Zhimin Li

Leizhen Dong, Zhimin Li, Kunlun Xu et al.

Human-Object Interactions (HOI) detection, which aims to localize a human and a relevant object while recognizing their interaction, is crucial for understanding a still image. Recently, transformer-based models have significantly advanced the progress of HOI detection. However, the capability of these models has not been fully explored since the Object Query of the model is always simply initialized as just zeros, which would affect the performance. In this paper, we try to study the issue of promoting transformer-based HOI detectors by initializing the Object Query with category-aware semantic information. To this end, we innovatively propose the Category-Aware Transformer Network (CATN). Specifically, the Object Query would be initialized via category priors represented by an external object detection model to yield better performance. Moreover, such category priors can be further used for enhancing the representation ability of features via the attention mechanism. We have firstly verified our idea via the Oracle experiment by initializing the Object Query with the groundtruth category information. And then extensive experiments have been conducted to show that a HOI detection model equipped with our idea outperforms the baseline by a large margin to achieve a new state-of-the-art result.

Jie Jiang, Zhimin Li, Jiangfeng Xiong et al.

Temporal video segmentation and classification have been advanced greatly by public benchmarks in recent years. However, such research still mainly focuses on human actions, failing to describe videos in a holistic view. In addition, previous research tends to pay much attention to visual information yet ignores the multi-modal nature of videos. To fill this gap, we construct the Tencent `Ads Video Segmentation'~(TAVS) dataset in the ads domain to escalate multi-modal video analysis to a new level. TAVS describes videos from three independent perspectives as `presentation form', `place', and `style', and contains rich multi-modal information such as video, audio, and text. TAVS is organized hierarchically in semantic aspects for comprehensive temporal video segmentation with three levels of categories for multi-label classification, e.g., `place' - `working place' - `office'. Therefore, TAVS is distinguished from previous temporal segmentation datasets due to its multi-modal information, holistic view of categories, and hierarchical granularities. It includes 12,000 videos, 82 classes, 33,900 segments, 121,100 shots, and 168,500 labels. Accompanied with TAVS, we also present a strong multi-modal video segmentation baseline coupled with multi-label class prediction. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate our proposed method as well as existing representative methods to reveal key challenges of our dataset TAVS.

Zhimin Li, Shusen Liu, Xin Yu et al.

Deep learning approaches have provided state-of-the-art performance in many applications by relying on large and overparameterized neural networks. However, such networks have been shown to be very brittle and are difficult to deploy on resource-limited platforms. Model pruning, i.e., reducing the size of the network, is a widely adopted strategy that can lead to a more robust and compact model. Many heuristics exist for model pruning, but empirical studies show that some heuristics improve performance whereas others can make models more brittle or have other side effects. This work aims to shed light on how different pruning methods alter the network's internal feature representation and the corresponding impact on model performance. To facilitate a comprehensive comparison and characterization of the high-dimensional model feature space, we introduce a visual geometric analysis of feature representations. We decomposed and evaluated a set of critical geometric concepts from the common adopted classification loss, and used them to design a visualization system to compare and highlight the impact of pruning on model performance and feature representation. The proposed tool provides an environment for in-depth comparison of pruning methods and a comprehensive understanding of how model response to common data corruption. By leveraging the proposed visualization, machine learning researchers can reveal the similarities between pruning methods and redundant in robustness evaluation benchmarks, obtain geometric insights about the differences between pruned models that achieve superior robustness performance, and identify samples that are robust or fragile to model pruning and common data corruption to model pruning and data corruption but also obtain insights and explanations on how some pruned models achieve superior robustness performance.

Zhimin Li, Jianwei Zhang, Qin Lin et al.

We present Hunyuan-DiT, a text-to-image diffusion transformer with fine-grained understanding of both English and Chinese. To construct Hunyuan-DiT, we carefully design the transformer structure, text encoder, and positional encoding. We also build from scratch a whole data pipeline to update and evaluate data for iterative model optimization. For fine-grained language understanding, we train a Multimodal Large Language Model to refine the captions of the images. Finally, Hunyuan-DiT can perform multi-turn multimodal dialogue with users, generating and refining images according to the context. Through our holistic human evaluation protocol with more than 50 professional human evaluators, Hunyuan-DiT sets a new state-of-the-art in Chinese-to-image generation compared with other open-source models. Code and pretrained models are publicly available at github.com/Tencent/HunyuanDiT

Zhimin Li, Shusen Liu, Kailkhura Bhavya et al.

