Chengcheng Wang

Chengcheng Wang, Wei He, Ying Nie et al.

In the past years, YOLO-series models have emerged as the leading approaches in the area of real-time object detection. Many studies pushed up the baseline to a higher level by modifying the architecture, augmenting data and designing new losses. However, we find previous models still suffer from information fusion problem, although Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and Path Aggregation Network (PANet) have alleviated this. Therefore, this study provides an advanced Gatherand-Distribute mechanism (GD) mechanism, which is realized with convolution and self-attention operations. This new designed model named as Gold-YOLO, which boosts the multi-scale feature fusion capabilities and achieves an ideal balance between latency and accuracy across all model scales. Additionally, we implement MAE-style pretraining in the YOLO-series for the first time, allowing YOLOseries models could be to benefit from unsupervised pretraining. Gold-YOLO-N attains an outstanding 39.9% AP on the COCO val2017 datasets and 1030 FPS on a T4 GPU, which outperforms the previous SOTA model YOLOv6-3.0-N with similar FPS by +2.4%. The PyTorch code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-Computing/tree/master/Detection/Gold-YOLO, and the MindSpore code is available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/Gold_YOLO.

Chengcheng Wang, Qinhua Xie, Wei He et al.

Autonomous research systems increasingly make the scientific workflow executable: agents can propose ideas, run code, inspect results, and draft papers. But executable workflows do not by themselves produce research judgment. We analyze where current systems lose trial experience: weak evidence becomes prose, pilot signals become broad claims, memory remains textual, and recurring process failures do not change later behavior. We introduce Sibyl-AutoResearch, a self-evolving AutoResearch framework built around Scientific Trial-and-Error Harnesses. A harness lets agents run bounded trials, preserve positive and negative outcomes, and route lessons into later planning, validation, claim scope, scheduling, critique, writing, and harness repair. We formalize this through two auditable conversion units: trial-to-behavior conversion, which links trial signals to later research actions, and trial-to-harness-behavior conversion, which links recurring process failures to system updates. We implement the framework in SIBYL, a file-backed autonomous research system that exposes the state, roles, memory, gates, and artifact traces needed to inspect these conversion paths. A retrospective audit identifies eight high-confidence conversion events, with a median latency of one iteration and a maximum latency of three iterations. A recovered-failure registry further shows how five naturally occurring failure classes, including duplicate results, stale numbers, and unsupported statistics, were blocked, downgraded, or routed into later repair. These traces do not establish a comparative performance claim; they show that the proposed conversion units are recoverable from realistic autonomous-research workspaces. The SIBYL framework and system are available at https://github.com/Sibyl-Research-Team/AutoResearch-SibylSystem.

Wei He, Kai Han, Ying Nie et al.

The development of foundation vision models has pushed the general visual recognition to a high level, but cannot well address the fine-grained recognition in specialized domain such as invasive species classification. Identifying and managing invasive species has strong social and ecological value. Currently, most invasive species datasets are limited in scale and cover a narrow range of species, which restricts the development of deep-learning based invasion biometrics systems. To fill the gap of this area, we introduced Species196, a large-scale semi-supervised dataset of 196-category invasive species. It collects over 19K images with expert-level accurate annotations Species196-L, and 1.2M unlabeled images of invasive species Species196-U. The dataset provides four experimental settings for benchmarking the existing models and algorithms, namely, supervised learning, semi-supervised learning, self-supervised pretraining and zero-shot inference ability of large multi-modal models. To facilitate future research on these four learning paradigms, we conduct an empirical study of the representative methods on the introduced dataset. The dataset is publicly available at https://species-dataset.github.io/.

Shuxin Zhang, Jinlei Zhang, Lixing Yang et al.

Accurate passenger flow prediction of urban rail transit is essential for improving the performance of intelligent transportation systems, especially during the epidemic. How to dynamically model the complex spatiotemporal dependencies of passenger flow is the main issue in achieving accurate passenger flow prediction during the epidemic. To solve this issue, this paper proposes a brand-new transformer-based architecture called STformer under the encoder-decoder framework specifically for COVID-19. Concretely, we develop a modified self-attention mechanism named Causal-Convolution ProbSparse Self-Attention (CPSA) to model the multiple temporal dependencies of passenger flow with low computational costs. To capture the complex and dynamic spatial dependencies, we introduce a novel Adaptive Multi-Graph Convolution Network (AMGCN) by leveraging multiple graphs in a self-adaptive manner. Additionally, the Multi-source Data Fusion block fuses the passenger flow data, COVID-19 confirmed case data, and the relevant social media data to study the impact of COVID-19 to passenger flow. Experiments on real-world passenger flow datasets demonstrate the superiority of ST-former over the other eleven state-of-the-art methods. Several ablation studies are carried out to verify the effectiveness and reliability of our model structure. Results can provide critical insights for the operation of URT systems.

