Dongmei Jiang

Hao Wang, Pengzhen Ren, Zequn Jie et al.

Open-vocabulary detection is a challenging task due to the requirement of detecting objects based on class names, including those not encountered during training. Existing methods have shown strong zero-shot detection capabilities through pre-training and pseudo-labeling on diverse large-scale datasets. However, these approaches encounter two main challenges: (i) how to effectively eliminate data noise from pseudo-labeling, and (ii) how to efficiently leverage the language-aware capability for region-level cross-modality fusion and alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unified open-vocabulary detection method called OV-DINO, which is pre-trained on diverse large-scale datasets with language-aware selective fusion in a unified framework. Specifically, we introduce a Unified Data Integration (UniDI) pipeline to enable end-to-end training and eliminate noise from pseudo-label generation by unifying different data sources into detection-centric data format. In addition, we propose a Language-Aware Selective Fusion (LASF) module to enhance the cross-modality alignment through a language-aware query selection and fusion process. We evaluate the performance of the proposed OV-DINO on popular open-vocabulary detection benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results with an AP of 50.6% on the COCO benchmark and 40.1% on the LVIS benchmark in a zero-shot manner, demonstrating its strong generalization ability. Furthermore, the fine-tuned OV-DINO on COCO achieves 58.4% AP, outperforming many existing methods with the same backbone. The code for OV-DINO is available at https://github.com/wanghao9610/OV-DINO.

Guiping Cao, Shengda Luo, Wenjian Huang et al.

Token interaction operation is one of the core modules in MLP-based models to exchange and aggregate information between different spatial locations. However, the power of token interaction on the spatial dimension is highly dependent on the spatial resolution of the feature maps, which limits the model's expressive ability, especially in deep layers where the feature are down-sampled to a small spatial size. To address this issue, we present a novel method called \textbf{Strip-MLP} to enrich the token interaction power in three ways. Firstly, we introduce a new MLP paradigm called Strip MLP layer that allows the token to interact with other tokens in a cross-strip manner, enabling the tokens in a row (or column) to contribute to the information aggregations in adjacent but different strips of rows (or columns). Secondly, a \textbf{C}ascade \textbf{G}roup \textbf{S}trip \textbf{M}ixing \textbf{M}odule (CGSMM) is proposed to overcome the performance degradation caused by small spatial feature size. The module allows tokens to interact more effectively in the manners of within-patch and cross-patch, which is independent to the feature spatial size. Finally, based on the Strip MLP layer, we propose a novel \textbf{L}ocal \textbf{S}trip \textbf{M}ixing \textbf{M}odule (LSMM) to boost the token interaction power in the local region. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Strip-MLP significantly improves the performance of MLP-based models on small datasets and obtains comparable or even better results on ImageNet. In particular, Strip-MLP models achieve higher average Top-1 accuracy than existing MLP-based models by +2.44\% on Caltech-101 and +2.16\% on CIFAR-100. The source codes will be available at~\href{https://github.com/Med-Process/Strip_MLP{https://github.com/Med-Process/Strip\_MLP}.

Yi Zhang, Jitao Sang, Junyang Wang et al.

Machine learning models often learn to make predictions that rely on sensitive social attributes like gender and race, which poses significant fairness risks, especially in societal applications, such as hiring, banking, and criminal justice. Existing work tackles this issue by minimizing the employed information about social attributes in models for debiasing. However, the high correlation between target task and these social attributes makes learning on the target task incompatible with debiasing. Given that model bias arises due to the learning of bias features (\emph{i.e}., gender) that help target task optimization, we explore the following research question: \emph{Can we leverage shortcut features to replace the role of bias feature in target task optimization for debiasing?} To this end, we propose \emph{Shortcut Debiasing}, to first transfer the target task's learning of bias attributes from bias features to shortcut features, and then employ causal intervention to eliminate shortcut features during inference. The key idea of \emph{Shortcut Debiasing} is to design controllable shortcut features to on one hand replace bias features in contributing to the target task during the training stage, and on the other hand be easily removed by intervention during the inference stage. This guarantees the learning of the target task does not hinder the elimination of bias features. We apply \emph{Shortcut Debiasing} to several benchmark datasets, and achieve significant improvements over the state-of-the-art debiasing methods in both accuracy and fairness.

Fan Cui, Liyong Guo, Lang He et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG) plays a vital role in detecting how brain responses to different stimulus. In this paper, we propose a novel Shallow-Deep Attention-based Network (SDANet) to classify the correct auditory stimulus evoking the EEG signal. It adopts the Attention-based Correlation Module (ACM) to discover the connection between auditory speech and EEG from global aspect, and the Shallow-Deep Similarity Classification Module (SDSCM) to decide the classification result via the embeddings learned from the shallow and deep layers. Moreover, various training strategies and data augmentation are used to boost the model robustness. Experiments are conducted on the dataset provided by Auditory EEG challenge (ICASSP Signal Processing Grand Challenge 2023). Results show that the proposed model has a significant gain over the baseline on the match-mismatch track.

