Xiaohan Yu

Anuroop Sriram, Sihoon Choi, Xiaohan Yu et al. · baidu, cmu

New methods for carbon dioxide removal are urgently needed to combat global climate change. Direct air capture (DAC) is an emerging technology to capture carbon dioxide directly from ambient air. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been widely studied as potentially customizable adsorbents for DAC. However, discovering promising MOF sorbents for DAC is challenging because of the vast chemical space to explore and the need to understand materials as functions of humidity and temperature. We explore a computational approach benefiting from recent innovations in machine learning (ML) and present a dataset named Open DAC 2023 (ODAC23) consisting of more than 38M density functional theory (DFT) calculations on more than 8,400 MOF materials containing adsorbed $CO_2$ and/or $H_2O$. ODAC23 is by far the largest dataset of MOF adsorption calculations at the DFT level of accuracy currently available. In addition to probing properties of adsorbed molecules, the dataset is a rich source of information on structural relaxation of MOFs, which will be useful in many contexts beyond specific applications for DAC. A large number of MOFs with promising properties for DAC are identified directly in ODAC23. We also trained state-of-the-art ML models on this dataset to approximate calculations at the DFT level. This open-source dataset and our initial ML models will provide an important baseline for future efforts to identify MOFs for a wide range of applications, including DAC.

Yanheng Wang, Xiaohan Yu, Yongsheng Gao et al.

Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) represent data features by learning the activation functions and demonstrate superior accuracy with fewer parameters, FLOPs, GPU memory usage (Memory), shorter training time (TraT), and testing time (TesT) when handling low-dimensional data. However, when applied to high-dimensional data, which contains significant redundant information, the current activation mechanism of KANs leads to unnecessary computations, thereby reducing computational efficiency. KANs require reshaping high-dimensional data into a one-dimensional tensor as input, which inevitably results in the loss of dimensional information. To address these limitations, we propose weighted activation distribution KANs (WKANs), which reduce the frequency of activations per node and distribute node information into different output nodes through weights to avoid extracting redundant information. Furthermore, we introduce a multilevel tensor splitting framework (MTSF), which decomposes high-dimensional data to extract features from each dimension independently and leverages tensor-parallel computation to significantly improve the computational efficiency of WKANs on high-dimensional data. In this paper, we design SpectralKAN for hyperspectral image change detection using the proposed MTSF. SpectralKAN demonstrates outstanding performance across five datasets, achieving an overall accuracy (OA) of 0.9801 and a Kappa coefficient (K) of 0.9514 on the Farmland dataset, with only 8 k parameters, 0.07 M FLOPs, 911 MB Memory, 13.26 S TraT, and 2.52 S TesT, underscoring its superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/yanhengwang-heu/SpectralKAN.

Zicheng Pan, Xiaohan Yu, Yongsheng Gao

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labelled source domain to an unlabelled target domain. A major challenge in SFDA is deriving accurate categorical information for the target domain, especially when sample embeddings from different classes appear similar. This issue is particularly pronounced in fine-grained visual categorization tasks, where inter-class differences are subtle. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel ETF-Informed Attention Network (EIANet) to separate class prototypes by utilizing attention and neural collapse principles. More specifically, EIANet employs a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) classifier in conjunction with an attention mechanism, facilitating the model to focus on discriminative features and ensuring maximum class prototype separation. This innovative approach effectively enlarges the feature difference between different classes in the latent space by locating salient regions, thereby preventing the misclassification of similar but distinct category samples and providing more accurate categorical information to guide the fine-tuning process on the target domain. Experimental results across four SFDA datasets validate EIANet's state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/zichengpan/EIANet.

Xiaohan Yu, Pu Jian, Chong Chen

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated considerable effectiveness in open-domain question answering. However, when applied to heterogeneous documents, comprising both textual and tabular components, existing RAG approaches exhibit critical limitations. The prevailing practice of flattening tables and chunking strategies disrupts the intrinsic tabular structure, leads to information loss, and undermines the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in multi-hop, global queries. To address these challenges, we propose TableRAG, an SQL-based framework that unifies textual understanding and complex manipulations over tabular data. TableRAG iteratively operates in four steps: context-sensitive query decomposition, text retrieval, SQL programming and execution, and compositional intermediate answer generation. We also develop HeteQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-hop heterogeneous reasoning capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that TableRAG consistently outperforms existing baselines on both public datasets and our HeteQA, establishing a new state-of-the-art for heterogeneous document question answering. We release TableRAG at https://github.com/yxh-y/TableRAG/tree/main.

