Zhenzhen Hu

Xuesong Zhang, Jia Li, Yunbo Xu et al.

Autonomous navigation guided by natural language instructions in embodied environments remains a challenge for vision-language navigation (VLN) agents. Although recent advancements in learning diverse and fine-grained visual environmental representations have shown promise, the fragile performance improvements may not conclusively attribute to enhanced visual grounding,a limitation also observed in related vision-language tasks. In this work, we preliminarily investigate whether advanced VLN models genuinely comprehend the visual content of their environments by introducing varying levels of visual perturbations. These perturbations include ground-truth depth images, perturbed views and random noise. Surprisingly, we experimentally find that simple branch expansion, even with noisy visual inputs, paradoxically improves the navigational efficacy. Inspired by these insights, we further present a versatile Multi-Branch Architecture (MBA) designed to delve into the impact of both the branch quantity and visual quality. The proposed MBA extends a base agent into a multi-branch variant, where each branch processes a different visual input. This approach is embarrassingly simple yet agnostic to topology-based VLN agents. Extensive experiments on three VLN benchmarks (R2R, REVERIE, SOON) demonstrate that our method with optimal visual permutations matches or even surpasses state-of-the-art results. The source code is available at here.

Wenhao Qian, Zhenzhen Hu, Zijie Song et al.

Metaphorical imagination, the ability to connect seemingly unrelated concepts, is fundamental to human cognition and communication. While understanding linguistic metaphors has advanced significantly, grasping multimodal metaphors, such as those found in internet memes, presents unique challenges due to their unconventional expressions and implied meanings. Existing methods for multimodal metaphor identification often struggle to bridge the gap between literal and figurative interpretations. Additionally, generative approaches that utilize large language models or text-to-image models, while promising, suffer from high computational costs. This paper introduces \textbf{C}oncept \textbf{D}rift \textbf{G}uided \textbf{L}ayerNorm \textbf{T}uning (\textbf{CDGLT}), a novel and training-efficient framework for multimodal metaphor identification. CDGLT incorporates two key innovations: (1) Concept Drift, a mechanism that leverages Spherical Linear Interpolation (SLERP) of cross-modal embeddings from a CLIP encoder to generate a new, divergent concept embedding. This drifted concept helps to alleviate the gap between literal features and the figurative task. (2) A prompt construction strategy, that adapts the method of feature extraction and fusion using pre-trained language models for the multimodal metaphor identification task. CDGLT achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MET-Meme benchmark while significantly reducing training costs compared to existing generative methods. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of both Concept Drift and our adapted LN Tuning approach. Our method represents a significant step towards efficient and accurate multimodal metaphor understanding. The code is available: \href{https://github.com/Qianvenh/CDGLT}{https://github.com/Qianvenh/CDGLT}.

Zijie Song, Zhenzhen Hu, Yuanen Zhou et al.

Cross-lingual image captioning is a challenging task that requires addressing both cross-lingual and cross-modal obstacles in multimedia analysis. The crucial issue in this task is to model the global and the local matching between the image and different languages. Existing cross-modal embedding methods based on the transformer architecture oversee the local matching between the image region and monolingual words, especially when dealing with diverse languages. To overcome these limitations, we propose an Embedded Heterogeneous Attention Transformer (EHAT) to establish cross-domain relationships and local correspondences between images and different languages by using a heterogeneous network. EHAT comprises Masked Heterogeneous Cross-attention (MHCA), Heterogeneous Attention Reasoning Network (HARN), and Heterogeneous Co-attention (HCA). The HARN serves as the core network and it captures cross-domain relationships by leveraging visual bounding box representation features to connect word features from two languages and to learn heterogeneous maps. MHCA and HCA facilitate cross-domain integration in the encoder through specialized heterogeneous attention mechanisms, enabling a single model to generate captions in two languages. We evaluate our approach on the MSCOCO dataset to generate captions in English and Chinese, two languages that exhibit significant differences in their language families. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing advanced monolingual methods. Our proposed EHAT framework effectively addresses the challenges of cross-lingual image captioning, paving the way for improved multilingual image analysis and understanding.

Yin Chen, Jia Li, Yu Zhang et al.

Dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) infers emotions from the temporal evolution of expressions, unlike static facial expression recognition (SFER), which relies solely on a single snapshot. This temporal analysis provides richer information and promises greater recognition capability. However, current DFER methods often exhibit unsatisfied performance largely due to fewer training samples compared to SFER. Given the inherent correlation between static and dynamic expressions, we hypothesize that leveraging the abundant SFER data can enhance DFER. To this end, we propose Static-for-Dynamic (S4D), a unified dual-modal learning framework that integrates SFER data as a complementary resource for DFER. Specifically, S4D employs dual-modal self-supervised pre-training on facial images and videos using a shared Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder-decoder architecture, yielding improved spatiotemporal representations. The pre-trained encoder is then fine-tuned on static and dynamic expression datasets in a multi-task learning setup to facilitate emotional information interaction. Unfortunately, vanilla multi-task learning in our study results in negative transfer. To address this, we propose an innovative Mixture of Adapter Experts (MoAE) module that facilitates task-specific knowledge acquisition while effectively extracting shared knowledge from both static and dynamic expression data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S4D achieves a deeper understanding of DFER, setting new state-of-the-art performance on FERV39K, MAFW, and DFEW benchmarks, with weighted average recall (WAR) of 53.65\%, 58.44\%, and 76.68\%, respectively. Additionally, a systematic correlation analysis between SFER and DFER tasks is presented, which further elucidates the potential benefits of leveraging SFER.

Zijie Song, Zhenzhen Hu, Richang Hong

Unsupervised representation learning for image clustering is essential in computer vision. Although the advancement of visual models has improved image clustering with efficient visual representations, challenges still remain. Firstly, existing features often lack the ability to represent the internal structure of images, hindering the accurate clustering of visually similar images. Secondly, finer-grained semantic labels are often missing, limiting the ability to capture nuanced differences and similarities between images. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on image clustering, the pretrain-based Grid Jigsaw Representation (pGJR). Inspired by human jigsaw puzzle processing, we modify the traditional jigsaw learning to gain a more sequential and incremental understanding of image structure. We also leverage the pretrained CLIP to extract the prior features which can benefit from the enhanced cross-modal representation for richer and more nuanced semantic information and label level differentiation. Our experiments demonstrate that using the pretrained model as a feature extractor can accelerate the convergence of clustering. We append the GJR module to pGJR and observe significant improvements on common-use benchmark datasets. The experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in the clustering task, as evidenced by improvements in the ACC, NMI, and ARI metrics, as well as the super-fast convergence speed.

Jia Li, Yu Zhang, Yin Chen et al.

Facial action unit (AU) detection and facial expression (FE) recognition can be jointly viewed as affective facial behavior tasks, representing fine-grained muscular activations and coarse-grained holistic affective states, respectively. Despite their inherent semantic correlation, existing studies predominantly focus on knowledge transfer from AUs to FEs, while bidirectional learning remains insufficiently explored. In practice, this challenge is further compounded by heterogeneous data conditions, where AU and FE datasets differ in annotation paradigms (frame-level vs.\ clip-level), label granularity, and data availability and diversity, hindering effective joint learning. To address these issues, we propose a Structured Semantic Mapping (SSM) framework for bidirectional AU--FE learning under different data domains and heterogeneous supervision. SSM consists of three key components: (1) a shared visual backbone that learns unified facial representations from dynamic AU and FE videos; (2) semantic mediation via a Textual Semantic Prototype (TSP) module, which constructs structured semantic prototypes from fixed textual descriptions augmented with learnable context prompts, serving as supervision signals and cross-task alignment anchors in a shared semantic space; and (3) a Dynamic Prior Mapping (DPM) module that incorporates prior knowledge derived from the Facial Action Coding System and learns a data-driven association matrix in a high-level feature space, enabling explicit and bidirectional knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on popular AU detection and FE recognition benchmarks show that SSM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks simultaneously, and demonstrate that holistic expression semantics can in turn enhance fine-grained AU learning even across heterogeneous datasets.

Peng Jia, Zhen Xiao, Jia Li et al.

High-quality, real-time talking head synthesis remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing reconstruction- and rendering-based methods typically rely on identity-specific models, limiting cross-identity generalization. To address this issue, we propose SDTalk, a one-shot 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based framework that generalizes to unseen identities without personalized training or fine-tuning. Our framework comprises two modules with a two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, we incorporate structured facial priors into the reconstruction module and separately predict 3DGS parameters for visible and occluded regions, enabling complete head reconstruction from a single image. In the second stage, we introduce a dual-branch motion field to model coarse and fine facial dynamics, improving detail fidelity and lip synchronization. Experiments demonstrate that SDTalk surpasses existing methods in both visual quality and inference efficiency.

Jia Li, Yang Wang, Wenhao Qian et al.

Interview performance assessment is essential for determining candidates' suitability for professional positions. To ensure holistic and fair evaluations, we propose a novel and comprehensive framework that explores ``365'' aspects of interview performance by integrating \textit{three} modalities (video, audio, and text), \textit{six} responses per candidate, and \textit{five} key evaluation dimensions. The framework employs modality-specific feature extractors to encode heterogeneous data streams and subsequently fused via a Shared Compression Multilayer Perceptron. This module compresses multimodal embeddings into a unified latent space, facilitating efficient feature interaction. To enhance prediction robustness, we incorporate a two-level ensemble learning strategy: (1) independent regression heads predict scores for each response, and (2) predictions are aggregated across responses using a mean-pooling mechanism to produce final scores for the five target dimensions. By listening to the unspoken, our approach captures both explicit and implicit cues from multimodal data, enabling comprehensive and unbiased assessments. Achieving a multi-dimensional average MSE of 0.1824, our framework secured first place in the AVI Challenge 2025, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in advancing automated and multimodal interview performance assessment. The full implementation is available at https://github.com/MSA-LMC/365Aspects.

Jia Li, Yichao He, Jiacheng Xu et al.

Accurate and reliable personality assessment plays a vital role in many fields, such as emotional intelligence, mental health diagnostics, and personalized education. Unlike fleeting emotions, personality traits are stable, often subconsciously leaked through language, facial expressions, and body behaviors, with asynchronous patterns across modalities. It was hard to model personality semantics with traditional superficial features and seemed impossible to achieve effective cross-modal understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a novel personality assessment framework called \textit{\textbf{Traits Run Deep}}. It employs \textit{\textbf{psychology-informed prompts}} to elicit high-level personality-relevant semantic representations. Besides, it devises a \textit{\textbf{Text-Centric Trait Fusion Network}} that anchors rich text semantics to align and integrate asynchronous signals from other modalities. To be specific, such fusion module includes a Chunk-Wise Projector to decrease dimensionality, a Cross-Modal Connector and a Text Feature Enhancer for effective modality fusion and an ensemble regression head to improve generalization in data-scarce situations. To our knowledge, we are the first to apply personality-specific prompts to guide large language models (LLMs) in extracting personality-aware semantics for improved representation quality. Furthermore, extracting and fusing audio-visual apparent behavior features further improves the accuracy. Experimental results on the AVI validation set have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed components, i.e., approximately a 45\% reduction in mean squared error (MSE). Final evaluations on the test set of the AVI Challenge 2025 confirm our method's superiority, ranking first in the Personality Assessment track. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/MSA-LMC/TraitsRunDeep.

Jian Xiao, Zijie Song, Jialong Hu et al.

Recent progress in text-video retrieval has been largely driven by contrastive learning. However, existing methods often overlook the effect of the modality gap, which causes anchor representations to undergo in-place optimization (i.e., optimization tension) that limits their alignment capacity. Moreover, noisy hard negatives further distort the semantics of anchors. To address these issues, we propose GARE, a Gap-Aware Retrieval framework that introduces a learnable, pair-specific increment $Δ_{ij}$ between text $t_i$ and video $v_j$, redistributing gradients to relieve optimization tension and absorb noise. We derive $Δ_{ij}$ via a multivariate first-order Taylor expansion of the InfoNCE loss under a trust-region constraint, showing that it guides updates along locally consistent descent directions. A lightweight neural module conditioned on the semantic gap couples increments across batches for structure-aware correction. Furthermore, we regularize $Δ$ through a variational information bottleneck with relaxed compression, enhancing stability and semantic consistency. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that GARE consistently improves alignment accuracy and robustness, validating the effectiveness of gap-aware tension mitigation. Code is available at https://github.com/musicman217/GARE-text-video-retrieval.

Zijie Song, Yuanen Zhou, Zhenzhen Hu et al.

