Wei Shen

Rui Zheng, Shihan Dou, Songyang Gao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have formulated a blueprint for the advancement of artificial general intelligence. Its primary objective is to function as a human-centric (helpful, honest, and harmless) assistant. Alignment with humans assumes paramount significance, and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) emerges as the pivotal technological paradigm underpinning this pursuit. Current technical routes usually include \textbf{reward models} to measure human preferences, \textbf{Proximal Policy Optimization} (PPO) to optimize policy model outputs, and \textbf{process supervision} to improve step-by-step reasoning capabilities. However, due to the challenges of reward design, environment interaction, and agent training, coupled with huge trial and error cost of large language models, there is a significant barrier for AI researchers to motivate the development of technical alignment and safe landing of LLMs. The stable training of RLHF has still been a puzzle. In the first report, we dissect the framework of RLHF, re-evaluate the inner workings of PPO, and explore how the parts comprising PPO algorithms impact policy agent training. We identify policy constraints being the key factor for the effective implementation of the PPO algorithm. Therefore, we explore the PPO-max, an advanced version of PPO algorithm, to efficiently improve the training stability of the policy model. Based on our main results, we perform a comprehensive analysis of RLHF abilities compared with SFT models and ChatGPT. The absence of open-source implementations has posed significant challenges to the investigation of LLMs alignment. Therefore, we are eager to release technical reports, reward models and PPO codes, aiming to make modest contributions to the advancement of LLMs.

Jiazhong Cen, Jiemin Fang, Zanwei Zhou et al.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) emerges as a powerful vision foundation model to generate high-quality 2D segmentation results. This paper aims to generalize SAM to segment 3D objects. Rather than replicating the data acquisition and annotation procedure which is costly in 3D, we design an efficient solution, leveraging the radiance field as a cheap and off-the-shelf prior that connects multi-view 2D images to the 3D space. We refer to the proposed solution as SA3D, short for Segment Anything in 3D. With SA3D, the user is only required to provide a 2D segmentation prompt (e.g., rough points) for the target object in a single view, which is used to generate its corresponding 2D mask with SAM. Next, SA3D alternately performs mask inverse rendering and cross-view self-prompting across various views to iteratively refine the 3D mask of the target object. For one view, mask inverse rendering projects the 2D mask obtained by SAM into the 3D space with guidance of the density distribution learned by the radiance field for 3D mask refinement; Then, cross-view self-prompting extracts reliable prompts automatically as the input to SAM from the rendered 2D mask of the inaccurate 3D mask for a new view. We show in experiments that SA3D adapts to various scenes and achieves 3D segmentation within seconds. Our research reveals a potential methodology to lift the ability of a 2D segmentation model to 3D. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jumpat/SegmentAnythingin3D.

Yuzhi Zhao, Lai-Man Po, Xuehui Wang et al.

The appearances of children are inherited from their parents, which makes it feasible to predict them. Predicting realistic children's faces may help settle many social problems, such as age-invariant face recognition, kinship verification, and missing child identification. It can be regarded as an image-to-image translation task. Existing approaches usually assume domain information in the image-to-image translation can be interpreted by "style", i.e., the separation of image content and style. However, such separation is improper for the child face prediction, because the facial contours between children and parents are not the same. To address this issue, we propose a new disentangled learning strategy for children's face prediction. We assume that children's faces are determined by genetic factors (compact family features, e.g., face contour), external factors (facial attributes irrelevant to prediction, such as moustaches and glasses), and variety factors (individual properties for each child). On this basis, we formulate predictions as a mapping from parents' genetic factors to children's genetic factors, and disentangle them from external and variety factors. In order to obtain accurate genetic factors and perform the mapping, we propose a ChildPredictor framework. It transfers human faces to genetic factors by encoders and back by generators. Then, it learns the relationship between the genetic factors of parents and children through a mapping function. To ensure the generated faces are realistic, we collect a large Family Face Database to train ChildPredictor and evaluate it on the FF-Database validation set. Experimental results demonstrate that ChildPredictor is superior to other well-known image-to-image translation methods in predicting realistic and diverse child faces. Implementation codes can be found at https://github.com/zhaoyuzhi/ChildPredictor.

Duowen Chen, Yunhao Bai, Wei Shen et al.

We propose a novel teacher-student model for semi-supervised multi-organ segmentation. In teacher-student model, data augmentation is usually adopted on unlabeled data to regularize the consistent training between teacher and student. We start from a key perspective that fixed relative locations and variable sizes of different organs can provide distribution information where a multi-organ CT scan is drawn. Thus, we treat the prior anatomy as a strong tool to guide the data augmentation and reduce the mismatch between labeled and unlabeled images for semi-supervised learning. More specifically, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on partition-and-recovery N$^3$ cubes cross- and within- labeled and unlabeled images. Our strategy encourages unlabeled images to learn organ semantics in relative locations from the labeled images (cross-branch) and enhances the learning ability for small organs (within-branch). For within-branch, we further propose to refine the quality of pseudo labels by blending the learned representations from small cubes to incorporate local attributes. Our method is termed as MagicNet, since it treats the CT volume as a magic-cube and N$^3$-cube partition-and-recovery process matches with the rule of playing a magic-cube. Extensive experiments on two public CT multi-organ datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MagicNet, and noticeably outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation approaches, with +7% DSC improvement on MACT dataset with 10% labeled images. Code is available at https://github.com/DeepMed-Lab-ECNU/MagicNet.

ByteDance Seed, Jiaze Chen, Tiantian Fan et al. · bytedance

We introduce Seed1.5-Thinking, capable of reasoning through thinking before responding, resulting in improved performance on a wide range of benchmarks. Seed1.5-Thinking achieves 86.7 on AIME 2024, 55.0 on Codeforces and 77.3 on GPQA, demonstrating excellent reasoning abilities in STEM and coding. Beyond reasoning tasks, the method demonstrates notable generalization across diverse domains. For instance, it surpasses DeepSeek R1 by 8% in win rate on non-reasoning tasks, indicating its broader applicability. Compared to other state-of-the-art reasoning models, Seed1.5-Thinking is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with a relatively small size, featuring 20B activated and 200B total parameters. As part of our effort to assess generalized reasoning, we develop two internal benchmarks, BeyondAIME and Codeforces, both of which will be publicly released to support future research. Model trial link: https://www.volcengine.com/experience/ark.

Huiyu Duan, Wei Shen, Xiongkuo Min et al.

With the rapid development of multimedia technology, Augmented Reality (AR) has become a promising next-generation mobile platform. The primary theory underlying AR is human visual confusion, which allows users to perceive the real-world scenes and augmented contents (virtual-world scenes) simultaneously by superimposing them together. To achieve good Quality of Experience (QoE), it is important to understand the interaction between two scenarios, and harmoniously display AR contents. However, studies on how this superimposition will influence the human visual attention are lacking. Therefore, in this paper, we mainly analyze the interaction effect between background (BG) scenes and AR contents, and study the saliency prediction problem in AR. Specifically, we first construct a Saliency in AR Dataset (SARD), which contains 450 BG images, 450 AR images, as well as 1350 superimposed images generated by superimposing BG and AR images in pair with three mixing levels. A large-scale eye-tracking experiment among 60 subjects is conducted to collect eye movement data. To better predict the saliency in AR, we propose a vector quantized saliency prediction method and generalize it for AR saliency prediction. For comparison, three benchmark methods are proposed and evaluated together with our proposed method on our SARD. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method on both of the common saliency prediction problem and the AR saliency prediction problem over benchmark methods. Our dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/DuanHuiyu/ARSaliency.

