Zhen Zhao

Yue Duan, Zhen Zhao, Lei Qi et al.

The core issue in semi-supervised learning (SSL) lies in how to effectively leverage unlabeled data, whereas most existing methods tend to put a great emphasis on the utilization of high-confidence samples yet seldom fully explore the usage of low-confidence samples. In this paper, we aim to utilize low-confidence samples in a novel way with our proposed mutex-based consistency regularization, namely MutexMatch. Specifically, the high-confidence samples are required to exactly predict "what it is" by conventional True-Positive Classifier, while the low-confidence samples are employed to achieve a simpler goal -- to predict with ease "what it is not" by True-Negative Classifier. In this sense, we not only mitigate the pseudo-labeling errors but also make full use of the low-confidence unlabeled data by consistency of dissimilarity degree. MutexMatch achieves superior performance on multiple benchmark datasets, i.e., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, STL-10, mini-ImageNet and Tiny-ImageNet. More importantly, our method further shows superiority when the amount of labeled data is scarce, e.g., 92.23% accuracy with only 20 labeled data on CIFAR-10. Our code and model weights have been released at https://github.com/NJUyued/MutexMatch4SSL.

Lihe Yang, Zhen Zhao, Lei Qi et al.

Semi-supervised learning is attracting blooming attention, due to its success in combining unlabeled data. To mitigate potentially incorrect pseudo labels, recent frameworks mostly set a fixed confidence threshold to discard uncertain samples. This practice ensures high-quality pseudo labels, but incurs a relatively low utilization of the whole unlabeled set. In this work, our key insight is that these uncertain samples can be turned into certain ones, as long as the confusion classes for the top-1 class are detected and removed. Invoked by this, we propose a novel method dubbed ShrinkMatch to learn uncertain samples. For each uncertain sample, it adaptively seeks a shrunk class space, which merely contains the original top-1 class, as well as remaining less likely classes. Since the confusion ones are removed in this space, the re-calculated top-1 confidence can satisfy the pre-defined threshold. We then impose a consistency regularization between a pair of strongly and weakly augmented samples in the shrunk space to strive for discriminative representations. Furthermore, considering the varied reliability among uncertain samples and the gradually improved model during training, we correspondingly design two reweighting principles for our uncertain loss. Our method exhibits impressive performance on widely adopted benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/LiheYoung/ShrinkMatch.

Zicheng Wang, Zhen Zhao, Xiaoxia Xing et al.

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS) has recently gained increasing research interest as it can reduce the requirement for large-scale fully-annotated training data. The current methods often suffer from the confirmation bias from the pseudo-labelling process, which can be alleviated by the co-training framework. The current co-training-based SSS methods rely on hand-crafted perturbations to prevent the different sub-nets from collapsing into each other, but these artificial perturbations cannot lead to the optimal solution. In this work, we propose a new conflict-based cross-view consistency (CCVC) method based on a two-branch co-training framework which aims at enforcing the two sub-nets to learn informative features from irrelevant views. In particular, we first propose a new cross-view consistency (CVC) strategy that encourages the two sub-nets to learn distinct features from the same input by introducing a feature discrepancy loss, while these distinct features are expected to generate consistent prediction scores of the input. The CVC strategy helps to prevent the two sub-nets from stepping into the collapse. In addition, we further propose a conflict-based pseudo-labelling (CPL) method to guarantee the model will learn more useful information from conflicting predictions, which will lead to a stable training process. We validate our new CCVC approach on the SSS benchmark datasets where our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyao3302/CCVC.

Yue Duan, Zhen Zhao, Lei Qi et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) tackles the label missing problem by enabling the effective usage of unlabeled data. While existing SSL methods focus on the traditional setting, a practical and challenging scenario called label Missing Not At Random (MNAR) is usually ignored. In MNAR, the labeled and unlabeled data fall into different class distributions resulting in biased label imputation, which deteriorates the performance of SSL models. In this work, class transition tracking based Pseudo-Rectifying Guidance (PRG) is devised for MNAR. We explore the class-level guidance information obtained by the Markov random walk, which is modeled on a dynamically created graph built over the class tracking matrix. PRG unifies the historical information of class distribution and class transitions caused by the pseudo-rectifying procedure to maintain the model's unbiased enthusiasm towards assigning pseudo-labels to all classes, so as the quality of pseudo-labels on both popular classes and rare classes in MNAR could be improved. Finally, we show the superior performance of PRG across a variety of MNAR scenarios, outperforming the latest SSL approaches combining bias removal solutions by a large margin. Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/NJUyued/PRG4SSL-MNAR.

Zhen Zhao, Jingqun Tang, Chunhui Lin et al.

Scene text recognition (STR) in the wild frequently encounters challenges when coping with domain variations, font diversity, shape deformations, etc. A straightforward solution is performing model fine-tuning tailored to a specific scenario, but it is computationally intensive and requires multiple model copies for various scenarios. Recent studies indicate that large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstration examples in a training-free manner, termed "In-Context Learning" (ICL). Nevertheless, applying LLMs as a text recognizer is unacceptably resource-consuming. Moreover, our pilot experiments on LLMs show that ICL fails in STR, mainly attributed to the insufficient incorporation of contextual information from diverse samples in the training stage. To this end, we introduce E$^2$STR, a STR model trained with context-rich scene text sequences, where the sequences are generated via our proposed in-context training strategy. E$^2$STR demonstrates that a regular-sized model is sufficient to achieve effective ICL capabilities in STR. Extensive experiments show that E$^2$STR exhibits remarkable training-free adaptation in various scenarios and outperforms even the fine-tuned state-of-the-art approaches on public benchmarks. The code is released at https://github.com/bytedance/E2STR .

Shichao Fan, Kun Wu, Zhengping Che et al.

Recent progress in large-scale robotic datasets and vision-language models (VLMs) has advanced research on vision-language-action (VLA) models. However, existing VLA models still face two fundamental challenges: (i) producing precise low-level actions from high-dimensional observations, (ii) bridging domain gaps across heterogeneous data sources, including diverse robot embodiments and human demonstrations. Existing methods often encode latent variables from either visual dynamics or robotic actions to guide policy learning, but they fail to fully exploit the complementary multi-modal knowledge present in large-scale, heterogeneous datasets. In this work, we present X Robotic Model 1 (XR-1), a novel framework for versatile and scalable VLA learning across diverse robots, tasks, and environments. XR-1 introduces the \emph{Unified Vision-Motion Codes (UVMC)}, a discrete latent representation learned via a dual-branch VQ-VAE that jointly encodes visual dynamics and robotic motion. UVMC addresses these challenges by (i) serving as an intermediate representation between the observations and actions, and (ii) aligning multimodal dynamic information from heterogeneous data sources to capture complementary knowledge. To effectively exploit UVMC, we propose a three-stage training paradigm: (i) self-supervised UVMC learning, (ii) UVMC-guided pretraining on large-scale cross-embodiment robotic datasets, and (iii) task-specific post-training. We validate XR-1 through extensive real-world experiments with more than 14,000 rollouts on six different robot embodiments, spanning over 120 diverse manipulation tasks. XR-1 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines such as $π_{0.5}$, $π_0$, RDT, UniVLA, and GR00T-N1.5 while demonstrating strong generalization to novel objects, background variations, distractors, and illumination changes. Our project is at https://xr-1-vla.github.io/.