Neural network have achieved remarkable successes in many scientific fields. However, the interpretability of the neural network model is still a major bottlenecks to deploy such technique into our daily life. The challenge can dive into the non-linear behavior of the neural network, which rises a critical question that how a model use input feature to make a decision. The classical approach to address this challenge is feature attribution, which assigns an important score to each input feature and reveal its importance of current prediction. However, current feature attribution approaches often indicate the importance of each input feature without detail of how they are actually processed by a model internally. These attribution approaches often raise a concern that whether they highlight correct features for a model prediction. For a neural network model, the non-linear behavior is often caused by non-linear activation units of a model. However, the computation behavior of a prediction from a neural network model is locally linear, because one prediction has only one activation pattern. Base on the observation, we propose an instance-wise linearization approach to reformulates the forward computation process of a neural network prediction. This approach reformulates different layers of convolution neural networks into linear matrix multiplication. Aggregating all layers' computation, a prediction complex convolution neural network operations can be described as a linear matrix multiplication $F(x) = W \cdot x + b$. This equation can not only provides a feature attribution map that highlights the important of the input features but also tells how each input feature contributes to a prediction exactly. Furthermore, we discuss the application of this technique in both supervise classification and unsupervised neural network learning parametric t-SNE dimension reduction.

Chao Wu, Yifan Gong, Liangkai Liu et al.

Object detection on the edge (Edge-OD) is in growing demand thanks to its ever-broad application prospects. However, the development of this field is rigorously restricted by the deployment dilemma of simultaneously achieving high accuracy, excellent power efficiency, and meeting strict real-time requirements. To tackle this dilemma, we propose AyE-Edge, the first-of-this-kind development tool that explores automated algorithm-device deployment space search to realize Accurate yet power-Efficient real-time object detection on the Edge. Through a collaborative exploration of keyframe selection, CPU-GPU configuration, and DNN pruning strategy, AyE-Edge excels in extensive real-world experiments conducted on a mobile device. The results consistently demonstrate AyE-Edge's effectiveness, realizing outstanding real-time performance, detection accuracy, and notably, a remarkable 96.7% reduction in power consumption, compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) competitors.

Haichao Miao, Zhimin Li, Kuangshi Ai et al.

The ability to inspect, interpret, and communicate complex data is crucial for virtually any scientific endeavor, but often requires significant expertise outside the core domain ranging from data management and analysis to visualization design and implementation. We present an end-to-end agentic harness that, based on only the data and a high level description of the tasks, independently designs custom visual analysis applications (VIS apps). This represents an important step towards a general AI co-scientist envisioned by many as an autonomous system that can autonomously execute long horizon tasks based on high-level directions. Our proposed VIS co-scientist is an essential component of this broader AI co-scientist vision: a harness that can autonomously analyze data and design visualization solutions using a collection of agents and specialized skills that coordinate exploratory analysis, plan, configure the environment, implement, validate the interface, and most importantly evaluate the overall task completion. Each stage produces document and instruction artifacts that guide downstream work and enable iterative refinement. We validate this approach on IEEE SciVis Contests spanning multiple science and engineering fields. These contests serve as ideal proving grounds because they encode real-world complexity: ambiguous requirements, diverse data modalities, design trade-offs, and task-driven validation. Given only the data and target tasks, our system autonomously produces functional single-page VIS Apps with verified linked-view behavior, highly customized to domain experts' specified tasks and needs.

Runze He, Yiji Cheng, Tiankai Hang et al.

In-context image generation and editing (ICGE) enables users to specify visual concepts through interleaved image-text prompts, demanding precise understanding and faithful execution of user intent. Although recent unified multimodal models exhibit promising understanding capabilities, these strengths often fail to transfer effectively to image generation. We introduce Re-Align, a unified framework that bridges the gap between understanding and generation through structured reasoning-guided alignment. At its core lies the In-Context Chain-of-Thought (IC-CoT), a structured reasoning paradigm that decouples semantic guidance and reference association, providing clear textual target and mitigating confusion among reference images. Furthermore, Re-Align introduces an effective RL training scheme that leverages a surrogate reward to measure the alignment between structured reasoning text and the generated image, thereby improving the model's overall performance on ICGE tasks. Extensive experiments verify that Re-Align outperforms competitive methods of comparable model scale and resources on both in-context image generation and editing tasks.

