Xiangyu He

Yanpeng Sun, Qiang Chen, Xiangyu He et al.

Freezing the pre-trained backbone has become a standard paradigm to avoid overfitting in few-shot segmentation. In this paper, we rethink the paradigm and explore a new regime: {\em fine-tuning a small part of parameters in the backbone}. We present a solution to overcome the overfitting problem, leading to better model generalization on learning novel classes. Our method decomposes backbone parameters into three successive matrices via the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), then {\em only fine-tunes the singular values} and keeps others frozen. The above design allows the model to adjust feature representations on novel classes while maintaining semantic clues within the pre-trained backbone. We evaluate our {\em Singular Value Fine-tuning (SVF)} approach on various few-shot segmentation methods with different backbones. We achieve state-of-the-art results on both Pascal-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ across 1-shot and 5-shot settings. Hopefully, this simple baseline will encourage researchers to rethink the role of backbone fine-tuning in few-shot settings. The source code and models will be available at https://github.com/syp2ysy/SVF.

Weixiang Xu, Xiangyu He, Tianli Zhao et al.

Large neural networks are difficult to deploy on mobile devices because of intensive computation and storage. To alleviate it, we study ternarization, a balance between efficiency and accuracy that quantizes both weights and activations into ternary values. In previous ternarized neural networks, a hard threshold Δ is introduced to determine quantization intervals. Although the selection of Δ greatly affects the training results, previous works estimate Δ via an approximation or treat it as a hyper-parameter, which is suboptimal. In this paper, we present the Soft Threshold Ternary Networks (STTN), which enables the model to automatically determine quantization intervals instead of depending on a hard threshold. Concretely, we replace the original ternary kernel with the addition of two binary kernels at training time, where ternary values are determined by the combination of two corresponding binary values. At inference time, we add up the two binary kernels to obtain a single ternary kernel. Our method dramatically outperforms current state-of-the-arts, lowering the performance gap between full-precision networks and extreme low bit networks. Experiments on ImageNet with ResNet-18 (Top-1 66.2%) achieves new state-of-the-art. Update: In this version, we further fine-tune the experimental hyperparameters and training procedure. The latest STTN shows that ResNet-18 with ternary weights and ternary activations achieves up to 68.2% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Code is available at: github.com/WeixiangXu/STTN.

Tencent Hunyuan Team, Ao Liu, Botong Zhou et al. · tencent-ai

As Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly advance, we introduce Hunyuan-TurboS, a novel large hybrid Transformer-Mamba Mixture of Experts (MoE) model. It synergistically combines Mamba's long-sequence processing efficiency with Transformer's superior contextual understanding. Hunyuan-TurboS features an adaptive long-short chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism, dynamically switching between rapid responses for simple queries and deep "thinking" modes for complex problems, optimizing computational resources. Architecturally, this 56B activated (560B total) parameter model employs 128 layers (Mamba2, Attention, FFN) with an innovative AMF/MF block pattern. Faster Mamba2 ensures linear complexity, Grouped-Query Attention minimizes KV cache, and FFNs use an MoE structure. Pre-trained on 16T high-quality tokens, it supports a 256K context length and is the first industry-deployed large-scale Mamba model. Our comprehensive post-training strategy enhances capabilities via Supervised Fine-Tuning (3M instructions), a novel Adaptive Long-short CoT Fusion method, Multi-round Deliberation Learning for iterative improvement, and a two-stage Large-scale Reinforcement Learning process targeting STEM and general instruction-following. Evaluations show strong performance: overall top 7 rank on LMSYS Chatbot Arena with a score of 1356, outperforming leading models like Gemini-2.0-Flash-001 (1352) and o4-mini-2025-04-16 (1345). TurboS also achieves an average of 77.9% across 23 automated benchmarks. Hunyuan-TurboS balances high performance and efficiency, offering substantial capabilities at lower inference costs than many reasoning models, establishing a new paradigm for efficient large-scale pre-trained models.

Yingying Deng, Xiangyu He, Fan Tang et al.

Despite the remarkable progress in image style transfer, formulating style in the context of art is inherently subjective and challenging. In contrast to existing learning/tuning methods, this study shows that vanilla diffusion models can directly extract style information and seamlessly integrate the generative prior into the content image without retraining. Specifically, we adopt dual denoising paths to represent content/style references in latent space and then guide the content image denoising process with style latent codes. We further reveal that the cross-attention mechanism in latent diffusion models tends to blend the content and style images, resulting in stylized outputs that deviate from the original content image. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a cross-attention rearrangement strategy. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the diffusion-based $\underline{Z}$ero-shot $\underline{S}$tyle $\underline{T}$ransfer via $\underline{A}$ttention $\underline{R}$earrangement, Z-STAR.

