Yaxiong Wang

Ye Wang, Yaxiong Wang, Guoshuai Zhao et al.

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to continually learn new classes using a few samples while not forgetting the old classes. The key of this task is effective knowledge transfer from the base session to the incremental sessions. Despite the advance of existing FSCIL methods, the proposed knowledge transfer learning schemes are sub-optimal due to the insufficient optimization for the model's plasticity. To address this issue, we propose a Random Episode Sampling and Augmentation (RESA) strategy that relies on diverse pseudo incremental tasks as agents to achieve the knowledge transfer. Concretely, RESA mimics the real incremental setting and constructs pseudo incremental tasks globally and locally, where the global pseudo incremental tasks are designed to coincide with the learning objective of FSCIL and the local pseudo incremental tasks are designed to improve the model's plasticity, respectively. Furthermore, to make convincing incremental predictions, we introduce a complementary model with a squared Euclidean-distance classifier as the auxiliary module, which couples with the widely used cosine classifier to form our whole architecture. By such a way, equipped with model decoupling strategy, we can maintain the model's stability while enhancing the model's plasticity. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on three popular FSCIL benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method, named Knowledge Transfer-driven Relation Complementation Network (KT-RCNet), outperforms almost all prior methods. More precisely, the average accuracy of our proposed KT-RCNet outperforms the second-best method by a margin of 5.26%, 3.49%, and 2.25% on miniImageNet, CIFAR100, and CUB200, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/YeZiLaiXi/KT-RCNet.git.

Xintong Jiang, Yaxiong Wang, Yujiao Wu et al.

Composed image retrieval, a task involving the search for a target image using a reference image and a complementary text as the query, has witnessed significant advancements owing to the progress made in cross-modal modeling. Unlike the general image-text retrieval problem with only one alignment relation, i.e., image-text, we argue for the existence of two types of relations in composed image retrieval. The explicit relation pertains to the reference image & complementary text-target image, which is commonly exploited by existing methods. Besides this intuitive relation, the observations during our practice have uncovered another implicit yet crucial relation, i.e., reference image & target image-complementary text, since we found that the complementary text can be inferred by studying the relation between the target image and the reference image. Regrettably, existing methods largely focus on leveraging the explicit relation to learn their networks, while overlooking the implicit relation. In response to this weakness, We propose a new framework for composed image retrieval, termed dual relation alignment, which integrates both explicit and implicit relations to fully exploit the correlations among the triplets. Specifically, we design a vision compositor to fuse reference image and target image at first, then the resulted representation will serve two roles: (1) counterpart for semantic alignment with the complementary text and (2) compensation for the complementary text to boost the explicit relation modeling, thereby implant the implicit relation into the alignment learning. Our method is evaluated on two popular datasets, CIRR and FashionIQ, through extensive experiments. The results confirm the effectiveness of our dual-relation learning in substantially enhancing composed image retrieval performance.

Shuyu Yang, Yinan Zhou, Yaxiong Wang et al.

In this paper, we introduce a large Multi-Attribute and Language Search dataset for text-based person retrieval, called MALS, and explore the feasibility of performing pre-training on both attribute recognition and image-text matching tasks in one stone. In particular, MALS contains 1,510,330 image-text pairs, which is about 37.5 times larger than prevailing CUHK-PEDES, and all images are annotated with 27 attributes. Considering the privacy concerns and annotation costs, we leverage the off-the-shelf diffusion models to generate the dataset. To verify the feasibility of learning from the generated data, we develop a new joint Attribute Prompt Learning and Text Matching Learning (APTM) framework, considering the shared knowledge between attribute and text. As the name implies, APTM contains an attribute prompt learning stream and a text matching learning stream. (1) The attribute prompt learning leverages the attribute prompts for image-attribute alignment, which enhances the text matching learning. (2) The text matching learning facilitates the representation learning on fine-grained details, and in turn, boosts the attribute prompt learning. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the pre-training on MALS, achieving state-of-the-art retrieval performance via APTM on three challenging real-world benchmarks. In particular, APTM achieves a consistent improvement of +6.96%, +7.68%, and +16.95% Recall@1 accuracy on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid datasets by a clear margin, respectively.

