Shengwu Xiong

Yi Rong, Xiongbo Lu, Zhaoyang Sun et al.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have recently been integrated into the few-shot learning (FSL) framework and have shown promising results in improving the few-shot image classification performance. However, existing SSL approaches used in FSL typically seek the supervision signals from the global embedding of every single image. Therefore, during the episodic training of FSL, these methods cannot capture and fully utilize the local visual information in image samples and the data structure information of the whole episode, which are beneficial to FSL. To this end, we propose to augment the few-shot learning objective with a novel self-supervised Episodic Spatial Pretext Task (ESPT). Specifically, for each few-shot episode, we generate its corresponding transformed episode by applying a random geometric transformation to all the images in it. Based on these, our ESPT objective is defined as maximizing the local spatial relationship consistency between the original episode and the transformed one. With this definition, the ESPT-augmented FSL objective promotes learning more transferable feature representations that capture the local spatial features of different images and their inter-relational structural information in each input episode, thus enabling the model to generalize better to new categories with only a few samples. Extensive experiments indicate that our ESPT method achieves new state-of-the-art performance for few-shot image classification on three mainstay benchmark datasets. The source code will be available at: https://github.com/Whut-YiRong/ESPT.

Ruilin Yao, Shengwu Xiong, Yichen Zhao et al.

Visual grounding is the task of locating objects specified by natural language expressions. Existing methods extend generic object detection frameworks to tackle this task. They typically extract visual and textual features separately using independent visual and textual encoders, then fuse these features in a multi-modal decoder for final prediction. However, visual grounding presents unique challenges. It often involves locating objects with different text descriptions within the same image. Existing methods struggle with this task because the independent visual encoder produces identical visual features for the same image, limiting detection performance. Some recently approaches propose various language-guided visual encoders to address this issue, but they mostly rely solely on textual information and require sophisticated designs. In this paper, we introduce Multi-modal Conditional Adaptation (MMCA), which enables the visual encoder to adaptively update weights, directing its focus towards text-relevant regions. Specifically, we first integrate information from different modalities to obtain multi-modal embeddings. Then we utilize a set of weighting coefficients, which generated from the multimodal embeddings, to reorganize the weight update matrices and apply them to the visual encoder of the visual grounding model. Extensive experiments on four widely used datasets demonstrate that MMCA achieves significant improvements and state-of-the-art results. Ablation experiments further demonstrate the lightweight and efficiency of our method. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/Mr-Bigworth/MMCA.

Henan Wang, Shengwu Xiong, Yifang Zhang et al.

Deep learning has significantly improved the accuracy of precipitation nowcasting. However, most existing multimodal models typically use simple channel concatenation or interpolation methods for data fusion, which often overlook the feature differences between different modalities. This paper therefore proposes a novel precipitation nowcasting optimisation framework called FusionCast. This framework incorporates three types of data: historical precipitable water vapour (PWV) data derived from global navigation satellite system (GNSS) inversions, historical radar based quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE), and forecasted radar QPE serving as a future prior. The FusionCast model comprises two core modules: the future prior radar QPE processing Module, which forecasts future radar data; and the Radar PWV Fusion (RPF) module, which uses a gate mechanism to efficiently combine features from various sources. Experimental results show that FusionCast significantly improves nowcasting performance.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM -- multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge'ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark -- a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.

Yaxiong Chen, Minghong Wei, Zixuan Zheng et al.

Referring medical image segmentation targets delineating lesions indicated by textual descriptions. Aligning visual and textual cues is challenging due to their distinct data properties. Inspired by large-scale pre-trained vision-language models, we propose CausalCLIPSeg, an end-to-end framework for referring medical image segmentation that leverages CLIP. Despite not being trained on medical data, we enforce CLIP's rich semantic space onto the medical domain by a tailored cross-modal decoding method to achieve text-to-pixel alignment. Furthermore, to mitigate confounding bias that may cause the model to learn spurious correlations instead of meaningful causal relationships, CausalCLIPSeg introduces a causal intervention module which self-annotates confounders and excavates causal features from inputs for segmentation judgments. We also devise an adversarial min-max game to optimize causal features while penalizing confounding ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/WUTCM-Lab/CausalCLIPSeg.