Huanyao Zhang, Jiepeng Zhou, Bo Li et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), equipped with increasingly advanced planning and tool-use capabilities, are evolving into autonomous agents capable of performing multimodal web browsing and deep search in open-world environments. However, existing benchmarks for multimodal browsing remain limited in task complexity, evidence accessibility, and evaluation granularity, hindering comprehensive and reproducible assessments of deep search capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce BrowseComp-$V^3$, a novel benchmark consisting of 300 carefully curated and challenging questions spanning diverse domains. The benchmark emphasizes deep, multi-level, and cross-modal multi-hop reasoning, where critical evidence is interleaved across textual and visual modalities within and across web pages. All supporting evidence is strictly required to be publicly searchable, ensuring fairness and reproducibility. Beyond final-answer accuracy, we incorporate an expert-validated, subgoal-driven process evaluation mechanism that enables fine-grained analysis of intermediate reasoning behaviors and systematic characterization of capability boundaries. In addition, we propose OmniSeeker, a unified multimodal browsing agent framework integrating diverse web search and visual perception tools. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models achieve only 36% accuracy on our benchmark, revealing critical bottlenecks in multimodal information integration and fine-grained perception. Our results highlight a fundamental gap between current model capabilities and robust multimodal deep search in real-world settings.

Xiyu Han, Xian Zhong, Wenxin Huang et al.

Cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to match individuals across surveillance cameras despite variations in clothing. Existing methods typically mitigate the impact of clothing changes or enhance identity (ID)-relevant features, but they often struggle to capture complex semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt learning framework Semantic Contextual Integration (SCI), which leverages the visual-textual representation capabilities of CLIP to reduce clothing-induced discrepancies and strengthen ID cues. Specifically, we introduce the Semantic Separation Enhancement (SSE) module, which employs dual learnable text tokens to disentangle clothing-related semantics from confounding factors, thereby isolating ID-relevant features. Furthermore, we develop a Semantic-Guided Interaction Module (SIM) that uses orthogonalized text features to guide visual representations, sharpening the focus of the model on distinctive ID characteristics. This semantic integration improves the discriminative power of the model and enriches the visual context with high-dimensional insights. Extensive experiments on three CC-ReID datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. The code will be released at https://github.com/hxy-499/CCREID-SCI.

Pengcheng Zhang, Xiaohan Yu, Xiao Bai et al.

The development of person search techniques has been greatly promoted in recent years for its superior practicality and challenging goals. Despite their significant progress, existing person search models still lack the ability to continually learn from increaseing real-world data and adaptively process input from different domains. To this end, this work introduces the continual person search task that sequentially learns on multiple domains and then performs person search on all seen domains. This requires balancing the stability and plasticity of the model to continually learn new knowledge without catastrophic forgetting. For this, we propose a Prompt-based Continual Person Search (PoPS) model in this paper. First, we design a compositional person search transformer to construct an effective pre-trained transformer without exhaustive pre-training from scratch on large-scale person search data. This serves as the fundamental for prompt-based continual learning. On top of that, we design a domain incremental prompt pool with a diverse attribute matching module. For each domain, we independently learn a set of prompts to encode the domain-oriented knowledge. Meanwhile, we jointly learn a group of diverse attribute projections and prototype embeddings to capture discriminative domain attributes. By matching an input image with the learned attributes across domains, the learned prompts can be properly selected for model inference. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the proposed method for continual person search. The source code is available at https://github.com/PatrickZad/PoPS.

Yuchen Wu, Jiahe Li, Xiaohan Yu et al.

Monocular visual SLAM enables 3D reconstruction from internet video and autonomous navigation on resource-constrained platforms, yet suffers from scale drift, i.e., the gradual divergence of estimated scale over long sequences. Existing frame-to-frame methods achieve real-time performance through local optimization but accumulate scale drift due to the lack of global constraints among independent windows. To address this, we propose SCE-SLAM, an end-to-end SLAM system that maintains scale consistency through scene coordinate embeddings, which are learned patch-level representations encoding 3D geometric relationships under a canonical scale reference. The framework consists of two key modules: geometry-guided aggregation that leverages 3D spatial proximity to propagate scale information from historical observations through geometry-modulated attention, and scene coordinate bundle adjustment that anchors current estimates to the reference scale through explicit 3D coordinate constraints decoded from the scene coordinate embeddings. Experiments on KITTI, Waymo, and vKITTI demonstrate substantial improvements: our method reduces absolute trajectory error by 8.36m on KITTI compared to the best prior approach, while maintaining 36 FPS and achieving scale consistency across large-scale scenes.

Peizhen Li, Longbing Cao, Xiao-Ming Wu et al.

