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Researcher profile

Byoung-Tak Zhang

Byoung-Tak Zhang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Computer VisionMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceNeural and Evolutionary ComputingComputation and Languageeess.IVEmerging TechnologiesRobotics

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

EvoGround: Self-Evolving Video Agents for Video Temporal Grounding

Video temporal grounding (VTG) takes an untrimmed video and a natural-language query as input and localizes the temporal moment that best matches the query. Existing methods rely on large, task-specific datasets requiring costly manual annotation. We introduce EvoGround, a framework of two coupled self-evolving agents, a proposer and a solver, that learn temporal grounding from raw videos without any human-labeled data. The proposer generates query--moment pairs from raw videos, while the solver learns to ground them and feeds back signals that improve the proposer in return. Through this self-reinforcing reinforcement-learning loop, the two agents are initialized from the same backbone and mutually improve across iterations. Trained on 2.5K unlabeled videos, EvoGround matches or surpasses fully supervised models across multiple VTG benchmarks, while emerging as a state-of-the-art fine-grained video captioner without manual labels.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Kinematics-Driven Gaussian Shape Deformation for Blurry Monocular Dynamic Scenes

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from blurry monocular videos is challenging as motion-induced blur entangles object motion and geometry, hindering geometric consistency. We present Kinematics-GS, a kinematics-aware framework that models blur as motion-aligned deformation and introduces a kinematic prior to reparameterize Gaussian shapes along motion trajectories, thereby mitigating degenerate shape collapse without auxiliary motion supervision. To stabilize optimization, we decompose scenes into dynamic and static components using temporal deformation variance and employ a coarse-to-fine deformation strategy to capture both global motion and fine-grained details. We also introduce a challenging real-world dataset of deformable and elastic objects exhibiting non-rigid motion with spatially non-uniform motion blur that obscures geometric cues. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks with realistic motion blur demonstrate that Kinematics-GS outperforms prior methods by a clear margin in monocular dynamic scene reconstruction, highlighting its effectiveness in handling complex and non-rigid motion scenarios.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

Robust Imitation via Mirror Descent Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Recently, adversarial imitation learning has shown a scalable reward acquisition method for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problems. However, estimated reward signals often become uncertain and fail to train a reliable statistical model since the existing methods tend to solve hard optimization problems directly. Inspired by a first-order optimization method called mirror descent, this paper proposes to predict a sequence of reward functions, which are iterative solutions for a constrained convex problem. IRL solutions derived by mirror descent are tolerant to the uncertainty incurred by target density estimation since the amount of reward learning is regulated with respect to local geometric constraints. We prove that the proposed mirror descent update rule ensures robust minimization of a Bregman divergence in terms of a rigorous regret bound of $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$ for step sizes $\{η_t\}_{t=1}^{T}$. Our IRL method was applied on top of an adversarial framework, and it outperformed existing adversarial methods in an extensive suite of benchmarks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Cross-Modal Alignment Learning of Vision-Language Conceptual Systems

Human infants learn the names of objects and develop their own conceptual systems without explicit supervision. In this study, we propose methods for learning aligned vision-language conceptual systems inspired by infants' word learning mechanisms. The proposed model learns the associations of visual objects and words online and gradually constructs cross-modal relational graph networks. Additionally, we also propose an aligned cross-modal representation learning method that learns semantic representations of visual objects and words in a self-supervised manner based on the cross-modal relational graph networks. It allows entities of different modalities with conceptually the same meaning to have similar semantic representation vectors. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our method, including object-to-word mapping and zero-shot learning tasks, showing that the proposed model significantly outperforms the baselines and that each conceptual system is topologically aligned.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

From Scratch to Sketch: Deep Decoupled Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Sketching Agent

We present an automated learning framework for a robotic sketching agent that is capable of learning stroke-based rendering and motor control simultaneously. We formulate the robotic sketching problem as a deep decoupled hierarchical reinforcement learning; two policies for stroke-based rendering and motor control are learned independently to achieve sub-tasks for drawing, and form a hierarchy when cooperating for real-world drawing. Without hand-crafted features, drawing sequences or trajectories, and inverse kinematics, the proposed method trains the robotic sketching agent from scratch. We performed experiments with a 6-DoF robot arm with 2F gripper to sketch doodles. Our experimental results show that the two policies successfully learned the sub-tasks and collaborated to sketch the target images. Also, the robustness and flexibility were examined by varying drawing tools and surfaces.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Hypergraph Transformer: Weakly-supervised Multi-hop Reasoning for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

