Qing Liu

Srinivasan Iyer, Xi Victoria Lin, Ramakanth Pasunuru et al. · berkeley, meta-ai

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.

Amazon AGI, Aaron Langford, Aayush Shah et al. · amazon-science

We present Amazon Nova, a new generation of state-of-the-art foundation models that deliver frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance. Amazon Nova Pro is a highly-capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks. Amazon Nova Lite is a low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing images, video, documents and text. Amazon Nova Micro is a text-only model that delivers our lowest-latency responses at very low cost. Amazon Nova Canvas is an image generation model that creates professional grade images with rich customization controls. Amazon Nova Reel is a video generation model offering high-quality outputs, customization, and motion control. Our models were built responsibly and with a commitment to customer trust, security, and reliability. We report benchmarking results for core capabilities, agentic performance, long context, functional adaptation, runtime performance, and human evaluation.

Jinkai Tian, Xiaoyu Sun, Yuxuan Du et al.

Quantum computers are next-generation devices that hold promise to perform calculations beyond the reach of classical computers. A leading method towards achieving this goal is through quantum machine learning, especially quantum generative learning. Due to the intrinsic probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, it is reasonable to postulate that quantum generative learning models (QGLMs) may surpass their classical counterparts. As such, QGLMs are receiving growing attention from the quantum physics and computer science communities, where various QGLMs that can be efficiently implemented on near-term quantum machines with potential computational advantages are proposed. In this paper, we review the current progress of QGLMs from the perspective of machine learning. Particularly, we interpret these QGLMs, covering quantum circuit born machines, quantum generative adversarial networks, quantum Boltzmann machines, and quantum autoencoders, as the quantum extension of classical generative learning models. In this context, we explore their intrinsic relation and their fundamental differences. We further summarize the potential applications of QGLMs in both conventional machine learning tasks and quantum physics. Last, we discuss the challenges and further research directions for QGLMs.

Yixiong Liang, Shuo Feng, Qing Liu et al.

Cervical abnormal cell detection is a challenging task as the morphological discrepancies between abnormal and normal cells are usually subtle. To determine whether a cervical cell is normal or abnormal, cytopathologists always take surrounding cells as references to identify its abnormality. To mimic these behaviors, we propose to explore contextual relationships to boost the performance of cervical abnormal cell detection. Specifically, both contextual relationships between cells and cell-to-global images are exploited to enhance features of each region of interest (RoI) proposals. Accordingly, two modules, dubbed as RoI-relationship attention module (RRAM) and global RoI attention module (GRAM), are developed and their combination strategies are also investigated. We establish a strong baseline by using Double-Head Faster R-CNN with feature pyramid network (FPN) and integrate our RRAM and GRAM into it to validate the effectiveness of the proposed modules. Experiments conducted on a large cervical cell detection dataset reveal that the introduction of RRAM and GRAM both achieves better average precision (AP) than the baseline methods. Moreover, when cascading RRAM and GRAM, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, we also show the proposed feature enhancing scheme can facilitate both image-level and smear-level classification. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/CVIU-CSU/CR4CACD.

Yu Zeng, Zhe Lin, Jianming Zhang et al.

We propose a new framework for conditional image synthesis from semantic layouts of any precision levels, ranging from pure text to a 2D semantic canvas with precise shapes. More specifically, the input layout consists of one or more semantic regions with free-form text descriptions and adjustable precision levels, which can be set based on the desired controllability. The framework naturally reduces to text-to-image (T2I) at the lowest level with no shape information, and it becomes segmentation-to-image (S2I) at the highest level. By supporting the levels in-between, our framework is flexible in assisting users of different drawing expertise and at different stages of their creative workflow. We introduce several novel techniques to address the challenges coming with this new setup, including a pipeline for collecting training data; a precision-encoded mask pyramid and a text feature map representation to jointly encode precision level, semantics, and composition information; and a multi-scale guided diffusion model to synthesize images. To evaluate the proposed method, we collect a test dataset containing user-drawn layouts with diverse scenes and styles. Experimental results show that the proposed method can generate high-quality images following the layout at given precision, and compares favorably against existing methods. Project page \url{https://zengxianyu.github.io/scenec/}

Yaojie Lu, Qing Liu, Dai Dai et al.

Information extraction suffers from its varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas. In this paper, we propose a unified text-to-structure generation framework, namely UIE, which can universally model different IE tasks, adaptively generate targeted structures, and collaboratively learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. Specifically, UIE uniformly encodes different extraction structures via a structured extraction language, adaptively generates target extractions via a schema-based prompt mechanism - structural schema instructor, and captures the common IE abilities via a large-scale pre-trained text-to-structure model. Experiments show that UIE achieved the state-of-the-art performance on 4 IE tasks, 13 datasets, and on all supervised, low-resource, and few-shot settings for a wide range of entity, relation, event and sentiment extraction tasks and their unification. These results verified the effectiveness, universality, and transferability of UIE.

Haitian Zheng, Zhe Lin, Jingwan Lu et al.

Structure-guided image completion aims to inpaint a local region of an image according to an input guidance map from users. While such a task enables many practical applications for interactive editing, existing methods often struggle to hallucinate realistic object instances in complex natural scenes. Such a limitation is partially due to the lack of semantic-level constraints inside the hole region as well as the lack of a mechanism to enforce realistic object generation. In this work, we propose a learning paradigm that consists of semantic discriminators and object-level discriminators for improving the generation of complex semantics and objects. Specifically, the semantic discriminators leverage pretrained visual features to improve the realism of the generated visual concepts. Moreover, the object-level discriminators take aligned instances as inputs to enforce the realism of individual objects. Our proposed scheme significantly improves the generation quality and achieves state-of-the-art results on various tasks, including segmentation-guided completion, edge-guided manipulation and panoptically-guided manipulation on Places2 datasets. Furthermore, our trained model is flexible and can support multiple editing use cases, such as object insertion, replacement, removal and standard inpainting. In particular, our trained model combined with a novel automatic image completion pipeline achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard inpainting task.

Jiawei Chen, Qing Liu, Hongyu Lin et al.

Few-shot NER needs to effectively capture information from limited instances and transfer useful knowledge from external resources. In this paper, we propose a self-describing mechanism for few-shot NER, which can effectively leverage illustrative instances and precisely transfer knowledge from external resources by describing both entity types and mentions using a universal concept set. Specifically, we design Self-describing Networks (SDNet), a Seq2Seq generation model which can universally describe mentions using concepts, automatically map novel entity types to concepts, and adaptively recognize entities on-demand. We pre-train SDNet with large-scale corpus, and conduct experiments on 8 benchmarks from different domains. Experiments show that SDNet achieves competitive performances on all benchmarks and achieves the new state-of-the-art on 6 benchmarks, which demonstrates its effectiveness and robustness.