Yaxiong Chen, Yujie Wang, Zixuan Zheng et al.

Medical ultrasound imaging is ubiquitous, but manual analysis struggles to keep pace. Automated segmentation can help but requires large labeled datasets, which are scarce. Semi-supervised learning leveraging both unlabeled and limited labeled data is a promising approach. State-of-the-art methods use consistency regularization or pseudo-labeling but grow increasingly complex. Without sufficient labels, these models often latch onto artifacts or allow anatomically implausible segmentations. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective pseudo-labeling method with an adversarially learned shape prior to regularize segmentations. Specifically, we devise an encoder-twin-decoder network where the shape prior acts as an implicit shape model, penalizing anatomically implausible but not ground-truth-deviating predictions. Without bells and whistles, our simple approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks under different partition protocols. We provide a strong baseline for future semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/WUTCM-Lab/Shape-Prior-Semi-Seg.

Ruilin Yao, Bo Zhang, Jirui Huang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant advances in integrating visual and linguistic information, yet their ability to reason about complex and real-world scenarios remains limited. The existing benchmarks are usually constructed in the task-oriented manner without guarantee that different task samples come from the same data distribution, thus they often fall short in evaluating the synergistic effects of lower-level perceptual capabilities on higher-order reasoning. To lift this limitation, we contribute Lens, a multi-level benchmark with 3.4K contemporary images and 60K+ human-authored questions covering eight tasks and 12 daily scenarios, forming three progressive task tiers, i.e., perception, understanding, and reasoning. One feature is that each image is equipped with rich annotations for all tasks. Thus, this dataset intrinsically supports to evaluate MLLMs to handle image-invariable prompts, from basic perception to compositional reasoning. In addition, our images are manully collected from the social media, in which 53% were published later than Jan. 2025. We evaluate 15+ frontier MLLMs such as Qwen2.5-VL-72B, InternVL3-78B, GPT-4o and two reasoning models QVQ-72B-preview and Kimi-VL. These models are released later than Dec. 2024, and none of them achieve an accuracy greater than 60% in the reasoning tasks. Project page: https://github.com/Lens4MLLMs/lens. ICCV 2025 workshop page: https://lens4mllms.github.io/mars2-workshop-iccv2025/

Zhaoyang Sun, Shengwu Xiong, Yaxiong Chen et al.

This paper studies the challenging task of makeup transfer, which aims to apply diverse makeup styles precisely and naturally to a given facial image. Due to the absence of paired data, current methods typically synthesize sub-optimal pseudo ground truths to guide the model training, resulting in low makeup fidelity. Additionally, different makeup styles generally have varying effects on the person face, but existing methods struggle to deal with this diversity. To address these issues, we propose a novel Self-supervised Hierarchical Makeup Transfer (SHMT) method via latent diffusion models. Following a "decoupling-and-reconstruction" paradigm, SHMT works in a self-supervised manner, freeing itself from the misguidance of imprecise pseudo-paired data. Furthermore, to accommodate a variety of makeup styles, hierarchical texture details are decomposed via a Laplacian pyramid and selectively introduced to the content representation. Finally, we design a novel Iterative Dual Alignment (IDA) module that dynamically adjusts the injection condition of the diffusion model, allowing the alignment errors caused by the domain gap between content and makeup representations to be corrected. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/Snowfallingplum/SHMT}.

Yaxiong Chen, Chuang Du, Chunlei Li et al.