Yixuan Pei, Zhiwu Qing, Jun Cen et al.

Recent incremental learning for action recognition usually stores representative videos to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, only a few bulky videos can be stored due to the limited memory. To address this problem, we propose FrameMaker, a memory-efficient video class-incremental learning approach that learns to produce a condensed frame for each selected video. Specifically, FrameMaker is mainly composed of two crucial components: Frame Condensing and Instance-Specific Prompt. The former is to reduce the memory cost by preserving only one condensed frame instead of the whole video, while the latter aims to compensate the lost spatio-temporal details in the Frame Condensing stage. By this means, FrameMaker enables a remarkable reduction in memory but keep enough information that can be applied to following incremental tasks. Experimental results on multiple challenging benchmarks, i.e., HMDB51, UCF101 and Something-Something V2, demonstrate that FrameMaker can achieve better performance to recent advanced methods while consuming only 20% memory. Additionally, under the same memory consumption conditions, FrameMaker significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-arts by a convincing margin.

Ye Wang, Yaxiong Wang, Guoshuai Zhao et al.

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to incrementally recognize new classes using a few samples while maintaining the performance on previously learned classes. One of the effective methods to solve this challenge is to construct prototypical evolution classifiers. Despite the advancement achieved by most existing methods, the classifier weights are simply initialized using mean features. Because representations for new classes are weak and biased, we argue such a strategy is suboptimal. In this paper, we tackle this issue from two aspects. Firstly, thanks to the development of foundation models, we employ a foundation model, the CLIP, as the network pedestal to provide a general representation for each class. Secondly, to generate a more reliable and comprehensive instance representation, we propose a Knowledge Adapter (KA) module that summarizes the data-specific knowledge from training data and fuses it into the general representation. Additionally, to tune the knowledge learned from the base classes to the upcoming classes, we propose a mechanism of Incremental Pseudo Episode Learning (IPEL) by simulating the actual FSCIL. Taken together, our proposed method, dubbed as Knowledge Adaptation Network (KANet), achieves competitive performance on a wide range of datasets, including CIFAR100, CUB200, and ImageNet-R.

Yujiao Wu, Yaxiong Wang, Xiaoshui Huang et al.

This paper focuses on the task of survival time analysis for lung cancer. Although much progress has been made in this problem in recent years, the performance of existing methods is still far from satisfactory. Traditional and some deep learning-based survival time analyses for lung cancer are mostly based on textual clinical information such as staging, age, histology, etc. Unlike existing methods that predicting on the single modality, we observe that a human clinician usually takes multimodal data such as text clinical data and visual scans to estimate survival time. Motivated by this, in this work, we contribute a smart cross-modality network for survival analysis network named Lite-ProSENet that simulates a human's manner of decision making. Extensive experiments were conducted using data from 422 NSCLC patients from The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). The results show that our Lite-ProSENet outperforms favorably again all comparison methods and achieves the new state of the art with the 89.3% on concordance. The code will be made publicly available.

Shuyu Yang, Yaxiong Wang, Li Zhu et al.

Text-based person search aims to retrieve specific individuals across camera networks using natural language descriptions. However, current benchmarks often exhibit biases towards common actions like walking or standing, neglecting the critical need for identifying abnormal behaviors in real-world scenarios. To meet such demands, we propose a new task, text-based person anomaly search, locating pedestrians engaged in both routine or anomalous activities via text. To enable the training and evaluation of this new task, we construct a large-scale image-text Pedestrian Anomaly Behavior (PAB) benchmark, featuring a broad spectrum of actions, e.g., running, performing, playing soccer, and the corresponding anomalies, e.g., lying, being hit, and falling of the same identity. The training set of PAB comprises 1,013,605 synthesized image-text pairs of both normalities and anomalies, while the test set includes 1,978 real-world image-text pairs. To validate the potential of PAB, we introduce a cross-modal pose-aware framework, which integrates human pose patterns with identity-based hard negative pair sampling. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmark show that synthetic training data facilitates the fine-grained behavior retrieval, and the proposed pose-aware method arrives at 84.93% recall@1 accuracy, surpassing other competitive methods. The dataset, model, and code are available at https://github.com/Shuyu-XJTU/CMP.

