Yiyang Shen

Yiyang Shen, Mingqiang Wei, Sen Deng et al.

The intricacy of rainy image contents often leads cutting-edge deraining models to image degradation including remnant rain, wrongly-removed details, and distorted appearance. Such degradation is further exacerbated when applying the models trained on synthetic data to real-world rainy images. We observe two types of domain gaps between synthetic and real-world rainy images: one exists in rain streak patterns; the other is the pixel-level appearance of rain-free images. To bridge the two domain gaps, we propose a semi-supervised detail-recovery image deraining network (Semi-DRDNet) with dual sample-augmented contrastive learning. Semi-DRDNet consists of three sub-networks:i) for removing rain streaks without remnants, we present a squeeze-and-excitation based rain residual network; ii) for encouraging the lost details to return, we construct a structure detail context aggregation based detail repair network; to our knowledge, this is the first time; and iii) for building efficient contrastive constraints for both rain streaks and clean backgrounds, we exploit a novel dual sample-augmented contrastive regularization network.Semi-DRDNet operates smoothly on both synthetic and real-world rainy data in terms of deraining robustness and detail accuracy. Comparisons on four datasets including our established Real200 show clear improvements of Semi-DRDNet over fifteen state-of-the-art methods. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/syy-whu/DRD-Net.

Yiyang Shen, Mingqiang Wei, Yongzhen Wang et al.

Recent diffusion models have exhibited great potential in generative modeling tasks. Part of their success can be attributed to the ability of training stable on huge sets of paired synthetic data. However, adapting these models to real-world image deraining remains difficult for two aspects. First, collecting a large-scale paired real-world clean/rainy dataset is unavailable while regular conditional diffusion models heavily rely on paired data for training. Second, real-world rain usually reflects real-world scenarios with a variety of unknown rain degradation types, which poses a significant challenge for the generative modeling process. To meet these challenges, we propose RainDiff, the first real-world image deraining paradigm based on diffusion models, serving as a new standard bar for real-world image deraining. We address the first challenge by introducing a stable and non-adversarial unpaired cycle-consistent architecture that can be trained, end-to-end, with only unpaired data for supervision; and the second challenge by proposing a degradation-conditioned diffusion model that refines the desired output via a diffusive generative process conditioned by learned priors of multiple rain degradations. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of our RainDiff over existing unpaired/semi-supervised methods and show its competitive advantages over several fully-supervised ones.

Yiyang Shen, Rongwei Yu, Peng Wu et al.

LiDAR and camera, as two different sensors, supply geometric (point clouds) and semantic (RGB images) information of 3D scenes. However, it is still challenging for existing methods to fuse data from the two cross sensors, making them complementary for quality 3D object detection (3OD). We propose ImLiDAR, a new 3OD paradigm to narrow the cross-sensor discrepancies by progressively fusing the multi-scale features of camera Images and LiDAR point clouds. ImLiDAR enables to provide the detection head with cross-sensor yet robustly fused features. To achieve this, two core designs exist in ImLiDAR. First, we propose a cross-sensor dynamic message propagation module to combine the best of the multi-scale image and point features. Second, we raise a direct set prediction problem that allows designing an effective set-based detector to tackle the inconsistency of the classification and localization confidences, and the sensitivity of hand-tuned hyperparameters. Besides, the novel set-based detector can be detachable and easily integrated into various detection networks. Comparisons on both the KITTI and SUN-RGBD datasets show clear visual and numerical improvements of our ImLiDAR over twenty-three state-of-the-art 3OD methods.

Yiyang Shen, Yongzhen Wang, Mingqiang Wei et al.

Rain is one of the most common weather which can completely degrade the image quality and interfere with the performance of many computer vision tasks, especially under heavy rain conditions. We observe that: (i) rain is a mixture of rain streaks and rainy haze; (ii) the scene depth determines the intensity of rain streaks and the transformation into the rainy haze; (iii) most existing deraining methods are only trained on synthetic rainy images, and hence generalize poorly to the real-world scenes. Motivated by these observations, we propose a new SEMI-supervised Mixture Of rain REmoval Generative Adversarial Network (Semi-MoreGAN), which consists of four key modules: (I) a novel attentional depth prediction network to provide precise depth estimation; (ii) a context feature prediction network composed of several well-designed detailed residual blocks to produce detailed image context features; (iii) a pyramid depth-guided non-local network to effectively integrate the image context with the depth information, and produce the final rain-free images; and (iv) a comprehensive semi-supervised loss function to make the model not limited to synthetic datasets but generalize smoothly to real-world heavy rainy scenes. Extensive experiments show clear improvements of our approach over twenty representative state-of-the-arts on both synthetic and real-world rainy images.

