Zhiyong Liu

Qianfan Zhao, Lu Zhang, Bin He et al.

Object goal visual navigation is a challenging task that aims to guide a robot to find the target object based on its visual observation, and the target is limited to the classes pre-defined in the training stage. However, in real households, there may exist numerous target classes that the robot needs to deal with, and it is hard for all of these classes to be contained in the training stage. To address this challenge, we study the zero-shot object goal visual navigation task, which aims at guiding robots to find targets belonging to novel classes without any training samples. To this end, we also propose a novel zero-shot object navigation framework called semantic similarity network (SSNet). Our framework use the detection results and the cosine similarity between semantic word embeddings as input. Such type of input data has a weak correlation with classes and thus our framework has the ability to generalize the policy to novel classes. Extensive experiments on the AI2-THOR platform show that our model outperforms the baseline models in the zero-shot object navigation task, which proves the generalization ability of our model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/pioneer-innovation/Zero-Shot-Object-Navigation.

Lu Zhang, Zhiyong Liu, Xiangyu Zhu et al.

To achieve accurate and robust object detection in the real-world scenario, various forms of images are incorporated, such as color, thermal, and depth. However, multimodal data often suffer from the position shift problem, i.e., the image pair is not strictly aligned, making one object has different positions in different modalities. For the deep learning method, this problem makes it difficult to fuse multimodal features and puzzles the convolutional neural network (CNN) training. In this article, we propose a general multimodal detector named aligned region CNN (AR-CNN) to tackle the position shift problem. First, a region feature (RF) alignment module with adjacent similarity constraint is designed to consistently predict the position shift between two modalities and adaptively align the cross-modal RFs. Second, we propose a novel region of interest (RoI) jitter strategy to improve the robustness to unexpected shift patterns. Third, we present a new multimodal feature fusion method that selects the more reliable feature and suppresses the less useful one via feature reweighting. In addition, by locating bounding boxes in both modalities and building their relationships, we provide novel multimodal labeling named KAIST-Paired. Extensive experiments on 2-D and 3-D object detection, RGB-T, and RGB-D datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

Lu Zhang, Lu Qi, Xu Yang et al.

This paper tackles the problem of novel category discovery (NCD), which aims to discriminate unknown categories in large-scale image collections. The NCD task is challenging due to the closeness to the real-world scenarios, where we have only encountered some partial classes and images. Unlike other works on the NCD, we leverage the prototypes to emphasize the importance of category discrimination and alleviate the issue of missing annotations of novel classes. Concretely, we propose a novel adaptive prototype learning method consisting of two main stages: prototypical representation learning and prototypical self-training. In the first stage, we obtain a robust feature extractor, which could serve for all images with base and novel categories. This ability of instance and category discrimination of the feature extractor is boosted by self-supervised learning and adaptive prototypes. In the second stage, we utilize the prototypes again to rectify offline pseudo labels and train a final parametric classifier for category clustering. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method with state-of-the-art performance.

Lu Zhang, Siqi Zhang, Xu Yang et al.

Segmenting unseen objects is a crucial ability for the robot since it may encounter new environments during the operation. Recently, a popular solution is leveraging RGB-D features of large-scale synthetic data and directly applying the model to unseen real-world scenarios. However, the domain shift caused by the sim2real gap is inevitable, posing a crucial challenge to the segmentation model. In this paper, we emphasize the adaptation process across sim2real domains and model it as a learning problem on the BatchNorm parameters of a simulation-trained model. Specifically, we propose a novel non-parametric entropy objective, which formulates the learning objective for the test-time adaptation in an open-world manner. Then, a cross-modality knowledge distillation objective is further designed to encourage the test-time knowledge transfer for feature enhancement. Our approach can be efficiently implemented with only test images, without requiring annotations or revisiting the large-scale synthetic training data. Besides significant time savings, the proposed method consistently improves segmentation results on the overlap and boundary metrics, achieving state-of-the-art performance on unseen object instance segmentation.

Siqi Zhang, Lu Zhang, Zhiyong Liu

Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) assumes that both labeled source data and unlabeled target data are available for training, but this assumption does not always hold in real-world scenarios. Thus, source-free DAOD is proposed to adapt the source-trained detectors to target domains with only unlabeled target data. Existing source-free DAOD methods typically utilize pseudo labeling, where the performance heavily relies on the selection of confidence threshold. However, most prior works adopt a single fixed threshold for all classes to generate pseudo labels, which ignore the imbalanced class distribution, resulting in biased pseudo labels. In this work, we propose a refined pseudo labeling framework for source-free DAOD. First, to generate unbiased pseudo labels, we present a category-aware adaptive threshold estimation module, which adaptively provides the appropriate threshold for each category. Second, to alleviate incorrect box regression, a localization-aware pseudo label assignment strategy is introduced to divide labels into certain and uncertain ones and optimize them separately. Finally, extensive experiments on four adaptation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Siqi Zhang, Lu Zhang, Zhiyong Liu et al.

Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to adapt the detector from a labelled source domain to an unlabelled target domain. In recent years, DAOD has attracted massive attention since it can alleviate performance degradation due to the large shift of data distributions in the wild. To align distributions between domains, adversarial learning is widely used in existing DAOD methods. However, the decision boundary for the adversarial domain discriminator may be inaccurate, causing the model biased towards the source domain. To alleviate this bias, we propose a novel Frequency-based Image Translation (FIT) framework for DAOD. First, by keeping domain-invariant frequency components and swapping domain-specific ones, we conduct image translation to reduce domain shift at the input level. Second, hierarchical adversarial feature learning is utilized to further mitigate the domain gap at the feature level. Finally, we design a joint loss to train the entire network in an end-to-end manner without extra training to obtain translated images. Extensive experiments on three challenging DAOD benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Ye Ouyang, Yaqin Zhang, Xiaozhou Ye et al.

In the global craze of GPT, people have deeply realized that AI, as a transformative technology and key force in economic and social development, will bring great leaps and breakthroughs to the global industry and profoundly influence the future world competition pattern. As the builder and operator of information and communication infrastructure, the telecom sector provides infrastructure support for the development of AI, and even takes the lead in the implementation of AI applications. How to enable the application of AIGC (GPT) and implement AIGC in the telecom sector are questions that telecom practitioners must ponder and answer. Through the study of GPT, a typical representative of AIGC, the authors have analyzed how GPT empowers the telecom sector in the form of scenarios, discussed the gap between the current GPT general model and telecom services, proposed for the first time a Telco Augmented Cognition capability system, provided answers to how to construct a telecom service GPT in the telecom sector, and carried out various practices. Our counterparts in the industry are expected to focus on collaborative innovation around telecom and AI, build an open and shared innovation ecosystem, promote the deep integration of AI and telecom sector, and accelerate the construction of next-generation information infrastructure, in an effort to facilitate the digital transformation of the economy and society.

Lu Zhang, Xiangyu Zhu, Xiangyu Chen et al.

Multispectral pedestrian detection has shown great advantages under poor illumination conditions, since the thermal modality provides complementary information for the color image. However, real multispectral data suffers from the position shift problem, i.e. the color-thermal image pairs are not strictly aligned, making one object has different positions in different modalities. In deep learning based methods, this problem makes it difficult to fuse the feature maps from both modalities and puzzles the CNN training. In this paper, we propose a novel Aligned Region CNN (AR-CNN) to handle the weakly aligned multispectral data in an end-to-end way. Firstly, we design a Region Feature Alignment (RFA) module to capture the position shift and adaptively align the region features of the two modalities. Secondly, we present a new multimodal fusion method, which performs feature re-weighting to select more reliable features and suppress the useless ones. Besides, we propose a novel RoI jitter strategy to improve the robustness to unexpected shift patterns of different devices and system settings. Finally, since our method depends on a new kind of labelling: bounding boxes that match each modality, we manually relabel the KAIST dataset by locating bounding boxes in both modalities and building their relationships, providing a new KAIST-Paired Annotation. Extensive experimental validations on existing datasets are performed, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Code and data are available at https://github.com/luzhang16/AR-CNN.

Yiming Ding, Siyu Cao, Luyuan Jiao et al.

Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims to localize temporal segments in videos that correspond to a natural language query, but typically assumes only a single matching moment for each query. This assumption does not always hold in real-world scenarios, where queries may correspond to multiple or no moments. Thus, we formulate Generalized Moment Retrieval (GMR), a unified setting that requires retrieving the complete set of relevant moments or predicting an empty set. To enable systematic study of GMR, we introduce Soccer-GMR, a large-scale benchmark built on challenging soccer videos that reflect general GMR scenarios, with realistic negative and positive queries. The benchmark is constructed via a duration-flexible semi-automated pipeline with human verification, enabling scalable data generation while maintaining high annotation quality. We further design a unified evaluation protocol with complementary metrics tailored for null-set rejection, positive-query localization, and end-to-end GMR performance. Finally, we establish strong baselines across two modeling paradigms: a lightweight plug-and-play GMR adapter for discriminative VMR models, and a GMR-tailored GRPO reward for fine-tuning multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Extensive experiments show consistent gains across all metrics and expose key limitations of current methods, positioning GMR as a more realistic and challenging benchmark for video-language understanding.