Zhen Zhao, Jingqun Tang, Binghong Wu et al.

In this work, we present TextHarmony, a unified and versatile multimodal generative model proficient in comprehending and generating visual text. Simultaneously generating images and texts typically results in performance degradation due to the inherent inconsistency between vision and language modalities. To overcome this challenge, existing approaches resort to modality-specific data for supervised fine-tuning, necessitating distinct model instances. We propose Slide-LoRA, which dynamically aggregates modality-specific and modality-agnostic LoRA experts, partially decoupling the multimodal generation space. Slide-LoRA harmonizes the generation of vision and language within a singular model instance, thereby facilitating a more unified generative process. Additionally, we develop a high-quality image caption dataset, DetailedTextCaps-100K, synthesized with a sophisticated closed-source MLLM to enhance visual text generation capabilities further. Comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Empowered by Slide-LoRA, TextHarmony achieves comparable performance to modality-specific fine-tuning results with only a 2% increase in parameters and shows an average improvement of 2.5% in visual text comprehension tasks and 4.0% in visual text generation tasks. Our work delineates the viability of an integrated approach to multimodal generation within the visual text domain, setting a foundation for subsequent inquiries. Code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/TextHarmony.

Zhen Zhao, Lihe Yang, Sifan Long et al.

Recent studies on semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS) have seen fast progress. Despite their promising performance, current state-of-the-art methods tend to increasingly complex designs at the cost of introducing more network components and additional training procedures. Differently, in this work, we follow a standard teacher-student framework and propose AugSeg, a simple and clean approach that focuses mainly on data perturbations to boost the SSS performance. We argue that various data augmentations should be adjusted to better adapt to the semi-supervised scenarios instead of directly applying these techniques from supervised learning. Specifically, we adopt a simplified intensity-based augmentation that selects a random number of data transformations with uniformly sampling distortion strengths from a continuous space. Based on the estimated confidence of the model on different unlabeled samples, we also randomly inject labelled information to augment the unlabeled samples in an adaptive manner. Without bells and whistles, our simple AugSeg can readily achieve new state-of-the-art performance on SSS benchmarks under different partition protocols.

Sifan Long, Zhen Zhao, Junkun Yuan et al. · tencent-ai

Prompt learning has become one of the most efficient paradigms for adapting large pre-trained vision-language models to downstream tasks. Current state-of-the-art methods, like CoOp and ProDA, tend to adopt soft prompts to learn an appropriate prompt for each specific task. Recent CoCoOp further boosts the base-to-new generalization performance via an image-conditional prompt. However, it directly fuses identical image semantics to prompts of different labels and significantly weakens the discrimination among different classes as shown in our experiments. Motivated by this observation, we first propose a class-aware text prompt (CTP) to enrich generated prompts with label-related image information. Unlike CoCoOp, CTP can effectively involve image semantics and avoid introducing extra ambiguities into different prompts. On the other hand, instead of reserving the complete image representations, we propose text-guided feature tuning (TFT) to make the image branch attend to class-related representation. A contrastive loss is employed to align such augmented text and image representations on downstream tasks. In this way, the image-to-text CTP and text-to-image TFT can be mutually promoted to enhance the adaptation of VLMs for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing methods by a significant margin. Especially, compared to CoCoOp, we achieve an average improvement of 4.03% on new classes and 3.19% on harmonic-mean over eleven classification benchmarks.

Sifan Long, Zhen Zhao, Jimin Pi et al.

Vision transformers have achieved significant improvements on various vision tasks but their quadratic interactions between tokens significantly reduce computational efficiency. Many pruning methods have been proposed to remove redundant tokens for efficient vision transformers recently. However, existing studies mainly focus on the token importance to preserve local attentive tokens but completely ignore the global token diversity. In this paper, we emphasize the cruciality of diverse global semantics and propose an efficient token decoupling and merging method that can jointly consider the token importance and diversity for token pruning. According to the class token attention, we decouple the attentive and inattentive tokens. In addition to preserving the most discriminative local tokens, we merge similar inattentive tokens and match homogeneous attentive tokens to maximize the token diversity. Despite its simplicity, our method obtains a promising trade-off between model complexity and classification accuracy. On DeiT-S, our method reduces the FLOPs by 35% with only a 0.2% accuracy drop. Notably, benefiting from maintaining the token diversity, our method can even improve the accuracy of DeiT-T by 0.1% after reducing its FLOPs by 40%.

Zhenhua Xu, Yujia Zhang, Enze Xie et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as a prominent area of interest within the research community, given their proficiency in handling and reasoning with non-textual data, including images and videos. This study seeks to extend the application of MLLMs to the realm of autonomous driving by introducing DriveGPT4, a novel interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving system based on LLMs. Capable of processing multi-frame video inputs and textual queries, DriveGPT4 facilitates the interpretation of vehicle actions, offers pertinent reasoning, and effectively addresses a diverse range of questions posed by users. Furthermore, DriveGPT4 predicts low-level vehicle control signals in an end-to-end fashion.These advanced capabilities are achieved through the utilization of a bespoke visual instruction tuning dataset, specifically tailored for autonomous driving applications, in conjunction with a mix-finetuning training strategy. DriveGPT4 represents the pioneering effort to leverage LLMs for the development of an interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving solution. Evaluations conducted on the BDD-X dataset showcase the superior qualitative and quantitative performance of DriveGPT4. Additionally, the fine-tuning of domain-specific data enables DriveGPT4 to yield close or even improved results in terms of autonomous driving grounding when contrasted with GPT4-V.

Zhen Zhao, Sifan Long, Jimin Pi et al.

Recently, semi-supervised semantic segmentation has achieved promising performance with a small fraction of labeled data. However, most existing studies treat all unlabeled data equally and barely consider the differences and training difficulties among unlabeled instances. Differentiating unlabeled instances can promote instance-specific supervision to adapt to the model's evolution dynamically. In this paper, we emphasize the cruciality of instance differences and propose an instance-specific and model-adaptive supervision for semi-supervised semantic segmentation, named iMAS. Relying on the model's performance, iMAS employs a class-weighted symmetric intersection-over-union to evaluate quantitative hardness of each unlabeled instance and supervises the training on unlabeled data in a model-adaptive manner. Specifically, iMAS learns from unlabeled instances progressively by weighing their corresponding consistency losses based on the evaluated hardness. Besides, iMAS dynamically adjusts the augmentation for each instance such that the distortion degree of augmented instances is adapted to the model's generalization capability across the training course. Not integrating additional losses and training procedures, iMAS can obtain remarkable performance gains against current state-of-the-art approaches on segmentation benchmarks under different semi-supervised partition protocols.

Guan Gui, Zhen Zhao, Lei Qi et al.

In semi-supervised learning, unlabeled samples can be utilized through augmentation and consistency regularization. However, we observed certain samples, even undergoing strong augmentation, are still correctly classified with high confidence, resulting in a loss close to zero. It indicates that these samples have been already learned well and do not provide any additional optimization benefits to the model. We refer to these samples as ``naive samples". Unfortunately, existing SSL models overlook the characteristics of naive samples, and they just apply the same learning strategy to all samples. To further optimize the SSL model, we emphasize the importance of giving attention to naive samples and augmenting them in a more diverse manner. Sample adaptive augmentation (SAA) is proposed for this stated purpose and consists of two modules: 1) sample selection module; 2) sample augmentation module. Specifically, the sample selection module picks out {naive samples} based on historical training information at each epoch, then the naive samples will be augmented in a more diverse manner in the sample augmentation module. Thanks to the extreme ease of implementation of the above modules, SAA is advantageous for being simple and lightweight. We add SAA on top of FixMatch and FlexMatch respectively, and experiments demonstrate SAA can significantly improve the models. For example, SAA helped improve the accuracy of FixMatch from 92.50% to 94.76% and that of FlexMatch from 95.01% to 95.31% on CIFAR-10 with 40 labels.

