Meiliu Wu

Siyu Chen, Ting Han, Chengzheng Fu et al.

Open-Vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) and domain generalization in semantic segmentation (DGSS) highlight a subtle complementarity that motivates Open-Vocabulary Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation (OV-DGSS). OV-DGSS aims to generate pixel-level masks for unseen categories while maintaining robustness across unseen domains, a critical capability for real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving in adverse conditions. We introduce Vireo, a novel single-stage framework for OV-DGSS that unifies the strengths of OVSS and DGSS for the first time. Vireo builds upon the frozen Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) and incorporates scene geometry via Depth VFMs to extract domain-invariant structural features. To bridge the gap between visual and textual modalities under domain shift, we propose three key components: (1) GeoText Prompts, which align geometric features with language cues and progressively refine VFM encoder representations; (2) Coarse Mask Prior Embedding (CMPE) for enhancing gradient flow for faster convergence and stronger textual influence; and (3) the Domain-Open-Vocabulary Vector Embedding Head (DOV-VEH), which fuses refined structural and semantic features for robust prediction. Comprehensive evaluation on these components demonstrates the effectiveness of our designs. Our proposed Vireo achieves the state-of-the-art performance and surpasses existing methods by a large margin in both domain generalization and open-vocabulary recognition, offering a unified and scalable solution for robust visual understanding in diverse and dynamic environments. Code is available at https://github.com/anonymouse-9c53tp182bvz/Vireo.

Siyu Chen, Ting Han, Changshe Zhang et al.

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have delivered remarkable performance in Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation (DGSS). However, recent methods often overlook the fact that visual cues are susceptible, whereas the underlying geometry remains stable, rendering depth information more robust. In this paper, we investigate the potential of integrating depth information with features from VFMs, to improve the geometric consistency within an image and boost the generalization performance of VFMs. We propose a novel fine-tuning DGSS framework, named DepthForge, which integrates the visual cues from frozen DINOv2 or EVA02 and depth cues from frozen Depth Anything V2. In each layer of the VFMs, we incorporate depth-aware learnable tokens to continuously decouple domain-invariant visual and spatial information, thereby enhancing depth awareness and attention of the VFMs. Finally, we develop a depth refinement decoder and integrate it into the model architecture to adaptively refine multi-layer VFM features and depth-aware learnable tokens. Extensive experiments are conducted based on various DGSS settings and five different datsets as unseen target domains. The qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms alternative approaches with stronger performance, steadier visual-spatial attention, and superior generalization ability. In particular, DepthForge exhibits outstanding performance under extreme conditions (e.g., night and snow). Code is available at https://github.com/anonymouse-xzrptkvyqc/DepthForge.

Ting Han, Fengjiao Li, Chunsong Chen et al.

This paper proposes Spatially-Weighted CLIP (SW-CLIP), a novel framework for street-view geo-localization that explicitly incorporates spatial autocorrelation into vision-language contrastive learning. Unlike conventional CLIP-based methods that treat all non-matching samples as equally negative, SW-CLIP leverages Tobler's First Law of Geography to model geographic relationships through distance-aware soft supervision. Specifically, we introduce a location-as-text representation to encode geographic positions and replace one-hot InfoNCE targets with spatially weighted soft labels derived from geodesic distance. Additionally, a neighborhood-consistency regularization is employed to preserve local spatial structure in the embedding space. Experiments on a multi-city dataset demonstrate that SW-CLIP significantly improves geo-localization accuracy, reduces long-tail errors, and enhances spatial coherence compared to standard CLIP. The results highlight the importance of shifting from semantic alignment to geographic alignment for robust geo-localization and provide a general paradigm for integrating spatial principles into multimodal representation learning.

Huan Chen, Ting Han, Siyu Chen et al.

Street-view imagery (SVI) offers a fine-grained lens on traffic risk, yet two fundamental challenges persist: (1) how to construct street-level indicators that capture accident-related features, and (2) how to quantify their causal impacts across different accident types. To address these challenges, we propose Semantic4Safety, a framework that applies zero-shot semantic segmentation to SVIs to derive 11 interpretable streetscape indicators, and integrates road type as contextual information to analyze approximately 30,000 accident records in Austin. Specifically, we train an eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) multi-class classifier and use Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) to interpret both global and local feature contributions, and then apply Generalized Propensity Score (GPS) weighting and Average Treatment Effect (ATE) estimation to control confounding and quantify causal effects. Results uncover heterogeneous, accident-type-specific causal patterns: features capturing scene complexity, exposure, and roadway geometry dominate predictive power; larger drivable area and emergency space reduce risk, whereas excessive visual openness can increase it. By bridging predictive modeling with causal inference, Semantic4Safety supports targeted interventions and high-risk corridor diagnosis, offering a scalable, data-informed tool for urban road safety planning.