Shuyuan Yang

Yuting Yang, Licheng Jiao, Xu Liu et al.

Dynamic attention mechanism and global modeling ability make Transformer show strong feature learning ability. In recent years, Transformer has become comparable to CNNs methods in computer vision. This review mainly investigates the current research progress of Transformer in image and video applications, which makes a comprehensive overview of Transformer in visual learning understanding. First, the attention mechanism is reviewed, which plays an essential part in Transformer. And then, the visual Transformer model and the principle of each module are introduced. Thirdly, the existing Transformer-based models are investigated, and their performance is compared in visual learning understanding applications. Three image tasks and two video tasks of computer vision are investigated. The former mainly includes image classification, object detection, and image segmentation. The latter contains object tracking and video classification. It is significant for comparing different models' performance in various tasks on several public benchmark data sets. Finally, ten general problems are summarized, and the developing prospects of the visual Transformer are given in this review.

Yanbiao Ma, Licheng Jiao, Fang Liu et al.

Model bias triggered by long-tailed data has been widely studied. However, measure based on the number of samples cannot explicate three phenomena simultaneously: (1) Given enough data, the classification performance gain is marginal with additional samples. (2) Classification performance decays precipitously as the number of training samples decreases when there is insufficient data. (3) Model trained on sample-balanced datasets still has different biases for different classes. In this work, we define and quantify the semantic scale of classes, which is used to measure the feature diversity of classes. It is exciting to find experimentally that there is a marginal effect of semantic scale, which perfectly describes the first two phenomena. Further, the quantitative measurement of semantic scale imbalance is proposed, which can accurately reflect model bias on multiple datasets, even on sample-balanced data, revealing a novel perspective for the study of class imbalance. Due to the prevalence of semantic scale imbalance, we propose semantic-scale-balanced learning, including a general loss improvement scheme and a dynamic re-weighting training framework that overcomes the challenge of calculating semantic scales in real-time during iterations. Comprehensive experiments show that dynamic semantic-scale-balanced learning consistently enables the model to perform superiorly on large-scale long-tailed and non-long-tailed natural and medical datasets, which is a good starting point for mitigating the prevalent but unnoticed model bias.

Dan Wang, Licheng Jiao, Jie Chen et al.

Difference features obtained by comparing the images of two periods play an indispensable role in the change detection (CD) task. However, a pair of bi-temporal images can exhibit diverse changes, which may cause various difference features. Identifying changed pixels with differ difference features to be the same category is thus a challenge for CD. Most nowadays' methods acquire distinctive difference features in implicit ways like enhancing image representation or supervision information. Nevertheless, informative image features only guarantee object semantics are modeled and can not guarantee that changed pixels have similar semantics in the difference feature space and are distinct from those unchanged ones. In this work, the generalized representation of various changes is learned straightforwardly in the difference feature space, and a novel Changes-Aware Transformer (CAT) for refining difference features is proposed. This generalized representation can perceive which pixels are changed and which are unchanged and further guide the update of pixels' difference features. CAT effectively accomplishes this refinement process through the stacked cosine cross-attention layer and self-attention layer. After refinement, the changed pixels in the difference feature space are closer to each other, which facilitates change detection. In addition, CAT is compatible with various backbone networks and existing CD methods. Experiments on remote sensing CD data set and street scene CD data set show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and has excellent generalization.

Yanbiao Ma, Licheng Jiao, Fang Liu et al.

To address the challenges of long-tailed classification, researchers have proposed several approaches to reduce model bias, most of which assume that classes with few samples are weak classes. However, recent studies have shown that tail classes are not always hard to learn, and model bias has been observed on sample-balanced datasets, suggesting the existence of other factors that affect model bias. In this work, we first establish a geometric perspective for analyzing model fairness and then systematically propose a series of geometric measurements for perceptual manifolds in deep neural networks. Subsequently, we comprehensively explore the effect of the geometric characteristics of perceptual manifolds on classification difficulty and how learning shapes the geometric characteristics of perceptual manifolds. An unanticipated finding is that the correlation between the class accuracy and the separation degree of perceptual manifolds gradually decreases during training, while the negative correlation with the curvature gradually increases, implying that curvature imbalance leads to model bias.Building upon these observations, we propose curvature regularization to facilitate the model to learn curvature-balanced and flatter perceptual manifolds. Evaluations on multiple long-tailed and non-long-tailed datasets show the excellent performance and exciting generality of our approach, especially in achieving significant performance improvements based on current state-of-the-art techniques. Our work opens up a geometric analysis perspective on model bias and reminds researchers to pay attention to model bias on non-long-tailed and even sample-balanced datasets.

