Wenhao Xu

Wenhao Xu, Changwei Wang, Xuxiang Feng et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable open-vocabulary object recognition capabilities, motivating their adaptation for dense prediction tasks like segmentation. However, directly applying VLMs to such tasks remains challenging due to their lack of pixel-level granularity and the limited data available for fine-tuning, leading to overfitting and poor generalization. To address these limitations, we propose Generalization Boosted Adapter (GBA), a novel adapter strategy that enhances the generalization and robustness of VLMs for open-vocabulary segmentation. GBA comprises two core components: (1) a Style Diversification Adapter (SDA) that decouples features into amplitude and phase components, operating solely on the amplitude to enrich the feature space representation while preserving semantic consistency; and (2) a Correlation Constraint Adapter (CCA) that employs cross-attention to establish tighter semantic associations between text categories and target regions, suppressing irrelevant low-frequency ``noise'' information and avoiding erroneous associations. Through the synergistic effect of the shallow SDA and the deep CCA, GBA effectively alleviates overfitting issues and enhances the semantic relevance of feature representations. As a simple, efficient, and plug-and-play component, GBA can be flexibly integrated into various CLIP-based methods, demonstrating broad applicability and achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple open-vocabulary segmentation benchmarks.

Wenhao Xu, Shuchen Zheng, Changwei Wang et al.

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is vital for long-range surveillance in military, maritime, and early warning applications. ISTD is challenged by targets occupying less than 0.15% of the image and low distinguishability from complex backgrounds. Existing deep learning methods often suffer from information loss during downsampling and inefficient global context modeling. This paper presents SAMamba, a novel framework integrating SAM2's hierarchical feature learning with Mamba's selective sequence modeling. Key innovations include: (1) A Feature Selection Adapter (FS-Adapter) for efficient natural-to-infrared domain adaptation via dual-stage selection (token-level with a learnable task embedding and channel-wise adaptive transformations); (2) A Cross-Channel State-Space Interaction (CSI) module for efficient global context modeling with linear complexity using selective state space modeling; and (3) A Detail-Preserving Contextual Fusion (DPCF) module that adaptively combines multi-scale features with a gating mechanism to balance high-resolution and low-resolution feature contributions. SAMamba addresses core ISTD challenges by bridging the domain gap, maintaining fine-grained details, and efficiently modeling long-range dependencies. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST, IRSTD-1k, and NUDT-SIRST datasets show SAMamba significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in challenging scenarios with heterogeneous backgrounds and varying target scales. Code: https://github.com/zhengshuchen/SAMamba.

Zherui Zhang, Changwei Wang, Rongtao Xu et al.

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) enables the knowledge transfer from the given pre-trained teacher network to the target student model without access to the real training data. Existing DFKD methods focus primarily on improving image recognition performance on associated datasets, often neglecting the crucial aspect of the transferability of learned representations. In this paper, we propose Category-Aware Embedding Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (CAE-DFKD), which addresses at the embedding level the limitations of previous rely on image-level methods to improve model generalization but fail when directly applied to DFKD. The superiority and flexibility of CAE-DFKD are extensively evaluated, including: \textit{\textbf{i.)}} Significant efficiency advantages resulting from altering the generator training paradigm; \textit{\textbf{ii.)}} Competitive performance with existing DFKD state-of-the-art methods on image recognition tasks; \textit{\textbf{iii.)}} Remarkable transferability of data-free learned representations demonstrated in downstream tasks.