Xiaoxu Cai

Zixuan Liu, Kaijie Yu, Chun He et al.

Morphological traits provide important evidence for phylogenetic reconstruction and evolutionary relationship analysis. Recent image-based approaches have introduced deep learning, particularly convolutional models, to derive morphological features from specimen images, but these methods generally rely on single-modality visual representations and do not explicitly incorporate morphological semantics. This study proposes a morphology-aware multimodal alignment framework for insect phylogenetic reconstruction. The framework combines specimen images with curated morphological descriptions by adapting a vision transformer through parameter-efficient fine-tuning and supervised contrastive learning, followed by image-text alignment in a shared latent space. The learned image embeddings are then used as continuous traits for Bayesian phylogenetic reconstruction. On the public Rove-Tree-11 dataset, comparative and ablation experiments across multiple visual backbones and feature adaptation strategies demonstrate that multimodal alignment improves topological agreement with the reference phylogeny. The results indicate that the proposed framework can derive morphology-aware visual traits for computational phylogenetic reconstruction.

Xiaoxu Cai, Hui Yu, Jianwen Lou et al.

We present to recover the complete 3D facial geometry from a single depth view by proposing an Attention Guided Generative Adversarial Networks (AGGAN). In contrast to existing work which normally requires two or more depth views to recover a full 3D facial geometry, the proposed AGGAN is able to generate a dense 3D voxel grid of the face from a single unconstrained depth view. Specifically, AGGAN encodes the 3D facial geometry within a voxel space and utilizes an attention-guided GAN to model the illposed 2.5D depth-3D mapping. Multiple loss functions, which enforce the 3D facial geometry consistency, together with a prior distribution of facial surface points in voxel space are incorporated to guide the training process. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons show that AGGAN recovers a more complete and smoother 3D facial shape, with the capability to handle a much wider range of view angles and resist to noise in the depth view than conventional methods

Jianwen Lou, Xiaoxu Cai, Junyu Dong et al.

We propose to learn a cascade of globally-optimized modular boosted ferns (GoMBF) to solve multi-modal facial motion regression for real-time 3D facial tracking from a monocular RGB camera. GoMBF is a deep composition of multiple regression models with each is a boosted ferns initially trained to predict partial motion parameters of the same modality, and then concatenated together via a global optimization step to form a singular strong boosted ferns that can effectively handle the whole regression target. It can explicitly cope with the modality variety in output variables, while manifesting increased fitting power and a faster learning speed comparing against the conventional boosted ferns. By further cascading a sequence of GoMBFs (GoMBF-Cascade) to regress facial motion parameters, we achieve competitive tracking performance on a variety of in-the-wild videos comparing to the state-of-the-art methods, which require much more training data or have higher computational complexity. It provides a robust and highly elegant solution to real-time 3D facial tracking using a small set of training data and hence makes it more practical in real-world applications.