Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting with Contextual Modeling: Facilitating Holistic Understanding of Crowd ScenesYifei Qian, Xiaopeng Hong, Zhongliang Guo et al.
To alleviate the heavy annotation burden for training a reliable crowd counting model and thus make the model more practicable and accurate by being able to benefit from more data, this paper presents a new semi-supervised method based on the mean teacher framework. When there is a scarcity of labeled data available, the model is prone to overfit local patches. Within such contexts, the conventional approach of solely improving the accuracy of local patch predictions through unlabeled data proves inadequate. Consequently, we propose a more nuanced approach: fostering the model's intrinsic 'subitizing' capability. This ability allows the model to accurately estimate the count in regions by leveraging its understanding of the crowd scenes, mirroring the human cognitive process. To achieve this goal, we apply masking on unlabeled data, guiding the model to make predictions for these masked patches based on the holistic cues. Furthermore, to help with feature learning, herein we incorporate a fine-grained density classification task. Our method is general and applicable to most existing crowd counting methods as it doesn't have strict structural or loss constraints. In addition, we observe that the model trained with our framework exhibits a 'subitizing'-like behavior. It accurately predicts low-density regions with only a 'glance', while incorporating local details to predict high-density regions. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous approaches by a large margin on challenging benchmarks such as ShanghaiTech A and UCF-QNRF. The code is available at: https://github.com/cha15yq/MRC-Crowd.
1.5CVAug 23, 2023
Multimodal Latent Emotion Recognition from Micro-expression and Physiological SignalsLiangfei Zhang, Yifei Qian, Ognjen Arandjelovic et al.
This paper discusses the benefits of incorporating multimodal data for improving latent emotion recognition accuracy, focusing on micro-expression (ME) and physiological signals (PS). The proposed approach presents a novel multimodal learning framework that combines ME and PS, including a 1D separable and mixable depthwise inception network, a standardised normal distribution weighted feature fusion method, and depth/physiology guided attention modules for multimodal learning. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the benchmark method, with the weighted fusion method and guided attention modules both contributing to enhanced performance.
Unleashing Infinite Motion: Scaling Expressive Quadrupedal Motion via Generative Video PriorsYouzhi Liu, Li Gao, Yifei Qian et al.
Quadruped robots have achieved remarkable locomotion, yet their behavioral repertoire remains confined to a few gaits--far from the expressive, companion-like presence long envisioned for them. Attempts to import the humanoid recipe of large-scale motion data have inherited one tacit assumption: that robot motion must first pass through an animal body, making data collection dependent on cooperative animals, reconstruction fragile across species, and retargeting ill-posed across incompatible morphologies. We propose Uni-Mo, a fully automated pipeline that removes the animal from the loop by reframing data scarcity as a generation problem: an LLM proposes motion prompts, a video diffusion model synthesizes the corresponding robot behaviors, and the generated videos are lifted into 3D reference trajectories used to train tracking policies deployed on a real Unitree Go2. To make naively-drifting generations reliably extractable, we introduce an Identity Consistency Loss that enforces appearance coherence across frames. We release Quad-Imaginarium at https://github.com/GaoLii/Quad-Imaginarium.git, the resulting open-source dataset of 7,488 language-annotated quadruped motions (18.5 hours) spanning acrobatic and performative behaviors. We validate 392 randomly sampled motions on a real Unitree Go2 with a 96.7% deployment success rate, complemented by a 97.6% success rate across the full dataset in simulation.
11.8CVAug 3, 2025
Beyond Vulnerabilities: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks as Both Threats and Defenses in Computer Vision SystemsZhongliang Guo, Yifei Qian, Yanli Li et al.
Adversarial attacks against computer vision systems have emerged as a critical research area that challenges the fundamental assumptions about neural network robustness and security. This comprehensive survey examines the evolving landscape of adversarial techniques, revealing their dual nature as both sophisticated security threats and valuable defensive tools. We provide a systematic analysis of adversarial attack methodologies across three primary domains: pixel-space attacks, physically realizable attacks, and latent-space attacks. Our investigation traces the technical evolution from early gradient-based methods such as FGSM and PGD to sophisticated optimization techniques incorporating momentum, adaptive step sizes, and advanced transferability mechanisms. We examine how physically realizable attacks have successfully bridged the gap between digital vulnerabilities and real-world threats through adversarial patches, 3D textures, and dynamic optical perturbations. Additionally, we explore the emergence of latent-space attacks that leverage semantic structure in internal representations to create more transferable and meaningful adversarial examples. Beyond traditional offensive applications, we investigate the constructive use of adversarial techniques for vulnerability assessment in biometric authentication systems and protection against malicious generative models. Our analysis reveals critical research gaps, particularly in neural style transfer protection and computational efficiency requirements. This survey contributes a comprehensive taxonomy, evolution analysis, and identification of future research directions, aiming to advance understanding of adversarial vulnerabilities and inform the development of more robust and trustworthy computer vision systems.