Yingying Deng, Xiangyu He, Changwang Mei et al.

Though Rectified Flows (ReFlows) with distillation offers a promising way for fast sampling, its fast inversion transforms images back to structured noise for recovery and following editing remains unsolved. This paper introduces FireFlow, a simple yet effective zero-shot approach that inherits the startling capacity of ReFlow-based models (such as FLUX) in generation while extending its capabilities to accurate inversion and editing in $8$ steps. We first demonstrate that a carefully designed numerical solver is pivotal for ReFlow inversion, enabling accurate inversion and reconstruction with the precision of a second-order solver while maintaining the practical efficiency of a first-order Euler method. This solver achieves a $3\times$ runtime speedup compared to state-of-the-art ReFlow inversion and editing techniques, while delivering smaller reconstruction errors and superior editing results in a training-free mode. The code is available at $\href{https://github.com/HolmesShuan/FireFlow}{this URL}$.

Yingying Deng, Xiangyu He, Fan Tang et al.

Style transfer, a pivotal task in image processing, synthesizes visually compelling images by seamlessly blending realistic content with artistic styles, enabling applications in photo editing and creative design. While mainstream training-free diffusion-based methods have greatly advanced style transfer in recent years, their reliance on computationally inversion processes compromises efficiency and introduces visual distortions when inversion is inaccurate. To address these limitations, we propose a novel \textit{inversion-free} style transfer framework based on dual rectified flows, which tackles the challenge of finding an unknown stylized distribution from two distinct inputs (content and style images), \textit{only with forward pass}. Our approach predicts content and style trajectories in parallel, then fuses them through a dynamic midpoint interpolation that integrates velocities from both paths while adapting to the evolving stylized image. By jointly modeling the content, style, and stylized distributions, our velocity field design achieves robust fusion and avoids the shortcomings of naive overlays. Attention injection further guides style integration, enhancing visual fidelity, content preservation, and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate generalization across diverse styles and content, providing an effective and efficient pipeline for style transfer.

Xiangyu He, Zitao Mo, Qiang Chen et al.

Many successful learning targets such as minimizing dice loss and cross-entropy loss have enabled unprecedented breakthroughs in segmentation tasks. Beyond these semantic metrics, this paper aims to introduce location supervision into semantic segmentation. Based on this idea, we present a Location-aware Upsampling (LaU) that adaptively refines the interpolating coordinates with trainable offsets. Then, location-aware losses are established by encouraging pixels to move towards well-classified locations. An LaU is offset prediction coupled with interpolation, which is trained end-to-end to generate confidence score at each position from coarse to fine. Guided by location-aware losses, the new module can replace its plain counterpart (\textit{e.g.}, bilinear upsampling) in a plug-and-play manner to further boost the leading encoder-decoder approaches. Extensive experiments validate the consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/HolmesShuan/Location-aware-Upsampling-for-Semantic-Segmentation

Qiang Chen, Anda Cheng, Xiangyu He et al.

Object location is fundamental to panoptic segmentation as it is related to all things and stuff in the image scene. Knowing the locations of objects in the image provides clues for segmenting and helps the network better understand the scene. How to integrate object location in both thing and stuff segmentation is a crucial problem. In this paper, we propose spatial information flows to achieve this objective. The flows can bridge all sub-tasks in panoptic segmentation by delivering the object's spatial context from the box regression task to others. More importantly, we design four parallel sub-networks to get a preferable adaptation of object spatial information in sub-tasks. Upon the sub-networks and the flows, we present a location-aware and unified framework for panoptic segmentation, denoted as SpatialFlow. We perform a detailed ablation study on each component and conduct extensive experiments to prove the effectiveness of SpatialFlow. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art results, which are $47.9$ PQ and $62.5$ PQ respectively on MS-COCO and Cityscapes panoptic benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/chensnathan/SpatialFlow.

Xiangyu He, Ke Cheng, Qiang Chen et al.