Chao Wang, Licheng Jiao, Jiaxuan Zhao et al.

The construction of machine learning models involves many bi-level multi-objective optimization problems (BL-MOPs), where upper level (UL) candidate solutions must be evaluated via training weights of a model in the lower level (LL). Due to the Pareto optimality of sub-problems and the complex dependency across UL solutions and LL weights, an UL solution is feasible if and only if the LL weight is Pareto optimal. It is computationally expensive to determine which LL Pareto weight in the LL Pareto weight set is the most appropriate for each UL solution. This paper proposes a bi-level multi-objective learning framework (BLMOL), coupling the above decision-making process with the optimization process of the UL-MOP by introducing LL preference $r$. Specifically, the UL variable and $r$ are simultaneously searched to minimize multiple UL objectives by evolutionary multi-objective algorithms. The LL weight with respect to $r$ is trained to minimize multiple LL objectives via gradient-based preference multi-objective algorithms. In addition, the preference surrogate model is constructed to replace the expensive evaluation process of the UL-MOP. We consider a novel case study on multi-task graph neural topology search. It aims to find a set of Pareto topologies and their Pareto weights, representing different trade-offs across tasks at UL and LL, respectively. The found graph neural network is employed to solve multiple tasks simultaneously, including graph classification, node classification, and link prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that BLMOL can outperform some state-of-the-art algorithms and generate well-representative UL solutions and LL weights.

Jiawei Zhang, Tiantian Wang, Zhixi Feng et al.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is a crucial stage in the spectrum management, signal monitoring, and control of wireless communication systems. The accurate classification of the modulation format plays a vital role in the subsequent decoding of the transmitted data. End-to-end deep learning methods have been recently applied to AMC, outperforming traditional feature engineering techniques. However, AMC still has limitations in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments. To address the drawback, we propose a novel AMC-Net that improves recognition by denoising the input signal in the frequency domain while performing multi-scale and effective feature extraction. Experiments on two representative datasets demonstrate that our model performs better in efficiency and effectiveness than the most current methods.

Yanbiao Ma, Licheng Jiao, Fang Liu et al.

In scenarios with long-tailed distributions, the model's ability to identify tail classes is limited due to the under-representation of tail samples. Class rebalancing, information augmentation, and other techniques have been proposed to facilitate models to learn the potential distribution of tail classes. The disadvantage is that these methods generally pursue models with balanced class accuracy on the data manifold, while ignoring the ability of the model to resist interference. By constructing noisy data manifold, we found that the robustness of models trained on unbalanced data has a long-tail phenomenon. That is, even if the class accuracy is balanced on the data domain, it still has bias on the noisy data manifold. However, existing methods cannot effectively mitigate the above phenomenon, which makes the model vulnerable in long-tailed scenarios. In this work, we propose an Orthogonal Uncertainty Representation (OUR) of feature embedding and an end-to-end training strategy to improve the long-tail phenomenon of model robustness. As a general enhancement tool, OUR has excellent compatibility with other methods and does not require additional data generation, ensuring fast and efficient training. Comprehensive evaluations on long-tailed datasets show that our method significantly improves the long-tail phenomenon of robustness, bringing consistent performance gains to other long-tailed learning methods.

