11.8CVNov 1, 2025Code
Rethinking Facial Expression Recognition in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models: Benchmark, Datasets, and BeyondFan Zhang, Haoxuan Li, Shengju Qian et al.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have revolutionized numerous research fields, including computer vision and affective computing. As a pivotal challenge in this interdisciplinary domain, facial expression recognition (FER) has evolved from separate, domain-specific models to more unified approaches. One promising avenue to unify FER tasks is converting conventional FER datasets into visual question-answering (VQA) formats, enabling the direct application of powerful generalist MLLMs for inference. However, despite the success of cutting-edge MLLMs in various tasks, their performance on FER tasks remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we provide FERBench, a systematic benchmark that incorporates 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs across four widely used FER datasets. Our results reveal that, while MLLMs exhibit good classification performance, they still face significant limitations in reasoning and interpretability. To this end, we introduce post-training strategies aimed at enhancing the facial expression reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Specifically, we curate two high-quality and large-scale datasets: UniFER-CoT-230K for cold-start initialization and UniFER-RLVR-360K for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), respectively. Building upon them, we develop a unified and interpretable FER foundation model termed UniFER-7B, which outperforms many open-sourced and closed-source generalist MLLMs (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro and Qwen2.5-VL-72B).
FourierFlow: Frequency-aware Flow Matching for Generative Turbulence ModelingHaixin Wang, Jiashu Pan, Hao Wu et al.
Modeling complex fluid systems, especially turbulence governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), remains a fundamental challenge in science and engineering. Recently, diffusion-based generative models have gained attention as a powerful approach for these tasks, owing to their capacity to capture long-range dependencies and recover hierarchical structures. However, we present both empirical and theoretical evidence showing that generative models struggle with significant spectral bias and common-mode noise when generating high-fidelity turbulent flows. Here we propose FourierFlow, a novel generative turbulence modeling framework that enhances the frequency-aware learning by both implicitly and explicitly mitigating spectral bias and common-mode noise. FourierFlow comprises three key innovations. Firstly, we adopt a dual-branch backbone architecture, consisting of a salient flow attention branch with local-global awareness to focus on sensitive turbulence areas. Secondly, we introduce a frequency-guided Fourier mixing branch, which is integrated via an adaptive fusion strategy to explicitly mitigate spectral bias in the generative model. Thirdly, we leverage the high-frequency modeling capabilities of the masked auto-encoder pre-training and implicitly align the features of the generative model toward high-frequency components. We validate the effectiveness of FourierFlow on three canonical turbulent flow scenarios, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that our model exhibits strong generalization capabilities in challenging settings such as out-of-distribution domains, long-term temporal extrapolation, and robustness to noisy inputs. The code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/FourierFlow.
4.1LGOct 22, 2025
Mixing Configurations for Downstream PredictionJuntang Wang, Hao Wu, Runkun Guo et al.
Humans possess an innate ability to group objects by similarity, a cognitive mechanism that clustering algorithms aim to emulate. Recent advances in community detection have enabled the discovery of configurations -- valid hierarchical clusterings across multiple resolution scales -- without requiring labeled data. In this paper, we formally characterize these configurations and identify similar emergent structures in register tokens within Vision Transformers. Unlike register tokens, configurations exhibit lower redundancy and eliminate the need for ad hoc selection. They can be learned through unsupervised or self-supervised methods, yet their selection or composition remains specific to the downstream task and input. Building on these insights, we introduce GraMixC, a plug-and-play module that extracts configurations, aligns them using our Reverse Merge/Split (RMS) technique, and fuses them via attention heads before forwarding them to any downstream predictor. On the DSN1 16S rRNA cultivation-media prediction task, GraMixC improves the R2 score from 0.6 to 0.9 across multiple methods, setting a new state of the art. We further validate GraMixC on standard tabular benchmarks, where it consistently outperforms single-resolution and static-feature baselines.