Jian Shao

Wenqing Wang, Kaifeng Gao, Yawei Luo et al.

Video-based scene graph generation (VidSGG) is an approach that aims to represent video content in a dynamic graph by identifying visual entities and their relationships. Due to the inherently biased distribution and missing annotations in the training data, current VidSGG methods have been found to perform poorly on less-represented predicates. In this paper, we propose an explicit solution to address this under-explored issue by supplementing missing predicates that should be appear in the ground-truth annotations. Dubbed Trico, our method seeks to supplement the missing predicates by exploring three complementary spatio-temporal correlations. Guided by these correlations, the missing labels can be effectively supplemented thus achieving an unbiased predicate predictions. We validate the effectiveness of Trico on the most widely used VidSGG datasets, i.e., VidVRD and VidOR. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance achieved by Trico, particularly on those tail predicates.

Yangjun Mao, Long Chen, Zhihong Jiang et al.

Distinctive Image Captioning (DIC) -- generating distinctive captions that describe the unique details of a target image -- has received considerable attention over the last few years. A recent DIC work proposes to generate distinctive captions by comparing the target image with a set of semantic-similar reference images, i.e., reference-based DIC (Ref-DIC). It aims to make the generated captions can tell apart the target and reference images. Unfortunately, reference images used by existing Ref-DIC works are easy to distinguish: these reference images only resemble the target image at scene-level and have few common objects, such that a Ref-DIC model can trivially generate distinctive captions even without considering the reference images. To ensure Ref-DIC models really perceive the unique objects (or attributes) in target images, we first propose two new Ref-DIC benchmarks. Specifically, we design a two-stage matching mechanism, which strictly controls the similarity between the target and reference images at object-/attribute- level (vs. scene-level). Secondly, to generate distinctive captions, we develop a strong Transformer-based Ref-DIC baseline, dubbed as TransDIC. It not only extracts visual features from the target image, but also encodes the differences between objects in the target and reference images. Finally, for more trustworthy benchmarking, we propose a new evaluation metric named DisCIDEr for Ref-DIC, which evaluates both the accuracy and distinctiveness of the generated captions. Experimental results demonstrate that our TransDIC can generate distinctive captions. Besides, it outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the two new benchmarks over different metrics.

Yangjun Mao, Jun Xiao, Dong Zhang et al.

Distinctive Image Captioning (DIC) -- generating distinctive captions that describe the unique details of a target image -- has received considerable attention over the last few years. A recent DIC method proposes to generate distinctive captions by comparing the target image with a set of semantic-similar reference images, i.e., reference-based DIC (Ref-DIC). It aims to force the generated captions to distinguish between the target image and the reference image. To ensure Ref-DIC models really perceive the unique objects (or attributes) in target images, we propose two new Ref-DIC benchmarks and develop a Transformer-based Ref-DIC baseline TransDIC. The model only extracts visual features from the target image, but also encodes the differences between objects in the target and reference images. Taking one step further, we propose a stronger TransDIC++, which consists of an extra contrastive learning module to make full use of the reference images. This new module is model-agnostic, which can be easily incorporated into various Ref-DIC architectures. Finally, for more trustworthy benchmarking, we propose a new evaluation metric named DisCIDEr for Ref-DIC, which evaluates both the accuracy and distinctiveness of the generated captions. Experimental results demonstrate that our TransDIC++ can generate distinctive captions. Besides, it outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the two new benchmarks over different metrics.

Chang Zong, Yuchen Yan, Weiming Lu et al.

Recent progress with LLM-based agents has shown promising results across various tasks. However, their use in answering questions from knowledge bases remains largely unexplored. Implementing a KBQA system using traditional methods is challenging due to the shortage of task-specific training data and the complexity of creating task-focused model structures. In this paper, we present Triad, a unified framework that utilizes an LLM-based agent with three roles for KBQA tasks. The agent is assigned three roles to tackle different KBQA subtasks: agent as a generalist for mastering various subtasks, as a decision maker for the selection of candidates, and as an advisor for answering questions with knowledge. Our KBQA framework is executed in four phases, involving the collaboration of the agent's multiple roles. We evaluated the performance of our framework using three benchmark datasets, and the results show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art systems on the LC-QuAD and YAGO-QA benchmarks, yielding F1 scores of 11.8% and 20.7%, respectively.

