image encoder with an LLM-based embedder. Specifically, ProCLIP first distills knowledge from CLIP's text encoder into the LLM-based embedder to leverage CLIP's rich pretrained knowledge while establishing initial alignment between the LLM embedder and CLIP image encoder. Subsequently, ProCLIP further aligns the CLIP image encoder with the LLM-based embedder through image-text contrastive tuning, employing self-distillation regularization to avoid overfitting. To achieve a more effective alignment, instance semantic alignment loss and embedding structure alignment loss are employed during representation inheritance and contrastive tuning. The Code is available at https://github.com/VisionXLab/ProCLIP.

Yue Zhou, Litong Feng, Mengcheng Lan et al.

Mathematical reasoning is critical for tasks such as precise distance and area computations, trajectory estimations, and spatial analysis in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based remote sensing, yet current vision-language models (VLMs) have not been adequately tested in this domain. To address this gap, we introduce AVI-Math, the first benchmark to rigorously evaluate multimodal mathematical reasoning in aerial vehicle imagery, moving beyond simple counting tasks to include domain-specific knowledge in areas such as geometry, logic, and algebra. The dataset comprises 3,773 high-quality vehicle-related questions captured from UAV views, covering 6 mathematical subjects and 20 topics. The data, collected at varying altitudes and from multiple UAV angles, reflects real-world UAV scenarios, ensuring the diversity and complexity of the constructed mathematical problems. In this paper, we benchmark 14 prominent VLMs through a comprehensive evaluation and demonstrate that, despite their success on previous multimodal benchmarks, these models struggle with the reasoning tasks in AVI-Math. Our detailed analysis highlights significant limitations in the mathematical reasoning capabilities of current VLMs and suggests avenues for future research. Furthermore, we explore the use of Chain-of-Thought prompting and fine-tuning techniques, which show promise in addressing the reasoning challenges in AVI-Math. Our findings not only expose the limitations of VLMs in mathematical reasoning but also offer valuable insights for advancing UAV-based trustworthy VLMs in real-world applications. The code, and datasets will be released at https://github.com/VisionXLab/avi-math

Xue Yang, Yue Zhou, Junchi Yan

AlphaRotate is an open-source Tensorflow benchmark for performing scalable rotation detection on various datasets. It currently provides more than 18 popular rotation detection models under a single, well-documented API designed for use by both practitioners and researchers. AlphaRotate regards high performance, robustness, sustainability and scalability as the core concept of design, and all models are covered by unit testing, continuous integration, code coverage, maintainability checks, and visual monitoring and analysis. AlphaRotate can be installed from PyPI and is released under the Apache-2.0 License. Source code is available at https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection.

Xue Yang, Xiaojiang Yang, Jirui Yang et al.

Existing rotated object detectors are mostly inherited from the horizontal detection paradigm, as the latter has evolved into a well-developed area. However, these detectors are difficult to perform prominently in high-precision detection due to the limitation of current regression loss design, especially for objects with large aspect ratios. Taking the perspective that horizontal detection is a special case for rotated object detection, in this paper, we are motivated to change the design of rotation regression loss from induction paradigm to deduction methodology, in terms of the relation between rotation and horizontal detection. We show that one essential challenge is how to modulate the coupled parameters in the rotation regression loss, as such the estimated parameters can influence to each other during the dynamic joint optimization, in an adaptive and synergetic way. Specifically, we first convert the rotated bounding box into a 2-D Gaussian distribution, and then calculate the Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) between the Gaussian distributions as the regression loss. By analyzing the gradient of each parameter, we show that KLD (and its derivatives) can dynamically adjust the parameter gradients according to the characteristics of the object. It will adjust the importance (gradient weight) of the angle parameter according to the aspect ratio. This mechanism can be vital for high-precision detection as a slight angle error would cause a serious accuracy drop for large aspect ratios objects. More importantly, we have proved that KLD is scale invariant. We further show that the KLD loss can be degenerated into the popular $l_{n}$-norm loss for horizontal detection. Experimental results on seven datasets using different detectors show its consistent superiority, and codes are available at https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection and https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmrotate.

Qi Ming, Lingjuan Miao, Zhiqiang Zhou et al.