Timothy Rupprecht, Sung-En Chang, Yushu Wu et al.

We present a novel prompting strategy for artificial intelligence driven digital avatars. To better quantify how our prompting strategy affects anthropomorphic features like humor, authenticity, and favorability we present Crowd Vote - an adaptation of Crowd Score that allows for judges to elect a large language model (LLM) candidate over competitors answering the same or similar prompts. To visualize the responses of our LLM, and the effectiveness of our prompting strategy we propose an end-to-end framework for creating high-fidelity artificial intelligence (AI) driven digital avatars. This pipeline effectively captures an individual's essence for interaction and our streaming algorithm delivers a high-quality digital avatar with real-time audio-video streaming from server to mobile device. Both our visualization tool, and our Crowd Vote metrics demonstrate our AI driven digital avatars have state-of-the-art humor, authenticity, and favorability outperforming all competitors and baselines. In the case of our Donald Trump and Joe Biden avatars, their authenticity and favorability are rated higher than even their real-world equivalents.

Siyu Cao, Hangting Chen, Peng Chen et al.

We present HunyuanImage 3.0, a native multimodal model that unifies multimodal understanding and generation within an autoregressive framework, with its image generation module publicly available. The achievement of HunyuanImage 3.0 relies on several key components, including meticulous data curation, advanced architecture design, a native Chain-of-Thoughts schema, progressive model pre-training, aggressive model post-training, and an efficient infrastructure that enables large-scale training and inference. With these advancements, we successfully trained a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model comprising over 80 billion parameters in total, with 13 billion parameters activated per token during inference, making it the largest and most powerful open-source image generative model to date. We conducted extensive experiments and the results of automatic and human evaluation of text-image alignment and visual quality demonstrate that HunyuanImage 3.0 rivals previous state-of-the-art models. By releasing the code and weights of HunyuanImage 3.0, we aim to enable the community to explore new ideas with a state-of-the-art foundation model, fostering a dynamic and vibrant multimodal ecosystem. All open source assets are publicly available at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanImage-3.0

Xiaohan Wang, Zhimin Li, Joshua A. Levine et al.

Recently, neural surrogate models have emerged as a compelling alternative to traditional simulation workflows. This is accomplished by modeling the underlying function of scientific simulations, removing the need to run expensive simulations. Beyond just mapping from input parameter to output, surrogates have also been shown useful for inverse problems: output to input parameters. Inverse problems can be understood as search, where we aim to find parameters whose surrogate outputs contain a specified feature. Yet finding these parameters can be costly, especially for high-dimensional parameter spaces. Thus, existing surrogate-based solutions primarily focus on finding a small set of matching parameters, in the process overlooking the broader picture of plausible parameters. Our work aims to model and visualize the distribution of possible input parameters that produce a given output feature. To achieve this goal, we aim to address two challenges: (1) the approximation error inherent in the surrogate model and (2) forming the parameter distribution in an interactive manner. We model error via density estimation, reporting high density only if a given parameter configuration is close to training parameters, measured both over the input and output space. Our density estimate is used to form a prior belief on parameters, and when combined with a likelihood on features, gives us an efficient way to sample plausible parameter configurations that generate a target output feature. We demonstrate the usability of our solution through a visualization interface by performing feature-driven parameter analysis over the input parameter space of three simulation datasets. Source code is available at https://github.com/matthewberger/seeing-the-many

Zhu Xu, Ting Lei, Zhimin Li et al.