Xinwei Cai, Xiangyu Ke, Kai Wang et al.

Bipartite graphs characterize relationships between two different sets of entities, like actor-movie, user-item, and author-paper. The butterfly, a 4-vertices 4-edges (2,2)-biclique, is the simplest cohesive motif in a bipartite graph and is the fundamental component of higher-order substructures. Counting and enumerating the butterflies offer significant benefits across various applications, including fraud detection, graph embedding, and community search. While the corresponding motif, the triangle, in the unipartite graphs has been widely studied in both static and temporal settings, the extension of butterfly to temporal bipartite graphs remains unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the temporal butterfly counting and enumeration problem: count and enumerate the butterflies whose edges establish following a certain order within a given duration. Towards efficient computation, we devise a non-trivial baseline rooted in the state-of-the-art butterfly counting algorithm on static graphs, further, explore the intrinsic property of the temporal butterfly, and develop a new optimization framework with a compact data structure and effective priority strategy. The time complexity is proved to be significantly reduced without compromising on space efficiency. In addition, we generalize our algorithms to practical streaming settings and multi-core computing architectures. Our extensive experiments on 11 large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our solutions.

Lingzhi Zhang, Zhengjie Xu, Connelly Barnes et al.

Recent advancements in deep generative models have facilitated the creation of photo-realistic images across various tasks. However, these generated images often exhibit perceptual artifacts in specific regions, necessitating manual correction. In this study, we present a comprehensive empirical examination of Perceptual Artifacts Localization (PAL) spanning diverse image synthesis endeavors. We introduce a novel dataset comprising 10,168 generated images, each annotated with per-pixel perceptual artifact labels across ten synthesis tasks. A segmentation model, trained on our proposed dataset, effectively localizes artifacts across a range of tasks. Additionally, we illustrate its proficiency in adapting to previously unseen models using minimal training samples. We further propose an innovative zoom-in inpainting pipeline that seamlessly rectifies perceptual artifacts in the generated images. Through our experimental analyses, we elucidate several practical downstream applications, such as automated artifact rectification, non-referential image quality evaluation, and abnormal region detection in images. The dataset and code are released.

Linhao Zhang, Li Jin, Xian Sun et al.

Multimodal hate detection, which aims to identify harmful content online such as memes, is crucial for building a wholesome internet environment. Previous work has made enlightening exploration in detecting explicit hate remarks. However, most of their approaches neglect the analysis of implicit harm, which is particularly challenging as explicit text markers and demographic visual cues are often twisted or missing. The leveraged cross-modal attention mechanisms also suffer from the distributional modality gap and lack logical interpretability. To address these semantic gaps issues, we propose TOT: a topology-aware optimal transport framework to decipher the implicit harm in memes scenario, which formulates the cross-modal aligning problem as solutions for optimal transportation plans. Specifically, we leverage an optimal transport kernel method to capture complementary information from multiple modalities. The kernel embedding provides a non-linear transformation ability to reproduce a kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), which reflects significance for eliminating the distributional modality gap. Moreover, we perceive the topology information based on aligned representations to conduct bipartite graph path reasoning. The newly achieved state-of-the-art performance on two publicly available benchmark datasets, together with further visual analysis, demonstrate the superiority of TOT in capturing implicit cross-modal alignment.

Minjun Zhao, Yichen Yin, Yuren Mao et al.

Top-k sparsification has recently been widely used to reduce the communication volume in distributed deep learning. However, due to the Sparse Gradient Accumulation (SGA) dilemma, the performance of top-k sparsification still has limitations. Recently, a few methods have been put forward to handle the SGA dilemma. Regrettably, even the state-of-the-art method suffers from several drawbacks, e.g., it relies on an inefficient communication algorithm and requires extra transmission steps. Motivated by the limitations of existing methods, we propose a novel efficient sparse communication framework, called SparDL. Specifically, SparDL uses the Spar-Reduce-Scatter algorithm, which is based on an efficient Reduce-Scatter model, to handle the SGA dilemma without additional communication operations. Besides, to further reduce the latency cost and improve the efficiency of SparDL, we propose the Spar-All-Gather algorithm. Moreover, we propose the global residual collection algorithm to ensure fast convergence of model training. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to validate the superiority of SparDL.

Hanrong Ye, Jason Kuen, Qing Liu et al.

We propose SegGen, a highly-effective training data generation method for image segmentation, which pushes the performance limits of state-of-the-art segmentation models to a significant extent. SegGen designs and integrates two data generation strategies: MaskSyn and ImgSyn. (i) MaskSyn synthesizes new mask-image pairs via our proposed text-to-mask generation model and mask-to-image generation model, greatly improving the diversity in segmentation masks for model supervision; (ii) ImgSyn synthesizes new images based on existing masks using the mask-to-image generation model, strongly improving image diversity for model inputs. On the highly competitive ADE20K and COCO benchmarks, our data generation method markedly improves the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation models in semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and instance segmentation. Notably, in terms of the ADE20K mIoU, Mask2Former R50 is largely boosted from 47.2 to 49.9 (+2.7); Mask2Former Swin-L is also significantly increased from 56.1 to 57.4 (+1.3). These promising results strongly suggest the effectiveness of our SegGen even when abundant human-annotated training data is utilized. Moreover, training with our synthetic data makes the segmentation models more robust towards unseen domains. Project website: https://seggenerator.github.io

Fanglong Yao, Changyuan Tian, Jintao Liu et al.

Reasoning ability is one of the most crucial capabilities of a foundation model, signifying its capacity to address complex reasoning tasks. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique is widely regarded as one of the effective methods for enhancing the reasoning ability of foundation models and has garnered significant attention. However, the reasoning process of CoT is linear, step-by-step, similar to personal logical reasoning, suitable for solving general and slightly complicated problems. On the contrary, the thinking pattern of an expert owns two prominent characteristics that cannot be handled appropriately in CoT, i.e., high-order multi-hop reasoning and multimodal comparative judgement. Therefore, the core motivation of this paper is transcending CoT to construct a reasoning paradigm that can think like an expert. The hyperedge of a hypergraph could connect various vertices, making it naturally suitable for modelling high-order relationships. Inspired by this, this paper innovatively proposes a multimodal Hypergraph-of-Thought (HoT) reasoning paradigm, which enables the foundation models to possess the expert-level ability of high-order multi-hop reasoning and multimodal comparative judgement. Specifically, a textual hypergraph-of-thought is constructed utilizing triple as the primary thought to model higher-order relationships, and a hyperedge-of-thought is generated through multi-hop walking paths to achieve multi-hop inference. Furthermore, we devise a visual hypergraph-of-thought to interact with the textual hypergraph-of-thought via Cross-modal Co-Attention Graph Learning for multimodal comparative verification. Experimentations on the ScienceQA benchmark demonstrate the proposed HoT-based T5 outperforms CoT-based GPT3.5 and chatGPT, which is on par with CoT-based GPT4 with a lower model size.