Yunhao Li, Zhenbo Yu, Yucheng Zhu et al.

Human motion synthesis is a long-standing problem with various applications in digital twins and the Metaverse. However, modern deep learning based motion synthesis approaches barely consider the physical plausibility of synthesized motions and consequently they usually produce unrealistic human motions. In order to solve this problem, we propose a system ``Skeleton2Humanoid'' which performs physics-oriented motion correction at test time by regularizing synthesized skeleton motions in a physics simulator. Concretely, our system consists of three sequential stages: (I) test time motion synthesis network adaptation, (II) skeleton to humanoid matching and (III) motion imitation based on reinforcement learning (RL). Stage I introduces a test time adaptation strategy, which improves the physical plausibility of synthesized human skeleton motions by optimizing skeleton joint locations. Stage II performs an analytical inverse kinematics strategy, which converts the optimized human skeleton motions to humanoid robot motions in a physics simulator, then the converted humanoid robot motions can be served as reference motions for the RL policy to imitate. Stage III introduces a curriculum residual force control policy, which drives the humanoid robot to mimic complex converted reference motions in accordance with the physical law. We verify our system on a typical human motion synthesis task, motion-in-betweening. Experiments on the challenging LaFAN1 dataset show our system can outperform prior methods significantly in terms of both physical plausibility and accuracy. Code will be released for research purposes at: https://github.com/michaelliyunhao/Skeleton2Humanoid

Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Vladimir Somers et al. · pku

The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet.

Chuheng Zhang, Wei Shen, Li Zhao et al. · tsinghua

While direct policy optimization methods exist, pioneering LLMs are fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to generate better responses under the supervision of a reward model learned from preference data. One major challenge of RLHF is the inaccuracy of the intermediate reward model, especially in the tasks that requires complex reasoning for the reward model to score a response. We find that the reliability of the reward model varies across responses assigned with different rewards. This motivates us to filter the samples whose rewards may be unreliable to improve the signal-to-noise ratio during policy learning, resulting in Policy Filtration for Proximal Policy Optimization (PF-PPO). To choose a proper policy filtering strategy, we use the coefficient of determination (R2) between the rewards and actual scores on filtered samples as the metrics to help us find promising strategies since it measures how well the rewards filtered by PF-PPO indicate real performance. We provide extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of PF-PPO in code generation and math reasoning tasks. In code generation, PF-PPO achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 7-billion-parameter models on HumanEval (+7.9%), MBPP (+0.7%), and LeetCode Contest (+10.0%) which is a more challenging benchmark created by us. In math reasoning, PF-PPO yields performance increase using different reward models and benchmarks (Ape210K and CMATH). Code is available on https://github.com/DtYXs/verl/tree/pf-ppo.

Zhiyuan Hu, Yuliang Liu, Jinman Zhao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in handling long-context tasks because of their limited effective context window size during pretraining, which restricts their ability to generalize over extended sequences. Meanwhile, extending the context window in LLMs through post-pretraining is highly resource-intensive. To address this, we introduce LongRecipe, an efficient training strategy for extending the context window of LLMs, including impactful token analysis, position index transformation, and training optimization strategies. It simulates long-sequence inputs while maintaining training efficiency and significantly improves the model's understanding of long-range dependencies. Experiments on three types of LLMs show that LongRecipe can utilize long sequences while requiring only 30% of the target context window size, and reduces computational training resource over 85% compared to full sequence training. Furthermore, LongRecipe also preserves the original LLM's capabilities in general tasks. Ultimately, we can extend the effective context window of open-source LLMs from 8k to 128k, achieving performance close to GPT-4 with just one day of dedicated training using a single GPU with 80G memory. Our code is released at https://github.com/zhiyuanhubj/LongRecipe.

Yuanying Cai, Chuheng Zhang, Li Zhao et al. · tsinghua

We consider an offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting where the agent need to learn from a dataset collected by rolling out multiple behavior policies. There are two challenges for this setting: 1) The optimal trade-off between optimizing the RL signal and the behavior cloning (BC) signal changes on different states due to the variation of the action coverage induced by different behavior policies. Previous methods fail to handle this by only controlling the global trade-off. 2) For a given state, the action distribution generated by different behavior policies may have multiple modes. The BC regularizers in many previous methods are mean-seeking, resulting in policies that select out-of-distribution (OOD) actions in the middle of the modes. In this paper, we address both challenges by using adaptively weighted reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the BC regularizer based on the TD3 algorithm. Our method not only trades off the RL and BC signals with per-state weights (i.e., strong BC regularization on the states with narrow action coverage, and vice versa) but also avoids selecting OOD actions thanks to the mode-seeking property of reverse KL. Empirically, our algorithm can outperform existing offline RL algorithms in the MuJoCo locomotion tasks with the standard D4RL datasets as well as the mixed datasets that combine the standard datasets.

Li Lyna Zhang, Youkow Homma, Yujing Wang et al. · microsoft-research, pku

Ad relevance modeling plays a critical role in online advertising systems including Microsoft Bing. To leverage powerful transformers like BERT in this low-latency setting, many existing approaches perform ad-side computations offline. While efficient, these approaches are unable to serve cold start ads, resulting in poor relevance predictions for such ads. This work aims to design a new, low-latency BERT via structured pruning to empower real-time online inference for cold start ads relevance on a CPU platform. Our challenge is that previous methods typically prune all layers of the transformer to a high, uniform sparsity, thereby producing models which cannot achieve satisfactory inference speed with an acceptable accuracy. In this paper, we propose SwiftPruner - an efficient framework that leverages evolution-based search to automatically find the best-performing layer-wise sparse BERT model under the desired latency constraint. Different from existing evolution algorithms that conduct random mutations, we propose a reinforced mutator with a latency-aware multi-objective reward to conduct better mutations for efficiently searching the large space of layer-wise sparse models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently achieves higher ROC AUC and lower latency than the uniform sparse baseline and state-of-the-art search methods. Remarkably, under our latency requirement of 1900us on CPU, SwiftPruner achieves a 0.86% higher AUC than the state-of-the-art uniform sparse baseline for BERT-Mini on a large scale real-world dataset. Online A/B testing shows that our model also achieves a significant 11.7% cut in the ratio of defective cold start ads with satisfactory real-time serving latency.

Wei Shen, Zelin Peng, Xuehui Wang et al.