Xiaoyang Hao, Zhixi Feng, Tongqing Peng et al.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is an effective way to deal with physical layer threats of the internet of things (IoT). However, there is often label mislabeling in practice, which significantly impacts the performance and robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs). In this paper, we propose a meta-learning guided label noise distillation method for robust AMC. Specifically, a teacher-student heterogeneous network (TSHN) framework is proposed to distill and reuse label noise. Based on the idea that labels are representations, the teacher network with trusted meta-learning divides and conquers untrusted label samples and then guides the student network to learn better by reassessing and correcting labels. Furthermore, we propose a multi-view signal (MVS) method to further improve the performance of hard-to-classify categories with few-shot trusted label samples. Extensive experimental results show that our methods can significantly improve the performance and robustness of signal AMC in various and complex label noise scenarios, which is crucial for securing IoT applications.

Zihan Gao, Lingling Li, Licheng Jiao et al.

Understanding 3D scenes is a crucial challenge in computer vision research with applications spanning multiple domains. Recent advancements in distilling 2D vision-language foundation models into neural fields, like NeRF and 3DGS, enable open-vocabulary segmentation of 3D scenes from 2D multi-view images without the need for precise 3D annotations. However, while effective, these methods typically rely on the per-pixel distillation of high-dimensional CLIP features, introducing ambiguity and necessitating complex regularization strategies, which adds inefficiency during training. This paper presents MaskField, which enables efficient 3D open-vocabulary segmentation with neural fields from a novel perspective. Unlike previous methods, MaskField decomposes the distillation of mask and semantic features from foundation models by formulating a mask feature field and queries. MaskField overcomes ambiguous object boundaries by naturally introducing SAM segmented object shapes without extra regularization during training. By circumventing the direct handling of dense high-dimensional CLIP features during training, MaskField is particularly compatible with explicit scene representations like 3DGS. Our extensive experiments show that MaskField not only surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods but also achieves remarkably fast convergence. We hope that MaskField will inspire further exploration into how neural fields can be trained to comprehend 3D scenes from 2D models.

Yinghui Xing, Shuyuan Yang, Song Wang et al.

The fusion of multispectral and panchromatic images is always dubbed pansharpening. Most of the available deep learning-based pan-sharpening methods sharpen the multispectral images through a one-step scheme, which strongly depends on the reconstruction ability of the network. However, remote sensing images always have large variations, as a result, these one-step methods are vulnerable to the error accumulation and thus incapable of preserving spatial details as well as the spectral information. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step model for pan-sharpening that sharpens the MS image through the progressive compensation of the spatial and spectral information. Firstly, a deep multiscale guided generative adversarial network is used to preliminarily enhance the spatial resolution of the MS image. Starting from the pre-sharpened MS image in the coarse domain, our approach then progressively refines the spatial and spectral residuals over a couple of generative adversarial networks (GANs) that have reverse architectures. The whole model is composed of triple GANs, and based on the specific architecture, a joint compensation loss function is designed to enable the triple GANs to be trained simultaneously. Moreover, the spatial-spectral residual compensation structure proposed in this paper can be extended to other pan-sharpening methods to further enhance their fusion results. Extensive experiments are performed on different datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

Yanbiao Ma, Licheng Jiao, Fang Liu et al.

In the context of the long-tail scenario, models exhibit a strong demand for high-quality data. Data-centric approaches aim to enhance both the quantity and quality of data to improve model performance. Among these approaches, information augmentation has been progressively introduced as a crucial category. It achieves a balance in model performance by augmenting the richness and quantity of samples in the tail classes. However, there is currently a lack of research into the underlying mechanisms explaining the effectiveness of information augmentation methods. Consequently, the utilization of information augmentation in long-tail recognition tasks relies heavily on empirical and intricate fine-tuning. This work makes two primary contributions. Firstly, we approach the problem from the perspectives of feature diversity and distribution shift, introducing the concept of Feature Diversity Gain (FDG) to elucidate why information augmentation is effective. We find that the performance of information augmentation can be explained by FDG, and its performance peaks when FDG achieves an appropriate balance. Experimental results demonstrate that by using FDG to select augmented data, we can further enhance model performance without the need for any modifications to the model's architecture. Thus, data-centric approaches hold significant potential in the field of long-tail recognition, beyond the development of new model structures. Furthermore, we systematically introduce the core components and fundamental tasks of a data-centric long-tail learning framework for the first time. These core components guide the implementation and deployment of the system, while the corresponding fundamental tasks refine and expand the research area.