Equipping humanoid robots with the capability to understand emotional states of human interactants and express emotions appropriately according to situations is essential for affective human-robot interaction. However, enabling current vision-aware multimodal emotion recognition models for affective human-robot interaction in the real-world raises embodiment challenges: addressing the environmental noise issue and meeting real-time requirements. First, in multiparty conversation scenarios, the noises inherited in the visual observation of the robot, which may come from either 1) distracting objects in the scene or 2) inactive speakers appearing in the field of view of the robot, hinder the models from extracting emotional cues from vision inputs. Secondly, realtime response, a desired feature for an interactive system, is also challenging to achieve. To tackle both challenges, we introduce an affective human-robot interaction system called UGotMe designed specifically for multiparty conversations. Two denoising strategies are proposed and incorporated into the system to solve the first issue. Specifically, to filter out distracting objects in the scene, we propose extracting face images of the speakers from the raw images and introduce a customized active face extraction strategy to rule out inactive speakers. As for the second issue, we employ efficient data transmission from the robot to the local server to improve realtime response capability. We deploy UGotMe on a human robot named Ameca to validate its real-time inference capabilities in practical scenarios. Videos demonstrating real-world deployment are available at https://lipzh5.github.io/HumanoidVLE/.

Jiahe Li, Jiawei Zhang, Youmin Zhang et al.

Reconstructing accurate surfaces with radiance fields has achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, prevailing approaches, primarily based on Gaussian Splatting, are increasingly constrained by representational bottlenecks. In this paper, we introduce GeoSVR, an explicit voxel-based framework that explores and extends the under-investigated potential of sparse voxels for achieving accurate, detailed, and complete surface reconstruction. As strengths, sparse voxels support preserving the coverage completeness and geometric clarity, while corresponding challenges also arise from absent scene constraints and locality in surface refinement. To ensure correct scene convergence, we first propose a Voxel-Uncertainty Depth Constraint that maximizes the effect of monocular depth cues while presenting a voxel-oriented uncertainty to avoid quality degradation, enabling effective and robust scene constraints yet preserving highly accurate geometries. Subsequently, Sparse Voxel Surface Regularization is designed to enhance geometric consistency for tiny voxels and facilitate the voxel-based formation of sharp and accurate surfaces. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior performance compared to existing methods across diverse challenging scenarios, excelling in geometric accuracy, detail preservation, and reconstruction completeness while maintaining high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Fictionarry/GeoSVR.

Jiahe Li, Jiawei Zhang, Xiao Bai et al.

Surface reconstruction with differentiable rendering has achieved impressive performance in recent years, yet the pervasive photometric ambiguities have strictly bottlenecked existing approaches. This paper presents AmbiSuR, a framework that explores an intrinsic solution upon Gaussian Splatting for the photometric ambiguity-robust surface 3D reconstruction with high performance. Starting by revisiting the foundation, our investigation uncovers two built-in primitive-wise ambiguities in representation, while revealing an intrinsic potential for ambiguity self-indication in Gaussian Splatting. Stemming from these, a photometric disambiguation is first introduced, constraining ill-posed geometry solution for definite surface formation. Then, we propose an ambiguity indication module that unleashes the self-indication potential to identify and further guide correcting underconstrained reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior surface reconstructions compared to existing methods across various challenging scenarios, excelling in broad compatibility. Project: https://fictionarry.github.io/AmbiSuR-Proj/ .

Xiaohan Yu, Yang Zhao, Yongsheng Gao et al.

Exterior contour and interior structure are both vital features for classifying objects. However, most of the existing methods consider exterior contour feature and internal structure feature separately, and thus fail to function when classifying patchy image structures that have similar contours and flexible structures. To address above limitations, this paper proposes a novel Multi-Orientation Region Transform (MORT), which can effectively characterize both contour and structure features simultaneously, for patchy image structure classification. MORT is performed over multiple orientation regions at multiple scales to effectively integrate patchy features, and thus enables a better description of the shape in a coarse-to-fine manner. Moreover, the proposed MORT can be extended to combine with the deep convolutional neural network techniques, for further enhancement of classification accuracy. Very encouraging experimental results on the challenging ultra-fine-grained cultivar recognition task, insect wing recognition task, and large variation butterfly recognition task are obtained, which demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed MORT over the state-of-the-art methods in classifying patchy image structures. Our code and three patchy image structure datasets are available at: https://github.com/XiaohanYu-GU/MReT2019.

Xiaohan Yu, Chao Feng, Lang Mei et al.

Recent advances in DeepResearch-style agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in autonomous information acquisition and synthesize from real-world web environments. However, existing approaches remain fundamentally limited to text modality. Extending autonomous information-seeking agents to multimodal settings introduces critical challenges: the specialization-generalization trade-off that emerges when training models for multimodal tool-use at scale, and the severe scarcity of training data capturing complex, multi-step multimodal search trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose M$^3$Searcher, a modular multimodal information-seeking agent that explicitly decouples information acquisition from answer derivation. M$^3$Searcher is optimized with a retrieval-oriented multi-objective reward that jointly encourages factual accuracy, reasoning soundness, and retrieval fidelity. In addition, we develop MMSearchVQA, a multimodal multi-hop dataset to support retrieval centric RL training. Experimental results demonstrate that M$^3$Searcher outperforms existing approaches, exhibits strong transfer adaptability and effective reasoning in complex multimodal tasks.