Fei Tang, Haolei Xu, Hang Zhang et al.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents have emerged as a transformative paradigm in human-computer interaction, evolving from rule-based automation scripts to sophisticated AI-driven systems capable of understanding and executing complex interface operations. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of the rapidly advancing field of LLM-based GUI Agents, systematically analyzing their architectural foundations, technical components, and evaluation methodologies. We identify and analyze four fundamental components that constitute modern GUI Agents: (1) perception systems that integrate text-based parsing with multimodal understanding for comprehensive interface comprehension; (2) exploration mechanisms that construct and maintain knowledge bases through internal modeling, historical experience, and external information retrieval; (3) planning frameworks that leverage advanced reasoning methodologies for task decomposition and execution; and (4) interaction systems that manage action generation with robust safety controls. Through rigorous analysis of these components, we reveal how recent advances in large language models and multimodal learning have revolutionized GUI automation across desktop, mobile, and web platforms. We critically examine current evaluation frameworks, highlighting methodological limitations in existing benchmarks while proposing directions for standardization. This survey also identifies key technical challenges, including accurate element localization, effective knowledge retrieval, long-horizon planning, and safety-aware execution control, while outlining promising research directions for enhancing GUI Agents' capabilities. Our systematic review provides researchers and practitioners with a thorough understanding of the field's current state and offers insights into future developments in intelligent interface automation.

Yuchen Yan, Jin Jiang, Zhenbang Ren et al.

Large reasoning models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have achieved remarkable performance in the domain of reasoning. A key component of their training is the incorporation of verifiable rewards within reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing reward benchmarks do not evaluate reference-based reward systems, leaving researchers with limited understanding of the accuracy of verifiers used in RL. In this paper, we introduce two benchmarks, VerifyBench and VerifyBench-Hard, designed to assess the performance of reference-based reward systems. These benchmarks are constructed through meticulous data collection and curation, followed by careful human annotation to ensure high quality. Current models still show considerable room for improvement on both VerifyBench and VerifyBench-Hard, especially smaller-scale models. Furthermore, we conduct a thorough and comprehensive analysis of evaluation results, offering insights for understanding and developing reference-based reward systems. Our proposed benchmarks serve as effective tools for guiding the development of verifier accuracy and the reasoning capabilities of models trained via RL in reasoning tasks.

Yuchen Yan, Yongliang Shen, Yang Liu et al.

Mathematical reasoning represents a critical frontier in advancing large language models (LLMs). While step-by-step approaches have emerged as the dominant paradigm for mathematical problem-solving in LLMs, the quality of reasoning steps in training data fundamentally constrains the performance of the models. Recent studies has demonstrated that more detailed intermediate steps can enhance model performance, yet existing methods for step expansion either require more powerful external models or incur substantial computational costs. In this paper, we introduce MathFimer, a novel framework for mathematical reasoning step expansion inspired by the "Fill-in-the-middle" task from code completion. By decomposing solution chains into prefix-suffix pairs and training models to reconstruct missing intermediate steps, we develop a specialized model, MathFimer-7B, on our carefully curated NuminaMath-FIM dataset. We then apply these models to enhance existing mathematical reasoning datasets by inserting detailed intermediate steps into their solution chains, creating MathFimer-expanded versions. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning datasets, including MathInstruct, MetaMathQA and etc., we demonstrate that models trained on MathFimer-expanded data consistently outperform their counterparts trained on original data across various benchmarks such as GSM8K and MATH. Our approach offers a practical, scalable solution for enhancing mathematical reasoning capabilities in LLMs without relying on powerful external models or expensive inference procedures.

Chenchi Zhang, Jun Xiao, Lei Chen et al.