The rapid development of deep learning has made a great progress in image segmentation, one of the fundamental tasks of computer vision. However, the current segmentation algorithms mostly rely on the availability of pixel-level annotations, which are often expensive, tedious, and laborious. To alleviate this burden, the past years have witnessed an increasing attention in building label-efficient, deep-learning-based image segmentation algorithms. This paper offers a comprehensive review on label-efficient image segmentation methods. To this end, we first develop a taxonomy to organize these methods according to the supervision provided by different types of weak labels (including no supervision, inexact supervision, incomplete supervision and inaccurate supervision) and supplemented by the types of segmentation problems (including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation). Next, we summarize the existing label-efficient image segmentation methods from a unified perspective that discusses an important question: how to bridge the gap between weak supervision and dense prediction -- the current methods are mostly based on heuristic priors, such as cross-pixel similarity, cross-label constraint, cross-view consistency, and cross-image relation. Finally, we share our opinions about the future research directions for label-efficient deep image segmentation.

Feng Wang, Huiyu Wang, Chen Wei et al.

Recent advances in self-supervised contrastive learning yield good image-level representation, which favors classification tasks but usually neglects pixel-level detailed information, leading to unsatisfactory transfer performance to dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. In this work, we propose a pixel-wise contrastive learning method called CP2 (Copy-Paste Contrastive Pretraining), which facilitates both image- and pixel-level representation learning and therefore is more suitable for downstream dense prediction tasks. In detail, we copy-paste a random crop from an image (the foreground) onto different background images and pretrain a semantic segmentation model with the objective of 1) distinguishing the foreground pixels from the background pixels, and 2) identifying the composed images that share the same foreground.Experiments show the strong performance of CP2 in downstream semantic segmentation: By finetuning CP2 pretrained models on PASCAL VOC 2012, we obtain 78.6% mIoU with a ResNet-50 and 79.5% with a ViT-S.

Danyang Tu, Xiongkuo Min, Huiyu Duan et al.

In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient method for Human-Gaze-Target (HGT) detection, i.e., gaze following. Current approaches decouple the HGT detection task into separate branches of salient object detection and human gaze prediction, employing a two-stage framework where human head locations must first be detected and then be fed into the next gaze target prediction sub-network. In contrast, we redefine the HGT detection task as detecting human head locations and their gaze targets, simultaneously. By this way, our method, named Human-Gaze-Target detection TRansformer or HGTTR, streamlines the HGT detection pipeline by eliminating all other additional components. HGTTR reasons about the relations of salient objects and human gaze from the global image context. Moreover, unlike existing two-stage methods that require human head locations as input and can predict only one human's gaze target at a time, HGTTR can directly predict the locations of all people and their gaze targets at one time in an end-to-end manner. The effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method are verified with extensive experiments on the two standard benchmark datasets, GazeFollowing and VideoAttentionTarget. Without bells and whistles, HGTTR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by large margins (6.4 mAP gain on GazeFollowing and 10.3 mAP gain on VideoAttentionTarget) with a much simpler architecture.

Tongkun Guan, Wei Shen, Xue Yang et al.

When handling complicated text images (e.g., irregular structures, low resolution, heavy occlusion, and uneven illumination), existing supervised text recognition methods are data-hungry. Although these methods employ large-scale synthetic text images to reduce the dependence on annotated real images, the domain gap still limits the recognition performance. Therefore, exploring the robust text feature representations on unlabeled real images by self-supervised learning is a good solution. However, existing self-supervised text recognition methods conduct sequence-to-sequence representation learning by roughly splitting the visual features along the horizontal axis, which limits the flexibility of the augmentations, as large geometric-based augmentations may lead to sequence-to-sequence feature inconsistency. Motivated by this, we propose a novel self-supervised Character-to-Character Distillation method, CCD, which enables versatile augmentations to facilitate general text representation learning. Specifically, we delineate the character structures of unlabeled real images by designing a self-supervised character segmentation module. Following this, CCD easily enriches the diversity of local characters while keeping their pairwise alignment under flexible augmentations, using the transformation matrix between two augmented views from images. Experiments demonstrate that CCD achieves state-of-the-art results, with average performance gains of 1.38% in text recognition, 1.7% in text segmentation, 0.24 dB (PSNR) and 0.0321 (SSIM) in text super-resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/TongkunGuan/CCD.

Danyang Tu, Xiongkuo Min, Huiyu Duan et al.

This paper presents a new vision Transformer, named Iwin Transformer, which is specifically designed for human-object interaction (HOI) detection, a detailed scene understanding task involving a sequential process of human/object detection and interaction recognition. Iwin Transformer is a hierarchical Transformer which progressively performs token representation learning and token agglomeration within irregular windows. The irregular windows, achieved by augmenting regular grid locations with learned offsets, 1) eliminate redundancy in token representation learning, which leads to efficient human/object detection, and 2) enable the agglomerated tokens to align with humans/objects with different shapes, which facilitates the acquisition of highly-abstracted visual semantics for interaction recognition. The effectiveness and efficiency of Iwin Transformer are verified on the two standard HOI detection benchmark datasets, HICO-DET and V-COCO. Results show our method outperforms existing Transformers-based methods by large margins (3.7 mAP gain on HICO-DET and 2.0 mAP gain on V-COCO) with fewer training epochs ($0.5 \times$).

Zelin Peng, Guanchun Wang, Lingxi Xie et al.

Seed area generation is usually the starting point of weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Computing the Class Activation Map (CAM) from a multi-label classification network is the de facto paradigm for seed area generation, but CAMs generated from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers are prone to be under- and over-activated, respectively, which makes the strategies to refine CAMs for CNNs usually inappropriate for Transformers, and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a Unified optimization paradigm for Seed Area GEneration (USAGE) for both types of networks, in which the objective function to be optimized consists of two terms: One is a generation loss, which controls the shape of seed areas by a temperature parameter following a deterministic principle for different types of networks; The other is a regularization loss, which ensures the consistency between the seed areas that are generated by self-adaptive network adjustment from different views, to overturn false activation in seed areas. Experimental results show that USAGE consistently improves seed area generation for both CNNs and Transformers by large margins, e.g., outperforming state-of-the-art methods by a mIoU of 4.1% on PASCAL VOC. Moreover, based on the USAGE-generated seed areas on Transformers, we achieve state-of-the-art WSSS results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO.

Danyang Tu, Wei Sun, Xiongkuo Min et al.

We present a novel vision Transformer, named TUTOR, which is able to learn tubelet tokens, served as highly-abstracted spatiotemporal representations, for video-based human-object interaction (V-HOI) detection. The tubelet tokens structurize videos by agglomerating and linking semantically-related patch tokens along spatial and temporal domains, which enjoy two benefits: 1) Compactness: each tubelet token is learned by a selective attention mechanism to reduce redundant spatial dependencies from others; 2) Expressiveness: each tubelet token is enabled to align with a semantic instance, i.e., an object or a human, across frames, thanks to agglomeration and linking. The effectiveness and efficiency of TUTOR are verified by extensive experiments. Results shows our method outperforms existing works by large margins, with a relative mAP gain of $16.14\%$ on VidHOI and a 2 points gain on CAD-120 as well as a $4 \times$ speedup.

