Qixing Zhang

Chong Wang, Cheng Xu, Adeel Akram et al.

Vanilla Transformers focus on semantic relevance between mid- to high-level features and are not good at extracting smoke features as they overlook subtle changes in low-level features like color, transparency, and texture which are essential for smoke recognition. To address this, we propose the Cross Contrast Patch Embedding (CCPE) module based on the Swin Transformer. This module leverages multi-scale spatial contrast information in both vertical and horizontal directions to enhance the network's discrimination of underlying details. By combining Cross Contrast with Transformer, we exploit the advantages of Transformer in global receptive field and context modeling while compensating for its inability to capture very low-level details, resulting in a more powerful backbone network tailored for smoke recognition tasks. Additionally, we introduce the Separable Negative Sampling Mechanism (SNSM) to address supervision signal confusion during training and release the SKLFS-WildFire Test dataset, the largest real-world wildfire testset to date, for systematic evaluation. Extensive testing and evaluation on the benchmark dataset FIgLib and the SKLFS-WildFire Test dataset show significant performance improvements of the proposed method over baseline detection models. The code and data are available at github.com/WCUSTC/CCPE.

Yao Shu, Qixin Zhang, Kun He et al.

Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization plays an essential role in scenarios where gradient information is inaccessible or unaffordable, such as black-box systems and resource-constrained environments. While existing adaptive methods such as ZO-AdaMM have shown promise, they are fundamentally limited by their underutilization of moment information during optimization, usually resulting in underperforming convergence. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces Refined Adaptive Zeroth-Order Optimization (R-AdaZO). Specifically, we first show the untapped variance reduction effect of first moment estimate on ZO gradient estimation, which improves the accuracy and stability of ZO updates. We then refine the second moment estimate based on these variance-reduced gradient estimates to better capture the geometry of the optimization landscape, enabling a more effective scaling of ZO updates. We present rigorous theoretical analysis to show (a) the first analysis to the variance reduction of first moment estimate in ZO optimization, (b) the improved second moment estimates with a more accurate approximation of its variance-free ideal, (c) the first variance-aware convergence framework for adaptive ZO methods, which may be of independent interest, and (d) the faster convergence of R-AdaZO than existing baselines like ZO-AdaMM. Our extensive experiments, including synthetic problems, black-box adversarial attack, and memory-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), further verify the superior convergence of R-AdaZO, indicating that R-AdaZO offers an improved solution for real-world ZO optimization challenges.

Gao Xu, Yongming Zhang, Qixing Zhang et al.

Video smoke detection is a promising fire detection method especially in open or large spaces and outdoor environments. Traditional video smoke detection methods usually consist of candidate region extraction and classification, but lack powerful characterization for smoke. In this paper, we propose a novel video smoke detection method based on deep saliency network. Visual saliency detection aims to highlight the most important object regions in an image. The pixel-level and object-level salient convolutional neural networks are combined to extract the informative smoke saliency map. An end-to-end framework for salient smoke detection and existence prediction of smoke is proposed for application in video smoke detection. The deep feature map is combined with the saliency map to predict the existence of smoke in an image. Initial and augmented dataset are built to measure the performance of frameworks with different design strategies. Qualitative and quantitative analysis at frame-level and pixel-level demonstrate the excellent performance of the ultimate framework.

Gao Xu, Yongming Zhang, Qixing Zhang et al.

This paper proposes a method for video smoke detection using synthetic smoke samples. The virtual data can automatically offer precise and rich annotated samples. However, the learning of smoke representations will be hurt by the appearance gap between real and synthetic smoke samples. The existed researches mainly work on the adaptation to samples extracted from original annotated samples. These methods take the object detection and domain adaptation as two independent parts. To train a strong detector with rich synthetic samples, we construct the adaptation to the detection layer of state-of-the-art single-model detectors (SSD and MS-CNN). The training procedure is an end-to-end stage. The classification, location and adaptation are combined in the learning. The performance of the proposed model surpasses the original baseline in our experiments. Meanwhile, our results show that the detectors based on the adversarial adaptation are superior to the detectors based on the discrepancy adaptation. Code will be made publicly available on http://smoke.ustc.edu.cn. Moreover, the domain adaptation for two-stage detector is described in Appendix A.

Gao Xu, Yongming Zhang, Qixing Zhang et al.

In this paper, a deep domain adaptation based method for video smoke detection is proposed to extract a powerful feature representation of smoke. Due to the smoke image samples limited in scale and diversity for deep CNN training, we systematically produced adequate synthetic smoke images with a wide variation in the smoke shape, background and lighting conditions. Considering that the appearance gap (dataset bias) between synthetic and real smoke images degrades significantly the performance of the trained model on the test set composed fully of real images, we build deep architectures based on domain adaptation to confuse the distributions of features extracted from synthetic and real smoke images. This approach expands the domain-invariant feature space for smoke image samples. With their approximate feature distribution off non-smoke images, the recognition rate of the trained model is improved significantly compared to the model trained directly on mixed dataset of synthetic and real images. Experimentally, several deep architectures with different design choices are applied to the smoke detector. The ultimate framework can get a satisfactory result on the test set. We believe that our approach is a start in the direction of utilizing deep neural networks enhanced with synthetic smoke images for video smoke detection.