Yuming Jiang, Nanxuan Zhao, Qing Liu et al.

Group portrait editing is highly desirable since users constantly want to add a person, delete a person, or manipulate existing persons. It is also challenging due to the intricate dynamics of human interactions and the diverse gestures. In this work, we present GroupDiff, a pioneering effort to tackle group photo editing with three dedicated contributions: 1) Data Engine: Since there is no labeled data for group photo editing, we create a data engine to generate paired data for training. The training data engine covers the diverse needs of group portrait editing. 2) Appearance Preservation: To keep the appearance consistent after editing, we inject the images of persons from the group photo into the attention modules and employ skeletons to provide intra-person guidance. 3) Control Flexibility: Bounding boxes indicating the locations of each person are used to reweight the attention matrix so that the features of each person can be injected into the correct places. This inter-person guidance provides flexible manners for manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GroupDiff exhibits state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. GroupDiff offers controllability for editing and maintains the fidelity of the original photos.

Denghao Ma, Qing Liu, Zulong Chen et al.

Document classification forms the backbone of modern enterprise content management, yet existing benchmarks remain trapped in oversimplified paradigms -- single domain settings with flat label structures -- that bear little resemblance to the hierarchical, multi-modal, and cross-domain nature of real-world business documents. This gap not only misrepresents practical complexity but also stifles progress toward industrially viable document intelligence. To bridge this gap, we construct the first Multi-level, Multi-domain, Multi-modal document classification Benchmark (MMM-Bench). MMM-Bench includes (1) a deeply hierarchical taxonomy spanning five levels that capture the authentic organizational logic of business documentation; and (2) 5,990 real-world multi-modal documents meticulously curated from 12 commercial domains in Alibaba. Each document is manually annotated with a complete hierarchical path by domain experts. We establish comprehensive baselines on MMM-Bench, which consists of open-weight models and API-based models. Through systematic experiments, we identify four fundamental challenges within MMM-Bench and propose corresponding insights. To provide a solid foundation for advancing research in multi-level, multi-domain document classification, we release all of the data and the evaluation toolkit of MMM-Bench at https://github.com/MMMDC-Bench/MMMDC-Bench.

Yunzhong He, Cong Zhang, Ruoyan Kong et al.

Query categorization at customer-to-customer e-commerce platforms like Facebook Marketplace is challenging due to the vagueness of search intent, noise in real-world data, and imbalanced training data across languages. Its deployment also needs to consider challenges in scalability and downstream integration in order to translate modeling advances into better search result relevance. In this paper we present HierCat, the query categorization system at Facebook Marketplace. HierCat addresses these challenges by leveraging multi-task pre-training of dual-encoder architectures with a hierarchical inference step to effectively learn from weakly supervised training data mined from searcher engagement. We show that HierCat not only outperforms popular methods in offline experiments, but also leads to 1.4% improvement in NDCG and 4.3% increase in searcher engagement at Facebook Marketplace Search in online A/B testing.

Yue Pan, Qile Liu, Qing Liu et al.

Affective brain-computer interfaces (aBCIs) are increasingly recognized for their potential in monitoring and interpreting emotional states through electroencephalography (EEG) signals. Current EEG-based emotion recognition methods perform well with short segments of EEG data. However, these methods encounter significant challenges in real-life scenarios where emotional states evolve over extended periods. To address this issue, we propose a Dual Attentive (DuA) transformer framework for long-term continuous EEG emotion analysis. Unlike segment-based approaches, the DuA transformer processes an entire EEG trial as a whole, identifying emotions at the trial level, referred to as trial-based emotion analysis. This framework is designed to adapt to varying signal lengths, providing a substantial advantage over traditional methods. The DuA transformer incorporates three key modules: the spatial-spectral network module, the temporal network module, and the transfer learning module. The spatial-spectral network module simultaneously captures spatial and spectral information from EEG signals, while the temporal network module detects temporal dependencies within long-term EEG data. The transfer learning module enhances the model's adaptability across different subjects and conditions. We extensively evaluate the DuA transformer using a self-constructed long-term EEG emotion database, along with two benchmark EEG emotion databases. On the basis of the trial-based leave-one-subject-out cross-subject cross-validation protocol, our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DuA transformer significantly outperforms existing methods in long-term continuous EEG emotion analysis, with an average enhancement of 5.28%.

Mohamed Elhabebe, Ayman El-Baz, Qing Liu

Automated glaucoma detection is critical for preventing irreversible vision loss and reducing the burden on healthcare systems. However, ensuring fairness across diverse patient populations remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose FairEnc, a fair pretraining method for vision-language models (VLMs) that enables simultaneous debiasing across multiple sensitive attributes. FairEnc jointly mitigates biases in both textual and visual modalities with respect to multiple sensitive attributes, including race, gender, ethnicity, and language. Specifically, for the textual encoder, we leverage a large language model to generate synthetic clinical descriptions with varied sensitive attributes while preserving disease semantics, and employ a contrastive alignment objective to encourage demographic-invariant representations. For the visual encoder, we propose a dual-level fairness strategy that combines mutual information regularization to reduce statistical dependence between learned features and demographic groups, with multi-discriminator adversarial debiasing. Comprehensive experiments on the publicly available Harvard-FairVLMed dataset demonstrate that FairEnc effectively reduces demographic disparity as measured by DPD and DEOdds while achieving strong diagnostic performance under both zero-shot and linear probing evaluations. Additional experiments on the private FairFundus dataset show that FairEnc consistently preserves fairness advantages under cross-domain and cross-modality settings and maintains diagnostic performance within a competitive range. These results highlight FairEnc's ability to generalize fairness under distribution shifts, supporting its potential for more equitable deployment in real-world clinical settings. Our codebase and synthetic clinical notes are available at https://github.com/Mohamed-Elhabebe/FairEnc

Yi Yang, Zhong-Qiu Zhao, Quan Bai et al.