Automated radiology report generation aims to expedite the tedious and error-prone reporting process for radiologists. While recent works have made progress, learning to align medical images and textual findings remains challenging due to the relative scarcity of labeled medical data. For example, datasets for this task are much smaller than those used for image captioning in computer vision. In this work, we propose to transfer representations from CLIP, a large-scale pre-trained vision-language model, to better capture cross-modal semantics between images and texts. However, directly applying CLIP is suboptimal due to the domain gap between natural images and radiology. To enable efficient adaptation, we introduce UniCrossAdapter, lightweight adapter modules that are incorporated into CLIP and fine-tuned on the target task while keeping base parameters fixed. The adapters are distributed across modalities and their interaction to enhance vision-language alignment. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, advancing state-of-the-art in radiology report generation. The proposed transfer learning framework provides a means of harnessing semantic knowledge from large-scale pre-trained models to tackle data-scarce medical vision-language tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/chauncey-tow/MRG-CLIP.

Yifang Zhang, Pengfei Duan, Yiwen Yang et al.

Currently, the main approach for Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle the hallucination issue is incorporating Knowledge Graphs(KGs).However, LLMs typically treat KGs as plain text, extracting only semantic information and limiting their use of the crucial structural aspects of KGs. Another challenge is the gap between the embedding spaces of KGs encoders and LLMs text embeddings, which hinders the effective integration of structured knowledge. To overcome these obstacles, we put forward the SSKG-LLM, an innovative model architecture that is designed to efficiently integrate both the Structural and Semantic information of KGs into the reasoning processes of LLMs. SSKG-LLM incorporates the Knowledge Graph Retrieval (KGR) module and the Knowledge Graph Encoding (KGE) module to preserve semantics while utilizing structure. Then, the Knowledge Graph Adaptation (KGA) module is incorporated to enable LLMs to understand KGs embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments and provide a detailed analysis to explore how incorporating the structural information of KGs can enhance the factual reasoning abilities of LLMs. Our code are available at https://github.com/yfangZhang/SSKG-LLM.

Tianyu Zou, Shengwu Xiong, Ruilin Yao et al.

This paper studies the few-shot segmentation (FSS) task, which aims to segment objects belonging to unseen categories in a query image by learning a model on a small number of well-annotated support samples. Our analysis of two mainstream FSS paradigms reveals that the predictions made by prototype learning methods are usually conservative, while those of affinity learning methods tend to be more aggressive. This observation motivates us to balance the conservative and aggressive information captured by these two types of FSS frameworks so as to improve the segmentation performance. To achieve this, we propose a **P**rototype-**A**ffinity **H**ybrid **Net**work (PAHNet), which introduces a Prototype-guided Feature Enhancement (PFE) module and an Attention Score Calibration (ASC) module in each attention block of an affinity learning model (called affinity learner). These two modules utilize the predictions generated by a pre-trained prototype learning model (called prototype predictor) to enhance the foreground information in support and query image representations and suppress the mismatched foreground-background (FG-BG) relationships between them, respectively. In this way, the aggressiveness of the affinity learner can be effectively mitigated, thereby eventually increasing the segmentation accuracy of our PAHNet method. Experimental results show that PAHNet outperforms most recently proposed methods across 1-shot and 5-shot settings on both PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ datasets, suggesting its effectiveness. The code is available at: [GitHub - tianyu-zou/PAHNet: Balancing Conservatism and Aggressiveness: Prototype-Affinity Hybrid Network for Few-Shot Segmentation (ICCV'25)](https://github.com/tianyu-zou/PAHNet)

Xiongbo Lu, Yaxiong Chen, Shengwu Xiong

Artistic Glyph Image Generation (AGIG) differs from current creativity-focused generation models by offering finely controllable deterministic generation. It transfers the style of a reference image to a source while preserving its content. Although advanced and promising, current methods may reveal flaws when scrutinizing synthesized image details, often producing blurred or incorrect textures, posing a significant challenge. Hence, we introduce AnyArtisticGlyph, a diffusion-based, multilingual controllable artistic glyph generation model. It includes a font fusion and embedding module, which generates latent features for detailed structure creation, and a vision-text fusion and embedding module that uses the CLIP model to encode references and blends them with transformation caption embeddings for seamless global image generation. Moreover, we incorporate a coarse-grained feature-level loss to enhance generation accuracy. Experiments show that it produces natural, detailed artistic glyph images with state-of-the-art performance. Our project will be open-sourced on https://github.com/jiean001/AnyArtisticGlyph to advance text generation technology.