Arbitrary-oriented objects exist widely in natural scenes, and thus the oriented object detection has received extensive attention in recent years. The mainstream rotation detectors use oriented bounding boxes (OBB) or quadrilateral bounding boxes (QBB) to represent the rotating objects. However, these methods suffer from the representation ambiguity for oriented object definition, which leads to suboptimal regression optimization and the inconsistency between the loss metric and the localization accuracy of the predictions. In this paper, we propose a Representation Invariance Loss (RIL) to optimize the bounding box regression for the rotating objects. Specifically, RIL treats multiple representations of an oriented object as multiple equivalent local minima, and hence transforms bounding box regression into an adaptive matching process with these local minima. Then, the Hungarian matching algorithm is adopted to obtain the optimal regression strategy. We also propose a normalized rotation loss to alleviate the weak correlation between different variables and their unbalanced loss contribution in OBB representation. Extensive experiments on remote sensing datasets and scene text datasets show that our method achieves consistent and substantial improvement. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/ming71/RIDet.

Xue Yang, Junchi Yan, Qi Ming et al.

Boundary discontinuity and its inconsistency to the final detection metric have been the bottleneck for rotating detection regression loss design. In this paper, we propose a novel regression loss based on Gaussian Wasserstein distance as a fundamental approach to solve the problem. Specifically, the rotated bounding box is converted to a 2-D Gaussian distribution, which enables to approximate the indifferentiable rotational IoU induced loss by the Gaussian Wasserstein distance (GWD) which can be learned efficiently by gradient back-propagation. GWD can still be informative for learning even there is no overlapping between two rotating bounding boxes which is often the case for small object detection. Thanks to its three unique properties, GWD can also elegantly solve the boundary discontinuity and square-like problem regardless how the bounding box is defined. Experiments on five datasets using different detectors show the effectiveness of our approach. Codes are available at https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection and https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmrotate.

Xue Yang, Liping Hou, Yue Zhou et al.

Rotation detection serves as a fundamental building block in many visual applications involving aerial image, scene text, and face etc. Differing from the dominant regression-based approaches for orientation estimation, this paper explores a relatively less-studied methodology based on classification. The hope is to inherently dismiss the boundary discontinuity issue as encountered by the regression-based detectors. We propose new techniques to push its frontier in two aspects: i) new encoding mechanism: the design of two Densely Coded Labels (DCL) for angle classification, to replace the Sparsely Coded Label (SCL) in existing classification-based detectors, leading to three times training speed increase as empirically observed across benchmarks, further with notable improvement in detection accuracy; ii) loss re-weighting: we propose Angle Distance and Aspect Ratio Sensitive Weighting (ADARSW), which improves the detection accuracy especially for square-like objects, by making DCL-based detectors sensitive to angular distance and object's aspect ratio. Extensive experiments and visual analysis on large-scale public datasets for aerial images i.e. DOTA, UCAS-AOD, HRSC2016, as well as scene text dataset ICDAR2015 and MLT, show the effectiveness of our approach. The source code is available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/DCL_RetinaNet_Tensorflow and is also integrated in our open source rotation detection benchmark: https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection.

Xue Yang, Junchi Yan, Ziming Feng et al.

Rotation detection is a challenging task due to the difficulties of locating the multi-angle objects and separating them effectively from the background. Though considerable progress has been made, for practical settings, there still exist challenges for rotating objects with large aspect ratio, dense distribution and category extremely imbalance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end refined single-stage rotation detector for fast and accurate object detection by using a progressive regression approach from coarse to fine granularity. Considering the shortcoming of feature misalignment in existing refined single-stage detector, we design a feature refinement module to improve detection performance by getting more accurate features. The key idea of feature refinement module is to re-encode the position information of the current refined bounding box to the corresponding feature points through pixel-wise feature interpolation to realize feature reconstruction and alignment. For more accurate rotation estimation, an approximate SkewIoU loss is proposed to solve the problem that the calculation of SkewIoU is not derivable. Experiments on three popular remote sensing public datasets DOTA, HRSC2016, UCAS-AOD as well as one scene text dataset ICDAR2015 show the effectiveness of our approach. Tensorflow and Pytorch version codes are available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/R3Det_Tensorflow and https://github.com/SJTU-Thinklab-Det/r3det-on-mmdetection, and R3Det is also integrated in our open source rotation detection benchmark: https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection.

Yijie Zheng, Weijie Wu, Qingyun Li et al.