Shaotian Li, Shangze Li, Chuancheng Shi et al.

Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable zero-shot capabilities, yet the internal mechanisms driving their anomaly detection (AD) performance remain poorly understood. Current methods predominantly treat VLMs as black-box feature extractors, assuming that anomaly-specific knowledge must be acquired through external adapters or memory banks. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by arguing that anomaly knowledge is intrinsically embedded within pre-trained models but remains latent and under-activated. We hypothesize that this knowledge is concentrated within a sparse subset of anomaly-sensitive neurons. To validate this, we propose latent anomaly knowledge excavation (LAKE), a training-free framework that identifies and elicits these critical neuronal signals using only a minimal set of normal samples. By isolating these sensitive neurons, LAKE constructs a highly compact normality representation that integrates visual structural deviations with cross-modal semantic activations. Extensive experiments on industrial AD benchmarks demonstrate that LAKE achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing intrinsic, neuron-level interpretability. Ultimately, our work advocates for a paradigm shift: redefining anomaly detection as the targeted activation of latent pre-trained knowledge rather than the acquisition of a downstream task.

Jiawei Zhang, Jiahe Li, Xiaohan Yu et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) creates a radiance field consisting of 3D Gaussians to represent a scene. With sparse training views, 3DGS easily suffers from overfitting, negatively impacting rendering. This paper introduces a new co-regularization perspective for improving sparse-view 3DGS. When training two 3D Gaussian radiance fields, we observe that the two radiance fields exhibit point disagreement and rendering disagreement that can unsupervisedly predict reconstruction quality, stemming from the randomness of densification implementation. We further quantify the two disagreements and demonstrate the negative correlation between them and accurate reconstruction, which allows us to identify inaccurate reconstruction without accessing ground-truth information. Based on the study, we propose CoR-GS, which identifies and suppresses inaccurate reconstruction based on the two disagreements: (1) Co-pruning considers Gaussians that exhibit high point disagreement in inaccurate positions and prunes them. (2) Pseudo-view co-regularization considers pixels that exhibit high rendering disagreement are inaccurate and suppress the disagreement. Results on LLFF, Mip-NeRF360, DTU, and Blender demonstrate that CoR-GS effectively regularizes the scene geometry, reconstructs the compact representations, and achieves state-of-the-art novel view synthesis quality under sparse training views.

Jiawei Zhang, Jiahe Li, Lei Huang et al.

With advancements in domain generalized stereo matching networks, models pre-trained on synthetic data demonstrate strong robustness to unseen domains. However, few studies have investigated the robustness after fine-tuning them in real-world scenarios, during which the domain generalization ability can be seriously degraded. In this paper, we explore fine-tuning stereo matching networks without compromising their robustness to unseen domains. Our motivation stems from comparing Ground Truth (GT) versus Pseudo Label (PL) for fine-tuning: GT degrades, but PL preserves the domain generalization ability. Empirically, we find the difference between GT and PL implies valuable information that can regularize networks during fine-tuning. We also propose a framework to utilize this difference for fine-tuning, consisting of a frozen Teacher, an exponential moving average (EMA) Teacher, and a Student network. The core idea is to utilize the EMA Teacher to measure what the Student has learned and dynamically improve GT and PL for fine-tuning. We integrate our framework with state-of-the-art networks and evaluate its effectiveness on several real-world datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method effectively preserves the domain generalization ability during fine-tuning.

Xiaohan Yu, Li Zhang, Xin Zhao et al.

Large language models (LLM) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for a variety of natural language processing tasks, bringing a new surge of combining LLM with recommendation systems, termed as LLM-based RS. Current approaches generally fall into two main paradigms, the ID direct usage paradigm and the ID translation paradigm, noting their core weakness stems from lacking recommendation knowledge and uniqueness. To address this limitation, we propose a new paradigm, ID representation, which incorporates pre-trained ID embeddings into LLMs in a complementary manner. In this work, we present RA-Rec, an efficient ID representation alignment framework for LLM-based recommendation, which is compatible with multiple ID-based methods and LLM architectures. Specifically, we treat ID embeddings as soft prompts and design an innovative alignment module and an efficient tuning method with tailored data construction for alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate RA-Rec substantially outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 3.0% absolute HitRate@100 improvements while utilizing less than 10x training data.