Yaxiong Chen, Junjian Hu, Chunlei Li et al.

Video object segmentation is crucial for the efficient analysis of complex medical video data, yet it faces significant challenges in data availability and annotation. We introduce the task of one-shot medical video object segmentation, which requires separating foreground and background pixels throughout a video given only the mask annotation of the first frame. To address this problem, we propose a temporal contrastive memory network comprising image and mask encoders to learn feature representations, a temporal contrastive memory bank that aligns embeddings from adjacent frames while pushing apart distant ones to explicitly model inter-frame relationships and stores these features, and a decoder that fuses encoded image features and memory readouts for segmentation. We also collect a diverse, multi-source medical video dataset spanning various modalities and anatomies to benchmark this task. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in segmenting both seen and unseen structures from a single exemplar, showing ability to generalize from scarce labels. This highlights the potential to alleviate annotation burdens for medical video analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/MedAITech/TCMN.

Xiaohan Yu, Yang Zhao, Yongsheng Gao et al.

Exterior contour and interior structure are both vital features for classifying objects. However, most of the existing methods consider exterior contour feature and internal structure feature separately, and thus fail to function when classifying patchy image structures that have similar contours and flexible structures. To address above limitations, this paper proposes a novel Multi-Orientation Region Transform (MORT), which can effectively characterize both contour and structure features simultaneously, for patchy image structure classification. MORT is performed over multiple orientation regions at multiple scales to effectively integrate patchy features, and thus enables a better description of the shape in a coarse-to-fine manner. Moreover, the proposed MORT can be extended to combine with the deep convolutional neural network techniques, for further enhancement of classification accuracy. Very encouraging experimental results on the challenging ultra-fine-grained cultivar recognition task, insect wing recognition task, and large variation butterfly recognition task are obtained, which demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed MORT over the state-of-the-art methods in classifying patchy image structures. Our code and three patchy image structure datasets are available at: https://github.com/XiaohanYu-GU/MReT2019.

Yifang Zhang, Shengwu Xiong, Henan Wang et al.

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) station-based Precipitation Nowcasting aims to predict rainfall within the next 0-6 hours by leveraging a GNSS station's historical observations of precipitation, GNSS-PWV, and related meteorological variables, which is crucial for disaster mitigation and real-time decision-making. In recent years, time-series forecasting approaches have been extensively applied to GNSS station-based precipitation nowcasting. However, the highly imbalanced temporal distribution of precipitation, marked not only by the dominance of non-rainfall events but also by the scarcity of extreme precipitation samples, significantly limits model performance in practical applications. To address the dual imbalance problem in precipitation nowcasting, we propose a continuous probability modeling-based framework, RainBalance. This plug-and-play module performs clustering for each input sample to obtain its cluster probability distribution, which is further mapped into a continuous latent space via a variational autoencoder (VAE). By learning in this continuous probabilistic space, the task is reformulated from fitting single and imbalance-prone precipitation labels to modeling continuous probabilistic label distributions, thereby alleviating the imbalance issue. We integrate this module into multiple state-of-the-art models and observe consistent performance gains. Comprehensive statistical analysis and ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Peng Xu, Shengwu Xiong, Jiajun Zhang et al.

This paper reviews the MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning. We aim to bring together different approaches in multimodal machine learning and LLMs via a large benchmark. We hope it better allows researchers to follow the state-of-the-art in this very dynamic area. Meanwhile, a growing number of testbeds have boosted the evolution of general-purpose large language models. Thus, this year's MARS2 focuses on real-world and specialized scenarios to broaden the multimodal reasoning applications of MLLMs. Our organizing team released two tailored datasets Lens and AdsQA as test sets, which support general reasoning in 12 daily scenarios and domain-specific reasoning in advertisement videos, respectively. We evaluated 40+ baselines that include both generalist MLLMs and task-specific models, and opened up three competition tracks, i.e., Visual Grounding in Real-world Scenarios (VG-RS), Visual Question Answering with Spatial Awareness (VQA-SA), and Visual Reasoning in Creative Advertisement Videos (VR-Ads). Finally, 76 teams from the renowned academic and industrial institutions have registered and 40+ valid submissions (out of 1200+) have been included in our ranking lists. Our datasets, code sets (40+ baselines and 15+ participants' methods), and rankings are publicly available on the MARS2 workshop website and our GitHub organization page https://github.com/mars2workshop/, where our updates and announcements of upcoming events will be continuously provided.