Prompt tuning has achieved great success in transferring the knowledge from large pretrained vision-language models into downstream tasks, and has dominated the performance on visual grounding (VG). However, almost all existing prompt tuning paradigms suffer from poor interpretability. In this paper, we argue that their poor interpretability is attributed to the holistic prompt generation and inference process. By "holistic", we mean that they usually directly learn a set of vectors as the prompt (i.e., prompt generation), and use the learned global prompt to augment the textual input for the VG model (i.e., prompt inference). To this end, we propose a new prompt construction paradigm with explicit explainable ability, named TreePrompt. Specifically, we first deconstruct a complex sentence into a tree, that is consistent with human reasoning. Then, following the syntax tree, we compose a structured prompt in a bottom-up manner. Thanks to this step-by-step prompt construction process, each intermediate prompt (i.e., tree node) permits us to understand the reasoning process. Extensive ablations on various backbones and benchmarks consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of our TreePrompt.

Shaoning Xiao, Long Chen, Jian Shao et al.

Given an untrimmed video and a natural language query, Natural Language Video Localization (NLVL) aims to identify the video moment described by the query. To address this task, existing methods can be roughly grouped into two groups: 1) propose-and-rank models first define a set of hand-designed moment candidates and then find out the best-matching one. 2) proposal-free models directly predict two temporal boundaries of the referential moment from frames. Currently, almost all the propose-and-rank methods have inferior performance than proposal-free counterparts. In this paper, we argue that propose-and-rank approach is underestimated due to the predefined manners: 1) Hand-designed rules are hard to guarantee the complete coverage of targeted segments. 2) Densely sampled candidate moments cause redundant computation and degrade the performance of ranking process. To this end, we propose a novel model termed LPNet (Learnable Proposal Network for NLVL) with a fixed set of learnable moment proposals. The position and length of these proposals are dynamically adjusted during training process. Moreover, a boundary-aware loss has been proposed to leverage frame-level information and further improve the performance. Extensive ablations on two challenging NLVL benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of LPNet over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Jiahui Li, Kun Kuang, Lin Li et al.

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in many data-driven and prediction-oriented applications, and sometimes even perform better than humans. However, their most significant drawback is the lack of interpretability, which makes them less attractive in many real-world applications. When relating to the moral problem or the environmental factors that are uncertain such as crime judgment, financial analysis, and medical diagnosis, it is essential to mine the evidence for the model's prediction (interpret model knowledge) to convince humans. Thus, investigating how to interpret model knowledge is of paramount importance for both academic research and real applications.

Tao Chen, Haochen Shi, Liyuan Liu et al.

With recent advances in distantly supervised (DS) relation extraction (RE), considerable attention is attracted to leverage multi-instance learning (MIL) to distill high-quality supervision from the noisy DS. Here, we go beyond label noise and identify the key bottleneck of DS-MIL to be its low data utilization: as high-quality supervision being refined by MIL, MIL abandons a large amount of training instances, which leads to a low data utilization and hinders model training from having abundant supervision. In this paper, we propose collaborative adversarial training to improve the data utilization, which coordinates virtual adversarial training (VAT) and adversarial training (AT) at different levels. Specifically, since VAT is label-free, we employ the instance-level VAT to recycle instances abandoned by MIL. Besides, we deploy AT at the bag-level to unleash the full potential of the high-quality supervision got by MIL. Our proposed method brings consistent improvements (~ 5 absolute AUC score) to the previous state of the art, which verifies the importance of the data utilization issue and the effectiveness of our method.

Feifei Shao, Long Chen, Jian Shao et al.

Weakly-Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) and Localization (WSOL), i.e., detecting multiple and single instances with bounding boxes in an image using image-level labels, are long-standing and challenging tasks in the CV community. With the success of deep neural networks in object detection, both WSOD and WSOL have received unprecedented attention. Hundreds of WSOD and WSOL methods and numerous techniques have been proposed in the deep learning era. To this end, in this paper, we consider WSOL is a sub-task of WSOD and provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements of WSOD. Specifically, we firstly describe the formulation and setting of the WSOD, including the background, challenges, basic framework. Meanwhile, we summarize and analyze all advanced techniques and training tricks for improving detection performance. Then, we introduce the widely-used datasets and evaluation metrics of WSOD. Lastly, we discuss the future directions of WSOD. We believe that these summaries can help pave a way for future research on WSOD and WSOL.