Anuroop Sriram, Logan M. Brabson, Xiaohan Yu et al. · baidu, cmu

Identifying useful sorbent materials for direct air capture (DAC) from humid air remains a challenge. We present the Open DAC 2025 (ODAC25) dataset, a significant expansion and improvement upon ODAC23 (Sriram et al., ACS Central Science, 10 (2024) 923), comprising nearly 60 million DFT single-point calculations for CO$_2$, H$_2$O, N$_2$, and O$_2$ adsorption in 15,000 MOFs. ODAC25 introduces chemical and configurational diversity through functionalized MOFs, high-energy GCMC-derived placements, and synthetically generated frameworks. ODAC25 also significantly improves upon the accuracy of DFT calculations and the treatment of flexible MOFs in ODAC23. Along with the dataset, we release new state-of-the-art machine-learned interatomic potentials trained on ODAC25 and evaluate them on adsorption energy and Henry's law coefficient predictions.

Xiaohan Yu, Li Zhang, Xin Zhao et al.

The recent breakthrough of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing has sparked exploration in recommendation systems, however, their limited domain-specific knowledge remains a critical bottleneck. Specifically, LLMs lack key pieces of information crucial for sequential recommendations, such as user behavior patterns. To address this critical gap, we propose IDLE-Adapter, a novel framework that integrates pre-trained ID embeddings, rich in domain-specific knowledge, into LLMs to improve recommendation accuracy. IDLE-Adapter acts as a bridge, transforming sparse user-item interaction data into dense, LLM-compatible representations through a Pre-trained ID Sequential Model, Dimensionality Alignment, Layer-wise Embedding Refinement, and Layer-wise Distribution Alignment. Furthermore, IDLE-Adapter demonstrates remarkable flexibility by seamlessly integrating ID embeddings from diverse ID-based sequential models and LLM architectures. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate the superiority of IDLE-Adapter, achieving over 10\% and 20\% improvements in HitRate@5 and NDCG@5 metrics, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Xiaohan Yu, Li Zhang, Chong Chen

Recommendation Systems have become integral to modern user experiences, but lack transparency in their decision-making processes. Existing explainable recommendation methods are hindered by reliance on a post-hoc paradigm, wherein explanation generators are trained independently of the underlying recommender models. This paradigm necessitates substantial human effort in data construction and raises concerns about explanation reliability. In this paper, we present ExpCTR, a novel framework that integrates large language model based explanation generation directly into the CTR prediction process. Inspired by recent advances in reinforcement learning, we employ two carefully designed reward mechanisms, LC alignment, which ensures explanations reflect user intentions, and IC alignment, which maintains consistency with traditional ID-based CTR models. Our approach incorporates an efficient training paradigm with LoRA and a three-stage iterative process. ExpCTR circumvents the need for extensive explanation datasets while fostering synergy between CTR prediction and explanation generation. Experimental results demonstrate that ExpCTR significantly enhances both recommendation accuracy and interpretability across three real-world datasets.

Tianyu Xiong, Xiaohan Yu

In the era of information overload, the value of recommender systems has been profoundly recognized in academia and industry alike. Multi-interest sequential recommendation, in particular, is a subfield that has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. By generating multiple-user representations, multi-interest learning models demonstrate superior expressiveness than single-user representation models, both theoretically and empirically. Despite major advancements in the field, three major issues continue to plague the performance and adoptability of multi-interest learning methods, the difference between training and deployment objectives, the inability to access item information, and the difficulty of industrial adoption due to its single-tower architecture. We address these challenges by proposing a novel multi-tower multi-interest framework with user representation repel. Experimental results across multiple large-scale industrial datasets proved the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed framework.

Meiying Gu, Jiawei Zhang, Jiahe Li et al.

Recent advances in optimizing Gaussian Splatting for scene geometry have enabled efficient reconstruction of detailed surfaces from images. However, when input views are sparse, such optimization is prone to overfitting, leading to suboptimal reconstruction quality. Existing approaches address this challenge by employing flattened Gaussian primitives to better fit surface geometry, combined with depth regularization to alleviate geometric ambiguities under limited viewpoints. Nevertheless, the increased anisotropy inherent in flattened Gaussians exacerbates overfitting in sparse-view scenarios, hindering accurate surface fitting and degrading novel view synthesis performance. In this paper, we propose \net{}, a method that reconstructs more accurate and detailed surfaces while preserving high-quality novel view rendering. Our key insight is to introduce Stereo Geometry-Texture Alignment, which bridges rendering quality and geometry estimation, thereby jointly enhancing both surface reconstruction and view synthesis. In addition, we present a Pseudo-Feature Enhanced Geometry Consistency that enforces multi-view geometric consistency by incorporating both training and unseen views, effectively mitigating overfitting caused by sparse supervision. Extensive experiments on the DTU, BlendedMVS, and Mip-NeRF360 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Jun Wang, Lixing Zhu, Xiaohan Yu et al.

