Xiaoyong Wei

Xiao Wang, Guangyao Chen, Guangwu Qian et al.

With the urgent demand for generalized deep models, many pre-trained big models are proposed, such as BERT, ViT, GPT, etc. Inspired by the success of these models in single domains (like computer vision and natural language processing), the multi-modal pre-trained big models have also drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this work, we give a comprehensive survey of these models and hope this paper could provide new insights and helps fresh researchers to track the most cutting-edge works. Specifically, we firstly introduce the background of multi-modal pre-training by reviewing the conventional deep learning, pre-training works in natural language process, computer vision, and speech. Then, we introduce the task definition, key challenges, and advantages of multi-modal pre-training models (MM-PTMs), and discuss the MM-PTMs with a focus on data, objectives, network architectures, and knowledge enhanced pre-training. After that, we introduce the downstream tasks used for the validation of large-scale MM-PTMs, including generative, classification, and regression tasks. We also give visualization and analysis of the model parameters and results on representative downstream tasks. Finally, we point out possible research directions for this topic that may benefit future works. In addition, we maintain a continuously updated paper list for large-scale pre-trained multi-modal big models: https://github.com/wangxiao5791509/MultiModal_BigModels_Survey. This paper has been published by the journal Machine Intelligence Research (MIR), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11633-022-1410-8, DOI: 10.1007/s11633-022-1410-8, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 447-482, 2023.

Xu Wenxin, Chen Jason Zhang, Xiaoyong Wei et al.

Text-to-Visualization (Text-to-Vis) translates natural language queries into visualization query languages, enabling non-expert users to perform data analysis. However, most existing methods follow a one-shot paradigm that requires users to specify all visualization details in a single round, often leading to cognitive overload and incorrect visualizations. In this paper, we propose PMVis, a progressive multi-turn paradigm for text-to-vis, where users' intents are refined through multi-turn interactions. To support research in this paradigm, we construct PMVisBench, the first dataset designed to capture the progressive and iterative nature of real-world user queries. It is built through VQL simplification and NLQ reconstruction, with explicit rule constraints to ensure each intermediate VQL remains valid and meaningful. Building upon PMVis, we further introduce PMVisAgent, an agent-based framework that simulates realistic user-system dialogues. PMVisAgent consists of a User, a System, and a Validation Agent that performs verification and repair via a ReAct-style tool-use loop to mitigate error accumulation across rounds, with explicit interaction and verification rules to ensure reliability of the multi-agent system. Extensive experiments on PMVisBench demonstrate that PMVisAgent significantly outperforms state-of-the-art text-to-vis baselines. It achieves up to 17.57\% and 23.21\% improvements in execution accuracy in single-table and multi-table settings, respectively, while ablation studies confirm the importance of combining progressive interaction with clarification. The code is available at https://github.com/wxxv/PMVis.

Huahang Li, Wentao Hu, Zhuoyue Wan et al.

In daily life, there are many scenarios that people need to tackle data-related tasks, such as filling out forms, analyzing Excel files, and visualize data report. However, the tools available for these tasks often fragment, requiring users to switch between multiple applications and manually orchestrate steps like data processing, querying, and visualization. Moreover, these tools often assume a certain level of technical proficiency, creating barriers for non-technical users. To facilitate tacking daily data task, we present DataClaw, an autonomous data agent that integrates directly into familiar instant messaging (IM) platforms. By simply typing a natural language request in a chat interface, users enable DataClaw to autonomously plan and execute a complete analytical pipeline, delivering insights, charts, and reports directly back into the conversation. Under the hood, DataClaw is powered by a transparent ReAct reasoning engine, a multi-tiered memory system for cross session context preservation, and a pluggable skill architecture for on-the-fly extensibility. In this demonstration, attendees will interact with DataClaw via standard IM platforms to solve real-world data scenarios, experiencing how it serves as a highly capable personal data assistant.

Xiao Dong, Xunlin Zhan, Yunchao Wei et al.

Our goal in this research is to study a more realistic environment in which we can conduct weakly-supervised multi-modal instance-level product retrieval for fine-grained product categories. We first contribute the Product1M datasets, and define two real practical instance-level retrieval tasks to enable the evaluations on the price comparison and personalized recommendations. For both instance-level tasks, how to accurately pinpoint the product target mentioned in the visual-linguistic data and effectively decrease the influence of irrelevant contents is quite challenging. To address this, we exploit to train a more effective cross-modal pertaining model which is adaptively capable of incorporating key concept information from the multi-modal data, by using an entity graph whose node and edge respectively denote the entity and the similarity relation between entities. Specifically, a novel Entity-Graph Enhanced Cross-Modal Pretraining (EGE-CMP) model is proposed for instance-level commodity retrieval, that explicitly injects entity knowledge in both node-based and subgraph-based ways into the multi-modal networks via a self-supervised hybrid-stream transformer, which could reduce the confusion between different object contents, thereby effectively guiding the network to focus on entities with real semantic. Experimental results well verify the efficacy and generalizability of our EGE-CMP, outperforming several SOTA cross-modal baselines like CLIP, UNITER and CAPTURE.