Fan Zhang, Lingling Li, Licheng Jiao et al.

Satellite imagery, due to its long-range imaging, brings with it a variety of scale-preferred tasks, such as the detection of tiny/small objects, making the precise localization and detection of small objects of interest a challenging task. In this article, we design a Knowledge Discovery Network (KDN) to implement the renormalization group theory in terms of efficient feature extraction. Renormalized connection (RC) on the KDN enables ``synergistic focusing'' of multi-scale features. Based on our observations of KDN, we abstract a class of RCs with different connection strengths, called n21C, and generalize it to FPN-based multi-branch detectors. In a series of FPN experiments on the scale-preferred tasks, we found that the ``divide-and-conquer'' idea of FPN severely hampers the detector's learning in the right direction due to the large number of large-scale negative samples and interference from background noise. Moreover, these negative samples cannot be eliminated by the focal loss function. The RCs extends the multi-level feature's ``divide-and-conquer'' mechanism of the FPN-based detectors to a wide range of scale-preferred tasks, and enables synergistic effects of multi-level features on the specific learning goal. In addition, interference activations in two aspects are greatly reduced and the detector learns in a more correct direction. Extensive experiments of 17 well-designed detection architectures embedded with n21s on five different levels of scale-preferred tasks validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the RCs. Especially the simplest linear form of RC, E421C performs well in all tasks and it satisfies the scaling property of RGT. We hope that our approach will transfer a large number of well-designed detectors from the computer vision community to the remote sensing community.

Kaiwen Zuo, Shuyuan Yang, Zonghe Chua

Grasp force estimation can help prevent robots from damaging delicate objects during manipulation and improve learning-based robotic control. Integrating force sensing into deformable grippers negotiates trade-offs in cost, complexity, mechanical robustness, and performance. With the growing integration of RGB-D wrist cameras into robotic systems for control purposes, camera-based techniques are a promising solution for indirect visual force estimation. Current approaches mostly utilize end-to-end deep learning, which can be brittle when generalizing to new scenarios, while existing model-based approaches are unsuited to grasping and modern grasper geometries. To address these challenges, we developed a model-based visual force sensing approach integrating an iterative contact localization with generalization to unseen objects. The system extracts structural key points from wrist camera RGB-D images of deforming fin-ray-shaped soft grippers, and uses these key points to define parameters of an inverse finite element analysis simulation in Simulation Open Framework Architecture. The iterative contact localization sub-system utilizes a deep learning-based online 3D reconstruction and pose estimation pipeline to dynamically update contact location, and is robust to visual occlusion and unseen objects. Our system demonstrated an average root mean square error of 0.23 N and normalized root mean square deviation of 2.11% during the load phase, and 0.48 N and 4.34% over the entire grasping process when interacting with different objects under various conditions, showcasing its potential for real-time model-based indirect force sensing of soft grippers.

Chao Wang, Jiaxuan Zhao, Lingling Li et al.

Graph neural architecture search (GNAS) can customize high-performance graph neural network architectures for specific graph tasks or datasets. However, existing GNAS methods begin searching for architectures from a zero-knowledge state, ignoring the prior knowledge that may improve the search efficiency. The available knowledge base (e.g. NAS-Bench-Graph) contains many rich architectures and their multiple performance metrics, such as the accuracy (#Acc) and number of parameters (#Params). This study proposes exploiting such prior knowledge to accelerate the multi-objective evolutionary search on a new graph dataset, named knowledge-aware evolutionary GNAS (KEGNAS). KEGNAS employs the knowledge base to train a knowledge model and a deep multi-output Gaussian process (DMOGP) in one go, which generates and evaluates transfer architectures in only a few GPU seconds. The knowledge model first establishes a dataset-to-architecture mapping, which can quickly generate candidate transfer architectures for a new dataset. Subsequently, the DMOGP with architecture and dataset encodings is designed to predict multiple performance metrics for candidate transfer architectures on the new dataset. According to the predicted metrics, non-dominated candidate transfer architectures are selected to warm-start the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for optimizing the #Acc and #Params on a new dataset. Empirical studies on NAS-Bench-Graph and five real-world datasets show that KEGNAS swiftly generates top-performance architectures, achieving 4.27% higher accuracy than advanced evolutionary baselines and 11.54% higher accuracy than advanced differentiable baselines. In addition, ablation studies demonstrate that the use of prior knowledge significantly improves the search performance.

