Tao Zhang

CV
h-index7
4papers
216citations
Novelty43%
AI Score46

4 Papers

43.9CVJan 7, 2025Code
Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with LLaVA for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videos

Haobo Yuan, Xiangtai Li, Tao Zhang et al.

This work presents Sa2VA, the first comprehensive, unified model for dense grounded understanding of both images and videos. Unlike existing multi-modal large language models, which are often limited to specific modalities and tasks, Sa2VA supports a wide range of image and video tasks, including referring segmentation and conversation, with minimal one-shot instruction tuning. Sa2VA combines SAM-2, a foundation video segmentation model, with MLLM, the advanced vision-language model, and unifies text, image, and video into a shared LLM token space. Using the LLM, Sa2VA generates instruction tokens that guide SAM-2 in producing precise masks, enabling a grounded, multi-modal understanding of both static and dynamic visual content. Additionally, we introduce Ref-SAV, an auto-labeled dataset containing over 72k object expressions in complex video scenes, designed to boost model performance. We also manually validate 2k video objects in the Ref-SAV datasets to benchmark referring video object segmentation in complex environments. Experiments show that Sa2VA achieves strong performance across multiple tasks, particularly in referring video object segmentation, highlighting its potential for complex real-world applications. In addition, Sa2VA can be easily extended into various VLMs, including Qwen-VL and Intern-VL, which can be updated with rapid process in current open-sourced VLMs. Code and models have been provided to the community.

32.6CVJul 10, 2025Code
Traceable Evidence Enhanced Visual Grounded Reasoning: Evaluation and Methodology

Haochen Wang, Xiangtai Li, Zilong Huang et al.

Models like OpenAI-o3 pioneer visual grounded reasoning by dynamically referencing visual regions, just like human "thinking with images". However, no benchmark exists to evaluate these capabilities holistically. To bridge this gap, we propose TreeBench (Traceable Evidence Evaluation Benchmark), a diagnostic benchmark built on three principles: (1) focused visual perception of subtle targets in complex scenes, (2) traceable evidence via bounding box evaluation, and (3) second-order reasoning to test object interactions and spatial hierarchies beyond simple object localization. Prioritizing images with dense objects, we initially sample 1K high-quality images from SA-1B, and incorporate eight LMM experts to manually annotate questions, candidate options, and answers for each image. After three stages of quality control, TreeBench consists of 405 challenging visual question-answering pairs, even the most advanced models struggle with this benchmark, where none of them reach 60% accuracy, e.g., OpenAI-o3 scores only 54.87. Furthermore, we introduce TreeVGR (Traceable Evidence Enhanced Visual Grounded Reasoning), a training paradigm to supervise localization and reasoning jointly with reinforcement learning, enabling accurate localizations and explainable reasoning pathways. Initialized from Qwen2.5-VL-7B, it improves V* Bench (+16.8), MME-RealWorld (+12.6), and TreeBench (+13.4), proving traceability is key to advancing vision-grounded reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/Haochen-Wang409/TreeVGR.

27.6CVOct 23, 2025
Open-o3 Video: Grounded Video Reasoning with Explicit Spatio-Temporal Evidence

Jiahao Meng, Xiangtai Li, Haochen Wang et al.

Most video reasoning models only generate textual reasoning traces without indicating when and where key evidence appears. Recent models such as OpenAI-o3 have sparked wide interest in evidence-centered reasoning for images, yet extending this ability to videos is more challenging, as it requires joint temporal tracking and spatial localization across dynamic scenes. We introduce Open-o3 Video, a non-agent framework that integrates explicit spatio-temporal evidence into video reasoning, and carefully collect training data and design training strategies to address the aforementioned challenges. The model highlights key timestamps, objects, and bounding boxes alongside its answers, allowing reasoning to be grounded in concrete visual observations. To enable this functionality, we first curate and build two high-quality datasets, STGR-CoT-30k for SFT and STGR-RL-36k for RL, with carefully constructed temporal and spatial annotations, since most existing datasets offer either temporal spans for videos or spatial boxes on images, lacking unified spatio-temporal supervision and reasoning traces. Then, we adopt a cold-start reinforcement learning strategy with multiple specially designed rewards that jointly encourage answer accuracy, temporal alignment, and spatial precision. On V-STAR benchmark, Open-o3 Video achieves state-of-the-art performance, raising mAM by 14.4% and mLGM by 24.2% on the Qwen2.5-VL baseline. Consistent improvements are also observed on a broad range of video understanding benchmarks, including VideoMME, WorldSense, VideoMMMU, and TVGBench. Beyond accuracy, the reasoning traces produced by Open-o3 Video also provide valuable signals for test-time scaling, enabling confidence-aware verification and improving answer reliability.

8.4CVApr 1, 2025Code
4th PVUW MeViS 3rd Place Report: Sa2VA

Haobo Yuan, Tao Zhang, Xiangtai Li et al.

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) is a challenging task that requires the model to segment the object in a video given the language description. MeViS is a recently proposed dataset that contains motion expressions of the target objects, leading to a challenging benchmark, compared with existing RVOS benchmarks. On the other hand, for referring expression tasks, a new trend is to adopt multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to achieve better image and text alignment. In this report, we show that with a simple modification to the test time inference method on stronger MLLMs, we can lead to stronger results on MeVIS. In particular, we adopt the recent method Sa2VA, a unified model for dense grounded understanding of both images and videos. By enlarging the scope of key frames, without any further training, we can achieve the 3rd place in the 4th PVUW workshop.