Xiaonan Hu

Jinyu Xu, Tianqi Hu, Xiaonan Hu et al.

Visually cataloging and quantifying the natural world requires pushing the boundaries of both detailed visual classification and counting at scale. Despite significant progress, particularly in crowd and traffic analysis, the fine-grained, taxonomy-aware plant counting remains underexplored in vision. In contrast to crowds, plants exhibit nonrigid morphologies and physical appearance variations across growth stages and environments. To fill this gap, we present TPC-268, the first plant counting benchmark incorporating plant taxonomy. Our dataset couples instance-level point annotations with Linnaean labels (kingdom -> species) and organ categories, enabling hierarchical reasoning and species-aware evaluation. The dataset features 10,000 images with 678,050 point annotations, includes 268 countable plant categories over 242 plant species in Plantae and Fungi, and spans observation scales from canopy-level remote sensing imagery to tissue-level microscopy. We follow the problem setting of class-agnostic counting (CAC), provide taxonomy-consistent, scale-aware data splits, and benchmark state-of-the-art regression- and detection-based CAC approaches. By capturing the biodiversity, hierarchical structure, and multi-scale nature of botanical and mycological taxa, TPC-268 provides a biologically grounded testbed to advance fine-grained class-agnostic counting. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/TPC-268.

Yuntian Wu, Xiaonan Hu, Ziqi Zhou et al.

The global fashion e-commerce market relies significantly on intelligent and aesthetic-aware outfit-completion tools to promote sales. While previous studies have approached the problem of fashion outfit-completion and compatible-item retrieval, most of them require expensive, task-specific training on large-scale labeled data, and no effort is made to guide outfit recommendation with explicit human aesthetics. In the era of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we show that the conventional training-based pipeline could be streamlined to a training-free paradigm, with better recommendation scores and enhanced aesthetic awareness. We achieve this with TATTOO, a Training-free AesTheTic-aware Outfit recommendation approach. It first generates a target-item description using MLLMs, followed by an aesthetic chain-of-thought used to distill the images into a structured aesthetic profile including color, style, occasion, season, material, and balance. By fusing the visual summary of the outfit with the textual description and aesthetics vectors using a dynamic entropy-gated mechanism, candidate items can be represented in a shared embedding space and be ranked accordingly. Experiments on a real-world evaluation set Aesthetic-100 show that TATTOO achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing training-based methods. Another standard Polyvore dataset is also used to measure the advanced zero-shot retrieval capability of our training-free method.

Xiaonan Hu, Xuebing Li, Jinyu Xu et al.

Accurate plant counting provides valuable information for agriculture such as crop yield prediction, plant density assessment, and phenotype quantification. Vision-based approaches are currently the mainstream solution. Prior art typically uses a detection or a regression model to count a specific plant. However, plants have biodiversity, and new cultivars are increasingly bred each year. It is almost impossible to exhaust and build all species-dependent counting models. Inspired by class-agnostic counting (CAC) in computer vision, we argue that it is time to rethink the problem formulation of plant counting, from what plants to count to how to count plants. In contrast to most daily objects with spatial and temporal invariance, plants are dynamic, changing with time and space. Their non-rigid structure often leads to worse performance than counting rigid instances like heads and cars such that current CAC and open-world detection models are suboptimal to count plants. In this work, we inherit the vein of the TasselNet plant counting model and introduce a new extension, TasselNetV4, shifting from species-specific counting to cross-species counting. TasselNetV4 marries the local counting idea of TasselNet with the extract-and-match paradigm in CAC. It builds upon a plain vision transformer and incorporates novel multi-branch box-aware local counters used to enhance cross-scale robustness. Two challenging datasets, PAC-105 and PAC-Somalia, are harvested. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art CAC models show that TasselNetV4 achieves not only superior counting performance but also high efficiency.Our results indicate that TasselNetV4 emerges to be a vision foundation model for cross-scene, cross-scale, and cross-species plant counting.