Wei He, Kai Han, Yehui Tang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) face a daunting challenge due to the excessive computational and memory requirements of the commonly used Transformer architecture. While state space model (SSM) is a new type of foundational network architecture offering lower computational complexity, their performance has yet to fully rival that of Transformers. This paper introduces DenseSSM, a novel approach to enhance the flow of hidden information between layers in SSMs. By selectively integrating shallowlayer hidden states into deeper layers, DenseSSM retains fine-grained information crucial for the final output. Dense connections enhanced DenseSSM still maintains the training parallelizability and inference efficiency. The proposed method can be widely applicable to various SSM types like RetNet and Mamba. With similar model size, DenseSSM achieves significant improvements, exemplified by DenseRetNet outperforming the original RetNet with up to 5% accuracy improvement on public benchmarks. code is avalaible at https://github.com/WailordHe/DenseSSM

Jianyuan Guo, Hanting Chen, Chengcheng Wang et al.

Recent advancements in large language models have sparked interest in their extraordinary and near-superhuman capabilities, leading researchers to explore methods for evaluating and optimizing these abilities, which is called superalignment. In this context, our paper delves into the realm of vision foundation models, focusing on the concept of weak-to-strong generalization, which involves using a weaker model to supervise a stronger one, aiming to enhance the latter's capabilities beyond the former's limits. We introduce a novel and adaptively adjustable loss function for weak-to-strong supervision. Our comprehensive experiments span various scenarios, including few-shot learning, transfer learning, noisy label learning, and common knowledge distillation settings. The results are striking: our approach not only exceeds the performance benchmarks set by strong-to-strong generalization but also surpasses the outcomes of fine-tuning strong models with whole datasets. This compelling evidence underscores the significant potential of weak-to-strong generalization, showcasing its capability to substantially elevate the performance of vision foundation models. The code is available at https://github.com/ggjy/vision_weak_to_strong.

Chengcheng Wang, Zhiwei Hao, Yehui Tang et al.

Diffusion-based super-resolution (SR) models have recently garnered significant attention due to their potent restoration capabilities. But conventional diffusion models perform noise sampling from a single distribution, constraining their ability to handle real-world scenes and complex textures across semantic regions. With the success of segment anything model (SAM), generating sufficiently fine-grained region masks can enhance the detail recovery of diffusion-based SR model. However, directly integrating SAM into SR models will result in much higher computational cost. In this paper, we propose the SAM-DiffSR model, which can utilize the fine-grained structure information from SAM in the process of sampling noise to improve the image quality without additional computational cost during inference. In the process of training, we encode structural position information into the segmentation mask from SAM. Then the encoded mask is integrated into the forward diffusion process by modulating it to the sampled noise. This adjustment allows us to independently adapt the noise mean within each corresponding segmentation area. The diffusion model is trained to estimate this modulated noise. Crucially, our proposed framework does NOT change the reverse diffusion process and does NOT require SAM at inference. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, showcasing superior performance in suppressing artifacts, and surpassing existing diffusion-based methods by 0.74 dB at the maximum in terms of PSNR on DIV2K dataset. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lose4578/SAM-DiffSR.

Jianyuan Guo, Zhiwei Hao, Chengcheng Wang et al.

Training general-purpose vision models on purely sequential visual data, eschewing linguistic inputs, has heralded a new frontier in visual understanding. These models are intended to not only comprehend but also seamlessly transit to out-of-domain tasks. However, current endeavors are hamstrung by an over-reliance on colossal models, exemplified by models with upwards of 3B parameters, and the necessity for an extensive corpus of visual data, often comprising a staggering 400B tokens. In this paper, we delve into the development of an efficient, autoregression-based vision model, innovatively architected to operate on a limited dataset. We meticulously demonstrate how this model achieves proficiency in a spectrum of visual tasks spanning both high-level and low-level semantic understanding during the testing phase. Our empirical evaluations underscore the model's agility in adapting to various tasks, heralding a significant reduction in the parameter footprint, and a marked decrease in training data requirements, thereby paving the way for more sustainable and accessible advancements in the field of generalist vision models. The code is available at https://github.com/ggjy/DeLVM.

Yuchuan Tian, Jing Han, Chengcheng Wang et al.