Due to the noises in crowdsourced labels, label aggregation (LA) has emerged as a standard procedure to post-process crowdsourced labels. LA methods estimate true labels from crowdsourced labels by modeling worker qualities. Most existing LA methods are iterative in nature. They need to traverse all the crowdsourced labels multiple times in order to jointly and iteratively update true labels and worker qualities until convergence. Consequently, these methods have high space and time complexities. In this paper, we treat LA as a dynamic system and model it as a Dynamic Bayesian network. From the dynamic model we derive two light-weight algorithms, LA\textsuperscript{onepass} and LA\textsuperscript{twopass}, which can effectively and efficiently estimate worker qualities and true labels by traversing all the labels at most twice. Due to the dynamic nature, the proposed algorithms can also estimate true labels online without re-visiting historical data. We theoretically prove the convergence property of the proposed algorithms, and bound the error of estimated worker qualities. We also analyze the space and time complexities of the proposed algorithms and show that they are equivalent to those of majority voting. Experiments conducted on 20 real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can effectively and efficiently aggregate labels in both offline and online settings even if they traverse all the labels at most twice.

Zhipeng Xu, Junhao Ji, Zulong Chen et al.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently shown strong performance on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tasks, demonstrating their promising capability in document literacy. However, their effectiveness in real-world applications remains underexplored, as existing benchmarks adopt task scopes misaligned with practical applications and assume homogeneous acquisition conditions. To address this gap, we introduce CC-OCR V2, a comprehensive and challenging OCR benchmark tailored to real-world document processing. CC-OCR V2 focuses on practical enterprise document processing tasks and incorporates hard and corner cases that are critical yet underrepresented in prior benchmarks, covering 5 major OCR-centric tracks: text recognition, document parsing, document grounding, key information extraction, and document question answering, comprising 7,093 high-difficulty samples. Extensive experiments on 14 advanced LMMs reveal that current models fall short of real-world application requirements. Even state-of-the-art LMMs exhibit substantial performance degradation across diverse tasks and scenarios. These findings reveal a significant gap between performance on current benchmarks and effectiveness in real-world applications. We release the full dataset and evaluation toolkit at https://github.com/eioss/CC-OCR-V2.

Yuhan Wang, Siwei Yang, Bingchen Zhao et al.

Recent advancements in large multimodal models like GPT-4o have set a new standard for high-fidelity, instruction-guided image editing. However, the proprietary nature of these models and their training data creates a significant barrier for open-source research. To bridge this gap, we introduce GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M, a publicly available, large-scale image-editing corpus containing more than 1.5 million high-quality triplets (instruction, source image, edited image). We systematically construct this dataset by leveraging the versatile capabilities of GPT-4o to unify and refine three popular image-editing datasets: OmniEdit, HQ-Edit, and UltraEdit. Specifically, our methodology involves 1) regenerating output images to enhance visual quality and instruction alignment, and 2) selectively rewriting prompts to improve semantic clarity. To validate the efficacy of our dataset, we fine-tune advanced open-source models on GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M. The empirical results are exciting, e.g., the fine-tuned FluxKontext achieves highly competitive performance across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, including 7.24 on GEdit-EN, 3.80 on ImgEdit-Full, and 8.78 on Complex-Edit, showing stronger instruction following and higher perceptual quality while maintaining identity. These scores markedly exceed all previously published open-source methods and substantially narrow the gap to leading proprietary models. We hope the full release of GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M can help to catalyze further open research in instruction-guided image editing.

Yuanhao Cai, He Zhang, Kai Zhang et al.

Existing feedforward image-to-3D methods mainly rely on 2D multi-view diffusion models that cannot guarantee 3D consistency. These methods easily collapse when changing the prompt view direction and mainly handle object-centric cases. In this paper, we propose a novel single-stage 3D diffusion model, DiffusionGS, for object generation and scene reconstruction from a single view. DiffusionGS directly outputs 3D Gaussian point clouds at each timestep to enforce view consistency and allow the model to generate robustly given prompt views of any directions, beyond object-centric inputs. Plus, to improve the capability and generality of DiffusionGS, we scale up 3D training data by developing a scene-object mixed training strategy. Experiments show that DiffusionGS yields improvements of 2.20 dB/23.25 and 1.34 dB/19.16 in PSNR/FID for objects and scenes than the state-of-the-art methods, without depth estimator. Plus, our method enjoys over 5$\times$ faster speed ($\sim$6s on an A100 GPU). Our Project page at https://caiyuanhao1998.github.io/project/DiffusionGS/ shows the video and interactive results. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Open-DiffusionGS

Nannan Li, Qing Liu, Krishna Kumar Singh et al.

Human image editing includes tasks like changing a person's pose, their clothing, or editing the image according to a text prompt. However, prior work often tackles these tasks separately, overlooking the benefit of mutual reinforcement from learning them jointly. In this paper, we propose UniHuman, a unified model that addresses multiple facets of human image editing in real-world settings. To enhance the model's generation quality and generalization capacity, we leverage guidance from human visual encoders and introduce a lightweight pose-warping module that can exploit different pose representations, accommodating unseen textures and patterns. Furthermore, to bridge the disparity between existing human editing benchmarks with real-world data, we curated 400K high-quality human image-text pairs for training and collected 2K human images for out-of-domain testing, both encompassing diverse clothing styles, backgrounds, and age groups. Experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain test sets demonstrate that UniHuman outperforms task-specific models by a significant margin. In user studies, UniHuman is preferred by the users in an average of 77% of cases. Our project is available at https://github.com/NannanLi999/UniHuman.

Qing Liu, Wenli Yang, Shiqing Wu

Over the past two decades, PKAW has provided a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss the state-of-the-arts in the area of knowledge acquisition and machine intelligence (MI, also Artificial Intelligence, AI). PKAW2022 will continue the above focus and welcome the contributions on the multi-disciplinary approach of human and big data-driven knowledge acquisition, as well as AI techniques and applications.

Mengqi Wang, Jianwei Wang, Qing Liu et al.