Qinghe Ma, Zhen Zhao, Yiming Wu et al.

Tool-augmented reasoning has emerged as a promising direction for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing studies mainly focus on enabling models to perform tool invocation, while neglecting the necessity of invoking tools. We argue that tool usage is not always beneficial, as redundant or inappropriate invocations largely increase reasoning overhead and even mislead model predictions. To address this issue, we introduce AutoTool, a model that adaptively decides whether to invoke tools according to the characteristics of each query. Within a reinforcement learning framework, we design an explicit dual-mode reasoning strategy with mode-specific reward functions to guide the model toward producing accurate responses. Moreover, to prevent premature bias toward a single reasoning mode, AutoTool jointly explores and balances tool-assisted and text-centric reasoning throughout training, and promotes free exploration in later stages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoTool exhibits outstanding performance and high efficiency, yielding a 21.8\% accuracy gain on V* benchmark compared to the base model, and a 44.9\% improvement in efficiency over existing tool-augmented methods on POPE benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/MQinghe/AutoTool.

Zhanyu Wang, Longyue Wang, Zhen Zhao et al.

While the recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitute a significant leap forward in the field, these models are predominantly confined to the realm of input-side multimodal comprehension, lacking the capacity for multimodal content generation. To fill this gap, we present GPT4Video, a unified multi-model framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capability of both video understanding and generation. Specifically, we develop an instruction-following-based approach integrated with the stable diffusion generative model, which has demonstrated to effectively and securely handle video generation scenarios. GPT4Video offers the following benefits: 1) It exhibits impressive capabilities in both video understanding and generation scenarios. For example, GPT4Video outperforms Valley by 11.8\% on the Video Question Answering task, and surpasses NExt-GPT by 2.3\% on the Text to Video generation task. 2) it endows the LLM/MLLM with video generation capabilities without requiring additional training parameters and can flexibly interface with a wide range of models to perform video generation. 3) it maintains a safe and healthy conversation not only in output-side but also the input side in an end-to-end manner. Qualitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that GPT4Video holds the potential to function as a effective, safe and Humanoid-like video assistant that can handle both video understanding and generation scenarios.

Zhen Zhao, Zicheng Wang, Longyue Wang et al.

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation studies have shown promise in training models with limited labeled data. However, current dominant teacher-student based approaches can suffer from the confirmation bias. To address this challenge, we propose AD-MT, an alternate diverse teaching approach in a teacher-student framework. It involves a single student model and two non-trainable teacher models that are momentum-updated periodically and randomly in an alternate fashion. To mitigate the confirmation bias from the diverse supervision, the core of AD-MT lies in two proposed modules: the Random Periodic Alternate (RPA) Updating Module and the Conflict-Combating Module (CCM). The RPA schedules the alternating diverse updating process with complementary data batches, distinct data augmentation, and random switching periods to encourage diverse reasoning from different teaching perspectives. The CCM employs an entropy-based ensembling strategy to encourage the model to learn from both the consistent and conflicting predictions between the teachers. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our AD-MT on the 2D and 3D medical segmentation benchmarks across various semi-supervised settings.

Zicheng Wang, Zhen Zhao, Yiming Wu et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a critical challenge in the field of point cloud analysis. Previous works tackle the problem either by feature extractor adaptation to enable a shared classifier to distinguish domain-invariant features, or by classifier adaptation to evolve the classifier to recognize target-styled source features to increase its adaptation ability. However, by learning domain-invariant features, feature extractor adaptation methods fail to encode semantically meaningful target-specific information, while classifier adaptation methods rely heavily on the accurate estimation of the target distribution. In this work, we propose a novel framework that deeply couples the classifier and feature extractor adaption for 3D UDA, dubbed Progressive Classifier and Feature Extractor Adaptation (PCFEA). Our PCFEA conducts 3D UDA from two distinct perspectives: macro and micro levels. On the macro level, we propose a progressive target-styled feature augmentation (PTFA) that establishes a series of intermediate domains to enable the model to progressively adapt to the target domain. Throughout this process, the source classifier is evolved to recognize target-styled source features (\ie, classifier adaptation). On the micro level, we develop an intermediate domain feature extractor adaptation (IDFA) that performs a compact feature alignment to encourage the target-styled feature extraction gradually. In this way, PTFA and IDFA can mutually benefit each other: IDFA contributes to the distribution estimation of PTFA while PTFA constructs smoother intermediate domains to encourage an accurate feature alignment of IDFA. We validate our method on popular benchmark datasets, where our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyao3302/PCFEA.

Zhen Zhao, Ye Liu, Meng Zhao et al.

Studies on semi-supervised medical image segmentation (SSMIS) have seen fast progress recently. Due to the limited labelled data, SSMIS methods mainly focus on effectively leveraging unlabeled data to enhance the segmentation performance. However, despite their promising performance, current state-of-the-art methods often prioritize integrating complex techniques and loss terms rather than addressing the core challenges of semi-supervised scenarios directly. We argue that the key to SSMIS lies in generating substantial and appropriate prediction disagreement on unlabeled data. To this end, we emphasize the crutiality of data perturbation and model stabilization in semi-supervised segmentation, and propose a simple yet effective approach to boost SSMIS performance significantly, dubbed DPMS. Specifically, we first revisit SSMIS from three distinct perspectives: the data, the model, and the loss, and conduct a comprehensive study of corresponding strategies to examine their effectiveness. Based on these examinations, we then propose DPMS, which adopts a plain teacher-student framework with a standard supervised loss and unsupervised consistency loss. To produce appropriate prediction disagreements, DPMS perturbs the unlabeled data via strong augmentations to enlarge prediction disagreements considerably. On the other hand, using EMA teacher when strong augmentation is applied does not necessarily improve performance. DPMS further utilizes a forwarding-twice and momentum updating strategies for normalization statistics to stabilize the training on unlabeled data effectively. Despite its simplicity, DPMS can obtain new state-of-the-art performance on the public 2D ACDC and 3D LA datasets across various semi-supervised settings, e.g. obtaining a remarkable 22.62% improvement against previous SOTA on ACDC with 5% labels.

Zicheng Wang, Zhen Zhao, Erjian Guo et al.

Current methods focusing on medical image segmentation suffer from incorrect annotations, which is known as the noisy label issue. Most medical image segmentation with noisy labels methods utilize either noise transition matrix, noise-robust loss functions or pseudo-labeling methods, while none of the current research focuses on clean label disentanglement. We argue that the main reason is that the severe class-imbalanced issue will lead to the inaccuracy of the selected ``clean'' labels, thus influencing the robustness of the model against the noises. In this work, we come up with a simple but efficient class-balanced sampling strategy to tackle the class-imbalanced problem, which enables our newly proposed clean label disentangling framework to successfully select clean labels from the given label sets and encourages the model to learn from the correct annotations. However, such a method will filter out too many annotations which may also contain useful information. Therefore, we further extend our clean label disentangling framework to a new noisy feature-aided clean label disentangling framework, which takes the full annotations into utilization to learn more semantics. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our methods, where our methods achieve new state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyao3302/2BDenoise.