Learning medical visual representations from image-report pairs through joint learning has garnered increasing research attention due to its potential to alleviate the data scarcity problem in the medical domain. The primary challenges stem from the lengthy reports that feature complex discourse relations and semantic pathologies. Previous works have predominantly focused on instance-wise or token-wise cross-modal alignment, often neglecting the importance of pathological-level consistency. This paper presents a novel framework PLACE that promotes the Pathological-Level Alignment and enriches the fine-grained details via Correlation Exploration without additional human annotations. Specifically, we propose a novel pathological-level cross-modal alignment (PCMA) approach to maximize the consistency of pathology observations from both images and reports. To facilitate this, a Visual Pathology Observation Extractor is introduced to extract visual pathological observation representations from localized tokens. The PCMA module operates independently of any external disease annotations, enhancing the generalizability and robustness of our methods. Furthermore, we design a proxy task that enforces the model to identify correlations among image patches, thereby enriching the fine-grained details crucial for various downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream tasks, including classification, image-to-text retrieval, semantic segmentation, object detection and report generation.

Jiachen Li, Qing Xie, Renshu Gu et al.

Zero-shot referring image segmentation aims to locate and segment the target region based on a referring expression, with the primary challenge of aligning and matching semantics across visual and textual modalities without training. Previous works address this challenge by utilizing Vision-Language Models and mask proposal networks for region-text matching. However, this paradigm may lead to incorrect target localization due to the inherent ambiguity and diversity of free-form referring expressions. To alleviate this issue, we present LGD (Leveraging Generative Descriptions), a framework that utilizes the advanced language generation capabilities of Multi-Modal Large Language Models to enhance region-text matching performance in Vision-Language Models. Specifically, we first design two kinds of prompts, the attribute prompt and the surrounding prompt, to guide the Multi-Modal Large Language Models in generating descriptions related to the crucial attributes of the referent object and the details of surrounding objects, referred to as attribute description and surrounding description, respectively. Secondly, three visual-text matching scores are introduced to evaluate the similarity between instance-level visual features and textual features, which determines the mask most associated with the referring expression. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg, with maximum improvements of 9.97% in oIoU and 11.29% in mIoU compared to previous methods.

Huajie Jiang, Zhengxian Li, Xiaohan Yu et al.

Generalized zero-shot learning aims to recognize both seen and unseen classes with the help of semantic information that is shared among different classes. It inevitably requires consistent visual-semantic alignment. Existing approaches fine-tune the visual backbone by seen-class data to obtain semantic-related visual features, which may cause overfitting on seen classes with a limited number of training images. This paper proposes a novel visual and semantic prompt collaboration framework, which utilizes prompt tuning techniques for efficient feature adaptation. Specifically, we design a visual prompt to integrate the visual information for discriminative feature learning and a semantic prompt to integrate the semantic formation for visualsemantic alignment. To achieve effective prompt information integration, we further design a weak prompt fusion mechanism for the shallow layers and a strong prompt fusion mechanism for the deep layers in the network. Through the collaboration of visual and semantic prompts, we can obtain discriminative semantic-related features for generalized zero-shot image recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently achieves favorable performance in both conventional zero-shot learning and generalized zero-shot learning benchmarks compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Zicheng Pan, Xiaohan Yu, Weichuan Zhang et al.

Source-free active domain adaptation (SFADA) addresses the challenge of adapting a pre-trained model to new domains without access to source data while minimizing the need for target domain annotations. This scenario is particularly relevant in real-world applications where data privacy, storage limitations, or labeling costs are significant concerns. Key challenges in SFADA include selecting the most informative samples from the target domain for labeling, effectively leveraging both labeled and unlabeled target data, and adapting the model without relying on source domain information. Additionally, existing methods often struggle with noisy or outlier samples and may require impractical progressive labeling during training. To effectively select more informative samples without frequently requesting human annotations, we propose the Propensity-driven Uncertainty Learning (ProULearn) framework. ProULearn utilizes a novel homogeneity propensity estimation mechanism combined with correlation index calculation to evaluate feature-level relationships. This approach enables the identification of representative and challenging samples while avoiding noisy outliers. Additionally, we develop a central correlation loss to refine pseudo-labels and create compact class distributions during adaptation. In this way, ProULearn effectively bridges the domain gap and maximizes adaptation performance. The principles of informative sample selection underlying ProULearn have broad implications beyond SFADA, offering benefits across various deep learning tasks where identifying key data points or features is crucial. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that ProULearn outperforms state-of-the-art methods in domain adaptation scenarios.

Xi He, Feiyu Du, Xiaohan Yu et al.