Wei Shen, Rui Zheng, Wenyu Zhan et al.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback serves as a crucial bridge, aligning large language models with human and societal values. This alignment requires a vast corpus of human feedback to learn a reward model, which is subsequently used to finetune language models. However, we have identified that the reward model often finds shortcuts to bypass its intended objectives, misleadingly assuming that humans prefer longer responses. The emergence of length bias often induces the model to favor longer outputs, yet it doesn't equate to an increase in helpful information within these outputs. In this paper, we propose an innovative solution, applying the Product-of-Experts (PoE) technique to separate reward modeling from the influence of sequence length. In our framework, the main expert concentrates on understanding human intents, while the biased expert targets the identification and capture of length bias. To further enhance the learning of bias, we introduce perturbations into the bias-focused expert, disrupting the flow of semantic information. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach, indicating that language model performance is improved, irrespective of sequence length.

Zelin Peng, Zhengqin Xu, Zhilin Zeng et al.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is an effective methodology to unleash the potential of large foundation models in novel scenarios with limited training data. In the computer vision community, PEFT has shown effectiveness in image classification, but little research has studied its ability for image segmentation. Fine-tuning segmentation models usually require a heavier adjustment of parameters to align the proper projection directions in the parameter space for new scenarios. This raises a challenge to existing PEFT algorithms, as they often inject a limited number of individual parameters into each block, which prevents substantial adjustment of the projection direction of the parameter space due to the limitation of Hidden Markov Chain along blocks. In this paper, we equip PEFT with a cross-block orchestration mechanism to enable the adaptation of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to various downstream scenarios. We introduce a novel inter-block communication module, which integrates a learnable relation matrix to facilitate communication among different coefficient sets of each PEFT block's parameter space. Moreover, we propose an intra-block enhancement module, which introduces a linear projection head whose weights are generated from a hyper-complex layer, further enhancing the impact of the adjustment of projection directions on the entire parameter space. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently improves the segmentation performance significantly on novel scenarios with only around 1K additional parameters.

Tongkun Guan, Chengyu Lin, Wei Shen et al.

Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) has wide applications in human-machine interaction scenarios, such as digitized education and automated offices. Recently, sequence-based models with encoder-decoder architectures have been commonly adopted to address this task by directly predicting LaTeX sequences of expression images. However, these methods only implicitly learn the syntax rules provided by LaTeX, which may fail to describe the position and hierarchical relationship between symbols due to complex structural relations and diverse handwriting styles. To overcome this challenge, we propose a position forest transformer (PosFormer) for HMER, which jointly optimizes two tasks: expression recognition and position recognition, to explicitly enable position-aware symbol feature representation learning. Specifically, we first design a position forest that models the mathematical expression as a forest structure and parses the relative position relationships between symbols. Without requiring extra annotations, each symbol is assigned a position identifier in the forest to denote its relative spatial position. Second, we propose an implicit attention correction module to accurately capture attention for HMER in the sequence-based decoder architecture. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of PosFormer, which consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods 2.03%/1.22%/2.00%, 1.83%, and 4.62% gains on the single-line CROHME 2014/2016/2019, multi-line M2E, and complex MNE datasets, respectively, with no additional latency or computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/SJTU-DeepVisionLab/PosFormer.

Xuehui Wang, Kai Zhao, Ruixin Zhang et al.

Partially-supervised instance segmentation is a task which requests segmenting objects from novel unseen categories via learning on limited seen categories with annotated masks thus eliminating demands of heavy annotation burden. The key to addressing this task is to build an effective class-agnostic mask segmentation model. Unlike previous methods that learn such models only on seen categories, in this paper, we propose a new method, named ContrastMask, which learns a mask segmentation model on both seen and unseen categories under a unified pixel-level contrastive learning framework. In this framework, annotated masks of seen categories and pseudo masks of unseen categories serve as a prior for contrastive learning, where features from the mask regions (foreground) are pulled together, and are contrasted against those from the background, and vice versa. Through this framework, feature discrimination between foreground and background is largely improved, facilitating learning of the class-agnostic mask segmentation model. Exhaustive experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method, which outperforms previous state-of-the-arts.

Yuan Yao, Fengze Liu, Zongwei Zhou et al.

Shape information is a strong and valuable prior in segmenting organs in medical images. However, most current deep learning based segmentation algorithms have not taken shape information into consideration, which can lead to bias towards texture. We aim at modeling shape explicitly and using it to help medical image segmentation. Previous methods proposed Variational Autoencoder (VAE) based models to learn the distribution of shape for a particular organ and used it to automatically evaluate the quality of a segmentation prediction by fitting it into the learned shape distribution. Based on which we aim at incorporating VAE into current segmentation pipelines. Specifically, we propose a new unsupervised domain adaptation pipeline based on a pseudo loss and a VAE reconstruction loss under a teacher-student learning paradigm. Both losses are optimized simultaneously and, in return, boost the segmentation task performance. Extensive experiments on three public Pancreas segmentation datasets as well as two in-house Pancreas segmentation datasets show consistent improvements with at least 2.8 points gain in the Dice score, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in challenging unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios for medical image segmentation. We hope this work will advance shape analysis and geometric learning in medical imaging.

Yinan Liu, Wei Shen, Yuanfei Wang et al.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) methods extract a large number of OIE triples (noun phrase, relation phrase, noun phrase) from text, which compose large Open Knowledge Bases (OKBs). However, noun phrases (NPs) and relation phrases (RPs) in OKBs are not canonicalized and often appear in different paraphrased textual variants, which leads to redundant and ambiguous facts. To address this problem, there are two related tasks: OKB canonicalization (i.e., convert NPs and RPs to canonicalized form) and OKB linking (i.e., link NPs and RPs with their corresponding entities and relations in a curated Knowledge Base (e.g., DBPedia). These two tasks are tightly coupled, and one task can benefit significantly from the other. However, they have been studied in isolation so far. In this paper, we explore the task of joint OKB canonicalization and linking for the first time, and propose a novel framework JOCL based on factor graph model to make them reinforce each other. JOCL is flexible enough to combine different signals from both tasks, and able to extend to fit any new signals. A thorough experimental study over two large scale OIE triple data sets shows that our framework outperforms all the baseline methods for the task of OKB canonicalization (OKB linking) in terms of average F1 (accuracy).

Huiyu Duan, Xiongkuo Min, Sijing Wu et al.

Image processing, including image restoration, image enhancement, etc., involves generating a high-quality clean image from a degraded input. Deep learning-based methods have shown superior performance for various image processing tasks in terms of single-task conditions. However, they require to train separate models for different degradations and levels, which limits the generalization abilities of these models and restricts their applications in real-world. In this paper, we propose a text-induced unified image processor for low-level vision tasks, termed UniProcessor, which can effectively process various degradation types and levels, and support multimodal control. Specifically, our UniProcessor encodes degradation-specific information with the subject prompt and process degradations with the manipulation prompt. These context control features are injected into the UniProcessor backbone via cross-attention to control the processing procedure. For automatic subject-prompt generation, we further build a vision-language model for general-purpose low-level degradation perception via instruction tuning techniques. Our UniProcessor covers 30 degradation types, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our UniProcessor can well process these degradations without additional training or tuning and outperforms other competing methods. Moreover, with the help of degradation-aware context control, our UniProcessor first shows the ability to individually handle a single distortion in an image with multiple degradations.