Long-range dependencies modeling, widely used in capturing spatiotemporal correlation, has shown to be effective in CNN dominated computer vision tasks. Yet neither stacks of convolutional operations to enlarge receptive fields nor recent nonlocal modules is computationally efficient. In this paper, we present a generic family of lightweight global descriptors for modeling the interactions between positions across different dimensions (e.g., channels, frames). This descriptor enables subsequent convolutions to access the informative global features with negligible computational complexity and parameters. Benchmark experiments show that the proposed method can complete state-of-the-art long-range mechanisms with a significant reduction in extra computing cost. Code available at https://github.com/HolmesShuan/Compact-Global-Descriptor.

Yingying Deng, Xiangyu He, Fan Tang et al.

Style transfer presents a significant challenge, primarily centered on identifying an appropriate style representation. Conventional methods employ style loss, derived from second-order statistics or contrastive learning, to constrain style representation in the stylized result. However, these pre-defined style representations often limit stylistic expression, leading to artifacts. In contrast to existing approaches, we have discovered that latent features in vanilla diffusion models inherently contain natural style and content distributions. This allows for direct extraction of style information and seamless integration of generative priors into the content image without necessitating retraining. Our method adopts dual denoising paths to represent content and style references in latent space, subsequently guiding the content image denoising process with style latent codes. We introduce a Cross-attention Reweighting module that utilizes local content features to query style image information best suited to the input patch, thereby aligning the style distribution of the stylized results with that of the style image. Furthermore, we design a scaled adaptive instance normalization to mitigate inconsistencies in color distribution between style and stylized images on a global scale. Through theoretical analysis and extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our diffusion-based \uline{z}ero-shot \uline{s}tyle \uline{t}ransfer via \uline{a}djusting style dist\uline{r}ibution, termed Z-STAR+.

Zijun Zhou, Yingying Deng, Xiangyu He et al.

Many real-world applications, such as interactive photo retouching, artistic content creation, and product design, require flexible and iterative image editing. However, existing image editing methods primarily focus on achieving the desired modifications in a single step, which often struggles with ambiguous user intent, complex transformations, or the need for progressive refinements. As a result, these methods frequently produce inconsistent outcomes or fail to meet user expectations. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-turn image editing framework that enables users to iteratively refine their edits, progressively achieving more satisfactory results. Our approach leverages flow matching for accurate image inversion and a dual-objective Linear Quadratic Regulators (LQR) for stable sampling, effectively mitigating error accumulation. Additionally, by analyzing the layer-wise roles of transformers, we introduce a adaptive attention highlighting method that enhances editability while preserving multi-turn coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly improves edit success rates and visual fidelity compared to existing methods.

Yingying Deng, Xiangyu He, Fan Tang et al.

The customization of multiple attributes has gained popularity with the rising demand for personalized content creation. Despite promising empirical results, the contextual coherence between different attributes has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we argue that subsequent attributes should follow the multivariable conditional distribution introduced by former attribute creation. In light of this, we reformulate multi-attribute creation from a conditional probability theory perspective and tackle the challenging zero-shot setting. By explicitly modeling the dependencies between attributes, we further enhance the coherence of generated images across diverse attribute combinations. Furthermore, we identify connections between multi-attribute customization and multi-task learning, effectively addressing the high computing cost encountered in multi-attribute synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Z-Magic outperforms existing models in zero-shot image generation, with broad implications for AI-driven design and creative applications.

Xiangyu He, Jian Cheng

Super-resolution as an ill-posed problem has many high-resolution candidates for a low-resolution input. However, the popular $\ell_1$ loss used to best fit the given HR image fails to consider this fundamental property of non-uniqueness in image restoration. In this work, we fix the missing piece in $\ell_1$ loss by formulating super-resolution with neural networks as a probabilistic model. It shows that $\ell_1$ loss is equivalent to a degraded likelihood function that removes the randomness from the learning process. By introducing a data-adaptive random variable, we present a new objective function that aims at minimizing the expectation of the reconstruction error over all plausible solutions. The experimental results show consistent improvements on mainstream architectures, with no extra parameter or computing cost at inference time.

Jiahao Lu, Xi Sheryl Zhang, Tianli Zhao et al.