Ye Wang, Yaxiong Wang, Yujiao Wu et al.

Generalized Class Discovery (GCD) aims to dynamically assign labels to unlabelled data partially based on knowledge learned from labelled data, where the unlabelled data may come from known or novel classes. The prevailing approach generally involves clustering across all data and learning conceptions by prototypical contrastive learning. However, existing methods largely hinge on the performance of clustering algorithms and are thus subject to their inherent limitations. Firstly, the estimated cluster number is often smaller than the ground truth, making the existing methods suffer from the lack of prototypes for comprehensive conception learning. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive probing mechanism that introduces learnable potential prototypes to expand cluster prototypes (centers). As there is no ground truth for the potential prototype, we develop a self-supervised prototype learning framework to optimize the potential prototype in an end-to-end fashion. Secondly, clustering is computationally intensive, and the conventional strategy of clustering both labelled and unlabelled instances exacerbates this issue. To counteract this inefficiency, we opt to cluster only the unlabelled instances and subsequently expand the cluster prototypes with our introduced potential prototypes to fast explore novel classes. Despite the simplicity of our proposed method, extensive empirical analysis on a wide range of datasets confirms that our method consistently delivers state-of-the-art results. Specifically, our method surpasses the nearest competitor by a significant margin of 9.7% within the Stanford Cars dataset and 12x clustering efficiency within the Herbarium 19 dataset. We will make the code and checkpoints publicly available at https://github.com/xjtuYW/PNP.git.

Hao Xu, Lechao Cheng, Yaxiong Wang et al.

We present our solution to the MiGA Challenge at IJCAI 2025, which aims to recognize micro-gestures (MGs) from skeleton sequences for the purpose of hidden emotion understanding. MGs are characterized by their subtlety, short duration, and low motion amplitude, making them particularly challenging to model and classify. We adopt PoseC3D as the baseline framework and introduce three key enhancements: (1) a topology-aware skeleton representation specifically designed for the iMiGUE dataset to better capture fine-grained motion patterns; (2) an improved temporal processing strategy that facilitates smoother and more temporally consistent motion modeling; and (3) the incorporation of semantic label embeddings as auxiliary supervision to improve the model generalization. Our method achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 67.01\% on the iMiGUE test set. As a result of these contributions, our approach ranks third on the official MiGA Challenge leaderboard. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/EGO-False-Sleep/Miga25_track1}{https://github.com/EGO-False-Sleep/Miga25\_track1}.

Jingchun Lian, Lingyu Liu, Yaxiong Wang et al.

Image forgery localization, which centers on identifying tampered pixels within an image, has seen significant advancements. Traditional approaches often model this challenge as a variant of image segmentation, treating the binary segmentation of forged areas as the end product. We argue that the basic binary forgery mask is inadequate for explaining model predictions. It doesn't clarify why the model pinpoints certain areas and treats all forged pixels the same, making it hard to spot the most fake-looking parts. In this study, we mitigate the aforementioned limitations by generating salient region-focused interpretation for the forgery images. To support this, we craft a Multi-Modal Tramper Tracing (MMTT) dataset, comprising facial images manipulated using deepfake techniques and paired with manual, interpretable textual annotations. To harvest high-quality annotation, annotators are instructed to meticulously observe the manipulated images and articulate the typical characteristics of the forgery regions. Subsequently, we collect a dataset of 128,303 image-text pairs. Leveraging the MMTT dataset, we develop ForgeryTalker, an architecture designed for concurrent forgery localization and interpretation. ForgeryTalker first trains a forgery prompter network to identify the pivotal clues within the explanatory text. Subsequently, the region prompter is incorporated into multimodal large language model for finetuning to achieve the dual goals of localization and interpretation. Extensive experiments conducted on the MMTT dataset verify the superior performance of our proposed model. The dataset, code as well as pretrained checkpoints will be made publicly available to facilitate further research and ensure the reproducibility of our results.