Xing Lan, Jian Xue, Ji Qi et al.

Facial expression recognition (FER) is a critical task in multimedia with significant implications across various domains. However, analyzing the causes of facial expressions is essential for accurately recognizing them. Current approaches, such as those based on facial action units (AUs), typically provide AU names and intensities but lack insight into the interactions and relationships between AUs and the overall expression. In this paper, we propose a novel method called ExpLLM, which leverages large language models to generate an accurate chain of thought (CoT) for facial expression recognition. Specifically, we have designed the CoT mechanism from three key perspectives: key observations, overall emotional interpretation, and conclusion. The key observations describe the AU's name, intensity, and associated emotions. The overall emotional interpretation provides an analysis based on multiple AUs and their interactions, identifying the dominant emotions and their relationships. Finally, the conclusion presents the final expression label derived from the preceding analysis. Furthermore, we also introduce the Exp-CoT Engine, designed to construct this expression CoT and generate instruction-description data for training our ExpLLM. Extensive experiments on the RAF-DB and AffectNet datasets demonstrate that ExpLLM outperforms current state-of-the-art FER methods. ExpLLM also surpasses the latest GPT-4o in expression CoT generation, particularly in recognizing micro-expressions where GPT-4o frequently fails.

Xinmeng Yu, Jiaxin Gao, Jianguo Zhang et al.

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a widely used metaheuristic, prized for its simplicity and small parameter set. Although decades of research have produced numerous PSO variants that improve performance by modifying key components (e.g., parameter schedules, swarm topologies, or updating rules), two fundamental challenges persist. First, most existing approaches are problem-specific and hand-crafted, leading to poor cross-task generalization and forcing practitioners to navigate an impractically large design space, which also hinders systematic reuse of prior effective mechanisms. Second, mainstream implementations remain CPU-bound, constraining scalability and substantially increasing computational cost in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose \emph{AutoPSO}, a highly automated meta-framework for constructing customized PSO algorithms. AutoPSO formulates PSO-based optimization as a bi-level process: an outer search explores the joint space of effective PSO components, while an inner loop instantiates candidate variants to solve the target task and provide feedback. The outer search operates over a curated, open-design component pool, supporting flexible replacement of the component set and the outer optimizer. Crucially, by leveraging EvoX for population tensorization and batched evaluations, AutoPSO can efficiently assess thousands of particles within practical time budgets. Comprehensive experiments on numerical benchmarks and neuroevolution robotic control tasks demonstrate that AutoPSO consistently discovers novel PSO variants that significantly outperform strong baselines. Ablation and scalability studies further highlight the contribution of individual algorithmic components and confirm that AutoPSO achieves increasing performance gains with larger swarm sizes. Source code will be made publicly available.

Guiping Cao, Tao Wang, Wenjian Huang et al.

Open-Ended object Detection (OED) is a novel and challenging task that detects objects and generates their category names in a free-form manner, without requiring additional vocabularies during inference. However, the existing OED models, such as GenerateU, require large-scale datasets for training, suffer from slow convergence, and exhibit limited performance. To address these issues, we present a novel and efficient Open-Det framework, consisting of four collaborative parts. Specifically, Open-Det accelerates model training in both the bounding box and object name generation process by reconstructing the Object Detector and the Object Name Generator. To bridge the semantic gap between Vision and Language modalities, we propose a Vision-Language Aligner with V-to-L and L-to-V alignment mechanisms, incorporating with the Prompts Distiller to transfer knowledge from the VLM into VL-prompts, enabling accurate object name generation for the LLM. In addition, we design a Masked Alignment Loss to eliminate contradictory supervision and introduce a Joint Loss to enhance classification, resulting in more efficient training. Compared to GenerateU, Open-Det, using only 1.5% of the training data (0.077M vs. 5.077M), 20.8% of the training epochs (31 vs. 149), and fewer GPU resources (4 V100 vs. 16 A100), achieves even higher performance (+1.0% in APr). The source codes are available at: https://github.com/Med-Process/Open-Det.

Guiping Cao, Xiangyuan Lan, Wenjian Huang et al.