Dynamic Scene Graph Generation (DSGG) aims to create a scene graph for each video frame by detecting objects and predicting their relationships. Weakly Supervised DSGG (WS-DSGG) reduces annotation workload by using an unlocalized scene graph from a single frame per video for training. Existing WS-DSGG methods depend on an off-the-shelf external object detector to generate pseudo labels for subsequent DSGG training. However, detectors trained on static, object-centric images struggle in dynamic, relation-aware scenarios required for DSGG, leading to inaccurate localization and low-confidence proposals. To address the challenges posed by external object detectors in WS-DSGG, we propose a Temporal-enhanced Relation-aware Knowledge Transferring (TRKT) method, which leverages knowledge to enhance detection in relation-aware dynamic scenarios. TRKT is built on two key components:(1)Relation-aware knowledge mining: we first employ object and relation class decoders that generate category-specific attention maps to highlight both object regions and interactive areas. Then we propose an Inter-frame Attention Augmentation strategy that exploits optical flow for neighboring frames to enhance the attention maps, making them motion-aware and robust to motion blur. This step yields relation- and motion-aware knowledge mining for WS-DSGG. (2) we introduce a Dual-stream Fusion Module that integrates category-specific attention maps into external detections to refine object localization and boost confidence scores for object proposals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TRKT achieves state-of-the-art performance on Action Genome dataset. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/XZPKU/TRKT.git.

Yibin Wang, Zhimin Li, Yuhang Zang et al.

Recent advances in multimodal Reward Models (RMs) have shown significant promise in delivering reward signals to align vision models with human preferences. However, current RMs are generally restricted to providing direct responses or engaging in shallow reasoning processes with limited depth, often leading to inaccurate reward signals. We posit that incorporating explicit long chains of thought (CoT) into the reward reasoning process can significantly strengthen their reliability and robustness. Furthermore, we believe that once RMs internalize CoT reasoning, their direct response accuracy can also be improved through implicit reasoning capabilities. To this end, this paper proposes UnifiedReward-Think, the first unified multimodal CoT-based reward model, capable of multi-dimensional, step-by-step long-chain reasoning for both visual understanding and generation reward tasks. Specifically, we adopt an exploration-driven reinforcement fine-tuning approach to elicit and incentivize the model's latent complex reasoning ability: (1) We first use a small amount of image generation preference data to distill the reasoning process of GPT-4o, which is then used for the model's cold start to learn the format and structure of CoT reasoning. (2) Subsequently, by leveraging the model's prior knowledge and generalization capabilities, we prepare large-scale unified multimodal preference data to elicit the model's reasoning process across various vision tasks. During this phase, correct reasoning outputs are retained for rejection sampling to refine the model (3) while incorrect predicted samples are finally used for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) based reinforcement fine-tuning, enabling the model to explore diverse reasoning paths and optimize for correct and robust solutions. Extensive experiments across various vision reward tasks demonstrate the superiority of our model.

Shusen Liu, Haichao Miao, Zhimin Li et al.

With recent advances in multi-modal foundation models, the previously text-only large language models (LLM) have evolved to incorporate visual input, opening up unprecedented opportunities for various applications in visualization. Our work explores the utilization of the visual perception ability of multi-modal LLMs to develop Autonomous Visualization Agents (AVAs) that can interpret and accomplish user-defined visualization objectives through natural language. We propose the first framework for the design of AVAs and present several usage scenarios intended to demonstrate the general applicability of the proposed paradigm. The addition of visual perception allows AVAs to act as the virtual visualization assistant for domain experts who may lack the knowledge or expertise in fine-tuning visualization outputs. Our preliminary exploration and proof-of-concept agents suggest that this approach can be widely applicable whenever the choices of appropriate visualization parameters require the interpretation of previous visual output. Feedback from unstructured interviews with experts in AI research, medical visualization, and radiology has been incorporated, highlighting the practicality and potential of AVAs. Our study indicates that AVAs represent a general paradigm for designing intelligent visualization systems that can achieve high-level visualization goals, which pave the way for developing expert-level visualization agents in the future.

Yibin Wang, Zhimin Li, Yuhang Zang et al.