Knowledge-based visual question answering (QA) aims to answer a question which requires visually-grounded external knowledge beyond image content itself. Answering complex questions that require multi-hop reasoning under weak supervision is considered as a challenging problem since i) no supervision is given to the reasoning process and ii) high-order semantics of multi-hop knowledge facts need to be captured. In this paper, we introduce a concept of hypergraph to encode high-level semantics of a question and a knowledge base, and to learn high-order associations between them. The proposed model, Hypergraph Transformer, constructs a question hypergraph and a query-aware knowledge hypergraph, and infers an answer by encoding inter-associations between two hypergraphs and intra-associations in both hypergraph itself. Extensive experiments on two knowledge-based visual QA and two knowledge-based textual QA demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially for multi-hop reasoning problem. Our source code is available at https://github.com/yujungheo/kbvqa-public.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

On the Importance of Critical Period in Multi-stage Reinforcement Learning

The initial years of an infant's life are known as the critical period, during which the overall development of learning performance is significantly impacted due to neural plasticity. In recent studies, an AI agent, with a deep neural network mimicking mechanisms of actual neurons, exhibited a learning period similar to human's critical period. Especially during this initial period, the appropriate stimuli play a vital role in developing learning ability. However, transforming human cognitive bias into an appropriate shaping reward is quite challenging, and prior works on critical period do not focus on finding the appropriate stimulus. To take a step further, we propose multi-stage reinforcement learning to emphasize finding ``appropriate stimulus" around the critical period. Inspired by humans' early cognitive-developmental stage, we use multi-stage guidance near the critical period, and demonstrate the appropriate shaping reward (stage-2 guidance) in terms of the AI agent's performance, efficiency, and stability.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Smooth-Swap: A Simple Enhancement for Face-Swapping with Smoothness

Face-swapping models have been drawing attention for their compelling generation quality, but their complex architectures and loss functions often require careful tuning for successful training. We propose a new face-swapping model called `Smooth-Swap', which excludes complex handcrafted designs and allows fast and stable training. The main idea of Smooth-Swap is to build smooth identity embedding that can provide stable gradients for identity change. Unlike the one used in previous models trained for a purely discriminative task, the proposed embedding is trained with a supervised contrastive loss promoting a smoother space. With improved smoothness, Smooth-Swap suffices to be composed of a generic U-Net-based generator and three basic loss functions, a far simpler design compared with the previous models. Extensive experiments on face-swapping benchmarks (FFHQ, FaceForensics++) and face images in the wild show that our model is also quantitatively and qualitatively comparable or even superior to the existing methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Toddler-Guidance Learning: Impacts of Critical Period on Multimodal AI Agents

Critical periods are phases during which a toddler's brain develops in spurts. To promote children's cognitive development, proper guidance is critical in this stage. However, it is not clear whether such a critical period also exists for the training of AI agents. Similar to human toddlers, well-timed guidance and multimodal interactions might significantly enhance the training efficiency of AI agents as well. To validate this hypothesis, we adapt this notion of critical periods to learning in AI agents and investigate the critical period in the virtual environment for AI agents. We formalize the critical period and Toddler-guidance learning in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Then, we built up a toddler-like environment with VECA toolkit to mimic human toddlers' learning characteristics. We study three discrete levels of mutual interaction: weak-mentor guidance (sparse reward), moderate mentor guidance (helper-reward), and mentor demonstration (behavioral cloning). We also introduce the EAVE dataset consisting of 30,000 real-world images to fully reflect the toddler's viewpoint. We evaluate the impact of critical periods on AI agents from two perspectives: how and when they are guided best in both uni- and multimodal learning. Our experimental results show that both uni- and multimodal agents with moderate mentor guidance and critical period on 1 million and 2 million training steps show a noticeable improvement. We validate these results with transfer learning on the EAVE dataset and find the performance advancement on the same critical period and the guidance.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Learning task-agnostic representation via toddler-inspired learning