Most current image captioning models typically generate captions from left-to-right. This unidirectional property makes them can only leverage past context but not future context. Though refinement-based models can exploit both past and future context by generating a new caption in the second stage based on pre-retrieved or pre-generated captions in the first stage, the decoder of these models generally consists of two networks~(i.e. a retriever or captioner in the first stage and a captioner in the second stage), which can only be executed sequentially. In this paper, we introduce a Compact Bidirectional Transformer model for image captioning that can leverage bidirectional context implicitly and explicitly while the decoder can be executed parallelly. Specifically, it is implemented by tightly coupling left-to-right(L2R) and right-to-left(R2L) flows into a single compact model to serve as a regularization for implicitly exploiting bidirectional context and optionally allowing explicit interaction of the bidirectional flows, while the final caption is chosen from either L2R or R2L flow in a sentence-level ensemble manner. We conduct extensive ablation studies on MSCOCO benchmark and find that the compact bidirectional architecture and the sentence-level ensemble play more important roles than the explicit interaction mechanism. By combining with word-level ensemble seamlessly, the effect of sentence-level ensemble is further enlarged. We further extend the conventional one-flow self-critical training to the two-flows version under this architecture and achieve new state-of-the-art results in comparison with non-vision-language-pretraining models. Finally, we verify the generality of this compact bidirectional architecture by extending it to LSTM backbone. Source code is available at https://github.com/YuanEZhou/cbtic.

Yuanen Zhou, Yong Zhang, Zhenzhen Hu et al.

Current state-of-the-art image captioning models adopt autoregressive decoders, \ie they generate each word by conditioning on previously generated words, which leads to heavy latency during inference. To tackle this issue, non-autoregressive image captioning models have recently been proposed to significantly accelerate the speed of inference by generating all words in parallel. However, these non-autoregressive models inevitably suffer from large generation quality degradation since they remove words dependence excessively. To make a better trade-off between speed and quality, we introduce a semi-autoregressive model for image captioning~(dubbed as SATIC), which keeps the autoregressive property in global but generates words parallelly in local . Based on Transformer, there are only a few modifications needed to implement SATIC. Experimental results on the MSCOCO image captioning benchmark show that SATIC can achieve a good trade-off without bells and whistles. Code is available at {\color{magenta}\url{https://github.com/YuanEZhou/satic}}.

Yuanen Zhou, Meng Wang, Daqing Liu et al.

Visual attention not only improves the performance of image captioners, but also serves as a visual interpretation to qualitatively measure the caption rationality and model transparency. Specifically, we expect that a captioner can fix its attentive gaze on the correct objects while generating the corresponding words. This ability is also known as grounded image captioning. However, the grounding accuracy of existing captioners is far from satisfactory. To improve the grounding accuracy while retaining the captioning quality, it is expensive to collect the word-region alignment as strong supervision. To this end, we propose a Part-of-Speech (POS) enhanced image-text matching model (SCAN \cite{lee2018stacked}): POS-SCAN, as the effective knowledge distillation for more grounded image captioning. The benefits are two-fold: 1) given a sentence and an image, POS-SCAN can ground the objects more accurately than SCAN; 2) POS-SCAN serves as a word-region alignment regularization for the captioner's visual attention module. By showing benchmark experimental results, we demonstrate that conventional image captioners equipped with POS-SCAN can significantly improve the grounding accuracy without strong supervision. Last but not the least, we explore the indispensable Self-Critical Sequence Training (SCST) \cite{Rennie_2017_CVPR} in the context of grounded image captioning and show that the image-text matching score can serve as a reward for more grounded captioning \footnote{https://github.com/YuanEZhou/Grounded-Image-Captioning}.

Yangchen Yu, Qian Chen, Jia Li et al.

Multimodal emotion recognition (MER) benefits from combining text, audio, and vision, yet standard fusion often fails when modalities conflict. Crucially, conflicts differ in resolvability: benign conflicts stem from missing, weak, or ambiguous cues and can be mitigated by cross-modal calibration, while severe conflicts arise from intrinsically contradictory (e.g., sarcasm) or misleading signals, for which forced fusion may amplify errors. Recognizing this, we propose Dual-Path Conflict Resolution (DCR), a unified framework that learns when to fuse and when to drop modalities. Path I (Affective Fusion Distiller, AFD) performs reverse distillation from audio/visual teachers to a textual student using temporally weighted class evidence, thereby enhancing representation-level calibration and improving fusion when alignment is beneficial. Path II (Affective Discernment Agent, ADA) formulates MER as a contextual bandit that selects among fusion and unimodal predictions based on a dual-view state and a calibration-aware reward, enabling decision-level arbitration under irreconcilable conflicts without requiring per-modality reliability labels. By taking into account the full multimodal context and coupling soft calibration with hard arbitration, DCR reconciles conflicts that can be aligned while bypassing misleading modalities when fusion is harmful. Across five benchmarks covering both dialogue-level and clip-level MER, DCR consistently outperforms competitive baselines or achieves highly competitive results. Further ablations, conflict-specific subset evaluation, and modality-selection analysis verify that AFD and ADA are complementary and jointly improve robust conflict-aware emotion recognition.