Recent advancements highlight the importance of GRPO-based reinforcement learning methods and benchmarking in enhancing text-to-image (T2I) generation. However, current methods using pointwise reward models (RM) for scoring generated images are susceptible to reward hacking. We reveal that this happens when minimal score differences between images are amplified after normalization, creating illusory advantages that drive the model to over-optimize for trivial gains, ultimately destabilizing the image generation process. To address this, we propose Pref-GRPO, a pairwise preference reward-based GRPO method that shifts the optimization objective from score maximization to preference fitting, ensuring more stable training. In Pref-GRPO, images are pairwise compared within each group using preference RM, and the win rate is used as the reward signal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PREF-GRPO differentiates subtle image quality differences, providing more stable advantages and mitigating reward hacking. Additionally, existing T2I benchmarks are limited by coarse evaluation criteria, hindering comprehensive model assessment. To solve this, we introduce UniGenBench, a unified T2I benchmark comprising 600 prompts across 5 main themes and 20 subthemes. It evaluates semantic consistency through 10 primary and 27 sub-criteria, leveraging MLLM for benchmark construction and evaluation. Our benchmarks uncover the strengths and weaknesses of both open and closed-source T2I models and validate the effectiveness of Pref-GRPO.

Xiangwei Shen, Zhimin Li, Zhantao Yang et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of directly aligning diffusion models with human preferences using differentiable reward. However, they exhibit two primary challenges: (1) they rely on multistep denoising with gradient computation for reward scoring, which is computationally expensive, thus restricting optimization to only a few diffusion steps; (2) they often need continuous offline adaptation of reward models in order to achieve desired aesthetic quality, such as photorealism or precise lighting effects. To address the limitation of multistep denoising, we propose Direct-Align, a method that predefines a noise prior to effectively recover original images from any time steps via interpolation, leveraging the equation that diffusion states are interpolations between noise and target images, which effectively avoids over-optimization in late timesteps. Furthermore, we introduce Semantic Relative Preference Optimization (SRPO), in which rewards are formulated as text-conditioned signals. This approach enables online adjustment of rewards in response to positive and negative prompt augmentation, thereby reducing the reliance on offline reward fine-tuning. By fine-tuning the FLUX model with optimized denoising and online reward adjustment, we improve its human-evaluated realism and aesthetic quality by over 3x.

Zhimin Li, Haichao Miao, Xinyuan Yan et al.

Recent developments in multimodal large language models (MLLM) have equipped language models to reason about vision and language jointly. This permits MLLMs to both perceive and answer questions about data visualization across a variety of designs and tasks. Applying MLLMs to a broad range of visualization tasks requires us to properly evaluate their capabilities, and the most common way to conduct evaluation is through measuring a model's visualization reasoning capability, analogous to how we would evaluate human understanding of visualizations (e.g., visualization literacy). However, we found that in the context of visualization question answering (VisQA), how an MLLM perceives and reasons about visualizations can be fundamentally different from how humans approach the same problem. During the evaluation, even without visualization, the model could correctly answer a substantial portion of the visualization test questions, regardless of whether any selection options were provided. We hypothesize that the vast amount of knowledge encoded in the language model permits factual recall that supersedes the need to seek information from the visual signal. It raises concerns that the current VisQA evaluation may not fully capture the models' visualization reasoning capabilities. To address this, we propose a comprehensive sanity check framework that integrates a rule-based decision tree and a sanity check table to disentangle the effects of "seeing" (visual processing) and "recall" (reliance on prior knowledge). This validates VisQA datasets for evaluation, highlighting where models are truly "seeing", positively or negatively affected by the factual recall, or relying on inductive biases for question answering. Our study underscores the need for careful consideration in designing future visualization understanding studies when utilizing MLLMs.

Ruihuang Li, Caijin Zhou, Shoujian Zheng et al. · tencent-ai

Intelligent game creation represents a transformative advancement in game development, utilizing generative artificial intelligence to dynamically generate and enhance game content. Despite notable progress in generative models, the comprehensive synthesis of high-quality game assets, including both images and videos, remains a challenging frontier. To create high-fidelity game content that simultaneously aligns with player preferences and significantly boosts designer efficiency, we present Hunyuan-Game, an innovative project designed to revolutionize intelligent game production. Hunyuan-Game encompasses two primary branches: image generation and video generation. The image generation component is built upon a vast dataset comprising billions of game images, leading to the development of a group of customized image generation models tailored for game scenarios: (1) General Text-to-Image Generation. (2) Game Visual Effects Generation, involving text-to-effect and reference image-based game visual effect generation. (3) Transparent Image Generation for characters, scenes, and game visual effects. (4) Game Character Generation based on sketches, black-and-white images, and white models. The video generation component is built upon a comprehensive dataset of millions of game and anime videos, leading to the development of five core algorithmic models, each targeting critical pain points in game development and having robust adaptation to diverse game video scenarios: (1) Image-to-Video Generation. (2) 360 A/T Pose Avatar Video Synthesis. (3) Dynamic Illustration Generation. (4) Generative Video Super-Resolution. (5) Interactive Game Video Generation. These image and video generation models not only exhibit high-level aesthetic expression but also deeply integrate domain-specific knowledge, establishing a systematic understanding of diverse game and anime art styles.