Language-Guided object recognition in remote sensing imagery is crucial for large-scale mapping and automated data annotation. However, existing open-vocabulary and visual grounding methods rely on explicit category cues, limiting their ability to handle complex or implicit queries that require advanced reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce a new suite of tasks, including Instruction-Oriented Object Counting, Detection, and Segmentation (InstructCDS), covering open-vocabulary, open-ended, and open-subclass scenarios. We further present EarthInstruct, the first InstructCDS benchmark for earth observation. It is constructed from two diverse remote sensing datasets with varying spatial resolutions and annotation rules across 20 categories, necessitating models to interpret dataset-specific instructions. Given the scarcity of semantically rich labeled data in remote sensing, we propose InstructSAM, a training-free framework for instruction-driven object recognition. InstructSAM leverages large vision-language models to interpret user instructions and estimate object counts, employs SAM2 for mask proposal, and formulates mask-label assignment as a binary integer programming problem. By integrating semantic similarity with counting constraints, InstructSAM efficiently assigns categories to predicted masks without relying on confidence thresholds. Experiments demonstrate that InstructSAM matches or surpasses specialized baselines across multiple tasks while maintaining near-constant inference time regardless of object count, reducing output tokens by 89% and overall runtime by over 32% compared to direct generation approaches. We believe the contributions of the proposed tasks, benchmark, and effective approach will advance future research in developing versatile object recognition systems.

Zhongyao Li, Peirui Cheng, Liangjin Zhao et al.

Multi-UAV collaborative 3D detection enables accurate and robust perception by fusing multi-view observations from aerial platforms, offering significant advantages in coverage and occlusion handling, while posing new challenges for computation on resource-constrained UAV platforms. In this paper, we present AdaBEV, a novel framework that learns adaptive instance-aware BEV representations through a refine-and-contrast paradigm. Unlike existing methods that treat all BEV grids equally, AdaBEV introduces a Box-Guided Refinement Module (BG-RM) and an Instance-Background Contrastive Learning (IBCL) to enhance semantic awareness and feature discriminability. BG-RM refines only BEV grids associated with foreground instances using 2D supervision and spatial subdivision, while IBCL promotes stronger separation between foreground and background features via contrastive learning in BEV space. Extensive experiments on the Air-Co-Pred dataset demonstrate that AdaBEV achieves superior accuracy-computation trade-offs across model scales, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods at low resolutions and approaching upper bound performance while maintaining low-resolution BEV inputs and negligible overhead.

Yansheng Li, Linlin Wang, Tingzhu Wang et al.

Scene graph generation (SGG) in satellite imagery (SAI) benefits promoting understanding of geospatial scenarios from perception to cognition. In SAI, objects exhibit great variations in scales and aspect ratios, and there exist rich relationships between objects (even between spatially disjoint objects), which makes it attractive to holistically conduct SGG in large-size very-high-resolution (VHR) SAI. However, there lack such SGG datasets. Due to the complexity of large-size SAI, mining triplets <subject, relationship, object> heavily relies on long-range contextual reasoning. Consequently, SGG models designed for small-size natural imagery are not directly applicable to large-size SAI. This paper constructs a large-scale dataset for SGG in large-size VHR SAI with image sizes ranging from 512 x 768 to 27,860 x 31,096 pixels, named STAR (Scene graph generaTion in lArge-size satellite imageRy), encompassing over 210K objects and over 400K triplets. To realize SGG in large-size SAI, we propose a context-aware cascade cognition (CAC) framework to understand SAI regarding object detection (OBD), pair pruning and relationship prediction for SGG. We also release a SAI-oriented SGG toolkit with about 30 OBD and 10 SGG methods which need further adaptation by our devised modules on our challenging STAR dataset. The dataset and toolkit are available at: https://linlin-dev.github.io/project/STAR.

Yang Xue, Fan Wang, Hao Tian et al.

Proactive human-robot interaction (HRI) allows the receptionist robots to actively greet people and offer services based on vision, which has been found to improve acceptability and customer satisfaction. Existing approaches are either based on multi-stage decision processes or based on end-to-end decision models. However, the rule-based approaches require sedulous expert efforts and only handle minimal pre-defined scenarios. On the other hand, existing works with end-to-end models are limited to very general greetings or few behavior patterns (typically less than 10). To address those challenges, we propose a new end-to-end framework, the TransFormer with Visual Tokens for Human-Robot Interaction (TFVT-HRI). The proposed framework extracts visual tokens of relative objects from an RGB camera first. To ensure the correct interpretation of the scenario, a transformer decision model is then employed to process the visual tokens, which is augmented with the temporal and spatial information. It predicts the appropriate action to take in each scenario and identifies the right target. Our data is collected from an in-service receptionist robot in an office building, which is then annotated by experts for appropriate proactive behavior. The action set includes 1000+ diverse patterns by combining language, emoji expression, and body motions. We compare our model with other SOTA end-to-end models on both offline test sets and online user experiments in realistic office building environments to validate this framework. It is demonstrated that the decision model achieves SOTA performance in action triggering and selection, resulting in more humanness and intelligence when compared with the previous reactive reception policies.