Xiao Dong, Runhui Huang, Xiaoyong Wei et al.

Recent advances in vision-language pre-training have enabled machines to perform better in multimodal object discrimination (e.g., image-text semantic alignment) and image synthesis (e.g., text-to-image generation). On the other hand, fine-tuning pre-trained models with discriminative or generative capabilities such as CLIP and Stable Diffusion on domain-specific datasets has shown to be effective in various tasks by adapting to specific domains. However, few studies have explored the possibility of learning both discriminative and generative capabilities and leveraging their synergistic effects to create a powerful and personalized multimodal model during fine-tuning. This paper presents UniDiff, a unified multi-modal model that integrates image-text contrastive learning (ITC), text-conditioned image synthesis learning (IS), and reciprocal semantic consistency modeling (RSC). UniDiff effectively learns aligned semantics and mitigates the issue of semantic collapse during fine-tuning on small datasets by leveraging RSC on visual features from CLIP and diffusion models, without altering the pre-trained model's basic architecture. UniDiff demonstrates versatility in both multi-modal understanding and generative tasks. Experimental results on three datasets (Fashion-man, Fashion-woman, and E-commercial Product) showcase substantial enhancements in vision-language retrieval and text-to-image generation, illustrating the advantages of combining discriminative and generative fine-tuning. The proposed UniDiff model establishes a robust pipeline for personalized modeling and serves as a benchmark for future comparisons in the field.

Youkang Wang, Jian Wang, Rubing Chen et al.

Inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing approaches often rely on heuristic strategies for parallel sampling, lacking a principled foundation. To address this gap, we propose a probabilistic framework that formalizes the optimality of inference-time scaling under the assumption that parallel samples are independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.), and where the Best-of-N selection strategy follows a probability distribution that can be estimated. Within this framework, we derive a theoretical lower bound on the required number of samples to achieve a target performance level, providing the first principled guidance for compute-efficient scaling. Leveraging this insight, we develop \textsc{OptScale}, a practical algorithm that dynamically determines the optimal number of sampled responses. \textsc{OptScale} employs a language model-based predictor to estimate probabilistic prior parameters, enabling the decision of the minimal number of samples needed that satisfy predefined performance thresholds and confidence levels. Extensive experiments on representative reasoning benchmarks (including MATH-500, GSM8K, AIME, and AMC) demonstrate that \textsc{OptScale} significantly reduces sampling overhead while remaining better or on par with state-of-the-art reasoning performance. Our work offers both a theoretical foundation and a practical solution for principled inference-time scaling, addressing a critical gap in the efficient deployment of LLMs for complex reasoning. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Albertwyk/OptScale.

Xulu Zhang, Xiaoyong Wei, Jinlin Wu et al.

Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) enables intelligence systems to autonomously refine their capabilities. This paper explores the application of RSI in text-to-image diffusion models, addressing the challenge of training collapse caused by synthetic data. We identify two key factors contributing to this collapse: the lack of perceptual alignment and the accumulation of generative hallucinations. To mitigate these issues, we propose three strategies: (1) a prompt construction and filtering pipeline designed to facilitate the generation of perceptual aligned data, (2) a preference sampling method to identify human-preferred samples and filter out generative hallucinations, and (3) a distribution-based weighting scheme to penalize selected samples with hallucinatory errors. Our extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of these approaches.

Xu-Lu Zhang, Zhen-Qun Yang, Dong-Mei Jiang et al.

Eating monitoring has remained an open challenge in medical research for years due to the lack of non-invasive sensors for continuous monitoring and the reliable methods for automatic behavior detection. In this paper, we present a pilot study using the wearable 24-hour ECG for sensing and tailoring the sophisticated deep learning for ad-hoc and interpretable detection. This is accomplished using a collocative learning framework in which 1) we construct collocative tensors as pseudo-images from 1D ECG signals to improve the feasibility of 2D image-based deep models; 2) we formulate the cardiac logic of analyzing the ECG data in a comparative way as periodic attention regulators so as to guide the deep inference to collect evidence in a human comprehensible manner; and 3) we improve the interpretability of the framework by enabling the backtracking of evidence with a set of methods designed for Class Activation Mapping (CAM) decoding and decision tree/forest generation. The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been validated on the largest ECG dataset of eating behavior with superior performance over conventional models, and its capacity of cardiac evidence mining has also been verified through the consistency of the evidence it backtracked and that of the previous medical studies.

Xulu Zhang, Zhenqun Yang, Hao Tian et al.