Zhaoyang Sun, Fei Du, Weihua Chen et al.

Recently, the success of text-to-image synthesis has greatly advanced the development of identity customization techniques, whose main goal is to produce realistic identity-specific photographs based on text prompts and reference face images. However, it is difficult for existing identity customization methods to simultaneously meet the various requirements of different real-world applications, including the identity fidelity of small face, the control of face location, pose and expression, as well as the customization of multiple persons. To this end, we propose a scale-robust and fine-controllable method, namely RealisID, which learns different control capabilities through the cooperation between a pair of local and global branches. Specifically, by using cropping and up-sampling operations to filter out face-irrelevant information, the local branch concentrates the fine control of facial details and the scale-robust identity fidelity within the face region. Meanwhile, the global branch manages the overall harmony of the entire image. It also controls the face location by taking the location guidance as input. As a result, RealisID can benefit from the complementarity of these two branches. Finally, by implementing our branches with two different variants of ControlNet, our method can be easily extended to handle multi-person customization, even only trained on single-person datasets. Extensive experiments and ablation studies indicate the effectiveness of RealisID and verify its ability in fulfilling all the requirements mentioned above.

Yaxiong Chen, Qicong Wang, Chunlei Li et al.

Existing approaches for the problem of ultrasound image segmentation, whether supervised or semi-supervised, are typically specialized for specific anatomical structures or tasks, limiting their practical utility in clinical settings. In this paper, we pioneer the task of universal semi-supervised ultrasound image segmentation and propose ProPL, a framework that can handle multiple organs and segmentation tasks while leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data. At its core, ProPL employs a shared vision encoder coupled with prompt-guided dual decoders, enabling flexible task adaptation through a prompting-upon-decoding mechanism and reliable self-training via an uncertainty-driven pseudo-label calibration (UPLC) module. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce a comprehensive ultrasound dataset spanning 5 organs and 8 segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProPL outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various metrics, establishing a new benchmark for universal ultrasound image segmentation.

Shilan Zhang, Jirui Huang, Ruilin Yao et al.

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) and Referring Expression Generation (REG) are fundamental tasks in multimodal understanding, supporting precise object localization through natural language. However, existing REC and REG datasets rely heavily on manual annotation, which is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we propose ColLab, a collaborative spatial progressive data engine that enables fully automated REC and REG data generation without human supervision. Specifically, our method introduces a Collaborative Multimodal Model Interaction (CMMI) strategy, which leverages the semantic understanding of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and large language models (LLMs) to generate descriptions. Furthermore, we design a module termed Spatial Progressive Augmentation (SPA) to enhance spatial expressiveness among duplicate instances. Experiments demonstrate that ColLab significantly accelerates the annotation process of REC and REG while improving the quality and discriminability of the generated expressions. In addition to the core methodological contribution, our framework was partially adopted in the data generation pipeline of the ICCV 2025 MARS2 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning, enriching the dataset with diverse and challenging samples that better reflect real-world reasoning demands.

Yifang Zhang, Shengwu Xiong, Henan Wang et al.

