Yang Liu

Yiming Ji, Kaijie Yun, Yang Liu et al.

The Object Navigation (ObjectNav) task aims to guide an agent to locate target objects in unseen environments using partial observations. Prior approaches have employed location prediction paradigms to achieve long-term goal reasoning, yet these methods often struggle to effectively integrate contextual relation reasoning. Alternatively, map completion-based paradigms predict long-term goals by generating semantic maps of unexplored areas. However, existing methods in this category fail to fully leverage known environmental information, resulting in suboptimal map quality that requires further improvement. In this work, we propose a novel approach to enhancing the ObjectNav task, by training a diffusion model to learn the statistical distribution patterns of objects in semantic maps, and using the map of the explored regions during navigation as the condition to generate the map of the unknown regions, thereby realizing the long-term goal reasoning of the target object, i.e., diffusion as reasoning (DAR). Meanwhile, we propose the Room Guidance method, which leverages commonsense knowledge derived from large language models (LLMs) to guide the diffusion model in generating room-aware object distributions. Based on the generated map in the unknown region, the agent sets the predicted location of the target as the goal and moves towards it. Experiments on Gibson and MP3D show the effectiveness of our method.

Tianle Wang, Sirui Zhang, Xinyi Tong et al.

This paper presents an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that identifies recurring patterns -- referred to as ``music-words'' -- from symbolic music data. These patterns are fundamental to musical structure and reflect the cognitive processes involved in composition. However, extracting these patterns remains challenging because of the inherent semantic ambiguity in musical interpretation. We formulate the task of music-word discovery as a statistical optimization problem and propose a two-stage Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based learning framework: 1. Developing a music-word dictionary; 2. Reconstructing the music data. When evaluated against human expert annotations, the algorithm achieved an Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.61. Our findings indicate that minimizing code length effectively addresses semantic ambiguity, suggesting that human optimization of encoding systems shapes musical semantics. This approach enables computers to extract ``basic building blocks'' from music data, facilitating structural analysis and sparse encoding. The method has two primary applications. First, in AI music, it supports downstream tasks such as music generation, classification, style transfer, and improvisation. Second, in musicology, it provides a tool for analyzing compositional patterns and offers insights into the principle of minimal encoding across diverse musical styles and composers.

Yang Liu, Pietro Perona, Markus Meister

The recently proposed panoptic segmentation task presents a significant challenge of image understanding with computer vision by unifying semantic segmentation and instance segmentation tasks. In this paper we present an efficient and novel panoptic data augmentation (PanDA) method which operates exclusively in pixel space, requires no additional data or training, and is computationally cheap to implement. By retraining original state-of-the-art models on PanDA augmented datasets generated with a single frozen set of parameters, we show robust performance gains in panoptic segmentation, instance segmentation, as well as detection across models, backbones, dataset domains, and scales. Finally, the effectiveness of unrealistic-looking training images synthesized by PanDA suggest that one should rethink the need for image realism for efficient data augmentation.

Shenglan Liu, Jun Wu, Lin Feng et al.

Incompatibility of image descriptor and ranking is always neglected in image retrieval. In this paper, manifold learning and Gestalt psychology theory are involved to solve the incompatibility problem. A new holistic descriptor called Perceptual Uniform Descriptor (PUD) based on Gestalt psychology is proposed, which combines color and gradient direction to imitate the human visual uniformity. PUD features in the same class images distributes on one manifold in most cases because PUD improves the visual uniformity of the traditional descriptors. Thus, we use manifold ranking and PUD to realize image retrieval. Experiments were carried out on five benchmark data sets, and the proposed method can greatly improve the accuracy of image retrieval. Our experimental results in the Ukbench and Corel-1K datasets demonstrated that N-S score reached to 3.58 (HSV 3.4) and mAP to 81.77% (ODBTC 77.9%) respectively by utilizing PUD which has only 280 dimension. The results are higher than other holistic image descriptors (even some local ones) and state-of-the-arts retrieval methods.

Shenglan Liu, Muxin Sun, Lin Feng et al.

Single feature is inefficient to describe content of an image, which is a shortcoming in traditional image retrieval task. We know that one image can be described by different features. Multi-feature fusion ranking can be utilized to improve the ranking list of query. In this paper, we first analyze graph structure and multi-feature fusion re-ranking from manifold aspect. Then, Three Tiers Neighborhood Graph (TTNG) is constructed to re-rank the original ranking list by single feature and to enhance precision of single feature. Furthermore, we propose Multi-graph Fusion Ranking (MFR) for multi-feature ranking, which considers the correlation of all images in multiple neighborhood graphs. Evaluations are conducted on UK-bench, Corel-1K, Corel-10K and Cifar-10 benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our TTNG and MFR outperform than other state-of-the-art methods. For example, we achieve competitive results N-S score 3.91 and precision 65.00% on UK-bench and Corel-10K datasets respectively.