Jianfeng Cai, Yue Ma, Zhixi Feng et al.

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image interpretation is widely used in various fields. Recently, deep learning has made significant progress in PolSAR image classification. Supervised learning (SL) requires a large amount of labeled PolSAR data with high quality to achieve better performance, however, manually labeled data is insufficient. This causes the SL to fail into overfitting and degrades its generalization performance. Furthermore, the scattering confusion problem is also a significant challenge that attracts more attention. To solve these problems, this article proposes a Heterogeneous Network based Contrastive Learning method(HCLNet). It aims to learn high-level representation from unlabeled PolSAR data for few-shot classification according to multi-features and superpixels. Beyond the conventional CL, HCLNet introduces the heterogeneous architecture for the first time to utilize heterogeneous PolSAR features better. And it develops two easy-to-use plugins to narrow the domain gap between optics and PolSAR, including feature filter and superpixel-based instance discrimination, which the former is used to enhance the complementarity of multi-features, and the latter is used to increase the diversity of negative samples. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of HCLNet on three widely used PolSAR benchmark datasets compared with state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies also verify the importance of each component. Besides, this work has implications for how to efficiently utilize the multi-features of PolSAR data to learn better high-level representation in CL and how to construct networks suitable for PolSAR data better.

Yi Zuo, Lingling Li, Licheng Jiao et al.

Existing diffusion-based methods have achieved impressive results in human motion editing. However, these methods often exhibit significant ghosting and body distortion in unseen in-the-wild cases. In this paper, we introduce Edit-Your-Motion, a video motion editing method that tackles these challenges through one-shot fine-tuning on unseen cases. Specifically, firstly, we utilized DDIM inversion to initialize the noise, preserving the appearance of the source video and designed a lightweight motion attention adapter module to enhance motion fidelity. DDIM inversion aims to obtain the implicit representations by estimating the prediction noise from the source video, which serves as a starting point for the sampling process, ensuring the appearance consistency between the source and edited videos. The Motion Attention Module (MA) enhances the model's motion editing ability by resolving the conflict between the skeleton features and the appearance features. Secondly, to effectively decouple motion and appearance of source video, we design a spatio-temporal two-stage learning strategy (STL). In the first stage, we focus on learning temporal features of human motion and propose recurrent causal attention (RCA) to ensure consistency between video frames. In the second stage, we shift focus on learning the appearance features of the source video. With Edit-Your-Motion, users can edit the motion of humans in the source video, creating more engaging and diverse content. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, along with user preference studies, show that Edit-Your-Motion outperforms other methods.

Yanbiao Ma, Licheng Jiao, Fang Liu et al.

Building fair deep neural networks (DNNs) is a crucial step towards achieving trustworthy artificial intelligence. Delving into deeper factors that affect the fairness of DNNs is paramount and serves as the foundation for mitigating model biases. However, current methods are limited in accurately predicting DNN biases, relying solely on the number of training samples and lacking more precise measurement tools. Here, we establish a geometric perspective for analyzing the fairness of DNNs, comprehensively exploring how DNNs internally shape the intrinsic geometric characteristics of datasets-the intrinsic dimensions (IDs) of perceptual manifolds, and the impact of IDs on the fairness of DNNs. Based on multiple findings, we propose Intrinsic Dimension Regularization (IDR), which enhances the fairness and performance of models by promoting the learning of concise and ID-balanced class perceptual manifolds. In various image recognition benchmark tests, IDR significantly mitigates model bias while improving its performance.

Yanbiao Ma, Licheng Jiao, Fang Liu et al.

