Sipeng Zhang

Jing Liu, Donglai Wei, Yang Liu et al.

Text-Based Person Search (TBPS) aims to retrieve target person images from a large-scale gallery using natural language descriptions, posing fundamental challenges in cross-modal representation learning. Existing methods often struggle to bridge the semantic gap between heterogeneous modalities while capturing fine-grained correspondences essential for discriminating visually similar individuals. To address these challenges, we propose Sew Calibration and Masked Modeling (SCMM), a unified framework that calibrates cross-modal representations through complementary learning mechanisms. Notably, SCMM introduces two novel components: a sew calibration loss that dynamically aligns image-text features using quality-guided adaptive margins based on textual information density, and a masked caption modeling loss that establishes fine-grained cross-modal correspondences through transformer-based masked prediction. Additionally, the sew calibration mechanism implements bidirectional constraints to effectively compress same-identity features in the shared embedding space, while the masked modeling component leverages a cross-modal decoder to learn word-level visual-textual relationships, enabling discrimination of subtle attribute differences. Our dual-encoder architecture achieves an effective balance between representation capability and computational efficiency by employing a training-only decoder design. Extensive experiments on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReID benchmarks demonstrate that SCMM achieves state-of-the-art performance with Rank1 accuracies of 73.81%, 64.25%, and 57.35%, respectively. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each proposed component.

Sipeng Zhang, Longfei Yun, Zilong Wang et al.

At the core of Deep Research is knowledge mining, the task of extracting structured information from massive unstructured text in response to user instructions. Large language models (LLMs) excel at interpreting such instructions but are prohibitively expensive to deploy at scale, while traditional pipelines of classifiers and extractors remain efficient yet brittle and unable to generalize to new tasks. We introduce Falconer, a collaborative framework that combines the agentic reasoning of LLMs with lightweight proxy models for scalable knowledge mining. In Falconer, LLMs act as planners, decomposing user instructions into executable pipelines, and as annotators, generating supervision to train small proxies. The framework unifies classification and extraction into two atomic operations, get label and get span, enabling a single instruction-following model to replace multiple task-specific components. To evaluate the consistency between proxy models incubated by Falconer and annotations provided by humans and large models, we construct new benchmarks covering both planning and end-to-end execution. Experiments show that Falconer closely matches state-of-the-art LLMs in instruction-following accuracy while reducing inference cost by up to 90% and accelerating large-scale knowledge mining by more than 20x, offering an efficient and scalable foundation for Deep Research.