Yinan Zhou, Yaxiong Wang, Haokun Lin et al.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to search an image of interest using a combination of a reference image and modification text as the query. Despite recent advancements, this task remains challenging due to limited training data and laborious triplet annotation processes. To address this issue, this paper proposes to synthesize the training triplets to augment the training resource for the CIR problem. Specifically, we commence by training a modification text generator exploiting large-scale multimodal models and scale up the CIR learning throughout both the pretraining and fine-tuning stages. During pretraining, we leverage the trained generator to directly create Modification Text-oriented Synthetic Triplets(MTST) conditioned on pairs of images. For fine-tuning, we first synthesize reverse modification text to connect the target image back to the reference image. Subsequently, we devise a two-hop alignment strategy to incrementally close the semantic gap between the multimodal pair and the target image. We initially learn an implicit prototype utilizing both the original triplet and its reversed version in a cycle manner, followed by combining the implicit prototype feature with the modification text to facilitate accurate alignment with the target image. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of the generated triplets and confirm that our proposed methodology attains competitive recall on both the CIRR and FashionIQ benchmarks.

Jiayi He, Xu Wang, Ruobei Zhang et al.

We introduce the hfut-lmc team's solution to the SLRTP Sign Production Challenge. The challenge aims to generate semantically aligned sign language pose sequences from text inputs. To this end, we propose a Text-driven Diffusion Model (TDM) framework. During the training phase, TDM utilizes an encoder to encode text sequences and incorporates them into the diffusion model as conditional input to generate sign pose sequences. To guarantee the high quality and accuracy of the generated pose sequences, we utilize two key loss functions. The joint loss function L_{joint} is used to precisely measure and minimize the differences between the joint positions of the generated pose sequences and those of the ground truth. Similarly, the bone orientation loss function L_{bone} is instrumental in ensuring that the orientation of the bones in the generated poses aligns with the actual, correct orientations. In the inference stage, the TDM framework takes on a different yet equally important task. It starts with noisy sequences and, under the strict constraints of the text conditions, gradually refines and generates semantically consistent sign language pose sequences. Our carefully designed framework performs well on the sign language production task, and our solution achieves a BLEU-1 score of 20.17, placing second in the challenge.

Harry Walsh, Ed Fish, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan et al.

Sign Language Production (SLP) is the task of generating sign language video from spoken language inputs. The field has seen a range of innovations over the last few years, with the introduction of deep learning-based approaches providing significant improvements in the realism and naturalness of generated outputs. However, the lack of standardized evaluation metrics for SLP approaches hampers meaningful comparisons across different systems. To address this, we introduce the first Sign Language Production Challenge, held as part of the third SLRTP Workshop at CVPR 2025. The competition's aims are to evaluate architectures that translate from spoken language sentences to a sequence of skeleton poses, known as Text-to-Pose (T2P) translation, over a range of metrics. For our evaluation data, we use the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T dataset, a German Sign Language - Deutsche Gebardensprache (DGS) weather broadcast dataset. In addition, we curate a custom hidden test set from a similar domain of discourse. This paper presents the challenge design and the winning methodologies. The challenge attracted 33 participants who submitted 231 solutions, with the top-performing team achieving BLEU-1 scores of 31.40 and DTW-MJE of 0.0574. The winning approach utilized a retrieval-based framework and a pre-trained language model. As part of the workshop, we release a standardized evaluation network, including high-quality skeleton extraction-based keypoints establishing a consistent baseline for the SLP field, which will enable future researchers to compare their work against a broader range of methods.

Shuyu Yang, Yilun Wang, Yaxiong Wang et al.

Video anomaly retrieval aims to localize anomalous events in videos using natural language queries to facilitate public safety. However, existing datasets suffer from severe limitations: (1) data scarcity due to the long-tail nature of real-world anomalies, and (2) privacy constraints that impede large-scale collection. To address the aforementioned issues in one go, we introduce SVTA (Synthetic Video-Text Anomaly benchmark), the first large-scale dataset for cross-modal anomaly retrieval, leveraging generative models to overcome data availability challenges. Specifically, we collect and generate video descriptions via the off-the-shelf LLM (Large Language Model) covering 68 anomaly categories, e.g., throwing, stealing, and shooting. These descriptions encompass common long-tail events. We adopt these texts to guide the video generative model to produce diverse and high-quality videos. Finally, our SVTA involves 41,315 videos (1.36M frames) with paired captions, covering 30 normal activities, e.g., standing, walking, and sports, and 68 anomalous events, e.g., falling, fighting, theft, explosions, and natural disasters. We adopt three widely-used video-text retrieval baselines to comprehensively test our SVTA, revealing SVTA's challenging nature and its effectiveness in evaluating a robust cross-modal retrieval method. SVTA eliminates privacy risks associated with real-world anomaly collection while maintaining realistic scenarios. The dataset demo is available at: [https://svta-mm.github.io/SVTA.github.io/].