Rui Zheng, Wei Shen, Yuan Hua et al.

The success of AI assistants based on language models (LLMs) hinges crucially on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which enables the generation of responses more aligned with human preferences. As universal AI assistants, there's a growing expectation for them to perform consistently across various domains. However, previous work shows that Reinforcement Learning (RL) often exploits shortcuts to attain high rewards and overlooks challenging samples. This focus on quick reward gains undermines both the stability in training and the model's ability to generalize to new, unseen data. In this work, we propose a novel approach that can learn a consistent policy via RL across various data groups or domains. Given the challenges associated with acquiring group annotations, our method automatically classifies data into different groups, deliberately maximizing performance variance. Then, we optimize the policy to perform well on challenging groups. Lastly, leveraging the established groups, our approach adaptively adjusts the exploration space, allocating more learning capacity to more challenging data and preventing the model from over-optimizing on simpler data. Experimental results indicate that our approach significantly enhances training stability and model generalization.

Huiyu Duan, Wei Shen, Xiongkuo Min et al.

Transformers have shown significant effectiveness for various vision tasks including both high-level vision and low-level vision. Recently, masked autoencoders (MAE) for feature pre-training have further unleashed the potential of Transformers, leading to state-of-the-art performances on various high-level vision tasks. However, the significance of MAE pre-training on low-level vision tasks has not been sufficiently explored. In this paper, we show that masked autoencoders are also scalable self-supervised learners for image processing tasks. We first present an efficient Transformer model considering both channel attention and shifted-window-based self-attention termed CSformer. Then we develop an effective MAE architecture for image processing (MAEIP) tasks. Extensive experimental results show that with the help of MAEIP pre-training, our proposed CSformer achieves state-of-the-art performance on various image processing tasks, including Gaussian denoising, real image denoising, single-image motion deblurring, defocus deblurring, and image deraining.

Xue Li, Wei Shen, Denis Charles · microsoft-research

In this paper, we propose TEDL, a two-stage learning approach to quantify uncertainty for deep learning models in classification tasks, inspired by our findings in experimenting with Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) method, a recently proposed uncertainty quantification approach based on the Dempster-Shafer theory. More specifically, we observe that EDL tends to yield inferior AUC compared with models learnt by cross-entropy loss and is highly sensitive in training. Such sensitivity is likely to cause unreliable uncertainty estimation, making it risky for practical applications. To mitigate both limitations, we propose a simple yet effective two-stage learning approach based on our analysis on the likely reasons causing such sensitivity, with the first stage learning from cross-entropy loss, followed by a second stage learning from EDL loss. We also re-formulate the EDL loss by replacing ReLU with ELU to avoid the Dying ReLU issue. Extensive experiments are carried out on varied sized training corpus collected from a large-scale commercial search engine, demonstrating that the proposed two-stage learning framework can increase AUC significantly and greatly improve training robustness.

Danyang Tu, Wei Shen, Wei Sun et al.

This paper proposes an efficient and effective method for joint gaze location detection (GL-D) and gaze object detection (GO-D), \emph{i.e.}, gaze following detection. Current approaches frame GL-D and GO-D as two separate tasks, employing a multi-stage framework where human head crops must first be detected and then be fed into a subsequent GL-D sub-network, which is further followed by an additional object detector for GO-D. In contrast, we reframe the gaze following detection task as detecting human head locations and their gaze followings simultaneously, aiming at jointly detect human gaze location and gaze object in a unified and single-stage pipeline. To this end, we propose GTR, short for \underline{G}aze following detection \underline{TR}ansformer, streamlining the gaze following detection pipeline by eliminating all additional components, leading to the first unified paradigm that unites GL-D and GO-D in a fully end-to-end manner. GTR enables an iterative interaction between holistic semantics and human head features through a hierarchical structure, inferring the relations of salient objects and human gaze from the global image context and resulting in an impressive accuracy. Concretely, GTR achieves a 12.1 mAP gain ($\mathbf{25.1}\%$) on GazeFollowing and a 18.2 mAP gain ($\mathbf{43.3\%}$) on VideoAttentionTarget for GL-D, as well as a 19 mAP improvement ($\mathbf{45.2\%}$) on GOO-Real for GO-D. Meanwhile, unlike existing systems detecting gaze following sequentially due to the need for a human head as input, GTR has the flexibility to comprehend any number of people's gaze followings simultaneously, resulting in high efficiency. Specifically, GTR introduces over a $\times 9$ improvement in FPS and the relative gap becomes more pronounced as the human number grows.

Yuhan Li, Jian Wu, Zhiwei Yu et al. · pku

Extracting key information from scientific papers has the potential to help researchers work more efficiently and accelerate the pace of scientific progress. Over the last few years, research on Scientific Information Extraction (SciIE) witnessed the release of several new systems and benchmarks. However, existing paper-focused datasets mostly focus only on specific parts of a manuscript (e.g., abstracts) and are single-modality (i.e., text- or table-only), due to complex processing and expensive annotations. Moreover, core information can be present in either text or tables or across both. To close this gap in data availability and enable cross-modality IE, while alleviating labeling costs, we propose a semi-supervised pipeline for annotating entities in text, as well as entities and relations in tables, in an iterative procedure. Based on this pipeline, we release novel resources for the scientific community, including a high-quality benchmark, a large-scale corpus, and a semi-supervised annotation pipeline. We further report the performance of state-of-the-art IE models on the proposed benchmark dataset, as a baseline. Lastly, we explore the potential capability of large language models such as ChatGPT for the current task. Our new dataset, results, and analysis validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our semi-supervised pipeline, and we discuss its remaining limitations.

Danyang Tu, Wei Sun, Guangtao Zhai et al.

We propose an agglomerative Transformer (AGER) that enables Transformer-based human-object interaction (HOI) detectors to flexibly exploit extra instance-level cues in a single-stage and end-to-end manner for the first time. AGER acquires instance tokens by dynamically clustering patch tokens and aligning cluster centers to instances with textual guidance, thus enjoying two benefits: 1) Integrality: each instance token is encouraged to contain all discriminative feature regions of an instance, which demonstrates a significant improvement in the extraction of different instance-level cues and subsequently leads to a new state-of-the-art performance of HOI detection with 36.75 mAP on HICO-Det. 2) Efficiency: the dynamical clustering mechanism allows AGER to generate instance tokens jointly with the feature learning of the Transformer encoder, eliminating the need of an additional object detector or instance decoder in prior methods, thus allowing the extraction of desirable extra cues for HOI detection in a single-stage and end-to-end pipeline. Concretely, AGER reduces GFLOPs by 8.5% and improves FPS by 36%, even compared to a vanilla DETR-like pipeline without extra cue extraction.

Chenwei Ran, Wei Shen, Jianbo Gao et al.

Entity linking (EL) is the process of linking entity mentions appearing in text with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. EL features of entities (e.g., prior probability, relatedness score, and entity embedding) are usually estimated based on Wikipedia. However, for newly emerging entities (EEs) which have just been discovered in news, they may still not be included in Wikipedia yet. As a consequence, it is unable to obtain required EL features for those EEs from Wikipedia and EL models will always fail to link ambiguous mentions with those EEs correctly as the absence of their EL features. To deal with this problem, in this paper we focus on a new task of learning EL features for emerging entities in a general way. We propose a novel approach called STAMO to learn high-quality EL features for EEs automatically, which needs just a small number of labeled documents for each EE collected from the Web, as it could further leverage the knowledge hidden in the unlabeled data. STAMO is mainly based on self-training, which makes it flexibly integrated with any EL feature or EL model, but also makes it easily suffer from the error reinforcement problem caused by the mislabeled data. Instead of some common self-training strategies that try to throw the mislabeled data away explicitly, we regard self-training as a multiple optimization process with respect to the EL features of EEs, and propose both intra-slot and inter-slot optimizations to alleviate the error reinforcement problem implicitly. We construct two EL datasets involving selected EEs to evaluate the quality of obtained EL features for EEs, and the experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms other baseline methods of learning EL features.

Yuanying Cai, Chuheng Zhang, Wei Shen et al. · tsinghua

Inspired by the recent success of sequence modeling in RL and the use of masked language model for pre-training, we propose a masked model for pre-training in RL, RePreM (Representation Pre-training with Masked Model), which trains the encoder combined with transformer blocks to predict the masked states or actions in a trajectory. RePreM is simple but effective compared to existing representation pre-training methods in RL. It avoids algorithmic sophistication (such as data augmentation or estimating multiple models) with sequence modeling and generates a representation that captures long-term dynamics well. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of RePreM in various tasks, including dynamic prediction, transfer learning, and sample-efficient RL with both value-based and actor-critic methods. Moreover, we show that RePreM scales well with dataset size, dataset quality, and the scale of the encoder, which indicates its potential towards big RL models.

Wei Shen, Xiaonan He, Chuheng Zhang et al. · tsinghua

Recently, spoken dialogue systems have been widely deployed in a variety of applications, serving a huge number of end-users. A common issue is that the errors resulting from noisy utterances, semantic misunderstandings, or lack of knowledge make it hard for a real system to respond properly, possibly leading to an unsatisfactory user experience. To avoid such a case, we consider a proactive interaction mechanism where the system predicts the user satisfaction with the candidate response before giving it to the user. If the user is not likely to be satisfied according to the prediction, the system will ask the user a suitable question to determine the real intent of the user instead of providing the response directly. With such an interaction with the user, the system can give a better response to the user. Previous models that predict the user satisfaction are not applicable to DuerOS which is a large-scale commercial dialogue system. They are based on hand-crafted features and thus can hardly learn the complex patterns lying behind millions of conversations and temporal dependency in multiple turns of the conversation. Moreover, they are trained and evaluated on the benchmark datasets with adequate labels, which are expensive to obtain in a commercial dialogue system. To face these challenges, we propose a pipeline to predict the user satisfaction to help DuerOS decide whether to ask for clarification in each turn. Specifically, we propose to first generate a large number of weak labels and then train a transformer-based model to predict the user satisfaction with these weak labels. Empirically, we deploy and evaluate our model on DuerOS, and observe a 19% relative improvement on the accuracy of user satisfaction prediction and 2.3% relative improvement on user experience.

Zelin Peng, Zhengqin Xu, Zhilin Zeng et al.

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has received remarkable attention as it offers a powerful and versatile solution for object segmentation in images. However, fine-tuning SAM for downstream segmentation tasks under different scenarios remains a challenge, as the varied characteristics of different scenarios naturally requires diverse model parameter spaces. Most existing fine-tuning methods attempt to bridge the gaps among different scenarios by introducing a set of new parameters to modify SAM's original parameter space. Unlike these works, in this paper, we propose fine-tuning SAM efficiently by parameter space reconstruction (SAM-PARSER), which introduce nearly zero trainable parameters during fine-tuning. In SAM-PARSER, we assume that SAM's original parameter space is relatively complete, so that its bases are able to reconstruct the parameter space of a new scenario. We obtain the bases by matrix decomposition, and fine-tuning the coefficients to reconstruct the parameter space tailored to the new scenario by an optimal linear combination of the bases. Experimental results show that SAM-PARSER exhibits superior segmentation performance across various scenarios, while reducing the number of trainable parameters by $\approx 290$ times compared with current parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods.

Han Wang, Yifan Sun, Brian Ko et al.

Large language models (LLMs) can generate chains of thought (CoTs) that are not always causally responsible for their final outputs. When such a mismatch occurs, the CoT no longer faithfully reflects the decision-critical factors driving the model's behavior, leading to the reduced CoT monitorability problem. However, a comprehensive and fully open-source benchmark for studying CoT monitorability remains lacking. To address this gap, we propose MonitorBench, a systematic benchmark for evaluating CoT monitorability in LLMs. MonitorBench provides: (1) a diverse set of 1,514 test instances with carefully designed decision-critical factors across 19 tasks spanning 7 categories to characterize when CoTs can be used to monitor the factors driving LLM behavior; and (2) two stress-test settings to quantify the extent to which CoT monitorability can be degraded. Extensive experiments across multiple popular LLMs with varying capabilities show that CoT monitorability is higher when producing the final target response requires structural reasoning through the decision-critical factor. Closed-source LLMs generally show lower monitorability, and there exists a negative relationship between monitorability and model capability. Moreover, both open- and closed-source LLMs can intentionally reduce monitorability under stress-tests, with monitorability dropping by up to 30% in some tasks that do not require structural reasoning over the decision-critical factors. Beyond these empirical insights, MonitorBench provides a basis for further research on evaluating future LLMs, studying advanced stress-test monitorability techniques, and developing new monitoring approaches.

Chen Yang, Peihao Li, Zanwei Zhou et al.

We present NeRFVS, a novel neural radiance fields (NeRF) based method to enable free navigation in a room. NeRF achieves impressive performance in rendering images for novel views similar to the input views while suffering for novel views that are significantly different from the training views. To address this issue, we utilize the holistic priors, including pseudo depth maps and view coverage information, from neural reconstruction to guide the learning of implicit neural representations of 3D indoor scenes. Concretely, an off-the-shelf neural reconstruction method is leveraged to generate a geometry scaffold. Then, two loss functions based on the holistic priors are proposed to improve the learning of NeRF: 1) A robust depth loss that can tolerate the error of the pseudo depth map to guide the geometry learning of NeRF; 2) A variance loss to regularize the variance of implicit neural representations to reduce the geometry and color ambiguity in the learning procedure. These two loss functions are modulated during NeRF optimization according to the view coverage information to reduce the negative influence brought by the view coverage imbalance. Extensive results demonstrate that our NeRFVS outperforms state-of-the-art view synthesis methods quantitatively and qualitatively on indoor scenes, achieving high-fidelity free navigation results.

Zanwei Zhou, Ruizhe Zhong, Chen Yang et al.

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) is a fundamental problem in numerous real-world applications. Recently, Transformer has become the de facto solution for MTSF, especially for the long-term cases. However, except for the one forward operation, the basic configurations in existing MTSF Transformer architectures were barely carefully verified. In this study, we point out that the current tokenization strategy in MTSF Transformer architectures ignores the token uniformity inductive bias of Transformers. Therefore, the vanilla MTSF transformer struggles to capture details in time series and presents inferior performance. Based on this observation, we make a series of evolution on the basic architecture of the vanilla MTSF transformer. We vary the flawed tokenization strategy, along with the decoder structure and embeddings. Surprisingly, the evolved simple transformer architecture is highly effective, which successfully avoids the over-smoothing phenomena in the vanilla MTSF transformer, achieves a more detailed and accurate prediction, and even substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art Transformers that are well-designed for MTSF.

Kai Zhao, Lei Shen, Yingyi Zhang et al.

Palmprints are private and stable information for biometric recognition. In the deep learning era, the development of palmprint recognition is limited by the lack of sufficient training data. In this paper, by observing that palmar creases are the key information to deep-learning-based palmprint recognition, we propose to synthesize training data by manipulating palmar creases. Concretely, we introduce an intuitive geometric model which represents palmar creases with parameterized Bézier curves. By randomly sampling Bézier parameters, we can synthesize massive training samples of diverse identities, which enables us to pretrain large-scale palmprint recognition models. Experimental results demonstrate that such synthetically pretrained models have a very strong generalization ability: they can be efficiently transferred to real datasets, leading to significant performance improvements on palmprint recognition. For example, under the open-set protocol, our method improves the strong ArcFace baseline by more than 10\% in terms of TAR@1e-6. And under the closed-set protocol, our method reduces the equal error rate (EER) by an order of magnitude.

Tongkun Guan, Zhibo Yang, Jianqiang Wan et al.

When MLLMs fail at Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) visual reasoning, a fundamental question arises: is it due to perceptual deficiencies or reasoning limitations? Through systematic scaling analysis that independently scales perception and reasoning components, we uncover a critical insight: scaling perception consistently outperforms scaling reasoning. This reveals perception as the true lever limiting current STEM visual reasoning. Motivated by this insight, our work focuses on systematically enhancing the perception capabilities of MLLMs by establishing code as a powerful perceptual medium--executable code provides precise semantics that naturally align with the structured nature of STEM visuals. Specifically, we construct ICC-1M, a large-scale dataset comprising 1M Image-Caption-Code triplets that materializes this code-as-perception paradigm through two complementary approaches: (1) Code-Grounded Caption Generation treats executable code as ground truth for image captions, eliminating the hallucinations inherent in existing knowledge distillation methods; (2) STEM Image-to-Code Translation prompts models to generate reconstruction code, mitigating the ambiguity of natural language for perception enhancement. To validate this paradigm, we further introduce STEM2Code-Eval, a novel benchmark that directly evaluates visual perception in STEM domains. Unlike existing work relying on problem-solving accuracy as a proxy that only measures problem-relevant understanding, our benchmark requires comprehensive visual comprehension through executable code generation for image reconstruction, providing deterministic and verifiable assessment. Code is available at https://github.com/TongkunGuan/Qwen-CodePercept.

Yichen Zhao, Zelin Peng, Piao Yang et al.

Radiological diagnosis is a perceptual process in which careful visual inspection and language reasoning are repeatedly interleaved. Most medical large vision language models (LVLMs) perform visual inspection only once and then rely on text-only chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, which operates purely in the linguistic space and is prone to hallucination. Recent methods attempt to mitigate this issue by introducing visually related coordinates, such as bounding boxes. However, these remain a pseudo-visual solution: coordinates are still text and fail to preserve rich visual details like texture and density. Motivated by the interleaved nature of radiological diagnosis, we introduce MMRad-IVL-22K, the first large-scale dataset designed for natively interleaved visual language reasoning in chest X-ray interpretation. MMRad-IVL-22K reflects a repeated cycle of reasoning and visual inspection workflow of radiologists, in which visual rationales complement textual descriptions and ground each step of the reasoning process. MMRad-IVL-22K comprises 21,994 diagnostic traces, enabling systematic scanning across 35 anatomical regions. Experimental results on advanced closed-source LVLMs demonstrate that report generation guided by multimodal CoT significantly outperforms that guided by text-only CoT in clinical accuracy and report quality (e.g., 6\% increase in the RadGraph metric), confirming that high-fidelity interleaved vision language evidence is a non-substitutable component of reliable medical AI. Furthermore, benchmarking across seven state-of-the-art open-source LVLMs demonstrates that models fine-tuned on MMRad-IVL-22K achieve superior reasoning consistency and report quality compared with both general-purpose and medical-specific LVLMs. The project page is available at https://github.com/qiuzyc/thinking_like_a_radiologist.

Yinan Liu, Hu Chen, Wei Shen et al.

Personal knowledge bases (PKBs) are crucial for a broad range of applications such as personalized recommendation and Web-based chatbots. A critical challenge to build PKBs is extracting personal attribute knowledge from users' conversation data. Given some users of a conversational system, a personal attribute and these users' utterances, our goal is to predict the ranking of the given personal attribute values for each user. Previous studies often rely on a relative number of resources such as labeled utterances and external data, yet the attribute knowledge embedded in unlabeled utterances is underutilized and their performance of predicting some difficult personal attributes is still unsatisfactory. In addition, it is found that some text classification methods could be employed to resolve this task directly. However, they also perform not well over those difficult personal attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework PEARL to predict personal attributes from conversations by leveraging the abundant personal attribute knowledge from utterances under a low-resource setting in which no labeled utterances or external data are utilized. PEARL combines the biterm semantic information with the word co-occurrence information seamlessly via employing the updated prior attribute knowledge to refine the biterm topic model's Gibbs sampling process in an iterative manner. The extensive experimental results show that PEARL outperforms all the baseline methods not only on the task of personal attribute prediction from conversations over two data sets, but also on the more general weakly supervised text classification task over one data set.

Zhaolin Cai, Huiyu Duan, Zitong Xu et al.

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize human-object pairs and the interactions between them. Existing methods operate under a closed-world assumption, treating the task as a classification problem over a small, predefined verb set, which struggles to generalize to the long-tail of unseen or ambiguous interactions in the wild. While recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) possess the rich world knowledge required for open-vocabulary understanding, they remain decoupled from existing HOI detectors since fine-tuning them is computationally prohibitive. To address these constraints, we propose \GRASP-HO}, a novel Generative Reasoning And Steerable Perception framework that reformulates HOI detection from the closed-set classification task to the open-vocabulary generation problem. To bridge the vision and cognitive, we first extract hybrid interaction representations, then design a lightweight learnable cognitive steering conduit (CSC) module to inject the fine-grained visual evidence into a frozen MLLM for effective reasoning. To address the supervision mismatch between classification-based HOI datasets and open-vocabulary generative models, we introduce a hybrid guidance strategy that coupling the language modeling loss and auxiliary classification loss, enabling discriminative grounding without sacrificing generative flexibility. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art closed-set performance and strong zero-shot generalization, achieving a unified paradigm that seamlessly bridges discriminative perception and generative reasoning for open-world HOI detection.

Tongkun Guan, Chaochen Gu, Jingzheng Tu et al.

The attention mechanism has become the \emph{de facto} module in scene text recognition (STR) methods, due to its capability of extracting character-level representations. These methods can be summarized into implicit attention based and supervised attention based, depended on how the attention is computed, i.e., implicit attention and supervised attention are learned from sequence-level text annotations and or character-level bounding box annotations, respectively. Implicit attention, as it may extract coarse or even incorrect spatial regions as character attention, is prone to suffering from an alignment-drifted issue. Supervised attention can alleviate the above issue, but it is character category-specific, which requires extra laborious character-level bounding box annotations and would be memory-intensive when handling languages with larger character categories. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel attention mechanism for STR, self-supervised implicit glyph attention (SIGA). SIGA delineates the glyph structures of text images by jointly self-supervised text segmentation and implicit attention alignment, which serve as the supervision to improve attention correctness without extra character-level annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that SIGA performs consistently and significantly better than previous attention-based STR methods, in terms of both attention correctness and final recognition performance on publicly available context benchmarks and our contributed contextless benchmarks.

Shuaifang Zhang, Dongsheng Li, Wei Shen et al.

Beam structure is one of the most widely used structures in mechanical engineering and civil engineering. Ultrasonic guided wave based crack identification is one of the most important and accepted approaches applied to detect unseen small flaws in structures. Numerical simulations of ultrasonic guided wave propagation have caught more and more attention due to the fast development of hardware and software in the last few years. From all the numerical simulation methods, wavelet based finite element method has been proved to be one of the most efficient methods due to its better spatial resolution, which means it needs fewer elements to get the same accuracy and it can improve the calculation cost significantly. However, it needs a very small time interval. Laplace transform can easily convert the time domain into a frequency domain and then revert it back to a time domain. Laplace transform has thus the advantage of finding better results with a very large time interval. which can save a lot of time cost. This paper will present an innovative method combining Laplace transform and the B-spline wavelet on interval (BSWI) finite element method. This novel method allows to get results with the same accuracy and with a significantly lower time cost, which would not only decrease the total number of elements in the structure but also increase the time integration interval. The numerical Laplace transform and BSWI finite element will be introduced. Moreover, this innovative method is applied to simulate the ultrasonic wave propagation in a beam structure in different materials. Numerical examples for crack identification in beam structures have been studied for verification.

Wei Shen, Yang Yang, Yinan Liu

Open information extraction (OIE) methods extract plenty of OIE triples <noun phrase, relation phrase, noun phrase> from unstructured text, which compose large open knowledge bases (OKBs). Noun phrases and relation phrases in such OKBs are not canonicalized, which leads to scattered and redundant facts. It is found that two views of knowledge (i.e., a fact view based on the fact triple and a context view based on the fact triple's source context) provide complementary information that is vital to the task of OKB canonicalization, which clusters synonymous noun phrases and relation phrases into the same group and assigns them unique identifiers. However, these two views of knowledge have so far been leveraged in isolation by existing works. In this paper, we propose CMVC, a novel unsupervised framework that leverages these two views of knowledge jointly for canonicalizing OKBs without the need of manually annotated labels. To achieve this goal, we propose a multi-view CH K-Means clustering algorithm to mutually reinforce the clustering of view-specific embeddings learned from each view by considering their different clustering qualities. In order to further enhance the canonicalization performance, we propose a training data optimization strategy in terms of data quantity and data quality respectively in each particular view to refine the learned view-specific embeddings in an iterative manner. Additionally, we propose a Log-Jump algorithm to predict the optimal number of clusters in a data-driven way without requiring any labels. We demonstrate the superiority of our framework through extensive experiments on multiple real-world OKB data sets against state-of-the-art methods.

Jiazhong Cen, Jiemin Fang, Sikuang Li et al.

High-quality 3D assets are essential for VR/AR, industrial design, and entertainment, motivating growing interest in generative models that create 3D content from user prompts. Most existing 3D generators, however, rely on a single conditioning modality: image-conditioned models achieve high visual fidelity by exploiting pixel-aligned cues but suffer from viewpoint bias when the input view is limited or ambiguous, while text-conditioned models provide broad semantic guidance yet lack low-level visual detail. This limits how users can express intent and raises a natural question: can these two modalities be combined for more flexible and faithful 3D generation? Our diagnostic study shows that even simple late fusion of text- and image-conditioned predictions outperforms single-modality models, revealing strong cross-modal complementarity. We therefore formalize Text-Image Conditioned 3D Generation, which requires joint reasoning over a visual exemplar and a textual specification. To address this task, we introduce TIGON, a minimalist dual-branch baseline with separate image- and text-conditioned backbones and lightweight cross-modal fusion. Extensive experiments show that text-image conditioning consistently improves over single-modality methods, highlighting complementary vision-language guidance as a promising direction for future 3D generation research. Project page: https://jumpat.github.io/tigon-page

Jing Zhou, Chenglin Jiang, Wei Shen et al.

Most large language models are fine-tuned using either expensive human-annotated data or GPT-4 generated data which cannot guarantee performance in certain domains. We argue that although the web-crawled data often has formatting errors causing semantic inaccuracies, it can still serve as a valuable source for high-quality supervised fine-tuning in specific domains without relying on advanced models like GPT-4. To this end, we create a paired training dataset automatically by aligning web-crawled data with a smaller set of high-quality data. By training a language model on this dataset, we can convert web data with irregular formats into high-quality ones. Our experiments show that training with the model-transformed data yields better results, surpassing training with only high-quality data by an average score of 9.4% in Chinese math problems. Additionally, our 7B model outperforms several open-source models larger than 32B and surpasses well-known closed-source models such as GPT-3.5, highlighting the efficacy of our approach.

Yuhan Li, Wei Shen, Jianbo Gao et al.

Community Question Answering (CQA) platforms contain plenty of CQA texts (i.e., questions and answers corresponding to the question) where named entities appear ubiquitously. In this paper, we define a new task of CQA entity linking (CQAEL) as linking the textual entity mentions detected from CQA texts with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. This task can facilitate many downstream applications including expert finding and knowledge base enrichment. Traditional entity linking methods mainly focus on linking entities in news documents, and are suboptimal over this new task of CQAEL since they cannot effectively leverage various informative auxiliary data involved in the CQA platform to aid entity linking, such as parallel answers and two types of meta-data (i.e., topic tags and users). To remedy this crucial issue, we propose a novel transformer-based framework to effectively harness the knowledge delivered by different kinds of auxiliary data to promote the linking performance. We validate the superiority of our framework through extensive experiments over a newly released CQAEL data set against state-of-the-art entity linking methods.