Chenchi Zhang, Wenbo Ma, Jun Xiao et al.

The prevailing framework for matching multimodal inputs is based on a two-stage process: 1) detecting proposals with an object detector and 2) matching text queries with proposals. Existing two-stage solutions mostly focus on the matching step. In this paper, we argue that these methods overlook an obvious \emph{mismatch} between the roles of proposals in the two stages: they generate proposals solely based on the detection confidence (i.e., query-agnostic), hoping that the proposals contain all instances mentioned in the text query (i.e., query-aware). Due to this mismatch, chances are that proposals relevant to the text query are suppressed during the filtering process, which in turn bounds the matching performance. To this end, we propose VL-NMS, which is the first method to yield query-aware proposals at the first stage. VL-NMS regards all mentioned instances as critical objects, and introduces a lightweight module to predict a score for aligning each proposal with a critical object. These scores can guide the NMS operation to filter out proposals irrelevant to the text query, increasing the recall of critical objects, resulting in a significantly improved matching performance. Since VL-NMS is agnostic to the matching step, it can be easily integrated into any state-of-the-art two-stage matching methods. We validate the effectiveness of VL-NMS on two multimodal matching tasks, namely referring expression grounding and image-text matching. Extensive ablation studies on several baselines and benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superiority of VL-NMS.

Shaoning Xiao, Long Chen, Songyang Zhang et al.

We aim to address the problem of Natural Language Video Localization (NLVL)-localizing the video segment corresponding to a natural language description in a long and untrimmed video. State-of-the-art NLVL methods are almost in one-stage fashion, which can be typically grouped into two categories: 1) anchor-based approach: it first pre-defines a series of video segment candidates (e.g., by sliding window), and then does classification for each candidate; 2) anchor-free approach: it directly predicts the probabilities for each video frame as a boundary or intermediate frame inside the positive segment. However, both kinds of one-stage approaches have inherent drawbacks: the anchor-based approach is susceptible to the heuristic rules, further limiting the capability of handling videos with variant length. While the anchor-free approach fails to exploit the segment-level interaction thus achieving inferior results. In this paper, we propose a novel Boundary Proposal Network (BPNet), a universal two-stage framework that gets rid of the issues mentioned above. Specifically, in the first stage, BPNet utilizes an anchor-free model to generate a group of high-quality candidate video segments with their boundaries. In the second stage, a visual-language fusion layer is proposed to jointly model the multi-modal interaction between the candidate and the language query, followed by a matching score rating layer that outputs the alignment score for each candidate. We evaluate our BPNet on three challenging NLVL benchmarks (i.e., Charades-STA, TACoS and ActivityNet-Captions). Extensive experiments and ablative studies on these datasets demonstrate that the BPNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Long Chen, Hanwang Zhang, Jun Xiao et al.

Visual attention has been successfully applied in structural prediction tasks such as visual captioning and question answering. Existing visual attention models are generally spatial, i.e., the attention is modeled as spatial probabilities that re-weight the last conv-layer feature map of a CNN encoding an input image. However, we argue that such spatial attention does not necessarily conform to the attention mechanism --- a dynamic feature extractor that combines contextual fixations over time, as CNN features are naturally spatial, channel-wise and multi-layer. In this paper, we introduce a novel convolutional neural network dubbed SCA-CNN that incorporates Spatial and Channel-wise Attentions in a CNN. In the task of image captioning, SCA-CNN dynamically modulates the sentence generation context in multi-layer feature maps, encoding where (i.e., attentive spatial locations at multiple layers) and what (i.e., attentive channels) the visual attention is. We evaluate the proposed SCA-CNN architecture on three benchmark image captioning datasets: Flickr8K, Flickr30K, and MSCOCO. It is consistently observed that SCA-CNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visual attention-based image captioning methods.