Xizhi Wang, Yaxiong Wang, Mengjian Li

This paper presents a Geometric-Photometric Joint Alignment~(GPJA) method, which aligns discrete human expressions at pixel-level accuracy by combining geometric and photometric information. Common practices for registering human heads typically involve aligning landmarks with facial template meshes using geometry processing approaches, but often overlook dense pixel-level photometric consistency. This oversight leads to inconsistent texture parametrization across different expressions, hindering the creation of topologically consistent head meshes widely used in movies and games. GPJA overcomes this limitation by leveraging differentiable rendering to align vertices with target expressions, achieving joint alignment in both geometry and photometric appearances automatically, without requiring semantic annotation or pre-aligned meshes for training. It features a holistic rendering alignment mechanism and a multiscale regularized optimization for robust convergence on large deformation. The method utilizes derivatives at vertex positions for supervision and employs a gradient-based algorithm which guarantees smoothness and avoids topological artifacts during the geometry evolution. Experimental results demonstrate faithful alignment under various expressions, surpassing the conventional non-rigid ICP-based methods and the state-of-the-art deep learning based method. In practical, our method generates meshes of the same subject across diverse expressions, all with the same texture parametrization. This consistency benefits face animation, re-parametrization, and other batch operations for face modeling and applications with enhanced efficiency.

Chongyuan Dai, Yaling Shen, Jinpeng Hu et al.

Culture serves as a fundamental determinant of human affective processing and profoundly shapes how individuals perceive and interpret emotional stimuli. Despite this intrinsic link extant evaluations regarding cultural alignment within Large Language Models primarily prioritize declarative knowledge such as geographical facts or established societal customs. These benchmarks remain insufficient to capture the subjective interpretative variance inherent to diverse sociocultural lenses. To address this limitation, we introduce CEDAR, a multimodal benchmark constructed entirely from scenarios capturing Culturally \underline{\textsc{E}}licited \underline{\textsc{D}}istinct \underline{\textsc{A}}ffective \underline{\textsc{R}}esponses. To construct CEDAR, we implement a novel pipeline that leverages LLM-generated provisional labels to isolate instances yielding cross-cultural emotional distinctions, and subsequently derives reliable ground-truth annotations through rigorous human evaluation. The resulting benchmark comprises 10,962 instances across seven languages and 14 fine-grained emotion categories, with each language including 400 multimodal and 1,166 text-only samples. Comprehensive evaluations of 17 representative multilingual models reveal a dissociation between language consistency and cultural alignment, demonstrating that culturally grounded affective understanding remains a significant challenge for current models.

Yiyao Huang, Zhedong Zheng, Yu Ziwei et al.

Pre-defined 3D object templates are widely used in 3D reconstruction of hand-object interactions. However, they often require substantial manual efforts to capture or source, and inherently restrict the adaptability of models to unconstrained interaction scenarios, e.g., heavily-occluded objects. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a new Text-Instructed Generation and Refinement (TIGeR) framework, harnessing the power of intuitive text-driven priors to steer the object shape refinement and pose estimation. We use a two-stage framework: a text-instructed prior generation and vision-guided refinement. As the name implies, we first leverage off-the-shelf models to generate shape priors according to the text description without tedious 3D crafting. Considering the geometric gap between the synthesized prototype and the real object interacted with the hand, we further calibrate the synthesized prototype via 2D-3D collaborative attention. TIGeR achieves competitive performance, i.e., 1.979 and 5.468 object Chamfer distance on the widely-used Dex-YCB and Obman datasets, respectively, surpassing existing template-free methods. Notably, the proposed framework shows robustness to occlusion, while maintaining compatibility with heterogeneous prior sources, e.g., retrieved hand-crafted prototypes, in practical deployment scenarios.