Baian Chen, Lipeng Gu, Xin Zhuang et al.

We propose PSFormer, an effective point transformer model for 3D salient object detection. PSFormer is an encoder-decoder network that takes full advantage of transformers to model the contextual information in both multi-scale point- and scene-wise manners. In the encoder, we develop a Point Context Transformer (PCT) module to capture region contextual features at the point level; PCT contains two different transformers to excavate the relationship among points. In the decoder, we develop a Scene Context Transformer (SCT) module to learn context representations at the scene level; SCT contains both Upsampling-and-Transformer blocks and Multi-context Aggregation units to integrate the global semantic and multi-level features from the encoder into the global scene context. Experiments show clear improvements of PSFormer over its competitors and validate that PSFormer is more robust to challenging cases such as small objects, multiple objects, and objects with complex structures.

Yiyang Shen, Lifu Tu, Weiran Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to substantially improve the reasoning capability of small and large language models (LLMs), but existing approaches typically rely on verifiable rewards, hence ground truth labels. We propose an RL framework that uses rewards from an LLM that acts as a judge evaluating model outputs over large amounts of unlabeled data, enabling label-free knowledge distillation and replacing the need of ground truth supervision. Notably, the judge operates with a single-token output, making reward computation efficient. When combined with verifiable rewards, our approach yields substantial performance gains across math reasoning benchmarks. These results suggest that LLM-based evaluators can produce effective training signals for RL fine-tuning.

Yiyang Shen, Yin Yang, Kun Zhou et al.

We introduce S2C-3D, a novel sparse-view 3D reconstruction framework for high-fidelity and complete scene reconstruction from as few as six to eight images. Our framework features three components: a specialized diffusion model for scene-specific image restoration, a training-free view-consistency conditioned sampling process in the diffusion model for refined Gaussian optimization, and a camera trajectory planning scheme to ensure comprehensive scene coverage. The specialized diffusion model is developed by finetuning a pretrained architecture on the input views and their corresponding degraded counterparts. The adaptation to the scene distribution allows the model to repair Gaussian renderings while effectively eliminating domain gaps. Meanwhile, the trajectory planning scheme optimizes scene coverage by connecting each newly sampled camera to its two nearest neighbors. By iteratively constructing paths and retaining only those that significantly enhance visibility, the scheme establishes a trajectory that covers the entire scene. To address multi-view conflicts, the view-consistency conditioned sampling process quantifies the consistency between neighboring repaired images. This information is injected as a condition into the sampling process of the frozen diffusion model, facilitating the generation of view-consistent images without additional training. Consequently, our approach produces high-fidelity 3D Gaussians that are robust to artifacts. Experimental results demonstrate that S2C-3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods, constructing high-quality scenes that are free from missing regions, blurring, or other artifacts with very sparse inputs. The source code and data are available at https://gapszju.github.io/S2C-3D.

Huan Ni, Yubin Zhao, Haiyan Guan et al.

Large-scale high-resolution land cover classification is a prerequisite for constructing Earth system models and addressing ecological and resource issues. Advancements in satellite sensor technology have led to an improvement in spatial resolution and wider coverage areas. Nevertheless, the lack of high-resolution labeled data is still a challenge, hindering the largescale application of land cover classification methods. In this paper, we propose a Transformerbased weakly supervised method for cross-resolution land cover classification using outdated data. First, to capture long-range dependencies without missing the fine-grained details of objects, we propose a U-Net-like Transformer based on a reverse difference mechanism (RDM) using dynamic sparse attention. Second, we propose an anti-noise loss calculation (ANLC) module based on optimal transport (OT). Anti-noise loss calculation identifies confident areas (CA) and vague areas (VA) based on the OT matrix, which relieves the impact of noises in outdated land cover products. By introducing a weakly supervised loss with weights and employing unsupervised loss, the RDM-based U-Net-like Transformer was trained. Remote sensing images with 1 m resolution and the corresponding ground-truths of six states in the United States were employed to validate the performance of the proposed method. The experiments utilized outdated land cover products with 30 m resolution from 2013 as training labels, and produced land cover maps with 1 m resolution from 2017. The results show the superiority of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/yu-ni1989/ANLC-Former.

Yiyang Shen, Yutian He, Weiran Wang et al.