Yunxin Li, Haoyuan Shi, Baotian Hu et al.

Traditional animation generation methods depend on training generative models with human-labelled data, entailing a sophisticated multi-stage pipeline that demands substantial human effort and incurs high training costs. Due to limited prompting plans, these methods typically produce brief, information-poor, and context-incoherent animations. To overcome these limitations and automate the animation process, we pioneer the introduction of large multimodal models (LMMs) as the core processor to build an autonomous animation-making agent, named Anim-Director. This agent mainly harnesses the advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities of LMMs and generative AI tools to create animated videos from concise narratives or simple instructions. Specifically, it operates in three main stages: Firstly, the Anim-Director generates a coherent storyline from user inputs, followed by a detailed director's script that encompasses settings of character profiles and interior/exterior descriptions, and context-coherent scene descriptions that include appearing characters, interiors or exteriors, and scene events. Secondly, we employ LMMs with the image generation tool to produce visual images of settings and scenes. These images are designed to maintain visual consistency across different scenes using a visual-language prompting method that combines scene descriptions and images of the appearing character and setting. Thirdly, scene images serve as the foundation for producing animated videos, with LMMs generating prompts to guide this process. The whole process is notably autonomous without manual intervention, as the LMMs interact seamlessly with generative tools to generate prompts, evaluate visual quality, and select the best one to optimize the final output.

Haowen Wang, Zhipeng Fan, Zhen Zhao et al.

Estimating 6D poses and reconstructing 3D shapes of objects in open-world scenes from RGB-depth image pairs is challenging. Many existing methods rely on learning geometric features that correspond to specific templates while disregarding shape variations and pose differences among objects in the same category. As a result, these methods underperform when handling unseen object instances in complex environments. In contrast, other approaches aim to achieve category-level estimation and reconstruction by leveraging normalized geometric structure priors, but the static prior-based reconstruction struggles with substantial intra-class variations. To solve these problems, we propose the DTF-Net, a novel framework for pose estimation and shape reconstruction based on implicit neural fields of object categories. In DTF-Net, we design a deformable template field to represent the general category-wise shape latent features and intra-category geometric deformation features. The field establishes continuous shape correspondences, deforming the category template into arbitrary observed instances to accomplish shape reconstruction. We introduce a pose regression module that shares the deformation features and template codes from the fields to estimate the accurate 6D pose of each object in the scene. We integrate a multi-modal representation extraction module to extract object features and semantic masks, enabling end-to-end inference. Moreover, during training, we implement a shape-invariant training strategy and a viewpoint sampling method to further enhance the model's capability to extract object pose features. Extensive experiments on the REAL275 and CAMERA25 datasets demonstrate the superiority of DTF-Net in both synthetic and real scenes. Furthermore, we show that DTF-Net effectively supports grasping tasks with a real robot arm.

Ziyang Ding, Linjian Meng, Yiming Wu et al.

Due to the potential for exploratory reasoning of Latent Visual Reasoning, recent works tend to enable MLLMs (Multimodal Large Language Models) to perform visual reasoning by propagating continuous hidden states instead of decoding intermediate steps into discrete tokens. However, existing works typically rely on hard alignment objectives to force latent representations to match predefined visual features, thereby severely limiting the exploratory of latent reasoning process. To address this problem, we propose CoLVR (Contrastive Optimization for Latent Visual Reasoning). To obtain a more exploratory visual reasoning, CoLVR introduces a latent contrastive training framework. Firstly, CoLVR learns diverse and exploratory representations with a latent contrastive objective guided by angle-based perturbation, which expands the semantic latent space and avoids over-constrained embedding. Then, CoLVR employs a latent trajectory contrastive reward for RL (Reinforcement Learning) post-training to enable fine-grained optimization of latent visual reasoning process and thus fostering diverse reasoning behaviors. Experiments demonstrate that CoLVR significantly enhances the exploratory capability of latent representations, achieving average improvements of 5.83% on VSP and 8.00% on Jigsaw, while also outperforming existing latent models on out of domain benchmarks, with a 3.40% gain on MMStar. The data, codes, and models are released at https://github.com/Oscar-dzy/CoLVR.

Yixue Zhang, Kun Wu, Zhi Gao et al.

The pursuit of general-purpose robotic manipulation is hindered by the scarcity of diverse, real-world interaction data. Unlike data collection from web in vision or language, robotic data collection is an active process incurring prohibitive physical costs. Consequently, automated task curation to maximize data value remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. Existing manual methods are unscalable and biased toward common tasks, while off-the-shelf foundation models often hallucinate physically infeasible instructions. To address this, we introduce RoboGene, an agentic framework designed to automate the generation of diverse, physically plausible manipulation tasks across single-arm, dual-arm, and mobile robots. RoboGene integrates three core components: diversity-driven sampling for broad task coverage, self-reflection mechanisms to enforce physical constraints, and human-in-the-loop refinement for continuous improvement. We conduct extensive quantitative analysis and large-scale real-world experiments, collecting datasets of 18k trajectories and introducing novel metrics to assess task quality, feasibility, and diversity. Results demonstrate that RoboGene significantly outperforms state-of-the-art foundation models (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro). Furthermore, real-world experiments show that VLA models pre-trained with RoboGene achieve higher success rates and superior generalization, underscoring the importance of high-quality task generation. Our project is available at https://robogene-boost-vla.github.io.

Wanghan Xu, Yuhao Zhou, Yifan Zhou et al.

Despite advances in scientific AI, a coherent framework for Scientific General Intelligence (SGI)-the ability to autonomously conceive, investigate, and reason across scientific domains-remains lacking. We present an operational SGI definition grounded in the Practical Inquiry Model (PIM: Deliberation, Conception, Action, Perception) and operationalize it via four scientist-aligned tasks: deep research, idea generation, dry/wet experiments, and experimental reasoning. SGI-Bench comprises over 1,000 expert-curated, cross-disciplinary samples inspired by Science's 125 Big Questions, enabling systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs. Results reveal gaps: low exact match (10--20%) in deep research despite step-level alignment; ideas lacking feasibility and detail; high code executability but low execution result accuracy in dry experiments; low sequence fidelity in wet protocols; and persistent multimodal comparative-reasoning challenges. We further introduce Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL), which optimizes retrieval-augmented novelty rewards at inference, enhancing hypothesis novelty without reference answer. Together, our PIM-grounded definition, workflow-centric benchmark, and empirical insights establish a foundation for AI systems that genuinely participate in scientific discovery.

Jingqun Tang, Chunhui Lin, Zhen Zhao et al.