Lingyu Liu, Yaxiong Wang, Li Zhu et al.

We introduce a training-free framework specifically designed to bring real-world static paintings to life through image-to-video (I2V) synthesis, addressing the persistent challenge of aligning these motions with textual guidance while preserving fidelity to the original artworks. Existing I2V methods, primarily trained on natural video datasets, often struggle to generate dynamic outputs from static paintings. It remains challenging to generate motion while maintaining visual consistency with real-world paintings. This results in two distinct failure modes: either static outputs due to limited text-based motion interpretation or distorted dynamics caused by inadequate alignment with real-world artistic styles. We leverage the advanced text-image alignment capabilities of pre-trained image models to guide the animation process. Our approach introduces synthetic proxy images through two key innovations: (1) Dual-path score distillation: We employ a dual-path architecture to distill motion priors from both real and synthetic data, preserving static details from the original painting while learning dynamic characteristics from synthetic frames. (2) Hybrid latent fusion: We integrate hybrid features extracted from real paintings and synthetic proxy images via spherical linear interpolation in the latent space, ensuring smooth transitions and enhancing temporal consistency. Experimental evaluations confirm that our approach significantly improves semantic alignment with text prompts while faithfully preserving the unique characteristics and integrity of the original paintings. Crucially, by achieving enhanced dynamic effects without requiring any model training or learnable parameters, our framework enables plug-and-play integration with existing I2V methods, making it an ideal solution for animating real-world paintings. More animated examples can be found on our project website.

Yaxiong Wang, Yunchao Wei, Xueming Qian et al.

Superpixel segmentation has recently seen important progress benefiting from the advances in differentiable deep learning. However, the very high-resolution superpixel segmentation still remains challenging due to the expensive memory and computation cost, making the current advanced superpixel networks fail to process. In this paper, we devise Patch Calibration Networks (PCNet), aiming to efficiently and accurately implement high-resolution superpixel segmentation. PCNet follows the principle of producing high-resolution output from low-resolution input for saving GPU memory and relieving computation cost. To recall the fine details destroyed by the down-sampling operation, we propose a novel Decoupled Patch Calibration (DPC) branch for collaboratively augment the main superpixel generation branch. In particular, DPC takes a local patch from the high-resolution images and dynamically generates a binary mask to impose the network to focus on region boundaries. By sharing the parameters of DPC and main branches, the fine-detailed knowledge learned from high-resolution patches will be transferred to help calibrate the destroyed information. To the best of our knowledge, we make the first attempt to consider the deep-learning-based superpixel generation for high-resolution cases. To facilitate this research, we build evaluation benchmarks from two public datasets and one new constructed one, covering a wide range of diversities from fine-grained human parts to cityscapes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PCNet can not only perform favorably against the state-of-the-arts in the quantitative results but also improve the resolution upper bound from 3K to 5K on 1080Ti GPUs.

Yaxiong Wang, Yunchao Wei, Xueming Qian et al.

We aim to tackle the challenging yet practical scenery image outpainting task in this work. Recently, generative adversarial learning has significantly advanced the image outpainting by producing semantic consistent content for the given image. However, the existing methods always suffer from the blurry texture and the artifacts of the generative part, making the overall outpainting results lack authenticity. To overcome the weakness, this work investigates a principle way to synthesize texture-rich results by borrowing pixels from its neighbors (i.e., reference images), named \textbf{Re}ference-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{O}utpainting (ReGO). Particularly, the ReGO designs an Adaptive Content Selection (ACS) module to transfer the pixel of reference images for texture compensating of the target one. To prevent the style of the generated part from being affected by the reference images, a style ranking loss is further proposed to augment the ReGO to synthesize style-consistent results. Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks, NS6K \cite{yangzx} and NS8K \cite{wang}, well demonstrate the effectiveness of our ReGO. Our code will be made public available.

Yaxiong Wang, Yunchao Wei, Yujiao Wu et al.