Yibin Wang, Zhimin Li, Yuhang Zang et al.

Recent progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation underscores the importance of reliable benchmarks in evaluating how accurately generated images reflect the semantics of their textual prompt. However, (1) existing benchmarks lack the diversity of prompt scenarios and multilingual support, both essential for real-world applicability; (2) they offer only coarse evaluations across primary dimensions, covering a narrow range of sub-dimensions, and fall short in fine-grained sub-dimension assessment. To address these limitations, we introduce UniGenBench++, a unified semantic assessment benchmark for T2I generation. Specifically, it comprises 600 prompts organized hierarchically to ensure both coverage and efficiency: (1) spans across diverse real-world scenarios, i.e., 5 main prompt themes and 20 subthemes; (2) comprehensively probes T2I models' semantic consistency over 10 primary and 27 sub evaluation criteria, with each prompt assessing multiple testpoints. To rigorously assess model robustness to variations in language and prompt length, we provide both English and Chinese versions of each prompt in short and long forms. Leveraging the general world knowledge and fine-grained image understanding capabilities of a closed-source Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM), i.e., Gemini-2.5-Pro, an effective pipeline is developed for reliable benchmark construction and streamlined model assessment. Moreover, to further facilitate community use, we train a robust evaluation model that enables offline assessment of T2I model outputs. Through comprehensive benchmarking of both open- and closed-sourced T2I models, we systematically reveal their strengths and weaknesses across various aspects.

Ishrat Jahan Eliza, Xuan Huang, Aashish Panta et al.

Scientists face significant visualization challenges as time-varying datasets grow in speed and volume, often requiring specialized infrastructure and expertise to handle massive datasets. Petascale climate models generated in NASA laboratories require a dedicated group of graphics and media experts and access to high-performance computing resources. Scientists may need to share scientific results with the community iteratively and quickly. However, the time-consuming trial-and-error process incurs significant data transfer overhead and far exceeds the time and resources allocated for typical post-analysis visualization tasks, disrupting the production workflow. Our paper introduces a user-friendly framework for creating 3D animations of petascale, time-varying data on a commodity workstation. Our contributions: (i) Generalized Animation Descriptor (GAD) with a keyframe-based adaptable abstraction for animation, (ii) efficient data access from cloud-hosted repositories to reduce data management overhead, (iii) tailored rendering system, and (iv) an LLM-assisted conversational interface as a scripting module to allow domain scientists with no visualization expertise to create animations of their region of interest. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness with two case studies: first, by generating animations in which sampling criteria are specified based on prior knowledge, and second, by generating AI-assisted animations in which sampling parameters are derived from natural-language user prompts. In all cases, we use large-scale NASA climate-oceanographic datasets that exceed 1PB in size yet achieve a fast turnaround time of 1 minute to 2 hours. Users can generate a rough draft of the animation within minutes, then seamlessly incorporate as much high-resolution data as needed for the final version.

Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Zhimin Li et al.

Recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled increasingly sophisticated autonomous visualization agents capable of translating user intentions into data visualizations. However, measuring progress and comparing different agents remains challenging, particularly in scientific visualization (SciVis), due to the absence of comprehensive, large-scale benchmarks for evaluating real-world capabilities. This position paper examines the various types of evaluation required for SciVis agents, outlines the associated challenges, provides a simple proof-of-concept evaluation example, and discusses how evaluation benchmarks can facilitate agent self-improvement. We advocate for a broader collaboration to develop a SciVis agentic evaluation benchmark that would not only assess existing capabilities but also drive innovation and stimulate future development in the field.