The scarcity of labelled data is specifically an urgent challenge in the field of quantum machine learning (QML). Two transfer fusion frameworks are proposed in this paper to predict the labels of a target domain data by aligning its distribution to a different but related labelled source domain on quantum devices. The frameworks fuses the quantum data from two different, but related domains through a quantum information infusion channel. The predicting tasks in the target domain can be achieved with quantum advantages by post-processing quantum measurement results. One framework, the quantum basic linear algebra subroutines (QBLAS) based implementation, can theoretically achieve the procedure of transfer fusion with quadratic speedup on a universal quantum computer. In addition, the other framework, a hardware-scalable architecture, is implemented on the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices through a variational hybrid quantum-classical procedure. Numerical experiments on the synthetic and handwritten digits datasets demonstrate that the variatioinal transfer fusion (TF) framework can reach state-of-the-art (SOTA) quantum DA method performance.

Xiaohan Yu, Shaochen Mao

Attentive Neural Process (ANP) improves the fitting ability of Neural Process (NP) and improves its prediction accuracy, but the higher time complexity of the model imposes a limitation on the length of the input sequence. Inspired by models such as Vision Transformer (ViT) and Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE), we propose Patch Attentive Neural Process (PANP) using image patches as input and improve the structure of deterministic paths based on ANP, which allows the model to extract image features more accurately and efficiently reconstruction.

Yajie Sun, Miaohua Zhang, Xiaohan Yu et al.

Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC), which aims at classifying objects with small inter-class variances, has been significantly advanced in recent years. However, ultra-fine-grained visual categorization (ultra-FGVC), which targets at identifying subclasses with extremely similar patterns, has not received much attention. In ultra-FGVC datasets, the samples per category are always scarce as the granularity moves down, which will lead to overfitting problems. Moreover, the difference among different categories is too subtle to distinguish even for professional experts. Motivated by these issues, this paper proposes a novel compositional feature embedding and similarity metric (CECS). Specifically, in the compositional feature embedding module, we randomly select patches in the original input image, and these patches are then replaced by patches from the images of different categories or masked out. Then the replaced and masked images are used to augment the original input images, which can provide more diverse samples and thus largely alleviate overfitting problem resulted from limited training samples. Besides, learning with diverse samples forces the model to learn not only the most discriminative features but also other informative features in remaining regions, enhancing the generalization and robustness of the model. In the compositional similarity metric module, a new similarity metric is developed to improve the classification performance by narrowing the intra-category distance and enlarging the inter-category distance. Experimental results on two ultra-FGVC datasets and one FGVC dataset with recent benchmark methods consistently demonstrate that the proposed CECS method achieves the state of-the-art performance.

Zicheng Pan, Xiaohan Yu, Miaohua Zhang et al.

While the fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) problems have been greatly developed in the past years, the Ultra-fine-grained visual categorization (Ultra-FGVC) problems have been understudied. FGVC aims at classifying objects from the same species (very similar categories), while the Ultra-FGVC targets at more challenging problems of classifying images at an ultra-fine granularity where even human experts may fail to identify the visual difference. The challenges for Ultra-FGVC mainly comes from two aspects: one is that the Ultra-FGVC often arises overfitting problems due to the lack of training samples; and another lies in that the inter-class variance among images is much smaller than normal FGVC tasks, which makes it difficult to learn discriminative features for each class. To solve these challenges, a mask-guided feature extraction and feature augmentation method is proposed in this paper to extract discriminative and informative regions of images which are then used to augment the original feature map. The advantage of the proposed method is that the feature detection and extraction model only requires a small amount of target region samples with bounding boxes for training, then it can automatically locate the target area for a large number of images in the dataset at a high detection accuracy. Experimental results on two public datasets and ten state-of-the-art benchmark methods consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method both visually and quantitatively.

Jun Wang, Hefeng Zhou, Xiaohan Yu

Current state-of-the-art weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) studies mainly follow a two-stage training strategy which integrates a fully supervised detector (FSD) with a pure WSOD model. There are two main problems hindering the performance of the two-phase WSOD approaches, i.e., insufficient learning problem and strict reliance between the FSD and the pseudo ground truth (PGT) generated by the WSOD model. This paper proposes pseudo ground truth refinement network (PGTRNet), a simple yet effective method without introducing any extra learnable parameters, to cope with these problems. PGTRNet utilizes multiple bounding boxes to establish the PGT, mitigating the insufficient learning problem. Besides, we propose a novel online PGT refinement approach to steadily improve the quality of PGT by fully taking advantage of the power of FSD during the second-phase training, decoupling the first and second-phase models. Elaborate experiments are conducted on the PASCAL VOC 2007 benchmark to verify the effectiveness of our methods. Experimental results demonstrate that PGTRNet boosts the backbone model by 2.1% mAP and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Jun Wang, Xiaohan Yu, Yongsheng Gao