Precipitation Nowcasting, which aims to predict precipitation within the next 0 to 6 hours, is critical for disaster mitigation and real-time response planning. However, most time series forecasting benchmarks in meteorology are evaluated on variables with strong periodicity, such as temperature and humidity, which fail to reflect model capabilities in more complex and practically meteorology scenarios like precipitation nowcasting. To address this gap, we propose RainfallBench, a benchmark designed for precipitation nowcasting, a highly challenging and practically relevant task characterized by zero inflation, temporal decay, and non-stationarity, focusing on predicting precipitation within the next 0 to 6 hours. The dataset is derived from five years of meteorological observations, recorded at hourly intervals across six essential variables, and collected from more than 140 Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) stations globally. In particular, it incorporates precipitable water vapor (PWV), a crucial indicator of rainfall that is absent in other datasets. We further design specialized evaluation protocols to assess model performance on key meteorological challenges, including multi-scale prediction, multi-resolution forecasting, and extreme rainfall events, benchmarking 17 state-of-the-art models across six major architectures on RainfallBench. Additionally, to address the zero-inflation and temporal decay issues overlooked by existing models, we introduce Bi-Focus Precipitation Forecaster (BFPF), a plug-and-play module that incorporates domain-specific priors to enhance rainfall time series forecasting. Statistical analysis and ablation studies validate the comprehensiveness of our dataset as well as the superiority of our methodology.

Zhaoyang Sun, Yaxiong Chen, Shengwu Xiong

Makeup transfer is not only to extract the makeup style of the reference image, but also to render the makeup style to the semantic corresponding position of the target image. However, most existing methods focus on the former and ignore the latter, resulting in a failure to achieve desired results. To solve the above problems, we propose a unified Symmetric Semantic-Aware Transformer (SSAT) network, which incorporates semantic correspondence learning to realize makeup transfer and removal simultaneously. In SSAT, a novel Symmetric Semantic Corresponding Feature Transfer (SSCFT) module and a weakly supervised semantic loss are proposed to model and facilitate the establishment of accurate semantic correspondence. In the generation process, the extracted makeup features are spatially distorted by SSCFT to achieve semantic alignment with the target image, then the distorted makeup features are combined with unmodified makeup irrelevant features to produce the final result. Experiments show that our method obtains more visually accurate makeup transfer results, and user study in comparison with other state-of-the-art makeup transfer methods reflects the superiority of our method. Besides, we verify the robustness of the proposed method in the difference of expression and pose, object occlusion scenes, and extend it to video makeup transfer. Code will be available at https://gitee.com/sunzhaoyang0304/ssat-msp.

Anna Zhu, Hang Du, Shengwu Xiong

Object proposal technique with dense anchoring scheme for scene text detection were applied frequently to achieve high recall. It results in the significant improvement in accuracy but waste of computational searching, regression and classification. In this paper, we propose an anchor selection-based region proposal network (AS-RPN) using effective selected anchors instead of dense anchors to extract text proposals. The center, scales, aspect ratios and orientations of anchors are learnable instead of fixing, which leads to high recall and greatly reduced numbers of anchors. By replacing the anchor-based RPN in Faster RCNN, the AS-RPN-based Faster RCNN can achieve comparable performance with previous state-of-the-art text detecting approaches on standard benchmarks, including COCO-Text, ICDAR2013, ICDAR2015 and MSRA-TD500 when using single-scale and single model (ResNet50) testing only.

Zhaoyang Sun, Wenxuan Liu, Feng Liu et al.

Facial makeup transfer aims to render a non-makeup face image in an arbitrary given makeup one while preserving face identity. The most advanced method separates makeup style information from face images to realize makeup transfer. However, makeup style includes several semantic clear local styles which are still entangled together. In this paper, we propose a novel unified adversarial disentangling network to further decompose face images into four independent components, i.e., personal identity, lips makeup style, eyes makeup style and face makeup style. Owing to the further disentangling of makeup style, our method can not only control the degree of global makeup style, but also flexibly regulate the degree of local makeup styles which any other approaches can't do. For makeup removal, different from other methods which regard makeup removal as the reverse process of makeup, we integrate the makeup transfer with the makeup removal into one uniform framework and obtain multiple makeup removal results. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our approach can produce more realistic and accurate makeup transfer results compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Bin Wang, Yongsheng Gao, Xiaohan Yu et al.