Federated learning frameworks typically require collaborators to share their local gradient updates of a common model instead of sharing training data to preserve privacy. However, prior works on Gradient Leakage Attacks showed that private training data can be revealed from gradients. So far almost all relevant works base their attacks on fully-connected or convolutional neural networks. Given the recent overwhelmingly rising trend of adapting Transformers to solve multifarious vision tasks, it is highly valuable to investigate the privacy risk of vision transformers. In this paper, we analyse the gradient leakage risk of self-attention based mechanism in both theoretical and practical manners. Particularly, we propose APRIL - Attention PRIvacy Leakage, which poses a strong threat to self-attention inspired models such as ViT. Showing how vision Transformers are at the risk of privacy leakage via gradients, we urge the significance of designing privacy-safer Transformer models and defending schemes.

Weixiang Xu, Qiang Chen, Xiangyu He et al.

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) rely on a real-valued auxiliary variable W to help binary training. However, pioneering binary works only use W to accumulate gradient updates during backward propagation, which can not fully exploit its power and may hinder novel advances in BNNs. In this work, we explore the role of W in training besides acting as a latent variable. Notably, we propose to add W into the computation graph, making it perform as a real-valued feature extractor to aid the binary training. We make different attempts on how to utilize the real-valued weights and propose a specialized supervision. Visualization experiments qualitatively verify the effectiveness of our approach in making it easier to distinguish between different categories. Quantitative experiments show that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-arts, further closing the performance gap between floating-point networks and BNNs. Evaluation on ImageNet with ResNet-18 (Top-1 63.4%), ResNet-34 (Top-1 67.0%) achieves new state-of-the-art.

Tianli Zhao, Qinghao Hu, Xiangyu He et al.

Acceleration of deep neural networks to meet a specific latency constraint is essential for their deployment on mobile devices. In this paper, we design an architecture aware latency constrained sparse (ALCS) framework to prune and accelerate CNN models. Taking modern mobile computation architectures into consideration, we propose Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD)-structured pruning, along with a novel sparse convolution algorithm for efficient computation. Besides, we propose to estimate the run time of sparse models with piece-wise linear interpolation. The whole latency constrained pruning task is formulated as a constrained optimization problem that can be efficiently solved with Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Extensive experiments show that our system-algorithm co-design framework can achieve much better Pareto frontier among network accuracy and latency on resource-constrained mobile devices.

Xiangyu He, Qinghao Hu, Peisong Wang et al.

Convolutional neural networks are able to learn realistic image priors from numerous training samples in low-level image generation and restoration. We show that, for high-level image recognition tasks, we can further reconstruct "realistic" images of each category by leveraging intrinsic Batch Normalization (BN) statistics without any training data. Inspired by the popular VAE/GAN methods, we regard the zero-shot optimization process of synthetic images as generative modeling to match the distribution of BN statistics. The generated images serve as a calibration set for the following zero-shot network quantizations. Our method meets the needs for quantizing models based on sensitive information, \textit{e.g.,} due to privacy concerns, no data is available. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that, with the help of generated data, our approach consistently outperforms existing data-free quantization methods.

Kai Zhang, Martin Danelljan, Yawei Li et al.

This paper reviews the AIM 2020 challenge on efficient single image super-resolution with focus on the proposed solutions and results. The challenge task was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor x4 based on a set of prior examples of low and corresponding high resolution images. The goal is to devise a network that reduces one or several aspects such as runtime, parameter count, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption while at least maintaining PSNR of MSRResNet. The track had 150 registered participants, and 25 teams submitted the final results. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single image super-resolution.

Fanrong Li, Zitao Mo, Peisong Wang et al.

Object detection has made impressive progress in recent years with the help of deep learning. However, state-of-the-art algorithms are both computation and memory intensive. Though many lightweight networks are developed for a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, it is still a challenge to make it practical on an embedded device. In this paper, we present a system-level solution for efficient object detection on a heterogeneous embedded device. The detection network is quantized to low bits and allows efficient implementation with shift operators. In order to make the most of the benefits of low-bit quantization, we design a dedicated accelerator with programmable logic. Inside the accelerator, a hybrid dataflow is exploited according to the heterogeneous property of different convolutional layers. We adopt a straightforward but resource-friendly column-prior tiling strategy to map the computation-intensive convolutional layers to the accelerator that can support arbitrary feature size. Other operations can be performed on the low-power CPU cores, and the entire system is executed in a pipelined manner. As a case study, we evaluate our object detection system on a real-world surveillance video with input size of 512x512, and it turns out that the system can achieve an inference speed of 18 fps at the cost of 6.9W (with display) with an mAP of 66.4 verified on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset.