Liqiang Nie

Xuemeng Song, Haoqiang Lin, Haokun Wen et al.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging yet challenging task that allows users to search for target images using a multimodal query, comprising a reference image and a modification text specifying the user's desired changes to the reference image. Given its significant academic and practical value, CIR has become a rapidly growing area of interest in the computer vision and machine learning communities, particularly with the advances in deep learning. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no comprehensive review of CIR to provide a timely overview of this field. Therefore, we synthesize insights from over 120 publications in top conferences and journals, including ACM TOIS, SIGIR, and CVPR In particular, we systematically categorize existing supervised CIR and zero-shot CIR models using a fine-grained taxonomy. For a comprehensive review, we also briefly discuss approaches for tasks closely related to CIR, such as attribute-based CIR and dialog-based CIR. Additionally, we summarize benchmark datasets for evaluation and analyze existing supervised and zero-shot CIR methods by comparing experimental results across multiple datasets. Furthermore, we present promising future directions in this field, offering practical insights for researchers interested in further exploration. The curated collection of related works is maintained and continuously updated in https://github.com/haokunwen/Awesome-Composed-Image-Retrieval.

Enhao Cheng, Shoujia Zhang, Jianhua Yin et al.

Short text clustering has become increasingly important with the popularity of social media like Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Existing methods can be broadly categorized into two paradigms: topic model-based approaches and deep representation learning-based approaches. This task is inherently challenging due to the sparse, large-scale, and high-dimensional characteristics of the short text data. Furthermore, the computational intensity required by representation learning significantly increases the running time. To address these issues, we propose a collapsed Gibbs Sampling algorithm for the Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture model (GSDMM), which effectively handles the sparsity and high dimensionality of short texts while identifying representative words for each cluster. Based on several aspects of GSDMM that warrant further refinement, we propose an improved approach, GSDMM+, designed to further optimize its performance. GSDMM+ reduces initialization noise and adaptively adjusts word weights based on entropy, achieving fine-grained clustering that reveals more topic-related information. Additionally, strategic cluster merging is employed to refine clustering granularity, better aligning the predicted distribution with the true category distribution. We conduct extensive experiments, comparing our methods with both classical and state-of-the-art approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our methods. The source code for our model is publicly available at https://github.com/chehaoa/VEMC.

Qi Lv, Hao Li, Xiang Deng et al.

Despite the significant success of imitation learning in robotic manipulation, its application to bimanual tasks remains highly challenging. Existing approaches mainly learn a policy to predict a distant next-best end-effector pose (NBP) and then compute the corresponding joint rotation angles for motion using inverse kinematics. However, they suffer from two important issues: (1) rarely considering the physical robotic structure, which may cause self-collisions or interferences, and (2) overlooking the kinematics constraint, which may result in the predicted poses not conforming to the actual limitations of the robot joints. In this paper, we propose Kinematics enhanced Spatial-TemporAl gRaph Diffuser (KStar Diffuser). Specifically, (1) to incorporate the physical robot structure information into action prediction, KStar Diffuser maintains a dynamic spatial-temporal graph according to the physical bimanual joint motions at continuous timesteps. This dynamic graph serves as the robot-structure condition for denoising the actions; (2) to make the NBP learning objective consistent with kinematics, we introduce the differentiable kinematics to provide the reference for optimizing KStar Diffuser. This module regularizes the policy to predict more reliable and kinematics-aware next end-effector poses. Experimental results show that our method effectively leverages the physical structural information and generates kinematics-aware actions in both simulation and real-world

Hao Li, Qi Lv, Rui Shao et al.

Transforming complex actions into discrete skill abstractions has demonstrated strong potential for robotic manipulation. Existing approaches mainly leverage latent variable models, e.g., VQ-VAE, to learn skill abstractions through learned vectors (codebooks), while they suffer from codebook collapse and modeling the causal relationship between learned skills. To address these limitations, we present \textbf{S}kill \textbf{T}raining with \textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{R}otation (\textbf{STAR}), a framework that advances both skill learning and composition to complete complex behaviors. Specifically, to prevent codebook collapse, we devise rotation-augmented residual skill quantization (RaRSQ). It encodes relative angles between encoder outputs into the gradient flow by rotation-based gradient mechanism. Points within the same skill code are forced to be either pushed apart or pulled closer together depending on gradient directions. Further, to capture the causal relationship between skills, we present causal skill transformer (CST) which explicitly models dependencies between skill representations through an autoregressive mechanism for coherent action generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of STAR on both LIBERO benchmark and realworld tasks, with around 12\% improvement over the baselines.

Muhe Ding, Yang Ma, Pengda Qin et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently received substantial interest, which shows their emerging potential as general-purpose models for various vision-language tasks. MLLMs involve significant external knowledge within their parameters; however, it is challenging to continually update these models with the latest knowledge, which involves huge computational costs and poor interpretability. Retrieval augmentation techniques have proven to be effective plugins for both LLMs and MLLMs. In this study, we propose multimodal adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training (RA-BLIP), a novel retrieval-augmented framework for various MLLMs. Considering the redundant information within vision modality, we first leverage the question to instruct the extraction of visual information through interactions with one set of learnable queries, minimizing irrelevant interference during retrieval and generation. Besides, we introduce a pre-trained multimodal adaptive fusion module to achieve question text-to-multimodal retrieval and integration of multimodal knowledge by projecting visual and language modalities into a unified semantic space. Furthermore, we present an Adaptive Selection Knowledge Generation (ASKG) strategy to train the generator to autonomously discern the relevance of retrieved knowledge, which realizes excellent denoising performance. Extensive experiments on open multimodal question-answering datasets demonstrate that RA-BLIP achieves significant performance and surpasses the state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented models.

Zihan Li, Wei Sun, Jing Hu et al.

While large language-image pre-trained models like CLIP offer powerful generic features for image clustering, existing methods typically freeze the encoder. This creates a fundamental mismatch between the model's task-agnostic representations and the demands of a specific clustering task, imposing a ceiling on performance. To break this ceiling, we propose a self-enhanced framework based on cross-modal semantic consistency for efficient image clustering. Our framework first builds a strong foundation via Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency and then specializes the encoder through Self-Enhancement. In the first stage, we focus on Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency. By mining consistency between generated image-text pairs at the instance, cluster assignment, and cluster center levels, we train lightweight clustering heads to align with the rich semantics of the pre-trained model. This alignment process is bolstered by a novel method for generating higher-quality cluster centers and a dynamic balancing regularizer to ensure well-distributed assignments. In the second stage, we introduce a Self-Enhanced fine-tuning strategy. The well-aligned model from the first stage acts as a reliable pseudo-label generator. These self-generated supervisory signals are then used to feed back the efficient, joint optimization of the vision encoder and clustering heads, unlocking their full potential. Extensive experiments on six mainstream datasets show that our method outperforms existing deep clustering methods by significant margins. Notably, our ViT-B/32 model already matches or even surpasses the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods built upon the far larger ViT-L/14.

Yandu Chen, Kefan Gu, Yuqing Wen et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to couple perception with robotic control, offering a promising path toward general-purpose embodied intelligence. However, current SOTA VLAs are primarily pretrained on multimodal tasks with limited relevance to embodied scenarios, and then finetuned to map explicit instructions to actions. Consequently, due to the lack of reasoning-intensive pretraining and reasoning-guided manipulation, these models are unable to perform implicit human intention reasoning required for complex, real-world interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose \textbf{IntentionVLA}, a VLA framework with a curriculum training paradigm and an efficient inference mechanism. Our proposed method first leverages carefully designed reasoning data that combine intention inference, spatial grounding, and compact embodied reasoning, endowing the model with both reasoning and perception capabilities. In the following finetuning stage, IntentionVLA employs the compact reasoning outputs as contextual guidance for action generation, enabling fast inference under indirect instructions. Experimental results show that IntentionVLA substantially outperforms $π_0$, achieving 18\% higher success rates with direct instructions and 28\% higher than ECoT under intention instructions. On out-of-distribution intention tasks, IntentionVLA achieves over twice the success rate of all baselines, and further enables zero-shot human-robot interaction with 40\% success rate. These results highlight IntentionVLA as a promising paradigm for next-generation human-robot interaction (HRI) systems.

Hongyi Chen, Xiucheng Li, Xinyang Chen et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel Spatial Balance Attention block for spatiotemporal forecasting. To strike a balance between obeying spatial proximity and capturing global correlation, we partition the spatial graph into a set of subgraphs and instantiate Intra-subgraph Attention to learn local spatial correlation within each subgraph; to capture the global spatial correlation, we further aggregate the nodes to produce subgraph representations and achieve message passing among the subgraphs via Inter-subgraph Attention. Building on the proposed Spatial Balance Attention block, we develop a multiscale spatiotemporal forecasting model by progressively increasing the subgraph scales. The resulting model is both scalable and able to produce structured spatial correlation, and meanwhile, it is easy to implement. We evaluate its efficacy and efficiency against the existing models on real-world spatiotemporal datasets from medium to large sizes. The experimental results show that it can achieve performance improvements up to 7.7% over the baseline methods at low running costs.

Enhao Cheng, Shoujia Zhang, Jianhua Yin et al.

Graph clustering is crucial for unraveling intricate data structures, yet it presents significant challenges due to its unsupervised nature. Recently, goal-directed clustering techniques have yielded impressive results, with contrastive learning methods leveraging pseudo-label garnering considerable attention. Nonetheless, pseudo-label as a supervision signal is unreliable and existing goal-directed approaches utilize only features to construct a single-target distribution for single-center optimization, which lead to incomplete and less dependable guidance. In our work, we propose a novel Dual-Center Graph Clustering (DCGC) approach based on neighbor distribution properties, which includes representation learning with neighbor distribution and dual-center optimization. Specifically, we utilize neighbor distribution as a supervision signal to mine hard negative samples in contrastive learning, which is reliable and enhances the effectiveness of representation learning. Furthermore, neighbor distribution center is introduced alongside feature center to jointly construct a dual-target distribution for dual-center optimization. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate superior performance and effectiveness of our proposed method.

Han Liu, Keyan Ding, Peilin Chen et al.

Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is critical for drug discovery. While recent deep learning approaches have demonstrated promising results, they often rely solely on structural features of proteins and ligands, overlooking their valuable biochemical knowledge associated with binding affinity. To address this limitation, we propose KEPLA, a novel deep learning framework that explicitly integrates prior knowledge from Gene Ontology and ligand properties to enhance prediction performance. KEPLA takes protein sequences and ligand molecular graphs as input and optimizes two complementary objectives: (1) aligning global representations with knowledge graph relations to capture domain-specific biochemical insights, and (2) leveraging cross attention between local representations to construct fine-grained joint embeddings for prediction. Experiments on two benchmark datasets across both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios demonstrate that KEPLA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, interpretability analyses based on knowledge graph relations and cross attention maps provide valuable insights into the underlying predictive mechanisms.

Muhe Ding, Jianlong Wu, Xue Dong et al.

Knowledge distillation is a mainstream algorithm in model compression by transferring knowledge from the larger model (teacher) to the smaller model (student) to improve the performance of student. Despite many efforts, existing methods mainly investigate the consistency between instance-level feature representation or prediction, which neglects the category-level information and the difficulty of each sample, leading to undesirable performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel preview-based category contrastive learning method for knowledge distillation (PCKD). It first distills the structural knowledge of both instance-level feature correspondence and the relation between instance features and category centers in a contrastive learning fashion, which can explicitly optimize the category representation and explore the distinct correlation between representations of instances and categories, contributing to discriminative category centers and better classification results. Besides, we introduce a novel preview strategy to dynamically determine how much the student should learn from each sample according to their difficulty. Different from existing methods that treat all samples equally and curriculum learning that simply filters out hard samples, our method assigns a small weight for hard instances as a preview to better guide the student training. Extensive experiments on several challenging datasets, including CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, demonstrate the superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

Ruili Jiang, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai et al.

The recent surge of versatile large language models (LLMs) largely depends on aligning increasingly capable foundation models with human intentions by preference learning, enhancing LLMs with excellent applicability and effectiveness in a wide range of contexts. Despite the numerous related studies conducted, a perspective on how human preferences are introduced into LLMs remains limited, which may prevent a deeper comprehension of the relationships between human preferences and LLMs as well as the realization of their limitations. In this survey, we review the progress in exploring human preference learning for LLMs from a preference-centered perspective, covering the sources and formats of preference feedback, the modeling and usage of preference signals, as well as the evaluation of the aligned LLMs. We first categorize the human feedback according to data sources and formats. We then summarize techniques for human preferences modeling and compare the advantages and disadvantages of different schools of models. Moreover, we present various preference usage methods sorted by the objectives to utilize human preference signals. Finally, we summarize some prevailing approaches to evaluate LLMs in terms of alignment with human intentions and discuss our outlooks on the human intention alignment for LLMs.