Kai Chen

CV
h-index22
13papers
5,452citations
Novelty60%
AI Score58

13 Papers

18.6ROApr 14, 2022
Sim-to-Real 6D Object Pose Estimation via Iterative Self-training for Robotic Bin Picking

Kai Chen, Rui Cao, Stephen James et al.

In this paper, we propose an iterative self-training framework for sim-to-real 6D object pose estimation to facilitate cost-effective robotic grasping. Given a bin-picking scenario, we establish a photo-realistic simulator to synthesize abundant virtual data, and use this to train an initial pose estimation network. This network then takes the role of a teacher model, which generates pose predictions for unlabeled real data. With these predictions, we further design a comprehensive adaptive selection scheme to distinguish reliable results, and leverage them as pseudo labels to update a student model for pose estimation on real data. To continuously improve the quality of pseudo labels, we iterate the above steps by taking the trained student model as a new teacher and re-label real data using the refined teacher model. We evaluate our method on a public benchmark and our newly-released dataset, achieving an ADD(-S) improvement of 11.49% and 22.62% respectively. Our method is also able to improve robotic bin-picking success by 19.54%, demonstrating the potential of iterative sim-to-real solutions for robotic applications.

18.1RONov 3, 2022
StereoPose: Category-Level 6D Transparent Object Pose Estimation from Stereo Images via Back-View NOCS

Kai Chen, Stephen James, Congying Sui et al.

Most existing methods for category-level pose estimation rely on object point clouds. However, when considering transparent objects, depth cameras are usually not able to capture meaningful data, resulting in point clouds with severe artifacts. Without a high-quality point cloud, existing methods are not applicable to challenging transparent objects. To tackle this problem, we present StereoPose, a novel stereo image framework for category-level object pose estimation, ideally suited for transparent objects. For a robust estimation from pure stereo images, we develop a pipeline that decouples category-level pose estimation into object size estimation, initial pose estimation, and pose refinement. StereoPose then estimates object pose based on representation in the normalized object coordinate space~(NOCS). To address the issue of image content aliasing, we further define a back-view NOCS map for the transparent object. The back-view NOCS aims to reduce the network learning ambiguity caused by content aliasing, and leverage informative cues on the back of the transparent object for more accurate pose estimation. To further improve the performance of the stereo framework, StereoPose is equipped with a parallax attention module for stereo feature fusion and an epipolar loss for improving the stereo-view consistency of network predictions. Extensive experiments on the public TOD dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed StereoPose framework for category-level 6D transparent object pose estimation.

4.8CVMar 5, 2022
Towards Robust Part-aware Instance Segmentation for Industrial Bin Picking

Yidan Feng, Biqi Yang, Xianzhi Li et al.

Industrial bin picking is a challenging task that requires accurate and robust segmentation of individual object instances. Particularly, industrial objects can have irregular shapes, that is, thin and concave, whereas in bin-picking scenarios, objects are often closely packed with strong occlusion. To address these challenges, we formulate a novel part-aware instance segmentation pipeline. The key idea is to decompose industrial objects into correlated approximate convex parts and enhance the object-level segmentation with part-level segmentation. We design a part-aware network to predict part masks and part-to-part offsets, followed by a part aggregation module to assemble the recognized parts into instances. To guide the network learning, we also propose an automatic label decoupling scheme to generate ground-truth part-level labels from instance-level labels. Finally, we contribute the first instance segmentation dataset, which contains a variety of industrial objects that are thin and have non-trivial shapes. Extensive experimental results on various industrial objects demonstrate that our method can achieve the best segmentation results compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

3.3AIDec 16, 2025Code
Seismology modeling agent: A smart assistant for geophysical researchers

Yukun Ren, Siwei Yu, Kai Chen et al.