Leaf image recognition techniques have been actively researched for plant species identification. However it remains unclear whether leaf patterns can provide sufficient information for cultivar recognition. This paper reports the first attempt on soybean cultivar recognition from plant leaves which is not only a challenging research problem but also important for soybean cultivar evaluation, selection and production in agriculture. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale sliding chord matching (MSCM) approach to extract leaf patterns that are distinctive for soybean cultivar identification. A chord is defined to slide along the contour for measuring the synchronised patterns of exterior shape and interior appearance of soybean leaf images. A multiscale sliding chord strategy is developed to extract features in a coarse-to-fine hierarchical order. A joint description that integrates the leaf descriptors from different parts of a soybean plant is proposed for further enhancing the discriminative power of cultivar description. We built a cultivar leaf image database, SoyCultivar, consisting of 1200 sample leaf images from 200 soybean cultivars for performance evaluation. Encouraging experimental results of the proposed method in comparison to the state-of-the-art leaf species recognition methods demonstrate the availability of cultivar information in soybean leaves and effectiveness of the proposed MSCM for soybean cultivar identification, which may advance the research in leaf recognition from species to cultivar.

Yang Zhao, Yifan Liu, Chunhua Shen et al.

Facial landmark detection is a crucial prerequisite for many face analysis applications. Deep learning-based methods currently dominate the approach of addressing the facial landmark detection. However, such works generally introduce a large number of parameters, resulting in high memory cost. In this paper, we aim for a lightweight as well as effective solution to facial landmark detection. To this end, we propose an effective lightweight model, namely Mobile Face Alignment Network (MobileFAN), using a simple backbone MobileNetV2 as the encoder and three deconvolutional layers as the decoder. The proposed MobileFAN, with only 8% of the model size and lower computational cost, achieves superior or equivalent performance compared with state-of-the-art models. Moreover, by transferring the geometric structural information of a face graph from a large complex model to our proposed MobileFAN through feature-aligned distillation and feature-similarity distillation, the performance of MobileFAN is further improved in effectiveness and efficiency for face alignment. Extensive experiment results on three challenging facial landmark estimation benchmarks including COFW, 300W and WFLW show the superiority of our proposed MobileFAN against state-of-the-art methods.

Minglong Qi, Shengwu Xiong

In the paper of Tor Helleseth and Victor Zinoviev (Designs, Codes and Cryptography, \textbf{17}, 269-288(1999)), the number of solutions of the system of equations from $ Z_{4} $-linear Goethals codes $ G_{4} $ was determined and stated in Theorem 4. We found that Theorem 4 is wrong for $ m $ even. In this note, we complete Theorem 4, and present a series of new Kloosterman sum identities deduced from Theorem 4. Moreover, we show that several previously established formulas on the Kloosterman sum identities can be rediscovered from Theorem 4 with much simpler proofs.

Zhaoyang Sun, Shengwu Xiong, Ryan Wen Liu

Outdoor videos sometimes contain unexpected rain streaks due to the rainy weather, which bring negative effects on subsequent computer vision applications, e.g., video surveillance, object recognition and tracking, etc. In this paper, we propose a directional regularized tensor-based video deraining model by taking into consideration the arbitrary direction of rain streaks. In particular, the sparsity of rain streaks in spatial and derivative domains, the spatiotemporal sparsity and low-rank property of video background are incorporated into the proposed method. Different from many previous methods under the assumption of vertically falling rain streaks, we consider a more realistic assumption that all the rain streaks in a video fall in an approximately similar arbitrary direction. The resulting complicated optimization problem will be effectively solved through an alternating direction method. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and realistic datasets have demonstrated the superiority of the proposed deraining method.

Minglong Qi, Shengwu Xiong

Linear codes with a few weights have wide applications in information security, data storage systems, consuming electronics and communication systems. Construction of the linear codes with a few weights and determination of their parameters are an important research topic in coding theory. In this paper, we construct two classes of linear codes with a few weights and determine their complete weight enumerators based on twisted Kloosterman sums.

Yiyun Pan, Junwei Zhou, Yongsheng Gao et al.