In semi-supervised learning, methods that rely on confidence learning to generate pseudo-labels have been widely proposed. However, increasing research finds that when faced with noisy and biased data, the model's representation network is more reliable than the classification network. Additionally, label generation methods based on model predictions often show poor adaptability across different datasets, necessitating customization of the classification network. Therefore, we propose a Hierarchical Dynamic Labeling (HDL) algorithm that does not depend on model predictions and utilizes image embeddings to generate sample labels. We also introduce an adaptive method for selecting hyperparameters in HDL, enhancing its versatility. Moreover, HDL can be combined with general image encoders (e.g., CLIP) to serve as a fundamental data processing module. We extract embeddings from datasets with class-balanced and long-tailed distributions using pre-trained semi-supervised models. Subsequently, samples are re-labeled using HDL, and the re-labeled samples are used to further train the semi-supervised models. Experiments demonstrate improved model performance, validating the motivation that representation networks are more reliable than classifiers or predictors. Our approach has the potential to change the paradigm of pseudo-label generation in semi-supervised learning.

Shuai Chen, Yong Zu, Zhixi Feng et al.

The growing scarcity of spectrum resources and rapid proliferation of wireless devices make efficient radio network management critical. While deep learning-enhanced Cognitive Radio Technology (CRT) provides promising solutions for tasks such as radio signal classification (RSC), denoising, and spectrum allocation, existing DL-based CRT frameworks are typically task-specific and lack scalability in diverse real-world applications. This limitation naturally leads to the exploration of Large Language Models (LLMs), whose exceptional cross-domain generalization capabilities offer new potential for advancing CRT. To bridge this gap, we propose RadioLLM, a novel framework that integrates Hybrid Prompt and Token Reprogramming (HPTR) for combining radio signal features with expert knowledge, and a Frequency-Attuned Fusion (FAF) module for enhanced high-frequency feature modeling. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that RadioLLM achieves superior performance compared to existing baselines in the majority of testing scenarios.

Kehuan Song, Xinglin Xie, Kexin Zhang et al.

Segmentation of video objects in complex scenarios is highly challenging, and the MOSE dataset has significantly contributed to the development of this field. This technical report details the STSeg solution proposed by the "imaplus" team.By finetuning SAM2 and the unsupervised model TMO on the MOSE dataset, the STSeg solution demonstrates remarkable advantages in handling complex object motions and long-video sequences. In the inference phase, an Adaptive Pseudo-labels Guided Model Refinement Pipeline is adopted to intelligently select appropriate models for processing each video. Through finetuning the models and employing the Adaptive Pseudo-labels Guided Model Refinement Pipeline in the inference phase, the STSeg solution achieved a J&F score of 87.26% on the test set of the 2025 4th PVUW Challenge MOSE Track, securing the 1st place and advancing the technology for video object segmentation in complex scenarios.

Xinyu Liu, Jing Zhang, Kexin Zhang et al.

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is a vital task in computer vision, focusing on distinguishing foreground objects from the background across video frames. Our work draws inspiration from the Cutie model, and we investigate the effects of object memory, the total number of memory frames, and input resolution on segmentation performance. This report validates the effectiveness of our inference method on the coMplex video Object SEgmentation (MOSE) dataset, which features complex occlusions. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a J\&F score of 0.8139 on the test set, securing the third position in the final ranking. These findings highlight the robustness and accuracy of our method in handling challenging VOS scenarios.

Yanbiao Ma, Licheng Jiao, Fang Liu et al.

Real-world data are long-tailed, the lack of tail samples leads to a significant limitation in the generalization ability of the model. Although numerous approaches of class re-balancing perform well for moderate class imbalance problems, additional knowledge needs to be introduced to help the tail class recover the underlying true distribution when the observed distribution from a few tail samples does not represent its true distribution properly, thus allowing the model to learn valuable information outside the observed domain. In this work, we propose to leverage the geometric information of the feature distribution of the well-represented head class to guide the model to learn the underlying distribution of the tail class. Specifically, we first systematically define the geometry of the feature distribution and the similarity measures between the geometries, and discover four phenomena regarding the relationship between the geometries of different feature distributions. Then, based on four phenomena, feature uncertainty representation is proposed to perturb the tail features by utilizing the geometry of the head class feature distribution. It aims to make the perturbed features cover the underlying distribution of the tail class as much as possible, thus improving the model's generalization performance in the test domain. Finally, we design a three-stage training scheme enabling feature uncertainty modeling to be successfully applied. Experiments on CIFAR-10/100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist2018 show that our proposed approach outperforms other similar methods on most metrics. In addition, the experimental phenomena we discovered are able to provide new perspectives and theoretical foundations for subsequent studies.