We study a class of bilevel optimization problems in which both the upper- and lower-level problems have minimax structures. This setting captures a broad range of emerging applications. Despite the extensive literature on bilevel optimization and minimax optimization separately, existing methods mainly focus on bilevel optimization with lower-level minimization problems, often under strong convexity assumptions, and are not directly applicable to the minimax lower-level setting considered here. To address this gap, we develop penalty-based first-order methods for bilevel minimax optimization without requiring strong convexity of the lower-level problem. In the deterministic setting, we establish that the proposed method finds an $ε$-KKT point with $\tilde{O}(ε^{-4})$ oracle complexity. We further show that bilevel problems with convex constrained lower-level minimization can be reformulated as special cases of our framework via Lagrangian duality, leading to an $\tilde{O}(ε^{-4})$ complexity bound that improves upon the existing $\tilde{O}(ε^{-7})$ result. Finally, we extend our approach to the stochastic setting, where only stochastic gradient oracles are available, and prove that the proposed stochastic method finds a nearly $ε$-KKT point with $\tilde{O}(ε^{-9})$ oracle complexity.

Yijie Zhang, Yiyang Shen, Weiran Wang

Multimodal data are prevalent across various domains, and learning robust representations of such data is paramount to enhancing generation quality and downstream task performance. To handle heterogeneity and interconnections among different modalities, recent multimodal generative models extract shared and private (modality-specific) information with two separate variables. Despite attempts to enforce disentanglement between these two variables, these methods struggle with challenging datasets where the likelihood model is insufficient. In this paper, we propose Information-disentangled Multimodal VAE (IDMVAE) to explicitly address this issue, with rigorous mutual information-based regularizations, including cross-view mutual information maximization for extracting shared variables, and a cycle-consistency style loss for redundancy removal using generative augmentations. We further introduce diffusion models to improve the capacity of latent priors. These newly proposed components are complementary to each other. Compared to existing approaches, IDMVAE shows a clean separation between shared and private information, demonstrating superior generation quality and semantic coherence on challenging datasets.

Yiyang Shen, Weiran Wang

Multi-view learning is widely applied to real-life datasets, such as multiple omics biological data, but it often suffers from both missing views and missing labels. Prior probabilistic approaches addressed the missing view problem by using a product-of-experts scheme to aggregate representations from present views and achieved superior performance over deterministic classifiers, using the information bottleneck (IB) principle. However, the IB framework is inherently fully supervised and cannot leverage unlabeled data. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised generative model that utilizes both labeled and unlabeled samples in a unified framework. Our method maximizes the likelihood of unlabeled samples to learn a latent space shared with the IB on labeled data. We also perform cross-view mutual information maximization in the latent space to enhance the extraction of shared information across views. Compared to existing approaches, our model achieves better predictive and imputation performance on both image and multi-omics data with missing views and limited labeled samples.

Yiyang Shen, Kun Zhou, He Wang et al.

Recently single-view 3D generation via Gaussian splatting has emerged and developed quickly. They learn 3D Gaussians from 2D RGB images generated from pre-trained multi-view diffusion (MVD) models, and have shown a promising avenue for 3D generation through a single image. Despite the current progress, these methods still suffer from the inconsistency jointly caused by the geometric ambiguity in the 2D images, and the lack of structure of 3D Gaussians, leading to distorted and blurry 3D object generation. In this paper, we propose to fix these issues by GS-RGBN, a new RGBN-volume Gaussian Reconstruction Model designed to generate high-fidelity 3D objects from single-view images. Our key insight is a structured 3D representation can simultaneously mitigate the afore-mentioned two issues. To this end, we propose a novel hybrid Voxel-Gaussian representation, where a 3D voxel representation contains explicit 3D geometric information, eliminating the geometric ambiguity from 2D images. It also structures Gaussians during learning so that the optimization tends to find better local optima. Our 3D voxel representation is obtained by a fusion module that aligns RGB features and surface normal features, both of which can be estimated from 2D images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our methods over prior works in terms of high-quality reconstruction results, robust generalization, and good efficiency.

Yiyang Shen, Yidan Feng, Sen Deng et al.

Rain severely hampers the visibility of scene objects when images are captured through glass in heavily rainy days. We observe three intriguing phenomenons that, 1) rain is a mixture of raindrops, rain streaks and rainy haze; 2) the depth from the camera determines the degrees of object visibility, where objects nearby and faraway are visually blocked by rain streaks and rainy haze, respectively; and 3) raindrops on the glass randomly affect the object visibility of the whole image space. We for the first time consider that, the overall visibility of objects is determined by the mixture of rain (MOR). However, existing solutions and established datasets lack full consideration of the MOR. In this work, we first formulate a new rain imaging model; by then, we enrich the popular RainCityscapes by considering raindrops, named RainCityscapes++. Furthermore, we propose a multi-branch attention generative adversarial network (termed an MBA-RainGAN) to fully remove the MOR. The experiment shows clear visual and numerical improvements of our approach over the state-of-the-arts on RainCityscapes++. The code and dataset will be available.