Qiankun Li

Jinyue Li, Yuzhou Yu, Jingjing Yang et al.

The accurate classification of benign and malignant pulmonary nodules in CT scans is critical for early lung cancer screening, yet remains challenging due to the multi-scale and heterogeneous nature of pulmonary nodules. While deep learning offers potential for auxiliary diagnosis, most existing models act as "black boxes", lacking the transparency and explainability required for trustworthy clinical integration. To address this issue, we propose M3Net, a novel 3D network for pulmonary nodule classification inspired by the hierarchical diagnostic workflow of radiologists, which integrates multi-scale contextual information from fine-grained structures to global anatomical relationships. Our framework constructs a progressive multi-scale input, from fine-grained nodule structures to local semantics and global spatial relationships. M3Net employs scale-specific encoders and ensures cross-scale semantic consistency through latent space projection and mutual information maximization. Extensive experiments on the public LIDC-IDRI dataset and a self-collected clinical dataset (USTC-FHLN) demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with accuracies of 86.96% and 84.24% respectively, outperforming the best baseline by 3.26% and 2.17%. The results validate that M3Net provides a more robust and clinically relevant solution for pulmonary nodule classification. The code is available at https://github.com/jylEcho/M3-Net.

Fan Zhang, Haoxuan Li, Shengju Qian et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have revolutionized numerous research fields, including computer vision and affective computing. As a pivotal challenge in this interdisciplinary domain, facial expression recognition (FER) has evolved from separate, domain-specific models to more unified approaches. One promising avenue to unify FER tasks is converting conventional FER datasets into visual question-answering (VQA) formats, enabling the direct application of powerful generalist MLLMs for inference. However, despite the success of cutting-edge MLLMs in various tasks, their performance on FER tasks remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we provide FERBench, a systematic benchmark that incorporates 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs across four widely used FER datasets. Our results reveal that, while MLLMs exhibit good classification performance, they still face significant limitations in reasoning and interpretability. To this end, we introduce post-training strategies aimed at enhancing the facial expression reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Specifically, we curate two high-quality and large-scale datasets: UniFER-CoT-230K for cold-start initialization and UniFER-RLVR-360K for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), respectively. Building upon them, we develop a unified and interpretable FER foundation model termed UniFER-7B, which outperforms many open-sourced and closed-source generalist MLLMs (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro and Qwen2.5-VL-72B).

Xiaolong Huang, Qiankun Li

Image representations are a critical building block of computer vision applications. This paper presents the 2nd place solution to the Google Universal Image Embedding Competition, which is part of the ECCV2022 instance-level recognition workshops. We use the instance-level fine-grained image classification method to complete this competition. We focus on data building and processing, model structure, and training strategies. Finally, the solution scored 0.713 on the public leaderboard and 0.709 on the private leaderboard.

Hongbin Zhou, Yupeng Ren, Qiankun Li et al.

Siamese networks are widely used for remote sensing change detection tasks. A vanilla siamese network has two identical feature extraction branches which share weights, these two branches work independently and the feature maps are not fused until about to be sent to a decoder head. However we find that it is critical to exchange information between two feature extraction branches at early stage for change detection task. In this work we present Mutual-Attention Siamese Network (MASNet), a general siamese network with mutual-attention plug-in, so to exchange information between the two feature extraction branches. We show that our modification improve the performance of siamese networks on multi change detection datasets, and it works for both convolutional neural network and visual transformer.

Xiaolong Huang, Qiankun Li, Xueran Li et al.

Visual fine-tuning has garnered significant attention with the rise of pre-trained vision models. The current prevailing method, full fine-tuning, suffers from the issue of knowledge forgetting as it focuses solely on fitting the downstream training set. In this paper, we propose a novel weight rollback-based fine-tuning method called OLOR (One step Learning, One step Review). OLOR combines fine-tuning with optimizers, incorporating a weight rollback term into the weight update term at each step. This ensures consistency in the weight range of upstream and downstream models, effectively mitigating knowledge forgetting and enhancing fine-tuning performance. In addition, a layer-wise penalty is presented to employ penalty decay and the diversified decay rate to adjust the weight rollback levels of layers for adapting varying downstream tasks. Through extensive experiments on various tasks such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation, we demonstrate the general applicability and state-of-the-art performance of our proposed OLOR. Code is available at https://github.com/rainbow-xiao/OLOR-AAAI-2024.

Qiankun Li, Haobing Liu, Ruobing Jiang et al.

Clustering holds profound significance in data mining. In recent years, graph convolutional network (GCN) has emerged as a powerful tool for deep clustering, integrating both graph structural information and node attributes. However, most existing methods ignore the higher-order structural information of the graph. Evidently, nodes within the same cluster can establish distant connections. Besides, recent deep clustering methods usually apply a self-supervised module to monitor the training process of their model, focusing solely on node attributes without paying attention to graph structure. In this paper, we propose a novel graph clustering network to make full use of graph structural information. To capture the higher-order structural information, we design a graph mutual infomax module, effectively maximizing mutual information between graph-level and node-level representations, and employ a trinary self-supervised module that includes modularity as a structural constraint. Our proposed model outperforms many state-of-the-art methods on various datasets, demonstrating its superiority.

Yiming Zhang, Chengzhang Yu, Zhuokai Zhao et al.

The processing mechanisms underlying language and image understanding in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been extensively studied. However, the internal reasoning mechanisms of LVLMs for spatiotemporal understanding remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce a systematic, circuit-based framework designed to investigate how spatiotemporal visual semantics are represented and processed within these LVLMs. Specifically, our framework comprises three circuits: visual auditing circuit, semantic tracing circuit, and attention flow circuit. Through the lens of these circuits, we discover that visual semantics are highly localized to specific object tokens--removing these tokens can degrade model performance by up to 92.6%. Furthermore, we identify that interpretable concepts of objects and actions emerge and become progressively refined in the middle-to-late layers of LVLMs. In contrary to the current works that solely focus on objects in one image, we reveal that the middle-to-late layers of LVLMs exhibit specialized functional localization for spatiotemporal semantics. Our findings offer significant mechanistic insights into spatiotemporal semantics analysis of LVLMs, laying a foundation for designing more robust and interpretable models.

Jun Yin, Fei Wu, Yupeng Ren et al.

Public remote sensing datasets often face limitations in universality due to resolution variability and inconsistent land cover category definitions. To harness the vast pool of unlabeled remote sensing data, we propose SAMST, a semi-supervised semantic segmentation method. SAMST leverages the strengths of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in zero-shot generalization and boundary detection. SAMST iteratively refines pseudo-labels through two main components: supervised model self-training using both labeled and pseudo-labeled data, and a SAM-based Pseudo-label Refiner. The Pseudo-label Refiner comprises three modules: a Threshold Filter Module for preprocessing, a Prompt Generation Module for extracting connected regions and generating prompts for SAM, and a Label Refinement Module for final label stitching. By integrating the generalization power of large models with the training efficiency of small models, SAMST improves pseudo-label accuracy, thereby enhancing overall model performance. Experiments on the Potsdam dataset validate the effectiveness and feasibility of SAMST, demonstrating its potential to address the challenges posed by limited labeled data in remote sensing semantic segmentation.