The core for tackling the fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is to learn subtle yet discriminative features. Most previous works achieve this by explicitly selecting the discriminative parts or integrating the attention mechanism via CNN-based approaches.However, these methods enhance the computational complexity and make the modeldominated by the regions containing the most of the objects. Recently, vision trans-former (ViT) has achieved SOTA performance on general image recognition tasks. Theself-attention mechanism aggregates and weights the information from all patches to the classification token, making it perfectly suitable for FGVC. Nonetheless, the classifi-cation token in the deep layer pays more attention to the global information, lacking the local and low-level features that are essential for FGVC. In this work, we proposea novel pure transformer-based framework Feature Fusion Vision Transformer (FFVT)where we aggregate the important tokens from each transformer layer to compensate thelocal, low-level and middle-level information. We design a novel token selection mod-ule called mutual attention weight selection (MAWS) to guide the network effectively and efficiently towards selecting discriminative tokens without introducing extra param-eters. We verify the effectiveness of FFVT on three benchmarks where FFVT achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Jun Wang, Yang Zhao, Linglong Qian et al.

The precise detection of blood vessels in retinal images is crucial to the early diagnosis of the retinal vascular diseases, e.g., diabetic, hypertensive and solar retinopathies. Existing works often fail in predicting the abnormal areas, e.g, sudden brighter and darker areas and are inclined to predict a pixel to background due to the significant class imbalance, leading to high accuracy and specificity while low sensitivity. To that end, we propose a novel error attention refining network (ERA-Net) that is capable of learning and predicting the potential false predictions in a two-stage manner for effective retinal vessel segmentation. The proposed ERA-Net in the refine stage drives the model to focus on and refine the segmentation errors produced in the initial training stage. To achieve this, unlike most previous attention approaches that run in an unsupervised manner, we introduce a novel error attention mechanism which considers the differences between the ground truth and the initial segmentation masks as the ground truth to supervise the attention map learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two common retinal blood vessel datasets.

Jun Wang, Xiaohan Yu, Yongsheng Gao

In this work, we present a novel mask guided attention (MGA) method for fine-grained patchy image classification. The key challenge of fine-grained patchy image classification lies in two folds, ultra-fine-grained inter-category variances among objects and very few data available for training. This motivates us to consider employing more useful supervision signal to train a discriminative model within limited training samples. Specifically, the proposed MGA integrates a pre-trained semantic segmentation model that produces auxiliary supervision signal, i.e., patchy attention mask, enabling a discriminative representation learning. The patchy attention mask drives the classifier to filter out the insignificant parts of images (e.g., common features between different categories), which enhances the robustness of MGA for the fine-grained patchy image classification. We verify the effectiveness of our method on three publicly available patchy image datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our MGA method achieves superior performance on three datasets compared with the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our ablation study shows that MGA improves the accuracy by 2.25% and 2% on the SoyCultivarVein and BtfPIS datasets, indicating its practicality towards solving the fine-grained patchy image classification.

Bin Wang, Yongsheng Gao, Xiaohan Yu et al.

Leaf image recognition techniques have been actively researched for plant species identification. However it remains unclear whether leaf patterns can provide sufficient information for cultivar recognition. This paper reports the first attempt on soybean cultivar recognition from plant leaves which is not only a challenging research problem but also important for soybean cultivar evaluation, selection and production in agriculture. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale sliding chord matching (MSCM) approach to extract leaf patterns that are distinctive for soybean cultivar identification. A chord is defined to slide along the contour for measuring the synchronised patterns of exterior shape and interior appearance of soybean leaf images. A multiscale sliding chord strategy is developed to extract features in a coarse-to-fine hierarchical order. A joint description that integrates the leaf descriptors from different parts of a soybean plant is proposed for further enhancing the discriminative power of cultivar description. We built a cultivar leaf image database, SoyCultivar, consisting of 1200 sample leaf images from 200 soybean cultivars for performance evaluation. Encouraging experimental results of the proposed method in comparison to the state-of-the-art leaf species recognition methods demonstrate the availability of cultivar information in soybean leaves and effectiveness of the proposed MSCM for soybean cultivar identification, which may advance the research in leaf recognition from species to cultivar.

Yuxuan Lai, Yansong Feng, Xiaohan Yu et al.

Short text matching often faces the challenges that there are great word mismatch and expression diversity between the two texts, which would be further aggravated in languages like Chinese where there is no natural space to segment words explicitly. In this paper, we propose a novel lattice based CNN model (LCNs) to utilize multi-granularity information inherent in the word lattice while maintaining strong ability to deal with the introduced noisy information for matching based question answering in Chinese. We conduct extensive experiments on both document based question answering and knowledge based question answering tasks, and experimental results show that the LCNs models can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art matching models and strong baselines by taking advantages of better ability to distill rich but discriminative information from the word lattice input.