Error detection (ED), which aims to identify incorrect or inconsistent cell values in tabular data, is important for ensuring data quality. Recent state-of-the-art ED methods leverage the pre-trained knowledge and semantic capability embedded in large language models (LLMs) to directly label whether a cell is erroneous. However, this LLM-as-a-labeler pipeline (1) relies on the black box, implicit decision process, thus failing to provide explainability for the detection results, and (2) is highly sensitive to prompts, yielding inconsistent outputs due to inherent model stochasticity, therefore lacking robustness. To address these limitations, we propose an LLM-as-an-inducer framework that adopts LLM to induce the decision tree for ED (termed TreeED) and further ensembles multiple such trees for consensus detection (termed ForestED), thereby improving explainability and robustness. Specifically, based on prompts derived from data context, decision tree specifications and output requirements, TreeED queries the LLM to induce the decision tree skeleton, whose root-to-leaf decision paths specify the stepwise procedure for evaluating a given sample. Each tree contains three types of nodes: (1) rule nodes that perform simple validation checks (e.g., format or range), (2) Graph Neural Network (GNN) nodes that capture complex patterns (e.g., functional dependencies), and (3) leaf nodes that output the final decision types (error or clean). Furthermore, ForestED employs uncertainty-based sampling to obtain multiple row subsets, constructing a decision tree for each subset using TreeED. It then leverages an Expectation-Maximization-based algorithm that jointly estimates tree reliability and optimizes the consensus ED prediction. Extensive xperiments demonstrate that our methods are accurate, explainable and robust, achieving an average F1-score improvement of 16.1% over the best baseline.

Shiwei Zhang, Zhengzheng Wang, Qing Liu et al.

This paper presents a new annotation method called Sparse Annotation (SA) for crowd counting, which reduces human labeling efforts by sparsely labeling individuals in an image. We argue that sparse labeling can reduce the redundancy of full annotation and capture more diverse information from distant individuals that is not fully captured by Partial Annotation methods. Besides, we propose a point-based Progressive Point Matching network (PPM) to better explore the crowd from the whole image with sparse annotation, which includes a Proposal Matching Network (PMN) and a Performance Restoration Network (PRN). The PMN generates pseudo-point samples using a basic point classifier, while the PRN refines the point classifier with the pseudo points to maximize performance. Our experimental results show that PPM outperforms previous semi-supervised crowd counting methods with the same amount of annotation by a large margin and achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods.

Shilong Zhang, He Zhang, Zhifei Zhang et al.

Modern Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) typically operate in low-level Variational Autoencoder (VAE) latent spaces that are primarily optimized for pixel-level reconstruction. To unify vision generation and understanding, a burgeoning trend is to adopt high-dimensional features from representation encoders as generative latents. However, we empirically identify two fundamental obstacles in this paradigm: (1) the discriminative feature space lacks compact regularization, making diffusion models prone to off-manifold latents that lead to inaccurate object structures; and (2) the encoder's inherently weak pixel-level reconstruction hinders the generator from learning accurate fine-grained geometry and texture. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework to adapt understanding-oriented encoder features for generative tasks. We introduce a semantic-pixel reconstruction objective to regularize the latent space, enabling the compression of both semantic information and fine-grained details into a highly compact representation (96 channels with 16x16 spatial downsampling). This design ensures that the latent space remains semantically rich and achieves state-of-the-art image reconstruction, while remaining compact enough for accurate generation. Leveraging this representation, we design a unified Text-to-Image (T2I) and image editing model. Benchmarking against various feature spaces, we demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction, faster convergence, and substantial performance gains in both T2I and editing tasks, validating that representation encoders can be effectively adapted into robust generative components.

Yuming Yang, Jiang Zhong, Li Jin et al.

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) enhances reasoning capabilities by integrating external knowledge. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on simple image-text interactions, overlooking complex visual formats like charts that are prevalent in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce a novel task, Chart-based MRAG, to address this limitation. To semi-automatically generate high-quality evaluation samples, we propose CHARt-based document question-answering GEneration (CHARGE), a framework that produces evaluation data through structured keypoint extraction, crossmodal verification, and keypoint-based generation. By combining CHARGE with expert validation, we construct Chart-MRAG Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for chart-based MRAG evaluation, featuring 4,738 question-answering pairs across 8 domains from real-world documents. Our evaluation reveals three critical limitations in current approaches: (1) unified multimodal embedding retrieval methods struggles in chart-based scenarios, (2) even with ground-truth retrieval, state-of-the-art MLLMs achieve only 58.19% Correctness and 73.87% Coverage scores, and (3) MLLMs demonstrate consistent text-over-visual modality bias during Chart-based MRAG reasoning. The CHARGE and Chart-MRAG Bench are released at https://github.com/Nomothings/CHARGE.git.

Ziyuan Ding, Yixiong Liang, Shichao Kan et al.

High resolution is crucial for precise segmentation in fundus images, yet handling high-resolution inputs incurs considerable GPU memory costs, with diminishing performance gains as overhead increases. To address this issue while tackling the challenge of segmenting tiny objects, recent studies have explored local-global fusion methods. These methods preserve fine details using local regions and capture long-range context information from downscaled global images. However, the necessity of multiple forward passes inevitably incurs significant computational overhead, adversely affecting inference speed. In this paper, we propose HRDecoder, a simple High-Resolution Decoder network for fundus lesion segmentation. It integrates a high-resolution representation learning module to capture fine-grained local features and a high-resolution fusion module to fuse multi-scale predictions. Our method effectively improves the overall segmentation accuracy of fundus lesions while consuming reasonable memory and computational overhead, and maintaining satisfying inference speed. Experimental results on the IDRiD and DDR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/CVIU-CSU/HRDecoder.

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. Current hybrid RAG system retrieves evidence from both knowledge graphs (KGs) and text documents to support LLM reasoning. However, it faces challenges like handling multi-hop reasoning, multi-entity questions, multi-source verification, and effective graph utilization. To address these limitations, we present HydraRAG, a training-free framework that unifies graph topology, document semantics, and source reliability to support deep, faithful reasoning in LLMs. HydraRAG handles multi-hop and multi-entity problems through agent-driven exploration that combines structured and unstructured retrieval, increasing both diversity and precision of evidence. To tackle multi-source verification, HydraRAG uses a tri-factor cross-source verification (source trustworthiness assessment, cross-source corroboration, and entity-path alignment), to balance topic relevance with cross-modal agreement. By leveraging graph structure, HydraRAG fuses heterogeneous sources, guides efficient exploration, and prunes noise early. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets show that HydraRAG achieves overall state-of-the-art results on all benchmarks with GPT-3.5-Turbo, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by an average of 20.3% and up to 30.1%. Furthermore, HydraRAG enables smaller models (e.g., Llama-3.1-8B) to achieve reasoning performance comparable to that of GPT-4-Turbo. The source code is available on https://stevetantan.github.io/HydraRAG/.

Zhenghong Zhou, Xiaohang Zhan, Zhiqin Chen et al.