To address the steep learning curve and reliance on complex manual file editing and command-line operations in the traditional workflow of the mainstream open-source seismic wave simulation software SPECFEM, this paper proposes an intelligent, interactive workflow powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). We introduce the first Model Context Protocol (MCP) server suite for SPECFEM (supporting 2D, 3D Cartesian, and 3D Globe versions), which decomposes the entire simulation process into discrete, agent-executable tools spanning from parameter generation and mesh partitioning to solver execution and visualization. This approach enables a paradigm shift from file-driven to intent-driven conversational interactions. The framework supports both fully automated execution and human-in-the-loop collaboration, allowing researchers to guide simulation strategies in real time and retain scientific decision-making authority while significantly reducing tedious low-level operations. Validated through multiple case studies, the workflow operates seamlessly in both autonomous and interactive modes, yielding high-fidelity results consistent with standard baselines. As the first application of MCP technology to computational seismology, this study significantly lowers the entry barrier, enhances reproducibility, and offers a promising avenue for advancing computational geophysics toward AI-assisted and automated scientific research. The complete source code is available at https://github.com/RenYukun1563/specfem-mcp.

10.7CRSep 22, 2024Code
Dormant: Defending against Pose-driven Human Image Animation

Jiachen Zhou, Mingsi Wang, Tianlin Li et al.

Pose-driven human image animation has achieved tremendous progress, enabling the generation of vivid and realistic human videos from just one single photo. However, it conversely exacerbates the risk of image misuse, as attackers may use one available image to create videos involving politics, violence, and other illegal content. To counter this threat, we propose Dormant, a novel protection approach tailored to defend against pose-driven human image animation techniques. Dormant applies protective perturbation to one human image, preserving the visual similarity to the original but resulting in poor-quality video generation. The protective perturbation is optimized to induce misextraction of appearance features from the image and create incoherence among the generated video frames. Our extensive evaluation across 8 animation methods and 4 datasets demonstrates the superiority of Dormant over 6 baseline protection methods, leading to misaligned identities, visual distortions, noticeable artifacts, and inconsistent frames in the generated videos. Moreover, Dormant shows effectiveness on 6 real-world commercial services, even with fully black-box access.

49.6CVMay 23, 2024Code
YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection

Ao Wang, Hui Chen, Lihao Liu et al.

Over the past years, YOLOs have emerged as the predominant paradigm in the field of real-time object detection owing to their effective balance between computational cost and detection performance. Researchers have explored the architectural designs, optimization objectives, data augmentation strategies, and others for YOLOs, achieving notable progress. However, the reliance on the non-maximum suppression (NMS) for post-processing hampers the end-to-end deployment of YOLOs and adversely impacts the inference latency. Besides, the design of various components in YOLOs lacks the comprehensive and thorough inspection, resulting in noticeable computational redundancy and limiting the model's capability. It renders the suboptimal efficiency, along with considerable potential for performance improvements. In this work, we aim to further advance the performance-efficiency boundary of YOLOs from both the post-processing and model architecture. To this end, we first present the consistent dual assignments for NMS-free training of YOLOs, which brings competitive performance and low inference latency simultaneously. Moreover, we introduce the holistic efficiency-accuracy driven model design strategy for YOLOs. We comprehensively optimize various components of YOLOs from both efficiency and accuracy perspectives, which greatly reduces the computational overhead and enhances the capability. The outcome of our effort is a new generation of YOLO series for real-time end-to-end object detection, dubbed YOLOv10. Extensive experiments show that YOLOv10 achieves state-of-the-art performance and efficiency across various model scales. For example, our YOLOv10-S is 1.8$\times$ faster than RT-DETR-R18 under the similar AP on COCO, meanwhile enjoying 2.8$\times$ smaller number of parameters and FLOPs. Compared with YOLOv9-C, YOLOv10-B has 46\% less latency and 25\% fewer parameters for the same performance.