Popular transformer detectors have achieved promising performance through query-based learning using attention mechanisms. However, the roles of existing decoder query types (e.g., content query and positional query) are still underexplored. These queries are generally predefined with a fixed number (fixed-query), which limits their flexibility. We find that the learning of these fixed-query is impaired by Recurrent Opposing inTeractions (ROT) between two attention operations: Self-Attention (query-to-query) and Cross-Attention (query-to-encoder), thereby degrading decoder efficiency. Furthermore, "query ambiguity" arises when shared-weight decoder layers are processed with both one-to-one and one-to-many label assignments during training, violating DETR's one-to-one matching principle. To address these challenges, we propose DS-Det, a more efficient detector capable of detecting a flexible number of objects in images. Specifically, we reformulate and introduce a new unified Single-Query paradigm for decoder modeling, transforming the fixed-query into flexible. Furthermore, we propose a simplified decoder framework through attention disentangled learning: locating boxes with Cross-Attention (one-to-many process), deduplicating predictions with Self-Attention (one-to-one process), addressing "query ambiguity" and "ROT" issues directly, and enhancing decoder efficiency. We further introduce a unified PoCoo loss that leverages box size priors to prioritize query learning on hard samples such as small objects. Extensive experiments across five different backbone models on COCO2017 and WiderPerson datasets demonstrate the general effectiveness and superiority of DS-Det. The source codes are available at https://github.com/Med-Process/DS-Det/.

Guiping Cao, Wenjian Huang, Xiangyuan Lan et al.

Small Object Detection (SOD) poses significant challenges due to limited information and the model's low class prediction score. While Transformer-based detectors have shown promising performance, their potential for SOD remains largely unexplored. In typical DETR-like frameworks, the CNN backbone network, specialized in aggregating local information, struggles to capture the necessary contextual information for SOD. The multiple attention layers in the Transformer Encoder face difficulties in effectively attending to small objects and can also lead to blurring of features. Furthermore, the model's lower class prediction score of small objects compared to large objects further increases the difficulty of SOD. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach called Cross-DINO. This approach incorporates the deep MLP network to aggregate initial feature representations with both short and long range information for SOD. Then, a new Cross Coding Twice Module (CCTM) is applied to integrate these initial representations to the Transformer Encoder feature, enhancing the details of small objects. Additionally, we introduce a new kind of soft label named Category-Size (CS), integrating the Category and Size of objects. By treating CS as new ground truth, we propose a new loss function called Boost Loss to improve the class prediction score of the model. Extensive experimental results on COCO, WiderPerson, VisDrone, AI-TOD, and SODA-D datasets demonstrate that Cross-DINO efficiently improves the performance of DETR-like models on SOD. Specifically, our model achieves 36.4% APs on COCO for SOD with only 45M parameters, outperforming the DINO by +4.4% APS (36.4% vs. 32.0%) with fewer parameters and FLOPs, under 12 epochs training setting. The source codes will be available at https://github.com/Med-Process/Cross-DINO.

Yan Li, Yifei Xing, Xiangyuan Lan et al.

Cross-modal alignment is crucial for multimodal representation fusion due to the inherent heterogeneity between modalities. While Transformer-based methods have shown promising results in modeling inter-modal relationships, their quadratic computational complexity limits their applicability to long-sequence or large-scale data. Although recent Mamba-based approaches achieve linear complexity, their sequential scanning mechanism poses fundamental challenges in comprehensively modeling cross-modal relationships. To address this limitation, we propose AlignMamba, an efficient and effective method for multimodal fusion. Specifically, grounded in Optimal Transport, we introduce a local cross-modal alignment module that explicitly learns token-level correspondences between different modalities. Moreover, we propose a global cross-modal alignment loss based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy to implicitly enforce the consistency between different modal distributions. Finally, the unimodal representations after local and global alignment are passed to the Mamba backbone for further cross-modal interaction and multimodal fusion. Extensive experiments on complete and incomplete multimodal fusion tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Yong Dai, Xiaopeng Hong, Yabin Wang et al.

Contemporary continual learning approaches typically select prompts from a pool, which function as supplementary inputs to a pre-trained model. However, this strategy is hindered by the inherent noise of its selection approach when handling increasing tasks. In response to these challenges, we reformulate the prompting approach for continual learning and propose the prompt customization (PC) method. PC mainly comprises a prompt generation module (PGM) and a prompt modulation module (PMM). In contrast to conventional methods that employ hard prompt selection, PGM assigns different coefficients to prompts from a fixed-sized pool of prompts and generates tailored prompts. Moreover, PMM further modulates the prompts by adaptively assigning weights according to the correlations between input data and corresponding prompts. We evaluate our method on four benchmark datasets for three diverse settings, including the class, domain, and task-agnostic incremental learning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvement (by up to 16.2\%), yielded by the proposed method, over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques.

Keliang Li, Hongze Shen, Hao Shi et al.