Recent video diffusion models have made remarkable strides in visual quality, yet precise, fine-grained control remains a key bottleneck that limits practical customizability for content creation. For AI video creators, three forms of control are crucial: (i) scene composition, (ii) multi-view consistent subject customization, and (iii) camera-pose or object-motion adjustment. Existing methods typically handle these dimensions in isolation, with limited support for multi-view subject synthesis and identity preservation under arbitrary pose changes. This lack of a unified architecture makes it difficult to support versatile, jointly controllable video. We introduce Tri-Prompting, a unified framework and two-stage training paradigm that integrates scene composition, multi-view subject consistency, and motion control. Our approach leverages a dual-condition motion module driven by 3D tracking points for background scenes and downsampled RGB cues for foreground subjects. To ensure a balance between controllability and visual realism, we further propose an inference ControlNet scale schedule. Tri-Prompting supports novel workflows, including 3D-aware subject insertion into any scenes and manipulation of existing subjects in an image. Experimental results demonstrate that Tri-Prompting significantly outperforms specialized baselines such as Phantom and DaS in multi-view subject identity, 3D consistency, and motion accuracy.

Boyi Zheng, Qing Liu

Leveraging multiple partially labeled datasets to train a model for multiple retinal disease screening reduces the reliance on fully annotated datasets, but remains challenging due to significant domain shifts across training datasets from various medical sites, and the label absent issue for partial classes. To solve these challenges, we propose PSScreen, a novel Partially Supervised multiple retinal disease Screening model. Our PSScreen consists of two streams and one learns deterministic features and the other learns probabilistic features via uncertainty injection. Then, we leverage the textual guidance to decouple two types of features into disease-wise features and align them via feature distillation to boost the domain generalization ability. Meanwhile, we employ pseudo label consistency between two streams to address the label absent issue and introduce a self-distillation to transfer task-relevant semantics about known classes from the deterministic to the probabilistic stream to further enhance the detection performances. Experiments show that our PSScreen significantly enhances the detection performances on six retinal diseases and the normal state averagely and achieves state-of-the-art results on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/boyiZheng99/PSScreen.

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu et al.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide structured evidence that can ground large language model (LLM) reasoning for knowledge-intensive question answering. However, many practical KGs are private, and sending retrieved triples or exploration traces to closed-source LLM APIs introduces leakage risk. Existing privacy treatments focus on masking entity names, but they still face four limitations: structural leakage under semantic masking, uncontrollable remote interaction, fragile multi-hop and multi-entity reasoning, and limited experience reuse for stability and efficiency. To address these issues, we propose PrivGemo, a privacy-preserving retrieval-augmented framework for KG-grounded reasoning with memory-guided exposure control. PrivGemo uses a dual-tower design to keep raw KG knowledge local while enabling remote reasoning over an anonymized view that goes beyond name masking to limit both semantic and structural exposure. PrivGemo supports multi-hop, multi-entity reasoning by retrieving anonymized long-hop paths that connect all topic entities, while keeping grounding and verification on the local KG. A hierarchical controller and a privacy-aware experience memory further reduce unnecessary exploration and remote interactions. Comprehensive experiments on six benchmarks show that PrivGemo achieves overall state-of-the-art results, outperforming the strongest baseline by up to 17.1%. Furthermore, PrivGemo enables smaller models (e.g., Qwen3-4B) to achieve reasoning performance comparable to that of GPT-4-Turbo.

Boyi Zheng, Yalin Zheng, Hrvoje Bogunović et al.

In this work, we propose PSScreen V2, a partially supervised self-training framework for multiple retinal disease screening. Unlike previous methods that rely on fully labelled or single-domain datasets, PSScreen V2 is designed to learn from multiple partially labelled datasets with different distributions, addressing both label absence and domain shift challenges. To this end, PSScreen V2 adopts a three-branch architecture with one teacher and two student networks. The teacher branch generates pseudo labels from weakly augmented images to address missing labels, while the two student branches introduce novel feature augmentation strategies: Low-Frequency Dropout (LF-Dropout), which enhances domain robustness by randomly discarding domain-related low-frequency components, and Low-Frequency Uncertainty (LF-Uncert), which estimates uncertain domain variability via adversarially learned Gaussian perturbations of low-frequency statistics. Extensive experiments on multiple in-domain and out-of-domain fundus datasets demonstrate that PSScreen V2 achieves state-of-the-art performance and superior domain generalization ability. Furthermore, compatibility tests with diverse backbones, including the vision foundation model DINOv2, as well as evaluations on chest X-ray datasets, highlight the universality and adaptability of the proposed framework. The codes are available at https://github.com/boyiZheng99/PSScreen_V2.

Xuan Ju, Tianyu Wang, Yuqian Zhou et al.

Recent advances in foundation models highlight a clear trend toward unification and scaling, showing emergent capabilities across diverse domains. While image generation and editing have rapidly transitioned from task-specific to unified frameworks, video generation and editing remain fragmented due to architectural limitations and data scarcity. In this work, we introduce EditVerse, a unified framework for image and video generation and editing within a single model. By representing all modalities, i.e., text, image, and video, as a unified token sequence, EditVerse leverages self-attention to achieve robust in-context learning, natural cross-modal knowledge transfer, and flexible handling of inputs and outputs with arbitrary resolutions and durations. To address the lack of video editing training data, we design a scalable data pipeline that curates 232K video editing samples and combines them with large-scale image and video datasets for joint training. Furthermore, we present EditVerseBench, the first benchmark for instruction-based video editing covering diverse tasks and resolutions. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that EditVerse achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing open-source and commercial models, while exhibiting emergent editing and generation abilities across modalities.

Ali Salar, Qing Liu, Guoying Zhao

The growing use of portrait images in computer vision highlights the need to protect personal identities. At the same time, anonymized images must remain useful for downstream computer vision tasks. In this work, we propose a unified framework that leverages the inpainting ability of latent diffusion models to generate realistic anonymized images. Unlike prior approaches, we have complete control over the anonymization process by designing an adaptive attribute-guidance module that applies gradient correction during the reverse denoising process, aligning the facial attributes of the generated image with those of the synthesized target image. Our framework also supports localized anonymization, allowing users to specify which facial regions are left unchanged. Extensive experiments conducted on the public CelebA-HQ and FFHQ datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while requiring no additional model training. The source code is available on our page.

Xingyu Li, Qing Liu, Tony Jiang et al.

We propose a novel method, termed the M-learner, for estimating heterogeneous indirect and total treatment effects and identifying relevant subgroups within a mediation framework. The procedure comprises four key steps. First, we compute individual-level conditional average indirect/total treatment effect Second, we construct a distance matrix based on pairwise differences. Third, we apply tSNE to project this matrix into a low-dimensional Euclidean space, followed by K-means clustering to identify subgroup structures. Finally, we calibrate and refine the clusters using a threshold-based procedure to determine the optimal configuration. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach specifically designed to capture treatment effect heterogeneity in the presence of mediation. Experimental results validate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed framework. Application to the real-world Jobs II dataset highlights the broad adaptability and potential applicability of our method.Code is available at https: //anonymous.4open.science/r/M-learner-C4BB.