Robust facial landmark localization remains a challenging task when faces are partially occluded. Recently, the cascaded pose regression has attracted increasing attentions, due to it's superior performance in facial landmark localization and occlusion detection. However, such an approach is sensitive to initialization, where an improper initialization can severly degrade the performance. In this paper, we propose a Robust Initialization for Cascaded Pose Regression (RICPR) by providing texture and pose correlated initial shapes for the testing face. By examining the correlation of local binary patterns histograms between the testing face and the training faces, the shapes of the training faces that are most correlated with the testing face are selected as the texture correlated initialization. To make the initialization more robust to various poses, we estimate the rough pose of the testing face according to five fiducial landmarks located by multitask cascaded convolutional networks. Then the pose correlated initial shapes are constructed by the mean face's shape and the rough testing face pose. Finally, the texture correlated and the pose correlated initial shapes are joined together as the robust initialization. We evaluate RICPR on the challenging dataset of COFW. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves better performances than the state-of-the-art methods in facial landmark localization and occlusion detection.

Minglong Qi, Shengwu Xiong, Jingling Yuan et al.

Linear codes with a few weights have important applications in authentication codes, secret sharing, consumer electronics, etc.. The determination of the parameters such as Hamming weight distributions and complete weight enumerators of linear codes are important research topics. In this paper, we consider some classes of linear codes with a few weights and determine the complete weight enumerators from which the corresponding Hamming weight distributions are derived with help of some sums involving Legendre symbol.

Minglong Qi, Shengwu Xiong, Jingling Yuan et al.

In this paper, the formulas of some exponential sums over finite field, related to the Coulter's polynomial, are settled based on the Coulter's theorems on Weil sums, which may have potential application in the construction of linear codes with few weights.

Minglong Qi, Shengwu Xiong, Jinbgling Yuan et al.

Pseudorandom sequences with optimal three-level autocorrelation have important applications in CDMA communication systems. Constructing the sequences with three-level autocorrelation is equivalent to finding cyclic almost difference sets as their supports. In a paper of Ding, Helleseth, and Martinsen, the authors developed a new method known as the Ding-Helleseth-Martinsens Constructions in literature to construct the almost difference set using product set between GF(2) and union sets of cyclotomic classes of order 4. In this correspondence, we show that there do not exist such constructions for cyclotomic classes of order 6.

Minglong Qi, Shengwu Xiong, Jingling Yuan et al.

Pseudorandom binary sequences with optimal balance and autocorrelation have many applications in stream cipher, communication, coding theory, etc. It is known that binary sequences with three-level autocorrelation should have an almost difference set as their characteristic sets. How to construct new families of almost difference set is an important research topic in such fields as communication, coding theory and cryptography. In a work of Ding, Helleseth, and Martinsen in 2001, the authors developed a new method, known as the Ding-Helleseth-Martinsens Constructions in literature, of constructing an almost difference set from product sets of GF(2) and the union of two cyclotomic classes of order four. In the present paper, we have constructed two classes of almost difference set with product sets between GF(2) and union sets of the cyclotomic classes of order 12 using that method. In addition, we could find there do not exist the Ding-Helleseth-Martinsens Constructions for the cyclotomic classes of order six and eight.

Minglong Qi, Shengwu Xiong, Jingling Yuan et al.

In this paper, the linear complexity over $\mathbf{GF}(r)$ of generalized cyclotomic quaternary sequences with period $2pq$ is determined, where $ r $ is an odd prime such that $r \ge 5$ and $r\notin \lbrace p,q\rbrace$. The minimal value of the linear complexity is equal to $\tfrac{5pq+p+q+1}{4}$ which is greater than the half of the period $2pq$. According to the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm, these sequences are viewed as enough good for the use in cryptography. We show also that if the character of the extension field $\mathbf{GF}(r^{m})$, $r$, is chosen so that $\bigl(\tfrac{r}{p}\bigr) = \bigl(\tfrac{r}{q}\bigr) = -1$, $r\nmid 3pq-1$, and $r\nmid 2pq-4$, then the linear complexity can reach the maximal value equal to the length of the sequences.