One of the inherent limitations of current AI systems, stemming from the passive learning mechanisms (e.g., supervised learning), is that they perform well on labeled datasets but cannot deduce knowledge on their own. To tackle this problem, we derive inspiration from a highly intentional learning system via action: the toddler. Inspired by the toddler's learning procedure, we design an interactive agent that can learn and store task-agnostic visual representation while exploring and interacting with objects in the virtual environment. Experimental results show that such obtained representation was expandable to various vision tasks such as image classification, object localization, and distance estimation tasks. In specific, the proposed model achieved 100%, 75.1% accuracy and 1.62% relative error, respectively, which is noticeably better than autoencoder-based model (99.7%, 66.1%, 1.95%), and also comparable with those of supervised models (100%, 87.3%, 0.71%).

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

M2FN: Multi-step Modality Fusion for Advertisement Image Assessment

Assessing advertisements, specifically on the basis of user preferences and ad quality, is crucial to the marketing industry. Although recent studies have attempted to use deep neural networks for this purpose, these studies have not utilized image-related auxiliary attributes, which include embedded text frequently found in ad images. We, therefore, investigated the influence of these attributes on ad image preferences. First, we analyzed large-scale real-world ad log data and, based on our findings, proposed a novel multi-step modality fusion network (M2FN) that determines advertising images likely to appeal to user preferences. Our method utilizes auxiliary attributes through multiple steps in the network, which include conditional batch normalization-based low-level fusion and attention-based high-level fusion. We verified M2FN on the AVA dataset, which is widely used for aesthetic image assessment, and then demonstrated that M2FN can achieve state-of-the-art performance in preference prediction using a real-world ad dataset with rich auxiliary attributes.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Cut-Based Graph Learning Networks to Discover Compositional Structure of Sequential Video Data

Conventional sequential learning methods such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) focus on interactions between consecutive inputs, i.e. first-order Markovian dependency. However, most of sequential data, as seen with videos, have complex dependency structures that imply variable-length semantic flows and their compositions, and those are hard to be captured by conventional methods. Here, we propose Cut-Based Graph Learning Networks (CB-GLNs) for learning video data by discovering these complex structures of the video. The CB-GLNs represent video data as a graph, with nodes and edges corresponding to frames of the video and their dependencies respectively. The CB-GLNs find compositional dependencies of the data in multilevel graph forms via a parameterized kernel with graph-cut and a message passing framework. We evaluate the proposed method on the two different tasks for video understanding: Video theme classification (Youtube-8M dataset) and Video Question and Answering (TVQA dataset). The experimental results show that our model efficiently learns the semantic compositional structure of video data. Furthermore, our model achieves the highest performance in comparison to other baseline methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Label Propagation Adaptive Resonance Theory for Semi-supervised Continuous Learning

Semi-supervised learning and continuous learning are fundamental paradigms for human-level intelligence. To deal with real-world problems where labels are rarely given and the opportunity to access the same data is limited, it is necessary to apply these two paradigms in a joined fashion. In this paper, we propose Label Propagation Adaptive Resonance Theory (LPART) for semi-supervised continuous learning. LPART uses an online label propagation mechanism to perform classification and gradually improves its accuracy as the observed data accumulates. We evaluated the proposed model on visual (MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10) and audio (NSynth) datasets by adjusting the ratio of the labeled and unlabeled data. The accuracies are much higher when both labeled and unlabeled data are used, demonstrating the significant advantage of LPART in environments where the data labels are scarce.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Pattern Denoising in Molecular Associative Memory using Pairwise Markov Random Field Models

We propose an in silico molecular associative memory model for pattern learning, storage and denoising using Pairwise Markov Random Field (PMRF) model. Our PMRF-based molecular associative memory model extracts locally distributed features from the exposed examples, learns and stores the patterns in the molecular associative memory and denoises the given noisy patterns via DNA computation based operations. Thus, our computational molecular model demonstrates the functionalities of content-addressability of human memory. Our molecular simulation results show that the averaged mean squared error between the learned and denoised patterns are low (< 0.014) up to 30% of noise.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access