Superpixel segmentation has seen significant progress benefiting from the deep convolutional networks. The typical approach entails initial division of the image into grids, followed by a learning process that assigns each pixel to adjacent grid segments. However, reliance on convolutions with confined receptive fields results in an implicit, rather than explicit, understanding of pixel-grid interactions. This limitation often leads to a deficit of contextual information during the mapping of associations. To counteract this, we introduce the Association Implantation (AI) module, designed to allow networks to explicitly engage with pixel-grid relationships. This module embeds grid features directly into the vicinity of the central pixel and employs convolutional operations on an enlarged window, facilitating an adaptive transfer of knowledge. This approach enables the network to explicitly extract context at the pixel-grid level, which is more aligned with the objectives of superpixel segmentation than mere pixel-wise interactions. By integrating the AI module across various layers, we enable a progressive refinement of pixel-superpixel relationships from coarse to fine. To further enhance the assignment of boundary pixels, we've engineered a boundary-aware loss function. This function aids in the discrimination of boundary-adjacent pixels at the feature level, thereby empowering subsequent modules to precisely identify boundary pixels and enhance overall boundary accuracy. Our method has been rigorously tested on four benchmarks, including BSDS500, NYUv2, ACDC, and ISIC2017, and our model can achieve competitive performance with comparison methods.

Yaxiong Wang, Yunchao Wei, Xueming Qian et al.

Skin lesion segmentation is a crucial step in the computer-aided diagnosis of dermoscopic images. In the last few years, deep learning based semantic segmentation methods have significantly advanced the skin lesion segmentation results. However, the current performance is still unsatisfactory due to some challenging factors such as large variety of lesion scale and ambiguous difference between lesion region and background. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework, named Dual Objective Networks (DONet), to improve the skin lesion segmentation. Our DONet adopts two symmetric decoders to produce different predictions for approaching different objectives. Concretely, the two objectives are actually defined by different loss functions. In this way, the two decoders are encouraged to produce differentiated probability maps to match different optimization targets, resulting in complementary predictions accordingly. The complementary information learned by these two objectives are further aggregated together to make the final prediction, by which the uncertainty existing in segmentation maps can be significantly alleviated. Besides, to address the challenge of large variety of lesion scales and shapes in dermoscopic images, we additionally propose a recurrent context encoding module (RCEM) to model the complex correlation among skin lesions, where the features with different scale contexts are efficiently integrated to form a more robust representation. Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DONet. In particular, our DONet achieves 0.881 and 0.931 dice score on ISIC 2018 and $\text{PH}^2$, respectively. Code will be made public available.

Yaxiong Wang, Yunchao Wei, Xueming Qian et al.

The outpainting results produced by existing approaches are often too random to meet users' requirement. In this work, we take the image outpainting one step forward by allowing users to harvest personal custom outpainting results using sketches as the guidance. To this end, we propose an encoder-decoder based network to conduct sketch-guided outpainting, where two alignment modules are adopted to impose the generated content to be realistic and consistent with the provided sketches. First, we apply a holistic alignment module to make the synthesized part be similar to the real one from the global view. Second, we reversely produce the sketches from the synthesized part and encourage them be consistent with the ground-truth ones using a sketch alignment module. In this way, the learned generator will be imposed to pay more attention to fine details and be sensitive to the guiding sketches. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to explore the challenging yet meaningful conditional scenery image outpainting. We conduct extensive experiments on two collected benchmarks to qualitatively and quantitatively validate the effectiveness of our approach compared with the other state-of-the-art generative models.

Yaxiong Wang, Hao Yang, Xueming Qian et al.

Image-text matching tasks have recently attracted a lot of attention in the computer vision field. The key point of this cross-domain problem is how to accurately measure the similarity between the visual and the textual contents, which demands a fine understanding of both modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel position focused attention network (PFAN) to investigate the relation between the visual and the textual views. In this work, we integrate the object position clue to enhance the visual-text joint-embedding learning. We first split the images into blocks, by which we infer the relative position of region in the image. Then, an attention mechanism is proposed to model the relations between the image region and blocks and generate the valuable position feature, which will be further utilized to enhance the region expression and model a more reliable relationship between the visual image and the textual sentence. Experiments on the popular datasets Flickr30K and MS-COCO show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Besides the public datasets, we also conduct experiments on our collected practical large-scale news dataset (Tencent-News) to validate the practical application value of proposed method. As far as we know, this is the first attempt to test the performance on the practical application. Our method achieves the state-of-art performance on all of these three datasets.