Ruizhe Zeng, Lu Zhang, Xu Yang et al.

Open-vocabulary object detection is the task of accurately detecting objects from a candidate vocabulary list that includes both base and novel categories. Currently, numerous open-vocabulary detectors have achieved success by leveraging the impressive zero-shot capabilities of CLIP. However, we observe that CLIP models struggle to effectively handle background images (i.e. images without corresponding labels) due to their language-image learning methodology. This limitation results in suboptimal performance for open-vocabulary detectors that rely on CLIP when processing background samples. In this paper, we propose Background Information Representation for open-vocabulary Detector (BIRDet), a novel approach to address the limitations of CLIP in handling background samples. Specifically, we design Background Information Modeling (BIM) to replace the single, fixed background embedding in mainstream open-vocabulary detectors with dynamic scene information, and prompt it into image-related background representations. This method effectively enhances the ability to classify oversized regions as background. Besides, we introduce Partial Object Suppression (POS), an algorithm that utilizes the ratio of overlap area to address the issue of misclassifying partial regions as foreground. Experiments on OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of achieving performance enhancements across various open-vocabulary detectors.

Xiangkai Zhang, Dizhe Zhang, WenZhuo Cao et al.

Obstacle avoidance in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as a fundamental capability, has gained increasing attention with the growing focus on spatial intelligence. However, current obstacle-avoidance methods mainly depend on limited field-of-view sensors and are ill-suited for UAV scenarios which require full-spatial awareness when the movement direction differs from the UAV's heading. This limitation motivates us to explore omnidirectional obstacle avoidance for panoramic drones with full-view perception. We first study an under explored problem setting in which a UAV must generate collision-free motion in environments with obstacles from arbitrary directions, and then construct a benchmark that consists of three representative flight tasks. Based on such settings, we propose Fly360, a two-stage perception-decision pipeline with a fixed random-yaw training strategy. At the perception stage, panoramic RGB observations are input and converted into depth maps as a robust intermediate representation. For the policy network, it is lightweight and used to output body-frame velocity commands from depth inputs. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that Fly360 achieves stable omnidirectional obstacle avoidance and outperforms forward-view baselines across all tasks. Our model is available at https://zxkai.github.io/fly360/

Xiangkai Zhang, Xiang Zhou, Mao Chen et al.

Absolute localization, aiming to determine an agent's location with respect to a global reference, is crucial for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in various applications, but it becomes challenging when global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals are unavailable. Vision-based absolute localization methods, which locate the current view of the UAV in a reference satellite map to estimate its position, have become popular in GNSS-denied scenarios. However, existing methods mostly rely on traditional and low-level image matching, suffering from difficulties due to significant differences introduced by cross-source discrepancies and temporal variations. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we introduce a hierarchical cross-source image matching method designed for UAV absolute localization, which integrates a semantic-aware and structure-constrained coarse matching module with a lightweight fine-grained matching module. Specifically, in the coarse matching module, semantic features derived from a vision foundation model first establish region-level correspondences under semantic and structural constraints. Then, the fine-grained matching module is applied to extract fine features and establish pixel-level correspondences. Building upon this, a UAV absolute visual localization pipeline is constructed without any reliance on relative localization techniques, mainly by employing an image retrieval module before the proposed hierarchical image matching modules. Experimental evaluations on public benchmark datasets and a newly introduced CS-UAV dataset demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness of the proposed method under various challenging conditions, confirming its effectiveness.

Enze Zhang, Fa Zhang, Zhiyong Liu et al.

Electron tomography (ET) allows high-resolution reconstructions of macromolecular complexes at nearnative state. Cellular structures segmentation in the reconstruction data from electron tomographic images is often required for analyzing and visualizing biological structures, making it a powerful tool for quantitative descriptions of whole cell structures and understanding biological functions. However, these cellular structures are rather difficult to automatically separate or quantify from view owing to complex molecular environment and the limitations of reconstruction data of ET. In this paper, we propose a single end-to-end deep fully-convolutional semantic segmentation network dubbed SegET with rich contextual features which fully exploitsthe multi-scale and multi-level contextual information and reduces the loss of details of cellular structures in ET images. We trained and evaluated our network on the electron tomogram of the CTL Immunological Synapse from Cell Image library. Our results demonstrate that SegET can automatically segment accurately and outperform all other baseline methods on each individual structure in our ET dataset.