Xianhang Li, Haoqin Tu, Mude Hui et al.

Web-crawled image-text pairs are inherently noisy. Prior studies demonstrate that semantically aligning and enriching textual descriptions of these pairs can significantly enhance model training across various vision-language tasks, particularly text-to-image generation. However, large-scale investigations in this area remain predominantly closed-source. Our paper aims to bridge this community effort, leveraging the powerful and \textit{open-sourced} LLaMA-3, a GPT-4 level LLM. Our recaptioning pipeline is simple: first, we fine-tune a LLaMA-3-8B powered LLaVA-1.5 and then employ it to recaption 1.3 billion images from the DataComp-1B dataset. Our empirical results confirm that this enhanced dataset, Recap-DataComp-1B, offers substantial benefits in training advanced vision-language models. For discriminative models like CLIP, we observe enhanced zero-shot performance in cross-modal retrieval tasks. For generative models like text-to-image Diffusion Transformers, the generated images exhibit a significant improvement in alignment with users' text instructions, especially in following complex queries. Our project page is https://www.haqtu.me/Recap-Datacomp-1B/

Qing Liu, Haotian Liu, Wei Ke et al.

Feature reassembly is an essential component in modern CNN-based segmentation approaches, which includes feature downsampling and upsampling operators. Existing operators reassemble multiple features from a small predefined region into one for each target location independently. This may result in loss of spatial information, which could vanish activations caused by tiny lesions particularly when they cluster together. In this paper, we propose a many-to-many reassembly of features (M2MRF). It reassembles features in a dimension-reduced feature space and simultaneously aggregates multiple features inside a large predefined region into multiple target features. In this way, long range spatial dependencies are captured to maintain activations on tiny lesions. Experimental results on two lesion segmentation benchmarks, i.e. DDR and IDRiD, show that (1) our M2MRF outperforms existing feature reassembly operators; (2) equipped with our M2MRF, the HRNetv2 is able to achieve significant better performance to CNN-based segmentation methods and competitive even better performance to two recent transformer-based segmentation methods. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/CVIU-CSU/M2MRF-Lesion-Segmentation.

Qing Liu, Lingxi Xie, Huiyu Wang et al.

Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is widely recognized as an important vision problem which implies a wide range of real-world applications. Recently, research interests arise in solving this problem under the more realistic and challenging setting of zero-shot learning. In this paper, we investigate this problem from the viewpoint of domain adaptation which we show is critical in improving feature embedding in the zero-shot scenario. Based on a framework which starts with a pre-trained model on ImageNet and fine-tunes it on the training set of SBIR benchmark, we advocate the importance of preserving previously acquired knowledge, e.g., the rich discriminative features learned from ImageNet, to improve the model's transfer ability. For this purpose, we design an approach named Semantic-Aware Knowledge prEservation (SAKE), which fine-tunes the pre-trained model in an economical way and leverages semantic information, e.g., inter-class relationship, to achieve the goal of knowledge preservation. Zero-shot experiments on two extended SBIR datasets, TU-Berlin and Sketchy, verify the superior performance of our approach. Extensive diagnostic experiments validate that knowledge preserved benefits SBIR in zero-shot settings, as a large fraction of the performance gain is from the more properly structured feature embedding for photo images. Code is available at: https://github.com/qliu24/SAKE.

Yutong Bai, Qing Liu, Lingxi Xie et al.

Detecting semantic parts of an object is a challenging task in computer vision, particularly because it is hard to construct large annotated datasets due to the difficulty of annotating semantic parts. In this paper we present an approach which learns from a small training dataset of annotated semantic parts, where the object is seen from a limited range of viewpoints, but generalizes to detect semantic parts from a much larger range of viewpoints. Our approach is based on a matching algorithm for finding accurate spatial correspondence between two images, which enables semantic parts annotated on one image to be transplanted to another. In particular, this enables images in the training dataset to be matched to a virtual 3D model of the object (for simplicity, we assume that the object viewpoint can be estimated by standard techniques). Then a clustering algorithm is used to annotate the semantic parts of the 3D virtual model. This virtual 3D model can be used to synthesize annotated images from a large range of viewpoint. These can be matched to images in the test set, using the same matching algorithm, to detect semantic parts in novel viewpoints of the object. Our algorithm is very simple, intuitive, and contains very few parameters. We evaluate our approach in the car subclass of the VehicleSemanticPart dataset. We show it outperforms standard deep network approaches and, in particular, performs much better on novel viewpoints. For facilitating the future research, code is available: https://github.com/ytongbai/SemanticPartDetection

Yixiong Liang, Zhihong Tang, Meng Yan et al.

Automated detection of cervical cancer cells or cell clumps has the potential to significantly reduce error rate and increase productivity in cervical cancer screening. However, most traditional methods rely on the success of accurate cell segmentation and discriminative hand-crafted features extraction. Recently there are emerging deep learning-based methods which train convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify image patches, but they are computationally expensive. In this paper we propose an efficient CNN-based object detection methods for cervical cancer cells/clumps detection. Specifically, we utilize the state-of-the-art two-stage object detection method, the Faster-RCNN with Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) as the baseline and propose a novel comparison detector to deal with the limited data problem. The key idea is that classify the proposals by comparing with the reference samples of each category in object detection. In addition, we propose to learn the reference samples of the background from data instead of manually choosing them by some heuristic rules. Experimental results show that the proposed Comparison Detector yields significant improvement on the small dataset, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 26.3% and an Average Recall (AR) of 35.7%, both improving about 20 points compared to the baseline. Moreover, Comparison Detector improved AR by 4.6 points and achieved marginally better performance in terms of mAP compared with baseline model when training on the medium dataset. Our method is promising for the development of automation-assisted cervical cancer screening systems. Code is available at https://github.com/kuku-sichuan/ComparisonDetector.

Xi Chen, Zhifei Zhang, He Zhang et al.

We introduce UniReal, a unified framework designed to address various image generation and editing tasks. Existing solutions often vary by tasks, yet share fundamental principles: preserving consistency between inputs and outputs while capturing visual variations. Inspired by recent video generation models that effectively balance consistency and variation across frames, we propose a unifying approach that treats image-level tasks as discontinuous video generation. Specifically, we treat varying numbers of input and output images as frames, enabling seamless support for tasks such as image generation, editing, customization, composition, etc. Although designed for image-level tasks, we leverage videos as a scalable source for universal supervision. UniReal learns world dynamics from large-scale videos, demonstrating advanced capability in handling shadows, reflections, pose variation, and object interaction, while also exhibiting emergent capability for novel applications.