Zhimin Li, Haichao Miao, Valerio Pascucci et al.

The recent introduction of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) combine the inherent power of large language models (LLMs) with the renewed capabilities to reason about the multimodal context. The potential usage scenarios for MLLMs significantly outpace their text-only counterparts. Many recent works in visualization have demonstrated MLLMs' capability to understand and interpret visualization results and explain the content of the visualization to users in natural language. In the machine learning community, the general vision capabilities of MLLMs have been evaluated and tested through various visual understanding benchmarks. However, the ability of MLLMs to accomplish specific visualization tasks based on visual perception has not been properly explored and evaluated, particularly, from a visualization-centric perspective. In this work, we aim to fill the gap by utilizing the concept of visualization literacy to evaluate MLLMs. We assess MLLMs' performance over two popular visualization literacy evaluation datasets (VLAT and mini-VLAT). Under the framework of visualization literacy, we develop a general setup to compare different multimodal large language models (e.g., GPT4-o, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro) as well as against existing human baselines. Our study demonstrates MLLMs' competitive performance in visualization literacy, where they outperform humans in certain tasks such as identifying correlations, clusters, and hierarchical structures.

Kunlun Xu, Zhimin Li, Zhijun Zhang et al.

While Human-Object Interaction(HOI) Detection has achieved tremendous advances in recent, it still remains challenging due to complex interactions with multiple humans and objects occurring in images, which would inevitably lead to ambiguities. Most existing methods either generate all human-object pair candidates and infer their relationships by cropped local features successively in a two-stage manner, or directly predict interaction points in a one-stage procedure. However, the lack of spatial configurations or reasoning steps of two- or one- stage methods respectively limits their performance in such complex scenes. To avoid this ambiguity, we propose a novel actor-centric framework. The main ideas are that when inferring interactions: 1) the non-local features of the entire image guided by actor position are obtained to model the relationship between the actor and context, and then 2) we use an object branch to generate pixel-wise interaction area prediction, where the interaction area denotes the object central area. Moreover, we also use an actor branch to get interaction prediction of the actor and propose a novel composition strategy based on center-point indexing to generate the final HOI prediction. Thanks to the usage of the non-local features and the partly-coupled property of the human-objects composition strategy, our proposed framework can detect HOI more accurately especially for complex images. Extensive experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art on the challenging V-COCO and HICO-DET benchmarks and is more robust especially in multiple persons and/or objects scenes.

Zhimin Li, Cheng Zou, Yu Zhao et al.

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is a fundamental task in high-level human-centric scene understanding. We propose PhraseHOI, containing a HOI branch and a novel phrase branch, to leverage language prior and improve relation expression. Specifically, the phrase branch is supervised by semantic embeddings, whose ground truths are automatically converted from the original HOI annotations without extra human efforts. Meanwhile, a novel label composition method is proposed to deal with the long-tailed problem in HOI, which composites novel phrase labels by semantic neighbors. Further, to optimize the phrase branch, a loss composed of a distilling loss and a balanced triplet loss is proposed. Extensive experiments are conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed PhraseHOI, which achieves significant improvement over the baseline and surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods on Full and NonRare on the challenging HICO-DET benchmark.

Zhenzhi Wang, Liyu Wu, Zhimin Li et al.

Multi-modal Ads Video Understanding Challenge is the first grand challenge aiming to comprehensively understand ads videos. Our challenge includes two tasks: video structuring in the temporal dimension and multi-modal video classification. It asks the participants to accurately predict both the scene boundaries and the multi-label categories of each scene based on a fine-grained and ads-related category hierarchy. Therefore, our task has four distinguishing features from previous ones: ads domain, multi-modal information, temporal segmentation, and multi-label classification. It will advance the foundation of ads video understanding and have a significant impact on many ads applications like video recommendation. This paper presents an overview of our challenge, including the background of ads videos, an elaborate description of task and dataset, evaluation protocol, and our proposed baseline. By ablating the key components of our baseline, we would like to reveal the main challenges of this task and provide useful guidance for future research of this area. In this paper, we give an extended version of our challenge overview. The dataset will be publicly available at https://algo.qq.com/.