The aspiration for artificial general intelligence, fueled by the rapid progress of multimodal models, demands human-comparable performance across diverse environments. We propose HumanPCR, an evaluation suite for probing MLLMs' capacity about human-related visual contexts across three hierarchical levels: Perception, Comprehension, and Reasoning (denoted by Human-P, Human-C, and Human-R, respectively). Human-P and Human-C feature over 6,000 human-verified multiple choice questions, assessing massive tasks of 9 dimensions, including but not limited to essential skills frequently overlooked by existing benchmarks. Human-R offers a challenging manually curated video reasoning test that requires integrating multiple visual evidences, proactively extracting context beyond question cues, and applying human-like expertise. Each question includes human-annotated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales with key visual evidence to support further research. Extensive evaluations on over 30 state-of-the-art models exhibit significant challenges in human-centric visual understanding, particularly in tasks involving detailed space perception, temporal understanding, and mind modeling. Moreover, analysis of Human-R reveals the struggle of models in extracting essential proactive visual evidence from diverse human scenes and their faulty reliance on query-guided retrieval. Even with advanced techniques like scaling visual contexts and test-time thinking yield only limited benefits. We hope HumanPCR and our findings will advance the development, evaluation, and human-centric application of multimodal models.

Zaijing Li, Yuquan Xie, Rui Shao et al.

Recently, agents based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across various domains. However, building a generalist agent with capabilities such as perception, planning, action, grounding, and reflection in open-world environments like Minecraft remains challenges: insufficient domain-specific data, interference among heterogeneous tasks, and visual diversity in open-world settings. In this paper, we address these challenges through three key contributions. 1) We propose a knowledge-enhanced data generation pipeline to provide scalable and high-quality training data for agent development. 2) To mitigate interference among heterogeneous tasks, we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with task-level routing. 3) We develop a Multimodal Reasoning-Augmented Reinforcement Learning approach to enhance the agent's reasoning ability for visual diversity in Minecraft. Built upon these innovations, we present Optimus-3, a general-purpose agent for Minecraft. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Optimus-3 surpasses both generalist multimodal large language models and existing state-of-the-art agents across a wide range of tasks in the Minecraft environment. Project page: https://cybertronagent.github.io/Optimus-3.github.io/

Jiyao Liu, Yanxi Zhao, Hao Wu et al.

Recognizing the feelings of human beings plays a critical role in our daily communication. Neuroscience has demonstrated that different emotion states present different degrees of activation in different brain regions, EEG frequency bands and temporal stamps. In this paper, we propose a novel structure to explore the informative EEG features for emotion recognition. The proposed module, denoted by PST-Attention, consists of Positional, Spectral and Temporal Attention modules to explore more discriminative EEG features. Specifically, the Positional Attention module is to capture the activate regions stimulated by different emotions in the spatial dimension. The Spectral and Temporal Attention modules assign the weights of different frequency bands and temporal slices respectively. Our method is adaptive as well as efficient which can be fit into 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D-CNN) as a plug-in module. We conduct experiments on two real-world datasets. 3D-CNN combined with our module achieves promising results and demonstrate that the PST-Attention is able to capture stable patterns for emotion recognition from EEG.

Congqi Cao, Yue Lu, Yifan Zhang et al.

Contextual information plays an important role in action recognition. Local operations have difficulty to model the relation between two elements with a long-distance interval. However, directly modeling the contextual information between any two points brings huge cost in computation and memory, especially for action recognition, where there is an additional temporal dimension. Inspired from 2D criss-cross attention used in segmentation task, we propose a recurrent 3D criss-cross attention (RCCA-3D) module to model the dense long-range spatiotemporal contextual information in video for action recognition. The global context is factorized into sparse relation maps. We model the relationship between points in the same line along the direction of horizon, vertical and depth at each time, which forms a 3D criss-cross structure, and duplicate the same operation with recurrent mechanism to transmit the relation between points in a line to a plane finally to the whole spatiotemporal space. Compared with the non-local method, the proposed RCCA-3D module reduces the number of parameters and FLOPs by 25% and 30% for video context modeling. We evaluate the performance of RCCA-3D with two latest action recognition networks on three datasets and make a thorough analysis of the architecture, obtaining the optimal way to factorize and fuse the relation maps. Comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our model.

Meshia Cédric Oveneke, Mitchel Aliosha-Perez, Yong Zhao et al.

The omnipresence of deep learning architectures such as deep convolutional neural networks (CNN)s is fueled by the synergistic combination of ever-increasing labeled datasets and specialized hardware. Despite the indisputable success, the reliance on huge amounts of labeled data and specialized hardware can be a limiting factor when approaching new applications. To help alleviating these limitations, we propose an efficient learning strategy for layer-wise unsupervised training of deep CNNs on conventional hardware in acceptable time. Our proposed strategy consists of randomly convexifying the reconstruction contractive auto-encoding (RCAE) learning objective and solving the resulting large-scale convex minimization problem in the frequency domain via coordinate descent (CD). The main advantages of our proposed learning strategy are: (1) single tunable optimization parameter; (2) fast and guaranteed convergence; (3) possibilities for full parallelization. Numerical experiments show that our proposed learning strategy scales (in the worst case) linearly with image size, number of filters and filter size.