Yu Pei

Zhaodong Wu, Haochen Xue, Qi Cao et al.

Thinking with Images improves fine-grained VQA for MLLMs by emphasizing visual cues. However, tool-augmented methods depend on the capacity of grounding, which remains unreliable for MLLMs. In parallel, attention-driven methods to crop the Region of Interest (ROIs) are proposed but they are constrained by (1) fragmented attention signals scattered across layers, leading to suboptimal localization and (2) relying on question- or redundant-text-conditioned attention extraction. Our analysis reveals three patterns: MLLMs may attend to the correct region yet generate incorrect coordinates, where-to-look attention is often fragmented across layers, and attention extraction is query-sensitive. Motivated by these, We propose ConFoThinking, a Consolidated-Focused-Attention-Driven Thinking framework that learns to aggregate attention into a designated intermediate layer, from which we mine and zoom in salient regions for downstream visual understanding. Moreover, we extract attention using concise semantic cues of what to look into, which mitigates the semantic noise introduced by question- or redundant-text-based attention extraction. Experiments across five VQA benchmarks demonstrate ConFoThinking significantly improves perception performance. The code, checkpoints, and dataset will be released after being accepted.

Chuang Ma, Yu Pei, Jianhang Zhang et al.

Micro-expressions (MEs) are subtle, fleeting nonverbal cues that reveal an individual's genuine emotional state. Their analysis has attracted considerable interest due to its promising applications in fields such as healthcare, criminal investigation, and human-computer interaction. However, existing ME research is limited to single visual modality, overlooking the rich emotional information conveyed by other physiological modalities, resulting in ME recognition and spotting performance far below practical application needs. Therefore, exploring the cross-modal association mechanism between ME visual features and physiological signals (PS), and developing a multimodal fusion framework, represents a pivotal step toward advancing ME analysis. This study introduces a novel ME dataset, MMME, which, for the first time, enables synchronized collection of facial action signals (MEs), central nervous system signals (EEG), and peripheral PS (PPG, RSP, SKT, EDA, and ECG). By overcoming the constraints of existing ME corpora, MMME comprises 634 MEs, 2,841 macro-expressions (MaEs), and 2,890 trials of synchronized multimodal PS, establishing a robust foundation for investigating ME neural mechanisms and conducting multimodal fusion-based analyses. Extensive experiments validate the dataset's reliability and provide benchmarks for ME analysis, demonstrating that integrating MEs with PS significantly enhances recognition and spotting performance. To the best of our knowledge, MMME is the most comprehensive ME dataset to date in terms of modality diversity. It provides critical data support for exploring the neural mechanisms of MEs and uncovering the visual-physiological synergistic effects, driving a paradigm shift in ME research from single-modality visual analysis to multimodal fusion. The dataset will be publicly available upon acceptance of this paper.