AUCSeg: AUC-oriented Pixel-level Long-tail Semantic SegmentationBoyu Han, Qianqian Xu, Zhiyong Yang et al.
The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a well-known metric for evaluating instance-level long-tail learning problems. In the past two decades, many AUC optimization methods have been proposed to improve model performance under long-tail distributions. In this paper, we explore AUC optimization methods in the context of pixel-level long-tail semantic segmentation, a much more complicated scenario. This task introduces two major challenges for AUC optimization techniques. On one hand, AUC optimization in a pixel-level task involves complex coupling across loss terms, with structured inner-image and pairwise inter-image dependencies, complicating theoretical analysis. On the other hand, we find that mini-batch estimation of AUC loss in this case requires a larger batch size, resulting in an unaffordable space complexity. To address these issues, we develop a pixel-level AUC loss function and conduct a dependency-graph-based theoretical analysis of the algorithm's generalization ability. Additionally, we design a Tail-Classes Memory Bank (T-Memory Bank) to manage the significant memory demand. Finally, comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our proposed AUCSeg method. The code is available at https://github.com/boyuh/AUCSeg.
New Interaction Paradigm for Complex EDA Software Leveraging GPTXinyu Wang, Boyu Han, Zhenghan Tai et al.
Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools such as KiCad offer powerful functionalities but remain difficult to use, particularly for beginners, due to their steep learning curves and fragmented documentation. To address this challenge, we present SmartonAI, an AI-assisted interaction system that integrates large language models into the EDA workflow, enabling natural language communication, intelligent task decomposition, and contextual plugin execution. SmartonAI consists of two main components: a Chat Plugin that breaks down user instructions into subtasks and retrieves tailored documentation, and a OneCommandLine Plugin that recommends and executes relevant plugins based on user intent. The system supports multilingual interaction and adapts to user feedback through incremental learning. Preliminary results suggest that SmartonAI significantly reduces onboarding time and enhances productivity, representing a promising step toward generalizable AI-assisted interaction paradigms for complex software systems.
LightFair: Towards an Efficient Alternative for Fair T2I Diffusion via Debiasing Pre-trained Text EncodersBoyu Han, Qianqian Xu, Shilong Bao et al.
This paper explores a novel lightweight approach LightFair to achieve fair text-to-image diffusion models (T2I DMs) by addressing the adverse effects of the text encoder. Most existing methods either couple different parts of the diffusion model for full-parameter training or rely on auxiliary networks for correction. They incur heavy training or sampling burden and unsatisfactory performance. Since T2I DMs consist of multiple components, with the text encoder being the most fine-tunable and front-end module, this paper focuses on mitigating bias by fine-tuning text embeddings. To validate feasibility, we observe that the text encoder's neutral embedding output shows substantial skewness across image embeddings of various attributes in the CLIP space. More importantly, the noise prediction network further amplifies this imbalance. To finetune the text embedding, we propose a collaborative distance-constrained debiasing strategy that balances embedding distances to improve fairness without auxiliary references. However, mitigating bias can compromise the original generation quality. To address this, we introduce a two-stage text-guided sampling strategy to limit when the debiased text encoder intervenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LightFair is effective and efficient. Notably, on Stable Diffusion v1.5, our method achieves SOTA debiasing at just $1/4$ of the training burden, with virtually no increase in sampling burden. The code is available at https://github.com/boyuh/LightFair.
Towards Size-invariant Salient Object Detection: A Generic Evaluation and Optimization ApproachShilong Bao, Qianqian Xu, Feiran Li et al.
This paper investigates a fundamental yet underexplored issue in Salient Object Detection (SOD): the size-invariant property for evaluation protocols, particularly in scenarios when multiple salient objects of significantly different sizes appear within a single image. We first present a novel perspective to expose the inherent size sensitivity of existing widely used SOD metrics. Through careful theoretical derivations, we show that the evaluation outcome of an image under current SOD metrics can be essentially decomposed into a sum of several separable terms, with the contribution of each term being directly proportional to its corresponding region size. Consequently, the prediction errors would be dominated by the larger regions, while smaller yet potentially more semantically important objects are often overlooked, leading to biased performance assessments and practical degradation. To address this challenge, a generic Size-Invariant Evaluation (SIEva) framework is proposed. The core idea is to evaluate each separable component individually and then aggregate the results, thereby effectively mitigating the impact of size imbalance across objects. Building upon this, we further develop a dedicated optimization framework (SIOpt), which adheres to the size-invariant principle and significantly enhances the detection of salient objects across a broad range of sizes. Notably, SIOpt is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with a wide range of SOD backbones. Theoretically, we also present generalization analysis of SOD methods and provide evidence supporting the validity of our new evaluation protocols. Finally, comprehensive experiments speak to the efficacy of our proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/Ferry-Li/SI-SOD.