Diffusion models have shown exceptional performance in visual generation tasks. Recently, these models have shifted from traditional U-Shaped CNN-Attention hybrid structures to fully transformer-based isotropic architectures. While these transformers exhibit strong scalability and performance, their reliance on complicated self-attention operation results in slow inference speeds. Contrary to these works, we rethink one of the simplest yet fastest module in deep learning, 3x3 Convolution, to construct a scaled-up purely convolutional diffusion model. We first discover that an Encoder-Decoder Hourglass design outperforms scalable isotropic architectures for Conv3x3, but still under-performing our expectation. Further improving the architecture, we introduce sparse skip connections to reduce redundancy and improve scalability. Based on the architecture, we introduce conditioning improvements including stage-specific embeddings, mid-block condition injection, and conditional gating. These improvements lead to our proposed Diffusion CNN (DiC), which serves as a swift yet competitive diffusion architecture baseline. Experiments on various scales and settings show that DiC surpasses existing diffusion transformers by considerable margins in terms of performance while keeping a good speed advantage. Project page: https://github.com/YuchuanTian/DiC

Chengcheng Wang, Jianyuan Guo, Hongguang Li et al.

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is a widely adopted technique for encoding relative positional information in large language models (LLMs). However, when extended to vision-language models (VLMs), RoPE and its variants enforce relative positional dependencies separately within text and image tokens, introducing unintended cross-modal positional biases. For example, image tokens depicting semantically consistent content are assigned distinct positional encodings solely due to spatial location variations. As a result, such tokens exhibit entirely different relative positional relationships with their corresponding text tokens, ultimately leading to misaligned cross-modal representations. To address this, we propose Per-Token Distance, a simple yet effective metric for quantifying the independence of positional encodings across modalities. Informed by this analysis, we introduce Circle-RoPE, a novel encoding scheme designed to eliminate spurious cross-modal biases. Our key idea is to project image token indices onto a \emph{ring} that is orthogonal to the linear axis of text token indices, thereby forming a cone-like structure in the positional encoding space. In this configuration, each text token (point on the linear text axis) becomes the apex of a cone and maintains an equal distance to all image tokens (points on the circular image \emph{ring}), reducing artificial cross-modal biases while preserving intra-image spatial information. To further enhance performance, we propose a staggered strategy that applies different RoPE variants across layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively preserves spatial information from images while reducing relative positional bias, offering a more robust and flexible positional encoding framework for VLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/lose4578/CircleRoPE.

Yanpeng Cao, Chengcheng Wang, Changjun Song et al.

Video super-resolution (VSR) technology excels in reconstructing low-quality video, avoiding unpleasant blur effect caused by interpolation-based algorithms. However, vast computation complexity and memory occupation hampers the edge of deplorability and the runtime inference in real-life applications, especially for large-scale VSR task. This paper explores the possibility of real-time VSR system and designs an efficient and generic VSR network, termed EGVSR. The proposed EGVSR is based on spatio-temporal adversarial learning for temporal coherence. In order to pursue faster VSR processing ability up to 4K resolution, this paper tries to choose lightweight network structure and efficient upsampling method to reduce the computation required by EGVSR network under the guarantee of high visual quality. Besides, we implement the batch normalization computation fusion, convolutional acceleration algorithm and other neural network acceleration techniques on the actual hardware platform to optimize the inference process of EGVSR network. Finally, our EGVSR achieves the real-time processing capacity of 4K@29.61FPS. Compared with TecoGAN, the most advanced VSR network at present, we achieve 85.04% reduction of computation density and 7.92x performance speedups. In terms of visual quality, the proposed EGVSR tops the list of most metrics (such as LPIPS, tOF, tLP, etc.) on the public test dataset Vid4 and surpasses other state-of-the-art methods in overall performance score. The source code of this project can be found on https://github.com/Thmen/EGVSR.

Zihe Wang, Yihuan Wang, Haiyang Yu. Zhiyong Cui et al.

The current expressway operation relies on rule-based and isolated models, which limits the ability to jointly analyze knowledge across different systems. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in intelligent transportation, advancing traffic models from algorithmic to cognitive intelligence. However, general LLMs are unable to effectively understand the regulations and causal relationships of events in unconventional scenarios in the expressway field. Therefore, this paper constructs a pre-trained multimodal large language model (MLLM) for expressways, ExpressMind, which serves as the cognitive core for intelligent expressway operations. This paper constructs the industry's first full-stack expressway dataset, encompassing traffic knowledge texts, emergency reasoning chains, and annotated video events to overcome data scarcity. This paper proposes a dual-layer LLM pre-training paradigm based on self-supervised training and unsupervised learning. Additionally, this study introduces a Graph-Augmented RAG framework to dynamically index the expressway knowledge base. To enhance reasoning for expressway incident response strategies, we develop a RL-aligned Chain-of-Thought (RL-CoT) mechanism that enforces consistency between model reasoning and expert problem-solving heuristics for incident handling. Finally, ExpressMind integrates a cross-modal encoder to align the dynamic feature sequences under the visual and textual channels, enabling it to understand traffic scenes in both video and image modalities. Extensive experiments on our newly released multi-modal expressway benchmark demonstrate that ExpressMind comprehensively outperforms existing baselines in event detection, safety response generation, and complex traffic analysis. The code and data are available at: https://wanderhee.github.io/ExpressMind/.