Cheng Chi

Cheng Chi, Fangyun Wei, Han Hu

Existing object detection frameworks are usually built on a single format of object/part representation, i.e., anchor/proposal rectangle boxes in RetinaNet and Faster R-CNN, center points in FCOS and RepPoints, and corner points in CornerNet. While these different representations usually drive the frameworks to perform well in different aspects, e.g., better classification or finer localization, it is in general difficult to combine these representations in a single framework to make good use of each strength, due to the heterogeneous or non-grid feature extraction by different representations. This paper presents an attention-based decoder module similar as that in Transformer~\cite{vaswani2017attention} to bridge other representations into a typical object detector built on a single representation format, in an end-to-end fashion. The other representations act as a set of \emph{key} instances to strengthen the main \emph{query} representation features in the vanilla detectors. Novel techniques are proposed towards efficient computation of the decoder module, including a \emph{key sampling} approach and a \emph{shared location embedding} approach. The proposed module is named \emph{bridging visual representations} (BVR). It can perform in-place and we demonstrate its broad effectiveness in bridging other representations into prevalent object detection frameworks, including RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, FCOS and ATSS, where about $1.5\sim3.0$ AP improvements are achieved. In particular, we improve a state-of-the-art framework with a strong backbone by about $2.0$ AP, reaching $52.7$ AP on COCO test-dev. The resulting network is named RelationNet++. The code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/RelationNet2.

Shifeng Zhang, Cheng Chi, Yongqiang Yao et al.

Object detection has been dominated by anchor-based detectors for several years. Recently, anchor-free detectors have become popular due to the proposal of FPN and Focal Loss. In this paper, we first point out that the essential difference between anchor-based and anchor-free detection is actually how to define positive and negative training samples, which leads to the performance gap between them. If they adopt the same definition of positive and negative samples during training, there is no obvious difference in the final performance, no matter regressing from a box or a point. This shows that how to select positive and negative training samples is important for current object detectors. Then, we propose an Adaptive Training Sample Selection (ATSS) to automatically select positive and negative samples according to statistical characteristics of object. It significantly improves the performance of anchor-based and anchor-free detectors and bridges the gap between them. Finally, we discuss the necessity of tiling multiple anchors per location on the image to detect objects. Extensive experiments conducted on MS COCO support our aforementioned analysis and conclusions. With the newly introduced ATSS, we improve state-of-the-art detectors by a large margin to $50.7\%$ AP without introducing any overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/sfzhang15/ATSS

Zhe Li, Cheng Chi, Yangyang Wei et al.

Natural language offers a natural interface for humanoid robots, but existing language-guided humanoid locomotion pipelines remain cumbersome and untrustworthy. They typically decode human motion, retarget it to robot morphology, and then track it with a physics-based controller. However, this multi-stage process is prone to cumulative errors, introduces high latency, and yields weak coupling between semantics and control. These limitations call for a more direct pathway from language to action, one that eliminates fragile intermediate stages. Therefore, we present RoboGhost, a retargeting-free framework that directly conditions humanoid policies on language-grounded motion latents. By bypassing explicit motion decoding and retargeting, RoboGhost enables a diffusion-based policy to denoise executable actions directly from noise, preserving semantic intent and supporting fast, reactive control. A hybrid causal transformer-diffusion motion generator further ensures long-horizon consistency while maintaining stability and diversity, yielding rich latent representations for precise humanoid behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboGhost substantially reduces deployment latency, improves success rates and tracking precision, and produces smooth, semantically aligned locomotion on real humanoids. Beyond text, the framework naturally extends to other modalities such as images, audio, and music, providing a universal foundation for vision-language-action humanoid systems.

Cheng Chi, Shuran Song

This paper tackles the task of category-level pose estimation for garments. With a near infinite degree of freedom, a garment's full configuration (i.e., poses) is often described by the per-vertex 3D locations of its entire 3D surface. However, garments are also commonly subject to extreme cases of self-occlusion, especially when folded or crumpled, making it challenging to perceive their full 3D surface. To address these challenges, we propose GarmentNets, where the key idea is to formulate the deformable object pose estimation problem as a shape completion task in the canonical space. This canonical space is defined across garments instances within a category, therefore, specifies the shared category-level pose. By mapping the observed partial surface to the canonical space and completing it in this space, the output representation describes the garment's full configuration using a complete 3D mesh with the per-vertex canonical coordinate label. To properly handle the thin 3D structure presented on garments, we proposed a novel 3D shape representation using the generalized winding number field. Experiments demonstrate that GarmentNets is able to generalize to unseen garment instances and achieve significantly better performance compared to alternative approaches.

Chen Change Loy, Dahua Lin, Wanli Ouyang et al.

This paper presents a review of the 2018 WIDER Challenge on Face and Pedestrian. The challenge focuses on the problem of precise localization of human faces and bodies, and accurate association of identities. It comprises of three tracks: (i) WIDER Face which aims at soliciting new approaches to advance the state-of-the-art in face detection, (ii) WIDER Pedestrian which aims to find effective and efficient approaches to address the problem of pedestrian detection in unconstrained environments, and (iii) WIDER Person Search which presents an exciting challenge of searching persons across 192 movies. In total, 73 teams made valid submissions to the challenge tracks. We summarize the winning solutions for all three tracks. and present discussions on open problems and potential research directions in these topics.