Yangche Yu, Yin Chen, Jia Li et al.

Accurate engagement estimation is essential for adaptive human-computer interaction systems, yet robust deployment is hindered by poor generalizability across diverse domains and challenges in modeling complex interaction dynamics.To tackle these issues, we propose DAPA (Domain-Adaptive Parallel Attention), a novel framework for generalizable conversational engagement modeling. DAPA introduces a Domain Prompting mechanism by prepending learnable domain-specific vectors to the input, explicitly conditioning the model on the data's origin to facilitate domain-aware adaptation while preserving generalizable engagement representations. To capture interactional synchrony, the framework also incorporates a Parallel Cross-Attention module that explicitly aligns reactive (forward BiLSTM) and anticipatory (backward BiLSTM) states between participants.Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAPA establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on several cross-cultural and cross-linguistic benchmarks, notably achieving an absolute improvement of 0.45 in Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) over a strong baseline on the NoXi-J test set. The superiority of our method was also confirmed by winning the first place in the Multi-Domain Engagement Estimation Challenge at MultiMediate'25.

Hao Cheng, Zhiwei Zhao, Yichao He et al.

Audiovisual emotion recognition (AVER) aims to infer human emotions from nonverbal visual-audio (VA) cues, offering modality-complementary and language-agnostic advantages. However, AVER remains challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of emotional expressions, cross-modal expressive disparities, and the scarcity of reliably annotated data. Recent self-supervised AVER approaches have introduced strong multimodal representations, yet they predominantly rely on modality-specific encoders and coarse content-level alignment, limiting fine-grained emotional semantic modeling. To address these issues, we propose VAEmo, an efficient two-stage framework for emotion-centric joint VA representation learning with external knowledge injection. In Stage~1, a unified and lightweight representation network is pre-trained on large-scale speaker-centric VA corpora via masked reconstruction and contrastive objectives, mitigating the modality gap and learning expressive, complementary representations without emotion labels. In Stage~2, multimodal large language models automatically generate detailed affective descriptions according to our well-designed chain-of-thought prompting for only a small subset of VA samples; these rich textual semantics are then injected by aligning their corresponding embeddings with VA representations through dual-path contrastive learning, further bridging the emotion gap. Extensive experiments on multiple downstream AVER benchmarks show that VAEmo achieves state-of-the-art performance with a compact design, highlighting the benefit of unified cross-modal encoding and emotion-aware semantic guidance for efficient, generalizable VA emotion representations.

Kai Cui, Jia Li, Yu Liu et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals provide a promising and involuntary reflection of brain activity related to emotional states, offering significant advantages over behavioral cues like facial expressions. However, EEG signals are often noisy, affected by artifacts, and vary across individuals, complicating emotion recognition. While multimodal approaches have used Peripheral Physiological Signals (PPS) like GSR to complement EEG, they often overlook the dynamic synchronization and consistent semantics between the modalities. Additionally, the temporal dynamics of emotional fluctuations across different time resolutions in PPS remain underexplored. To address these challenges, we propose PhysioSync, a novel pre-training framework leveraging temporal and cross-modal contrastive learning, inspired by physiological synchronization phenomena. PhysioSync incorporates Cross-Modal Consistency Alignment (CM-CA) to model dynamic relationships between EEG and complementary PPS, enabling emotion-related synchronizations across modalities. Besides, it introduces Long- and Short-Term Temporal Contrastive Learning (LS-TCL) to capture emotional synchronization at different temporal resolutions within modalities. After pre-training, cross-resolution and cross-modal features are hierarchically fused and fine-tuned to enhance emotion recognition. Experiments on DEAP and DREAMER datasets demonstrate PhysioSync's advanced performance under uni-modal and cross-modal conditions, highlighting its effectiveness for EEG-centered emotion recognition.