Text-centric visual question answering (VQA) has made great strides with the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet open-source models still fall short of leading models like GPT4V and Gemini, partly due to a lack of extensive, high-quality instruction tuning data. To this end, we introduce a new approach for creating a massive, high-quality instruction-tuning dataset, Square-10M, which is generated using closed-source MLLMs. The data construction process, termed Square, consists of four steps: Self-Questioning, Answering, Reasoning, and Evaluation. Our experiments with Square-10M led to three key findings: 1) Our model, TextSquare, considerably surpasses open-source previous state-of-the-art Text-centric MLLMs and sets a new standard on OCRBench(62.2%). It even outperforms top-tier models like GPT4V and Gemini in 6 of 10 text-centric benchmarks. 2) Additionally, we demonstrate the critical role of VQA reasoning data in offering comprehensive contextual insights for specific questions. This not only improves accuracy but also significantly mitigates hallucinations. Specifically, TextSquare scores an average of 75.1% across four general VQA and hallucination evaluation datasets, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models. 3) Notably, the phenomenon observed in scaling text-centric VQA datasets reveals a vivid pattern: the exponential increase of instruction tuning data volume is directly proportional to the improvement in model performance, thereby validating the necessity of the dataset scale and the high quality of Square-10M.

Lihe Yang, Zhen Zhao, Hengshuang Zhao

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS) aims at learning rich visual knowledge from cheap unlabeled images to enhance semantic segmentation capability. Among recent works, UniMatch improves its precedents tremendously by amplifying the practice of weak-to-strong consistency regularization. Subsequent works typically follow similar pipelines and propose various delicate designs. Despite the achieved progress, strangely, even in this flourishing era of numerous powerful vision models, almost all SSS works are still sticking to 1) using outdated ResNet encoders with small-scale ImageNet-1K pre-training, and 2) evaluation on simple Pascal and Cityscapes datasets. In this work, we argue that, it is necessary to switch the baseline of SSS from ResNet-based encoders to more capable ViT-based encoders (e.g., DINOv2) that are pre-trained on massive data. A simple update on the encoder (even using 2x fewer parameters) can bring more significant improvement than careful method designs. Built on this competitive baseline, we present our upgraded and simplified UniMatch V2, inheriting the core spirit of weak-to-strong consistency from V1, but requiring less training cost and providing consistently better results. Additionally, witnessing the gradually saturated performance on Pascal and Cityscapes, we appeal that we should focus on more challenging benchmarks with complex taxonomy, such as ADE20K and COCO datasets. Code, models, and logs of all reported values, are available at https://github.com/LiheYoung/UniMatch-V2.

Yibang Tang, Yifan Yang, Jingyuan Wang et al.

Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems (RMFS) rely on mobile robots for automated inventory transportation, coordinating order allocation and robot scheduling to enhance warehousing efficiency. However, optimizing RMFS is challenging due to strict real-time constraints and the strong coupling of multi-phase decisions. Existing methods either decompose the problem into isolated sub-tasks to guarantee responsiveness at the cost of global optimality, or rely on computationally expensive global optimization models that are unsuitable for dynamic industrial environments. To bridge this gap, we propose SOAR, a unified Deep Reinforcement Learning framework for real-time joint optimization. SOAR transforms order allocation and robot scheduling into a unified process by utilizing soft order allocations as observations. We formulate this as an Event-Driven Markov Decision Process, enabling the agent to perform simultaneous scheduling in response to asynchronous system events. Technically, we employ a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer to encode the warehouse state and integrate phased domain knowledge. Additionally, we incorporate a reward shaping strategy to address sparse feedback in long-horizon tasks. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world industrial datasets, in collaboration with Geekplus, demonstrate that SOAR reduces global makespan by 7.5\% and average order completion time by 15.4\% with sub-100ms latency. Furthermore, sim-to-real deployment confirms its practical viability and significant performance gains in production environments. The code is available at https://github.com/200815147/SOAR.

Zicheng Wang, Zhenghao Chen, Yiming Wu et al.

Point cloud analysis has seen substantial advancements due to deep learning, although previous Transformer-based methods excel at modeling long-range dependencies on this task, their computational demands are substantial. Conversely, the Mamba offers greater efficiency but shows limited potential compared with Transformer-based methods. In this study, we introduce PoinTramba, a pioneering hybrid framework that synergies the analytical power of Transformer with the remarkable computational efficiency of Mamba for enhanced point cloud analysis. Specifically, our approach first segments point clouds into groups, where the Transformer meticulously captures intricate intra-group dependencies and produces group embeddings, whose inter-group relationships will be simultaneously and adeptly captured by efficient Mamba architecture, ensuring comprehensive analysis. Unlike previous Mamba approaches, we introduce a bi-directional importance-aware ordering (BIO) strategy to tackle the challenges of random ordering effects. This innovative strategy intelligently reorders group embeddings based on their calculated importance scores, significantly enhancing Mamba's performance and optimizing the overall analytical process. Our framework achieves a superior balance between computational efficiency and analytical performance by seamlessly integrating these advanced techniques, marking a substantial leap forward in point cloud analysis. Extensive experiments on datasets such as ScanObjectNN, ModelNet40, and ShapeNetPart demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, establishing a new state-of-the-art analysis benchmark on point cloud recognition. For the first time, this paradigm leverages the combined strengths of both Transformer and Mamba architectures, facilitating a new standard in the field. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyao3302/PoinTramba.

Songtao Huang, Zhen Zhao, Can Li et al.

Real-world time series often have multiple frequency components that are intertwined with each other, making accurate time series forecasting challenging. Decomposing the mixed frequency components into multiple single frequency components is a natural choice. However, the information density of patterns varies across different frequencies, and employing a uniform modeling approach for different frequency components can lead to inaccurate characterization. To address this challenges, inspired by the flexibility of the recent Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), we propose a KAN-based Frequency Decomposition Learning architecture (TimeKAN) to address the complex forecasting challenges caused by multiple frequency mixtures. Specifically, TimeKAN mainly consists of three components: Cascaded Frequency Decomposition (CFD) blocks, Multi-order KAN Representation Learning (M-KAN) blocks and Frequency Mixing blocks. CFD blocks adopt a bottom-up cascading approach to obtain series representations for each frequency band. Benefiting from the high flexibility of KAN, we design a novel M-KAN block to learn and represent specific temporal patterns within each frequency band. Finally, Frequency Mixing blocks is used to recombine the frequency bands into the original format. Extensive experimental results across multiple real-world time series datasets demonstrate that TimeKAN achieves state-of-the-art performance as an extremely lightweight architecture. Code is available at https://github.com/huangst21/TimeKAN.

Yue Duan, Zhen Zhao, Lei Qi et al.

While semi-supervised learning (SSL) has yielded promising results, the more realistic SSL scenario remains to be explored, in which the unlabeled data exhibits extremely high recognition difficulty, e.g., fine-grained visual classification in the context of SSL (SS-FGVC). The increased recognition difficulty on fine-grained unlabeled data spells disaster for pseudo-labeling accuracy, resulting in poor performance of the SSL model. To tackle this challenge, we propose Soft Label Selection with Confidence-Aware Clustering based on Class Transition Tracking (SoC) by reconstructing the pseudo-label selection process by jointly optimizing Expansion Objective and Shrinkage Objective, which is based on a soft label manner. Respectively, the former objective encourages soft labels to absorb more candidate classes to ensure the attendance of ground-truth class, while the latter encourages soft labels to reject more noisy classes, which is theoretically proved to be equivalent to entropy minimization. In comparisons with various state-of-the-art methods, our approach demonstrates its superior performance in SS-FGVC. Checkpoints and source code are available at https://github.com/NJUyued/SoC4SS-FGVC.

Zicheng Wang, Zhen Zhao, Luping Zhou et al.