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in various tasks but struggle with hallucination problems and lack of relevant knowledge, especially in deep complex reasoning and knowledge-intensive tasks. Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which capture vast amounts of facts in a structured format, offer a reliable source of knowledge for reasoning. However, existing KG-based LLM reasoning methods face challenges like handling multi-hop reasoning, multi-entity questions, and effectively utilizing graph structures. To address these issues, we propose Paths-over-Graph (PoG), a novel method that enhances LLM reasoning by integrating knowledge reasoning paths from KGs, improving the interpretability and faithfulness of LLM outputs. PoG tackles multi-hop and multi-entity questions through a three-phase dynamic multi-hop path exploration, which combines the inherent knowledge of LLMs with factual knowledge from KGs. In order to improve the efficiency, PoG prunes irrelevant information from the graph exploration first and introduces efficient three-step pruning techniques that incorporate graph structures, LLM prompting, and a pre-trained language model (e.g., SBERT) to effectively narrow down the explored candidate paths. This ensures all reasoning paths contain highly relevant information captured from KGs, making the reasoning faithful and interpretable in problem-solving. PoG innovatively utilizes graph structure to prune the irrelevant noise and represents the first method to implement multi-entity deep path detection on KGs for LLM reasoning tasks. Comprehensive experiments on five benchmark KGQA datasets demonstrate PoG outperforms the state-of-the-art method ToG across GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 18.9%. Notably, PoG with GPT-3.5-Turbo surpasses ToG with GPT-4 by up to 23.9%.

Yu-Ju Tsai, Brian Price, Qing Liu et al.

Personalized image completion aims to restore occluded regions in personal photos while preserving identity and appearance. Existing methods either rely on generic inpainting models that often fail to maintain identity consistency, or assume that suitable reference images are explicitly provided. In practice, suitable references are often not explicitly provided, requiring the system to search for identity-consistent images within personal photo collections. We present AlbumFill, a training-free framework that retrieves identity-consistent references from personal albums for personalized completion. Given an occluded image and a personal album, a vision-language model infers missing semantic cues to guide composed image retrieval, and the retrieved references are used by reference-based completion models. To facilitate this task, we introduce a dataset containing 54K human-centric samples with associated album images. Experiments across multiple baselines demonstrate the difficulty of personalized completion and highlight the importance of identity-consistent reference retrieval. Project Page: https://liagm.github.io/AlbumFill/

Qian Gong, Jieyang Chen, Ben Whitney et al.

We describe MGARD, a software providing MultiGrid Adaptive Reduction for floating-point scientific data on structured and unstructured grids. With exceptional data compression capability and precise error control, MGARD addresses a wide range of requirements, including storage reduction, high-performance I/O, and in-situ data analysis. It features a unified application programming interface (API) that seamlessly operates across diverse computing architectures. MGARD has been optimized with highly-tuned GPU kernels and efficient memory and device management mechanisms, ensuring scalable and rapid operations.

Jihang Li, Qing Liu, Zulong Chen et al.

Tax code prediction is a crucial yet underexplored task in automating invoicing and compliance management for large-scale e-commerce platforms. Each product must be accurately mapped to a node within a multi-level taxonomic hierarchy defined by national standards, where errors lead to financial inconsistencies and regulatory risks. This paper presents Taxon, a semantically aligned and expert-guided framework for hierarchical tax code prediction. Taxon integrates (i) a feature-gating mixture-of-experts architecture that adaptively routes multi-modal features across taxonomy levels, and (ii) a semantic consistency model distilled from large language models acting as domain experts to verify alignment between product titles and official tax definitions. To address noisy supervision in real business records, we design a multi-source training pipeline that combines curated tax databases, invoice validation logs, and merchant registration data to provide both structural and semantic supervision. Extensive experiments on the proprietary TaxCode dataset and public benchmarks demonstrate that Taxon achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines. Further, an additional full hierarchical paths reconstruction procedure significantly improves structural consistency, yielding the highest overall F1 scores. Taxon has been deployed in production within Alibaba's tax service system, handling an average of over 500,000 tax code queries per day and reaching peak volumes above five million requests during business event with improved accuracy, interpretability, and robustness.

Jaskirat Singh, Jianming Zhang, Qing Liu et al.

The field of generative image inpainting and object insertion has made significant progress with the recent advent of latent diffusion models. Utilizing a precise object mask can greatly enhance these applications. However, due to the challenges users encounter in creating high-fidelity masks, there is a tendency for these methods to rely on more coarse masks (e.g., bounding box) for these applications. This results in limited control and compromised background content preservation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SmartMask, which allows any novice user to create detailed masks for precise object insertion. Combined with a ControlNet-Inpaint model, our experiments demonstrate that SmartMask achieves superior object insertion quality, preserving the background content more effectively than previous methods. Notably, unlike prior works the proposed approach can also be used even without user-mask guidance, which allows it to perform mask-free object insertion at diverse positions and scales. Furthermore, we find that when used iteratively with a novel instruction-tuning based planning model, SmartMask can be used to design detailed layouts from scratch. As compared with user-scribble based layout design, we observe that SmartMask allows for better quality outputs with layout-to-image generation methods. Project page is available at https://smartmask-gen.github.io

Hang Hua, Qing Liu, Lingzhi Zhang et al.

The advent of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced multimodal tasks, enabling more sophisticated and accurate reasoning across various applications, including image and video captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. Despite their superior capabilities, VLMs struggle with fine-grained image regional composition information perception. Specifically, they have difficulty accurately aligning the segmentation masks with the corresponding semantics and precisely describing the compositional aspects of the referred regions. However, compositionality - the ability to understand and generate novel combinations of known visual and textual components - is critical for facilitating coherent reasoning and understanding across modalities by VLMs. To address this issue, we propose FINECAPTION, a novel VLM that can recognize arbitrary masks as referential inputs and process high-resolution images for compositional image captioning at different granularity levels. To support this endeavor, we introduce COMPOSITIONCAP, a new dataset for multi-grained region compositional image captioning, which introduces the task of compositional attribute-aware regional image captioning. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model compared to other state-of-the-art VLMs. Additionally, we analyze the capabilities of current VLMs in recognizing various visual prompts for compositional region image captioning, highlighting areas for improvement in VLM design and training.