Yunbo Xu, Xuesong Zhang, Jia Li et al.

Following language instructions, vision-language navigation (VLN) agents are tasked with navigating unseen environments. While augmenting multifaceted visual representations has propelled advancements in VLN, the significance of foreground and background in visual observations remains underexplored. Intuitively, foreground regions provide semantic cues, whereas the background encompasses spatial connectivity information. Inspired on this insight, we propose a Consensus-driven Online Feature Augmentation strategy (COFA) with alternative foreground and background features to facilitate the navigable generalization. Specifically, we first leverage semantically-enhanced landmark identification to disentangle foreground and background as candidate augmented features. Subsequently, a consensus-driven online augmentation strategy encourages the agent to consolidate two-stage voting results on feature preferences according to diverse instructions and navigational locations. Experiments on REVERIE and R2R demonstrate that our online foreground-background augmentation boosts the generalization of baseline and attains state-of-the-art performance.

Zijie Song, Zhenzhen Hu, Yixiao Ma et al.

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a complex video-language task that demands a sophisticated understanding of both visual content and temporal dynamics. Traditional Transformer-style architectures, while effective in integrating multimodal data, often simplify temporal dynamics through positional encoding and fail to capture non-linear interactions within video sequences. In this paper, we introduce the Temporal Trio Transformer (T3T), a novel architecture that models time consistency and time variability. The T3T integrates three key components: Temporal Smoothing (TS), Temporal Difference (TD), and Temporal Fusion (TF). The TS module employs Brownian Bridge for capturing smooth, continuous temporal transitions, while the TD module identifies and encodes significant temporal variations and abrupt changes within the video content. Subsequently, the TF module synthesizes these temporal features with textual cues, facilitating a deeper contextual understanding and response accuracy. The efficacy of the T3T is demonstrated through extensive testing on multiple VideoQA benchmark datasets. Our results underscore the importance of a nuanced approach to temporal modeling in improving the accuracy and depth of video-based question answering.

Xuesong Zhang, Yunbo Xu, Jia Li et al.

Navigating unseen environments from natural language instructions remains challenging for egocentric agents in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). Humans naturally ground concrete semantic knowledge within spatial layouts during indoor navigation. Although prior work has introduced diverse environment representations to improve reasoning, auxiliary modalities are often naively concatenated with RGB features, which underutilizes each modality's distinct contribution. We propose a hierarchical Semantic Understanding and Spatial Awareness (SUSA) architecture to enable agents to perceive and ground environments at multiple scales. Specifically, the Textual Semantic Understanding (TSU) module supports local action prediction by generating view-level descriptions, capturing fine-grained semantics and narrowing the modality gap between instructions and environments. Complementarily, the Depth Enhanced Spatial Perception (DSP) module incrementally builds a trajectory-level depth exploration map, providing a coarse-grained representation of global spatial layout. Extensive experiments show that the hierarchical representation enrichment of SUSA significantly improves navigation performance over the baseline on discrete VLN benchmarks (REVERIE, R2R, and SOON) and generalizes better to the continuous R2R-CE benchmark.

Lei Chen, Le Wu, Zhenzhen Hu et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely used for the image-to-image translation task. While these models rely heavily on the labeled image pairs, recently some GAN variants have been proposed to tackle the unpaired image translation task. These models exploited supervision at the domain level with a reconstruction process for unpaired image translation. On the other hand, parallel works have shown that leveraging perceptual loss functions based on high level deep features could enhance the generated image quality. Nevertheless, as these GAN-based models either depended on the pretrained deep network structure or relied on the labeled image pairs, they could not be directly applied to the unpaired image translation task. Moreover, despite the improvement of the introduced perceptual losses from deep neural networks, few researchers have explored the possibility of improving the generated image quality from classical image quality measures. To tackle the above two challenges, in this paper, we propose a unified quality-aware GAN-based framework for unpaired image-to-image translation, where a quality-aware loss is explicitly incorporated by comparing each source image and the reconstructed image at the domain level. Specifically, we design two detailed implementations of the quality loss. The first method is based on a classical image quality assessment measure by defining a classical quality-aware loss. The second method proposes an adaptive deep network based loss. Finally, extensive experimental results on many real-world datasets clearly show the quality improvement of our proposed framework, and the superiority of leveraging classical image quality measures for unpaired image translation compared to the deep network based model.