Brain decoding aims to reconstruct original stimuli from fMRI signals, providing insights into interpreting mental content. Current approaches rely heavily on subject-specific models due to the complex brain processing mechanisms and the variations in fMRI signals across individuals. Therefore, these methods greatly limit the generalization of models and fail to capture cross-subject commonalities. To address this, we present UniBrain, a unified brain decoding model that requires no subject-specific parameters. Our approach includes a group-based extractor to handle variable fMRI signal lengths, a mutual assistance embedder to capture cross-subject commonalities, and a bilevel feature alignment scheme for extracting subject-invariant features. We validate our UniBrain on the brain decoding benchmark, achieving comparable performance to current state-of-the-art subject-specific models with extremely fewer parameters. We also propose a generalization benchmark to encourage the community to emphasize cross-subject commonalities for more general brain decoding. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyao3302/UniBrain.

Yuchen Li, Zhen Zhao, Yi Liu et al.

Medical referring image segmentation (MRIS) requires pixel-level masks aligned with textual descriptions of anatomical locations, making annotation costly in low-label regimes. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) can mitigate this burden by leveraging unlabeled data, but its success hinges on maintaining reliable image-text alignment under perturbations. Most existing SSL-based referred segmentation methods use either independent or simplistic multi-modal perturbations (e.g., left-right flips), without fully addressing cross-modal alignment under strong augmentation, while CutMix, highly effective in single-modal SSL, remains underexplored in multi-modal settings due to its tendency to disrupt image-text coherence. We propose Semi-MedRef, a teacher-student SSL framework designed to explicitly maintain consistency between medical images and positional language through three alignment-preserving components: T-PatchMix, a cross-modal CutMix-style augmentation that synchronizes patch mixing with referring expressions via position-constrained and probability-driven rules; PosAug, a position-aware text augmentation that masks or fuzzes anatomical phrases; and ITCL, a position-guided image-text contrastive learning module, which leverages positional pseudo-labels to construct soft anatomical positives and strengthen medically grounded cross-modal alignment. Experiments on QaTa-COV19 and MosMedData+ demonstrate that Semi-MedRef consistently outperforms both fully supervised and semi-supervised baselines across all label regimes.

Yuxin Xie, Yuming Chen, Yishan Yang et al.

Medical image segmentation is undergoing a paradigm shift from conventional visual pattern matching to cognitive reasoning analysis. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in integrating linguistic and visual knowledge, significant gaps remain: existing general MLLMs possess broad common sense but lack the specialized visual reasoning required for complex lesions, whereas traditional segmentation models excel at pixel-level segmentation but lack logical interpretability. In this paper, we introduce ComLesion-14K, the first diverse Chain-of-Thought (CoT) benchmark for reasoning-driven complex lesion segmentation. To accomplish this task, we propose CORE-Seg, an end-to-end framework integrating reasoning with segmentation through a Semantic-Guided Prompt Adapter. We design a progressive training strategy from SFT to GRPO, equipped with an adaptive dual-granularity reward mechanism to mitigate reward sparsity. Our Method achieves state-of-the-art results with a mean Dice of 37.06\% (14.89\% higher than the second-best baseline), while reducing the failure rate to 18.42\%. Project Page: https://xyxl024.github.io/CORE-Seg.github.io/

Kun Wu, Chengkai Hou, Jiaming Liu et al.

In this paper, we introduce RoboMIND (Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulation), a dataset containing 107k demonstration trajectories across 479 diverse tasks involving 96 object classes. RoboMIND is collected through human teleoperation and encompasses comprehensive robotic-related information, including multi-view observations, proprioceptive robot state information, and linguistic task descriptions. To ensure data consistency and reliability for imitation learning, RoboMIND is built on a unified data collection platform and a standardized protocol, covering four distinct robotic embodiments: the Franka Emika Panda, the UR5e, the AgileX dual-arm robot, and a humanoid robot with dual dexterous hands. Our dataset also includes 5k real-world failure demonstrations, each accompanied by detailed causes, enabling failure reflection and correction during policy learning. Additionally, we created a digital twin environment in the Isaac Sim simulator, replicating the real-world tasks and assets, which facilitates the low-cost collection of additional training data and enables efficient evaluation. To demonstrate the quality and diversity of our dataset, we conducted extensive experiments using various imitation learning methods for single-task settings and state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for multi-task scenarios. By leveraging RoboMIND, the VLA models achieved high manipulation success rates and demonstrated strong generalization capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, RoboMIND is the largest multi-embodiment teleoperation dataset collected on a unified platform, providing large-scale and high-quality robotic training data. Our project is at https://x-humanoid-robomind.github.io/.

Jingqun Tang, Qi Liu, Yongjie Ye et al.

Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) in its proper format not only facilitates human-machine interaction in text-centric visual environments but also serves as a de facto gold proxy to evaluate AI models in the domain of text-centric scene understanding. Nonetheless, most existing TEC-VQA benchmarks have focused on high-resource languages like English and Chinese. Despite pioneering works to expand multilingual QA pairs in non-text-centric VQA datasets through translation engines, the translation-based protocol encounters a substantial "visual-textual misalignment" problem when applied to TEC-VQA. Specifically, it prioritizes the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding the visual text present in images. Moreover, it fails to address complexities related to nuanced meaning, contextual distortion, language bias, and question-type diversity. In this work, we tackle multilingual TEC-VQA by introducing MTVQA, the first benchmark featuring high-quality human expert annotations across 9 diverse languages, consisting of 6,778 question-answer pairs across 2,116 images. Further, by comprehensively evaluating numerous state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models~(MLLMs), including Qwen2-VL, GPT-4o, GPT-4V, Claude3, and Gemini, on the MTVQA benchmark, it is evident that there is still a large room for performance improvement (Qwen2-VL scoring 30.9 versus 79.7 for human performance), underscoring the value of MTVQA. Additionally, we supply multilingual training data within the MTVQA dataset, demonstrating that straightforward fine-tuning with this data can substantially enhance multilingual TEC-VQA performance. We aspire that MTVQA will offer the research community fresh insights and stimulate further exploration in multilingual visual text comprehension. The project homepage is available at https://bytedance.github.io/MTVQA/.

Yiming Wu, Qihe Pan, Zhen Zhao et al.

In this paper, we delve into a new task known as small object editing (SOE), which focuses on text-based image inpainting within a constrained, small-sized area. Despite the remarkable success have been achieved by current image inpainting approaches, their application to the SOE task generally results in failure cases such as Object Missing, Text-Image Mismatch, and Distortion. These failures stem from the limited use of small-sized objects in training datasets and the downsampling operations employed by U-Net models, which hinders accurate generation. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel training-based approach, SOEDiff, aimed at enhancing the capability of baseline models like StableDiffusion in editing small-sized objects while minimizing training costs. Specifically, our method involves two key components: SO-LoRA, which efficiently fine-tunes low-rank matrices, and Cross-Scale Score Distillation loss, which leverages high-resolution predictions from the pre-trained teacher diffusion model. Our method presents significant improvements on the test dataset collected from MSCOCO and OpenImage, validating the effectiveness of our proposed method in small object editing. In particular, when comparing SOEDiff with SD-I model on the OpenImage-f dataset, we observe a 0.99 improvement in CLIP-Score and a reduction of 2.87 in FID.

Haowen Wang, Zhen Zhao, Zhao Jin et al.

