Miao Yang

Yang Miao, Jan-Nico Zaech, Xi Wang et al.

We propose LangHOPS, the first Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) based framework for open-vocabulary object-part instance segmentation. Given an image, LangHOPS can jointly detect and segment hierarchical object and part instances from open-vocabulary candidate categories. Unlike prior approaches that rely on heuristic or learnable visual grouping, our approach grounds object-part hierarchies in language space. It integrates the MLLM into the object-part parsing pipeline to leverage its rich knowledge and reasoning capabilities, and link multi-granularity concepts within the hierarchies. We evaluate LangHOPS across multiple challenging scenarios, including in-domain and cross-dataset object-part instance segmentation, and zero-shot semantic segmentation. LangHOPS achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing previous methods by 5.5% Average Precision (AP) (in-domain) and 4.8% (cross-dataset) on the PartImageNet dataset and by 2.5% mIOU on unseen object parts in ADE20K (zero-shot). Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the language-grounded hierarchy and MLLM driven part query refinement strategy. The code will be released here.

Deheng Zhang, Yuqian Fu, Runyi Yang et al.

Most existing benchmarks for egocentric vision understanding focus primarily on daytime scenarios, overlooking the low-light conditions that are inevitable in real-world applications. To investigate this gap, we present EgoNight, the first comprehensive benchmark for nighttime egocentric vision, with visual question answering (VQA) as the core task. A key feature of EgoNight is the introduction of day-night aligned videos, which enhance night annotation quality using the daytime data and reveal clear performance gaps between lighting conditions. To achieve this, we collect both synthetic videos rendered by Blender and real-world recordings, ensuring that scenes and actions are visually and temporally aligned. Leveraging these paired videos, we construct EgoNight-VQA, supported by a novel day-augmented night auto-labeling engine and refinement through extensive human verification. Each QA pair is double-checked by annotators for reliability. In total, EgoNight-VQA contains 3658 QA pairs across 90 videos, spanning 12 diverse QA types, with more than 300 hours of human work. Evaluations of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveal substantial performance drops when transferring from day to night, underscoring the challenges of reasoning under low-light conditions. Beyond VQA, EgoNight also introduces two auxiliary tasks, day-night correspondence retrieval and egocentric depth estimation at night, that further explore the boundaries of existing models. We believe EgoNight-VQA provides a strong foundation for advancing application-driven egocentric vision research and for developing models that generalize across illumination domains. All the data and code will be made available upon acceptance.

Miao Yang, Hongbin Zhu, Hua Qian et al.

Comparing to cloud computing, fog computing performs computation and services at the edge of networks, thus relieving the computation burden of the data center and reducing the task latency of end devices. Computation latency is a crucial performance metric in fog computing, especially for real-time applications. In this paper, we study a peer computation offloading problem for a fog network with unknown dynamics. In this scenario, each fog node (FN) can offload their computation tasks to neighboring FNs in a time slot manner. The offloading latency, however, could not be fed back to the task dispatcher instantaneously due to the uncertainty of the processing time in peer FNs. Besides, peer competition occurs when different FNs offload tasks to one FN at the same time. To tackle the above difficulties, we model the computation offloading problem as a sequential FN selection problem with delayed information feedback. Using adversarial multi-arm bandit framework, we construct an online learning policy to deal with delayed information feedback. Different contention resolution approaches are considered to resolve peer competition. Performance analysis shows that the regret of the proposed algorithm, or the performance loss with suboptimal FN selections, achieves a sub-linear order, suggesting an optimal FN selection policy. In addition, we prove that the proposed strategy can result in a Nash equilibrium (NE) with all FNs playing the same policy. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed policy.

Miao Yang, Akitanoshou Wong, Hongbin Zhu et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising technique that enables a large amount of edge computing devices to collaboratively train a global learning model. Due to privacy concerns, the raw data on devices could not be available for centralized server. Constrained by the spectrum limitation and computation capacity, only a subset of devices can be engaged to train and transmit the trained model to centralized server for aggregation. Since the local data distribution varies among all devices, class imbalance problem arises along with the unfavorable client selection, resulting in a slow converge rate of the global model. In this paper, an estimation scheme is designed to reveal the class distribution without the awareness of raw data. Based on the scheme, a device selection algorithm towards minimal class imbalance is proposed, thus can improve the convergence performance of the global model. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.