19.9CLAug 12, 2025Code
InternBootcamp Technical Report: Boosting LLM Reasoning with Verifiable Task Scaling

Peiji Li, Jiasheng Ye, Yongkang Chen et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence by enabling complex reasoning capabilities. While recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) have primarily focused on domain-specific reasoning tasks (e.g., mathematics or code generation), real-world reasoning scenarios often require models to handle diverse and complex environments that narrow-domain benchmarks cannot fully capture. To address this gap, we present InternBootcamp, an open-source framework comprising 1000+ domain-diverse task environments specifically designed for LLM reasoning research. Our codebase offers two key functionalities: (1) automated generation of unlimited training/testing cases with configurable difficulty levels, and (2) integrated verification modules for objective response evaluation. These features make InternBootcamp fundamental infrastructure for RL-based model optimization, synthetic data generation, and model evaluation. Although manually developing such a framework with enormous task coverage is extremely cumbersome, we accelerate the development procedure through an automated agent workflow supplemented by manual validation protocols, which enables the task scope to expand rapidly. % With these bootcamps, we further establish Bootcamp-EVAL, an automatically generated benchmark for comprehensive performance assessment. Evaluation reveals that frontier models still underperform in many reasoning tasks, while training with InternBootcamp provides an effective way to significantly improve performance, leading to our 32B model that achieves state-of-the-art results on Bootcamp-EVAL and excels on other established benchmarks. In particular, we validate that consistent performance gains come from including more training tasks, namely \textbf{task scaling}, over two orders of magnitude, offering a promising route towards capable reasoning generalist.

32.5CVJan 10, 2019Code
Region Proposal by Guided Anchoring

Jiaqi Wang, Kai Chen, Shuo Yang et al.

Region anchors are the cornerstone of modern object detection techniques. State-of-the-art detectors mostly rely on a dense anchoring scheme, where anchors are sampled uniformly over the spatial domain with a predefined set of scales and aspect ratios. In this paper, we revisit this foundational stage. Our study shows that it can be done much more effectively and efficiently. Specifically, we present an alternative scheme, named Guided Anchoring, which leverages semantic features to guide the anchoring. The proposed method jointly predicts the locations where the center of objects of interest are likely to exist as well as the scales and aspect ratios at different locations. On top of predicted anchor shapes, we mitigate the feature inconsistency with a feature adaption module. We also study the use of high-quality proposals to improve detection performance. The anchoring scheme can be seamlessly integrated into proposal methods and detectors. With Guided Anchoring, we achieve 9.1% higher recall on MS COCO with 90% fewer anchors than the RPN baseline. We also adopt Guided Anchoring in Fast R-CNN, Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet, respectively improving the detection mAP by 2.2%, 2.7% and 1.2%. Code will be available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection.

30.0CVJan 5, 2024Code
Open-Vocabulary SAM: Segment and Recognize Twenty-thousand Classes Interactively

Haobo Yuan, Xiangtai Li, Chong Zhou et al.

The CLIP and Segment Anything Model (SAM) are remarkable vision foundation models (VFMs). SAM excels in segmentation tasks across diverse domains, whereas CLIP is renowned for its zero-shot recognition capabilities. This paper presents an in-depth exploration of integrating these two models into a unified framework. Specifically, we introduce the Open-Vocabulary SAM, a SAM-inspired model designed for simultaneous interactive segmentation and recognition, leveraging two unique knowledge transfer modules: SAM2CLIP and CLIP2SAM. The former adapts SAM's knowledge into the CLIP via distillation and learnable transformer adapters, while the latter transfers CLIP knowledge into SAM, enhancing its recognition capabilities. Extensive experiments on various datasets and detectors show the effectiveness of Open-Vocabulary SAM in both segmentation and recognition tasks, significantly outperforming the naïve baselines of simply combining SAM and CLIP. Furthermore, aided with image classification data training, our method can segment and recognize approximately 22,000 classes.

14.7CVApr 22, 2024Code
UVEB: A Large-scale Benchmark and Baseline Towards Real-World Underwater Video Enhancement

Yaofeng Xie, Lingwei Kong, Kai Chen et al.

Learning-based underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods have made great progress. However, the lack of large-scale and high-quality paired training samples has become the main bottleneck hindering the development of UIE. The inter-frame information in underwater videos can accelerate or optimize the UIE process. Thus, we constructed the first large-scale high-resolution underwater video enhancement benchmark (UVEB) to promote the development of underwater vision.It contains 1,308 pairs of video sequences and more than 453,000 high-resolution with 38\% Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) 4K frame pairs. UVEB comes from multiple countries, containing various scenes and video degradation types to adapt to diverse and complex underwater environments. We also propose the first supervised underwater video enhancement method, UVE-Net. UVE-Net converts the current frame information into convolutional kernels and passes them to adjacent frames for efficient inter-frame information exchange. By fully utilizing the redundant degraded information of underwater videos, UVE-Net completes video enhancement better. Experiments show the effective network design and good performance of UVE-Net.