Deep learning became the game changer for image retrieval soon after it was introduced. It promotes the feature extraction (by representation learning) as the core of image retrieval, with the relevance/matching evaluation being degenerated into simple similarity metrics. In many applications, we need the matching evidence to be indicated rather than just have the ranked list (e.g., the locations of the target proteins/cells/lesions in medical images). It is like the matched words need to be highlighted in search engines. However, this is not easy to implement without explicit relevance/matching modeling. The deep representation learning models are not feasible because of their blackbox nature. In this paper, we revisit the importance of relevance/matching modeling in deep learning era with an indicative retrieval setting. The study shows that it is possible to skip the representation learning and model the matching evidence directly. By removing the dependency on the pre-trained models, it has avoided a lot of related issues (e.g., the domain gap between classification and retrieval, the detail-diffusion caused by convolution, and so on). More importantly, the study demonstrates that the matching can be explicitly modeled and backtracked later for generating the matching evidence indications. It can improve the explainability of deep inference. Our method obtains a best performance in literature on both Oxford-5k and Paris-6k, and sets a new record of 97.77% on Oxford-5k (97.81% on Paris-6k) without extracting any deep features.

Guangwu Qian, Zhen-Qun Yang, Xu-Lu Zhang et al.

Class Activation Mapping (CAM) has been widely adopted to generate saliency maps which provides visual explanations for deep neural networks (DNNs). The saliency maps are conventionally generated by fusing the channels of the target feature map using a weighted average scheme. It is a weak model for the inter-channel relation, in the sense that it only models the relation among channels in a contrastive way (i.e., channels that play key roles in the prediction are given higher weights for them to stand out in the fusion). The collaborative relation, which makes the channels work together to provide cross reference, has been ignored. Furthermore, the model has neglected the intra-channel relation thoroughly.In this paper, we address this problem by introducing Conceptor learning into CAM generation. Conceptor leaning has been originally proposed to model the patterns of state changes in recurrent neural networks (RNNs). By relaxing the dependency of Conceptor learning to RNNs, we make Conceptor-CAM not only generalizable to more DNN architectures but also able to learn both the inter- and intra-channel relations for better saliency map generation. Moreover, we have enabled the use of Boolean operations to combine the positive and pseudo-negative evidences, which has made the CAM inference more robust and comprehensive. The effectiveness of Conceptor-CAM has been validated with both formal verifications and experiments on the dataset of the largest scale in literature. The experimental results show that Conceptor-CAM is compatible with and can bring significant improvement to all well recognized CAM-based methods, and has outperformed the state-of-the-art methods by 43.14%~72.79% (88.39%~168.15%) on ILSVRC2012 in Average Increase (Drop), 15.42%~42.55% (47.09%~372.09%) on VOC, and 17.43%~31.32% (47.54%~206.45%) on COCO, respectively.

Zhangqiang Ming, Min Zhu, Xiangkun Wang et al.

In recent years, with the increasing demand for public safety and the rapid development of intelligent surveillance networks, person re-identification (Re-ID) has become one of the hot research topics in the computer vision field. The main research goal of person Re-ID is to retrieve persons with the same identity from different cameras. However, traditional person Re-ID methods require manual marking of person targets, which consumes a lot of labor cost. With the widespread application of deep neural networks, many deep learning-based person Re-ID methods have emerged. Therefore, this paper is to facilitate researchers to understand the latest research results and the future trends in the field. Firstly, we summarize the studies of several recently published person Re-ID surveys and complement the latest research methods to systematically classify deep learning-based person Re-ID methods. Secondly, we propose a multi-dimensional taxonomy that classifies current deep learning-based person Re-ID methods into four categories according to metric and representation learning, including methods for deep metric learning, local feature learning, generative adversarial learning and sequence feature learning. Furthermore, we subdivide the above four categories according to their methodologies and motivations, discussing the advantages and limitations of part subcategories. Finally, we discuss some challenges and possible research directions for person Re-ID.

Xiao Dong, Xunlin Zhan, Yangxin Wu et al.

Despite the potential of multi-modal pre-training to learn highly discriminative feature representations from complementary data modalities, current progress is being slowed by the lack of large-scale modality-diverse datasets. By leveraging the natural suitability of E-commerce, where different modalities capture complementary semantic information, we contribute a large-scale multi-modal pre-training dataset M5Product. The dataset comprises 5 modalities (image, text, table, video, and audio), covers over 6,000 categories and 5,000 attributes, and is 500 larger than the largest publicly available dataset with a similar number of modalities. Furthermore, M5Product contains incomplete modality pairs and noise while also having a long-tailed distribution, resembling most real-world problems. We further propose Self-harmonized ContrAstive LEarning (SCALE), a novel pretraining framework that integrates the different modalities into a unified model through an adaptive feature fusion mechanism, where the importance of each modality is learned directly from the modality embeddings and impacts the inter-modality contrastive learning and masked tasks within a multi-modal transformer model. We evaluate the current multi-modal pre-training state-of-the-art approaches and benchmark their ability to learn from unlabeled data when faced with the large number of modalities in the M5Product dataset. We conduct extensive experiments on four downstream tasks and demonstrate the superiority of our SCALE model, providing insights into the importance of dataset scale and diversity.