Wen Qian, Xue Yang, Silong Peng et al.

Popular rotated detection methods usually use five parameters (coordinates of the central point, width, height, and rotation angle) to describe the rotated bounding box and l1-loss as the loss function. In this paper, we argue that the aforementioned integration can cause training instability and performance degeneration, due to the loss discontinuity resulted from the inherent periodicity of angles and the associated sudden exchange of width and height. This problem is further pronounced given the regression inconsistency among five parameters with different measurement units. We refer to the above issues as rotation sensitivity error (RSE) and propose a modulated rotation loss to dismiss the loss discontinuity. Our new loss is combined with the eight-parameter regression to further solve the problem of inconsistent parameter regression. Experiments show the state-of-art performances of our method on the public aerial image benchmark DOTA and UCAS-AOD. Its generalization abilities are also verified on ICDAR2015, HRSC2016, and FDDB. Qualitative improvements can be seen in Fig 1, and the source code will be released with the publication of the paper.

Ang Li, Xue Yang, Chongyang Zhang

We extend the state-of-the-art Cascade R-CNN with a simple feature sharing mechanism. Our approach focuses on the performance increases on high IoU but decreases on low IoU thresholds--a key problem this detector suffers from. Feature sharing is extremely helpful, our results show that given this mechanism embedded into all stages, we can easily narrow the gap between the last stage and preceding stages on low IoU thresholds without resorting to the commonly used testing ensemble but the network itself. We also observe obvious improvements on all IoU thresholds benefited from feature sharing, and the resulting cascade structure can easily match or exceed its counterparts, only with negligible extra parameters introduced. To push the envelope, we demonstrate 43.2 AP on COCO object detection without any bells and whistles including testing ensemble, surpassing previous Cascade R-CNN by a large margin. Our framework is easy to implement and we hope it can serve as a general and strong baseline for future research.

Dayiheng Liu, Xu Yang, Feng He et al.

It has been previously observed that training Variational Recurrent Autoencoders (VRAE) for text generation suffers from serious uninformative latent variables problem. The model would collapse into a plain language model that totally ignore the latent variables and can only generate repeating and dull samples. In this paper, we explore the reason behind this issue and propose an effective regularizer based approach to address it. The proposed method directly injects extra constraints on the posteriors of latent variables into the learning process of VRAE, which can flexibly and stably control the trade-off between the KL term and the reconstruction term, making the model learn dense and meaningful latent representations. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several strong baselines and can make the model learn interpretable latent variables and generate diverse meaningful sentences. Furthermore, the proposed method can perform well without using other strategies, such as KL annealing.

Tengfei Zhang, Yue Zhang, Xian Sun et al.

The current advances in object detection depend on large-scale datasets to get good performance. However, there may not always be sufficient samples in many scenarios, which leads to the research on few-shot detection as well as its extreme variation one-shot detection. In this paper, the one-shot detection has been formulated as a conditional probability problem. With this insight, a novel one-shot conditional object detection (OSCD) framework, referred as Comparison Network (ComparisonNet), has been proposed. Specifically, query and target image features are extracted through a Siamese network as mapped metrics of marginal probabilities. A two-stage detector for OSCD is introduced to compare the extracted query and target features with the learnable metric to approach the optimized non-linear conditional probability. Once trained, ComparisonNet can detect objects of both seen and unseen classes without further training, which also has the advantages including class-agnostic, training-free for unseen classes, and without catastrophic forgetting. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the proposed datasets of Fashion-MNIST and PASCAL VOC.

Xue Yang, Jirui Yang, Junchi Yan et al.

Object detection has been a building block in computer vision. Though considerable progress has been made, there still exist challenges for objects with small size, arbitrary direction, and dense distribution. Apart from natural images, such issues are especially pronounced for aerial images of great importance. This paper presents a novel multi-category rotation detector for small, cluttered and rotated objects, namely SCRDet. Specifically, a sampling fusion network is devised which fuses multi-layer feature with effective anchor sampling, to improve the sensitivity to small objects. Meanwhile, the supervised pixel attention network and the channel attention network are jointly explored for small and cluttered object detection by suppressing the noise and highlighting the objects feature. For more accurate rotation estimation, the IoU constant factor is added to the smooth L1 loss to address the boundary problem for the rotating bounding box. Extensive experiments on two remote sensing public datasets DOTA, NWPU VHR-10 as well as natural image datasets COCO, VOC2007 and scene text data ICDAR2015 show the state-of-the-art performance of our detector. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/DetectionTeamUCAS.