Reconstructing real-world objects and estimating their movable joint structures are pivotal technologies within the field of robotics. Previous research has predominantly focused on supervised approaches, relying on extensively annotated datasets to model articulated objects within limited categories. However, this approach falls short of effectively addressing the diversity present in the real world. To tackle this issue, we propose a self-supervised interaction perception method, referred to as SM$^3$, which leverages multi-view RGB images captured before and after interaction to model articulated objects, identify the movable parts, and infer the parameters of their rotating joints. By constructing 3D geometries and textures from the captured 2D images, SM$^3$ achieves integrated optimization of movable part and joint parameters during the reconstruction process, obviating the need for annotations. Furthermore, we introduce the MMArt dataset, an extension of PartNet-Mobility, encompassing multi-view and multi-modal data of articulated objects spanning diverse categories. Evaluations demonstrate that SM$^3$ surpasses existing benchmarks across various categories and objects, while its adaptability in real-world scenarios has been thoroughly validated.

Haowen Wang, Xiaoping Yuan, Zhao Jin et al.

Articulated objects are ubiquitous in everyday life, and accurate 3D representations of their geometry and motion are critical for numerous applications. However, in the absence of human annotation, existing approaches still struggle to build a unified representation for objects that contain multiple movable parts. We introduce DeGSS, a unified framework that encodes articulated objects as deformable 3D Gaussian fields, embedding geometry, appearance, and motion in one compact representation. Each interaction state is modeled as a smooth deformation of a shared field, and the resulting deformation trajectories guide a progressive coarse-to-fine part segmentation that identifies distinct rigid components, all in an unsupervised manner. The refined field provides a spatially continuous, fully decoupled description of every part, supporting part-level reconstruction and precise modeling of their kinematic relationships. To evaluate generalization and realism, we enlarge the synthetic PartNet-Mobility benchmark and release RS-Art, a real-to-sim dataset that pairs RGB captures with accurately reverse-engineered 3D models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and stability.

Yifei Su, Ning Liu, Dong Chen et al.

Generative modeling-based visuomotor policies have been widely adopted in robotic manipulation attributed to their ability to model multimodal action distributions. However, the high inference cost of multi-step sampling limits their applicability in real-time robotic systems. To address this issue, existing approaches accelerate the sampling process in generative modeling-based visuomotor policies by adapting acceleration techniques originally developed for image generation. Despite this progress, a major distinction remains: image generation typically involves producing independent samples without temporal dependencies, whereas robotic manipulation involves generating time-series action trajectories that require continuity and temporal coherence. To effectively exploit temporal information in robotic manipulation, we propose FreqPolicy, a novel approach that first imposes frequency consistency constraints on flow-based visuomotor policies. Our work enables the action model to capture temporal structure effectively while supporting efficient, high-quality one-step action generation. We introduce a frequency consistency constraint that enforces alignment of frequency-domain action features across different timesteps along the flow, thereby promoting convergence of one-step action generation toward the target distribution. In addition, we design an adaptive consistency loss to capture structural temporal variations inherent in robotic manipulation tasks. We assess FreqPolicy on 53 tasks across 3 simulation benchmarks, proving its superiority over existing one-step action generators. We further integrate FreqPolicy into the vision-language-action (VLA) model and achieve acceleration without performance degradation on the 40 tasks of Libero. Besides, we show efficiency and effectiveness in real-world robotic scenarios with an inference frequency 93.5Hz. The code will be publicly available.

Erjian Guo, Zicheng Wang, Zhen Zhao et al.

Accurate medical image segmentation is often hindered by noisy labels in training data, due to the challenges of annotating medical images. Prior research works addressing noisy labels tend to make class-dependent assumptions, overlooking the pixel-dependent nature of most noisy labels. Furthermore, existing methods typically apply fixed thresholds to filter out noisy labels, risking the removal of minority classes and consequently degrading segmentation performance. To bridge these gaps, our proposed framework, Collaborative Learning with Curriculum Selection (CLCS), addresses pixel-dependent noisy labels with class imbalance. CLCS advances the existing works by i) treating noisy labels as pixel-dependent and addressing them through a collaborative learning framework, and ii) employing a curriculum dynamic thresholding approach adapting to model learning progress to select clean data samples to mitigate the class imbalance issue, and iii) applying a noise balance loss to noisy data samples to improve data utilization instead of discarding them outright. Specifically, our CLCS contains two modules: Curriculum Noisy Label Sample Selection (CNS) and Noise Balance Loss (NBL). In the CNS module, we designed a two-branch network with discrepancy loss for collaborative learning so that different feature representations of the same instance could be extracted from distinct views and used to vote the class probabilities of pixels. Besides, a curriculum dynamic threshold is adopted to select clean-label samples through probability voting. In the NBL module, instead of directly dropping the suspiciously noisy labels, we further adopt a robust loss to leverage such instances to boost the performance.

Qihe Pan, Zhen Zhao, Zicheng Wang et al.

A plethora of text-guided image editing methods has recently been developed by leveraging the impressive capabilities of large-scale diffusion-based generative models especially Stable Diffusion. Despite the success of diffusion models in producing high-quality images, their application to small object generation has been limited due to difficulties in aligning cross-modal attention maps between text and these objects. Our approach offers a training-free method that significantly mitigates this alignment issue with local and global attention guidance , enhancing the model's ability to accurately render small objects in accordance with textual descriptions. We detail the methodology in our approach, emphasizing its divergence from traditional generation techniques and highlighting its advantages. What's more important is that we also provide~\textit{SOEBench} (Small Object Editing), a standardized benchmark for quantitatively evaluating text-based small object generation collected from \textit{MSCOCO} and \textit{OpenImage}. Preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing marked improvements in the fidelity and accuracy of small object generation compared to existing models. This advancement not only contributes to the field of AI and computer vision but also opens up new possibilities for applications in various industries where precise image generation is critical. We will release our dataset on our project page: \href{https://soebench.github.io/}{https://soebench.github.io/}.

Kun Wu, Ning Liu, Zhen Zhao et al.

Improving data utilization, especially for imperfect data from task failures, is crucial for robotic manipulation due to the challenging, time-consuming, and expensive data collection process in the real world. Current imitation learning (IL) typically discards imperfect data, focusing solely on successful expert data. While reinforcement learning (RL) can learn from explorations and failures, the sim2real gap and its reliance on dense reward and online exploration make it difficult to apply effectively in real-world scenarios. In this work, we aim to conquer the challenge of leveraging imperfect data without the need for reward information to improve the model performance for robotic manipulation in an offline manner. Specifically, we introduce a Self-Supervised Data Filtering framework (SSDF) that combines expert and imperfect data to compute quality scores for failed trajectory segments. High-quality segments from the failed data are used to expand the training dataset. Then, the enhanced dataset can be used with any downstream policy learning method for robotic manipulation tasks. Extensive experiments on the ManiSkill2 benchmark built on the high-fidelity Sapien simulator and real-world robotic manipulation tasks using the Franka robot arm demonstrated that the SSDF can accurately expand the training dataset with high-quality imperfect data and improve the success rates for all robotic manipulation tasks.

Erjian Guo, Zhen Zhao, Zicheng Wang et al.

Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA) systems benefit the interpretation of medical images containing critical clinical information. However, the challenge of noisy labels and limited high-quality datasets remains underexplored. To address this, we establish the first benchmark for noisy labels in Med-VQA by simulating human mislabeling with semantically designed noise types. More importantly, we introduce the DiN framework, which leverages a diffusion model to handle noisy labels in Med-VQA. Unlike the dominant classification-based VQA approaches that directly predict answers, our Answer Diffuser (AD) module employs a coarse-to-fine process, refining answer candidates with a diffusion model for improved accuracy. The Answer Condition Generator (ACG) further enhances this process by generating task-specific conditional information via integrating answer embeddings with fused image-question features. To address label noise, our Noisy Label Refinement(NLR) module introduces a robust loss function and dynamic answer adjustment to further boost the performance of the AD module.

Sifan Long, Linbin Wang, Zhen Zhao et al.

Prompt learning has become the most effective paradigm for adapting large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. Recently, unsupervised prompt tuning methods, such as UPL and POUF, directly leverage pseudo-labels as supervisory information to fine-tune additional adaptation modules on unlabeled data. However, inaccurate pseudo labels easily misguide the tuning process and result in poor representation capabilities. In light of this, we propose Training-Free Unsupervised Prompts (TFUP), which maximally preserves the inherent representation capabilities and enhances them with a residual connection to similarity-based prediction probabilities in a training-free and labeling-free manner. Specifically, we integrate both instance confidence and prototype scores to select representative samples, which are used to customize a reliable Feature Cache Model (FCM) for training-free inference. Then, we design a Multi-level Similarity Measure (MSM) that considers both feature-level and semantic-level similarities to calculate the distance between each test image and the cached sample as the weight of the corresponding cached label to generate similarity-based prediction probabilities. In this way, TFUP achieves surprising performance, even surpassing the training-base method on multiple classification datasets. Based on our TFUP, we propose a training-based approach (TFUP-T) to further boost the adaptation performance. In addition to the standard cross-entropy loss, TFUP-T adopts an additional marginal distribution entropy loss to constrain the model from a global perspective. Our TFUP-T achieves new state-of-the-art classification performance compared to unsupervised and few-shot adaptation approaches on multiple benchmarks. In particular, TFUP-T improves the classification accuracy of POUF by 3.3% on the most challenging Domain-Net dataset.

Zhen Zhao, Wenqi Huang, Zicheng Wang et al.

Power flow estimation plays a vital role in ensuring the stability and reliability of electrical power systems, particularly in the context of growing network complexities and renewable energy integration. However, existing studies often fail to adequately address the unique characteristics of power systems, such as the sparsity of network connections and the critical importance of the unique Slack node, which poses significant challenges in achieving high-accuracy estimations. In this paper, we present SenseFlow, a novel physics-informed and self-ensembling iterative framework that integrates two main designs, the Physics-Informed Power Flow Network (FlowNet) and Self-Ensembling Iterative Estimation (SeIter), to carefully address the unique properties of the power system and thereby enhance the power flow estimation. Specifically, SenseFlow enforces the FlowNet to gradually predict high-precision voltage magnitudes and phase angles through the iterative SeIter process. On the one hand, FlowNet employs the Virtual Node Attention and Slack-Gated Feed-Forward modules to facilitate efficient global-local communication in the face of network sparsity and amplify the influence of the Slack node on angle predictions, respectively. On the other hand, SeIter maintains an exponential moving average of FlowNet's parameters to create a robust ensemble model that refines power state predictions throughout the iterative fitting process. Experimental results demonstrate that SenseFlow outperforms existing methods, providing a promising solution for high-accuracy power flow estimation across diverse grid configurations.

Lihe Yang, Bingyi Kang, Zilong Huang et al.

This work presents Depth Anything V2. Without pursuing fancy techniques, we aim to reveal crucial findings to pave the way towards building a powerful monocular depth estimation model. Notably, compared with V1, this version produces much finer and more robust depth predictions through three key practices: 1) replacing all labeled real images with synthetic images, 2) scaling up the capacity of our teacher model, and 3) teaching student models via the bridge of large-scale pseudo-labeled real images. Compared with the latest models built on Stable Diffusion, our models are significantly more efficient (more than 10x faster) and more accurate. We offer models of different scales (ranging from 25M to 1.3B params) to support extensive scenarios. Benefiting from their strong generalization capability, we fine-tune them with metric depth labels to obtain our metric depth models. In addition to our models, considering the limited diversity and frequent noise in current test sets, we construct a versatile evaluation benchmark with precise annotations and diverse scenes to facilitate future research.

Zhen Zhao, Yuqiu Liu, Gang Zhang et al.

Extracting cultivated land accurately from high-resolution remote images is a basic task for precision agriculture. This report introduces our solution to the iFLYTEK challenge 2021 cultivated land extraction from high-resolution remote sensing image. The challenge requires segmenting cultivated land objects in very high-resolution multispectral remote sensing images. We established a highly effective and efficient pipeline to solve this problem. We first divided the original images into small tiles and separately performed instance segmentation on each tile. We explored several instance segmentation algorithms that work well on natural images and developed a set of effective methods that are applicable to remote sensing images. Then we merged the prediction results of all small tiles into seamless, continuous segmentation results through our proposed overlap-tile fusion strategy. We achieved the first place among 486 teams in the challenge.

Zhen Zhao, Yuhong Guo, Jieping Ye

Recently the problem of cross-domain object detection has started drawing attention in the computer vision community. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised cross-domain detection model that exploits the annotated data in a source domain to train an object detector for a different target domain. The proposed model mitigates the cross-domain representation divergence for object detection by performing cross-domain feature alignment in two dimensions, the depth dimension and the spatial dimension. In the depth dimension of channel layers, it uses inter-channel information to bridge the domain divergence with respect to image style alignment. In the dimension of spatial layers, it deploys spatial attention modules to enhance detection relevant regions and suppress irrelevant regions with respect to cross-domain feature alignment. Experiments are conducted on a number of benchmark cross-domain detection datasets. The empirical results show the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art comparison methods.

Zhen Zhao, Miaojing Shi, Xiaoxiao Zhao et al.

To learn a reliable people counter from crowd images, head center annotations are normally required. Annotating head centers is however a laborious and tedious process in dense crowds. In this paper, we present an active learning framework which enables accurate crowd counting with limited supervision: given a small labeling budget, instead of randomly selecting images to annotate, we first introduce an active labeling strategy to annotate the most informative images in the dataset and learn the counting model upon them. The process is repeated such that in every cycle we select the samples that are diverse in crowd density and dissimilar to previous selections. In the last cycle when the labeling budget is met, the large amount of unlabeled data are also utilized: a distribution classifier is introduced to align the labeled data with unlabeled data; furthermore, we propose to mix up the distribution labels and latent representations of data in the network to particularly improve the distribution alignment in-between training samples. We follow the popular density estimation pipeline for crowd counting. Extensive experiments are conducted on standard benchmarks i.e. ShanghaiTech, UCF CC 50, MAll, TRANCOS, and DCC. By annotating limited number of images (e.g. 10% of the dataset), our method reaches levels of performance not far from the state of the art which utilize full annotations of the dataset.

Zhen Zhao, Bingyu Liu, Yuhong Guo et al.

In this paper, we present our proposed ensemble model with batch spectral regularization and data blending mechanisms for the Track 2 problem of the cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) challenge. We build a multi-branch ensemble framework by using diverse feature transformation matrices, while deploying batch spectral feature regularization on each branch to improve the model's transferability. Moreover, we propose a data blending method to exploit the unlabeled data and augment the sparse support set in the target domain. Our proposed model demonstrates effective performance on the CD-FSL benchmark tasks.