19.0CVJun 27, 2024Code
AnyControl: Create Your Artwork with Versatile Control on Text-to-Image Generation

Yanan Sun, Yanchen Liu, Yinhao Tang et al.

The field of text-to-image (T2I) generation has made significant progress in recent years, largely driven by advancements in diffusion models. Linguistic control enables effective content creation, but struggles with fine-grained control over image generation. This challenge has been explored, to a great extent, by incorporating additional user-supplied spatial conditions, such as depth maps and edge maps, into pre-trained T2I models through extra encoding. However, multi-control image synthesis still faces several challenges. Specifically, current approaches are limited in handling free combinations of diverse input control signals, overlook the complex relationships among multiple spatial conditions, and often fail to maintain semantic alignment with provided textual prompts. This can lead to suboptimal user experiences. To address these challenges, we propose AnyControl, a multi-control image synthesis framework that supports arbitrary combinations of diverse control signals. AnyControl develops a novel Multi-Control Encoder that extracts a unified multi-modal embedding to guide the generation process. This approach enables a holistic understanding of user inputs, and produces high-quality, faithful results under versatile control signals, as demonstrated by extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our project page is available in https://any-control.github.io.

20.9CVAug 19, 2021
Category-Level 6D Object Pose Estimation via Cascaded Relation and Recurrent Reconstruction Networks

Jiaze Wang, Kai Chen, Qi Dou

Category-level 6D pose estimation, aiming to predict the location and orientation of unseen object instances, is fundamental to many scenarios such as robotic manipulation and augmented reality, yet still remains unsolved. Precisely recovering instance 3D model in the canonical space and accurately matching it with the observation is an essential point when estimating 6D pose for unseen objects. In this paper, we achieve accurate category-level 6D pose estimation via cascaded relation and recurrent reconstruction networks. Specifically, a novel cascaded relation network is dedicated for advanced representation learning to explore the complex and informative relations among instance RGB image, instance point cloud and category shape prior. Furthermore, we design a recurrent reconstruction network for iterative residual refinement to progressively improve the reconstruction and correspondence estimations from coarse to fine. Finally, the instance 6D pose is obtained leveraging the estimated dense correspondences between the instance point cloud and the reconstructed 3D model in the canonical space. We have conducted extensive experiments on two well-acknowledged benchmarks of category-level 6D pose estimation, with significant performance improvement over existing approaches. On the representatively strict evaluation metrics of $3D_{75}$ and $5^{\circ}2 cm$, our method exceeds the latest state-of-the-art SPD by $4.9\%$ and $17.7\%$ on the CAMERA25 dataset, and by $2.7\%$ and $8.5\%$ on the REAL275 dataset. Codes are available at https://wangjiaze.cn/projects/6DPoseEstimation.html.

11.3LGFeb 10, 2021Code
NAST: Non-Autoregressive Spatial-Temporal Transformer for Time Series Forecasting

Kai Chen, Guang Chen, Dan Xu et al.

Although Transformer has made breakthrough success in widespread domains especially in Natural Language Processing (NLP), applying it to time series forecasting is still a great challenge. In time series forecasting, the autoregressive decoding of canonical Transformer models could introduce huge accumulative errors inevitably. Besides, utilizing Transformer to deal with spatial-temporal dependencies in the problem still faces tough difficulties.~To tackle these limitations, this work is the first attempt to propose a Non-Autoregressive Transformer architecture for time series forecasting, aiming at overcoming the time delay and accumulative error issues in the canonical Transformer. Moreover, we present a novel spatial-temporal attention mechanism, building a bridge by a learned temporal influence map to fill the gaps between the spatial and temporal attention, so that spatial and temporal dependencies can be processed integrally. Empirically, we evaluate our model on diversified ego-centric future localization datasets and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both real-time and accuracy.