Chao Wang, Jiaxuan Zhao, Licheng Jiao et al.

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful capabilities for generating natural text. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) can discover diverse solutions to complex real-world problems. Motivated by the common collective and directionality of text generation and evolution, this paper first illustrates the conceptual parallels between LLMs and EAs at a micro level, which includes multiple one-to-one key characteristics: token representation and individual representation, position encoding and fitness shaping, position embedding and selection, Transformers block and reproduction, and model training and parameter adaptation. These parallels highlight potential opportunities for technical advancements in both LLMs and EAs. Subsequently, we analyze existing interdisciplinary research from a macro perspective to uncover critical challenges, with a particular focus on evolutionary fine-tuning and LLM-enhanced EAs. These analyses not only provide insights into the evolutionary mechanisms behind LLMs but also offer potential directions for enhancing the capabilities of artificial agents.

Licheng Jiao, Fan Zhang, Fang Liu et al.

Object detection is one of the most important and challenging branches of computer vision, which has been widely applied in peoples life, such as monitoring security, autonomous driving and so on, with the purpose of locating instances of semantic objects of a certain class. With the rapid development of deep learning networks for detection tasks, the performance of object detectors has been greatly improved. In order to understand the main development status of object detection pipeline, thoroughly and deeply, in this survey, we first analyze the methods of existing typical detection models and describe the benchmark datasets. Afterwards and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a variety of object detection methods in a systematic manner, covering the one-stage and two-stage detectors. Moreover, we list the traditional and new applications. Some representative branches of object detection are analyzed as well. Finally, we discuss the architecture of exploiting these object detection methods to build an effective and efficient system and point out a set of development trends to better follow the state-of-the-art algorithms and further research.

Yan Ju, Lingling Li, Licheng Jiao et al.

Due to the limited amount and imbalanced classes of labeled training data, the conventional supervised learning can not ensure the discrimination of the learned feature for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. In this paper, we propose a modified diversity of class probability estimation (MDCPE) with two deep neural networks to learn spectral-spatial feature for HSI classification. In co-training phase, recurrent neural network (RNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) are utilized as two learners to extract features from labeled and unlabeled data. Based on the extracted features, MDCPE selects most credible samples to update initial labeled data by combining k-means clustering with the traditional diversity of class probability estimation (DCPE) co-training. In this way, MDCPE can keep new labeled data class-balanced and extract discriminative features for both the minority and majority classes. During testing process, classification results are acquired by co-decision of the two learners. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed semi-supervised co-training method can make full use of unlabeled information to enhance generality of the learners and achieve favorable accuracies on all three widely used data sets: Salinas, Pavia University and Pavia Center.

Fang Liu, Junfei Shi, Licheng Jiao et al.

For polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) image classification, it is a challenge to classify the aggregated terrain types, such as the urban area, into semantic homogenous regions due to sharp bright-dark variations in intensity. The aggregated terrain type is formulated by the similar ground objects aggregated together. In this paper, a polarimetric hierarchical semantic model (PHSM) is firstly proposed to overcome this disadvantage based on the constructions of a primal-level and a middle-level semantic. The primal-level semantic is a polarimetric sketch map which consists of sketch segments as the sparse representation of a PolSAR image. The middle-level semantic is a region map which can extract semantic homogenous regions from the sketch map by exploiting the topological structure of sketch segments. Mapping the region map to the PolSAR image, a complex PolSAR scene is partitioned into aggregated, structural and homogenous pixel-level subspaces with the characteristics of relatively coherent terrain types in each subspace. Then, according to the characteristics of three subspaces above, three specific methods are adopted, and furthermore polarimetric information is exploited to improve the segmentation result. Experimental results on PolSAR data sets with different bands and sensors demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in region homogeneity and edge preservation for terrain classification.