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Jianfei Yang

Jianfei Yang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

27 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

EVA-0: Test-Time Model Evolution with Only Two Forward Passes per Sample

Test-time model evolution offers a promising way for deployed models to improve from unlabeled test-time experience, yet most existing methods depend on backpropagation (BP), which incurs substantial memory overhead and makes them difficult to deploy on edge devices, quantized models, specialized accelerators, or black-box models. In this work, we study test-time model evolution under a strict two-forward budget, a setting that pushes adaptation toward highly efficient real-world deployment. We reveal three key obstacles in zeroth-order test-time optimization: susceptibility to shortcut solutions, uncontrolled weight drift, and ineffective update direction estimation. To overcome them, we propose EVA-0, a minimal zeroth-order adaptation framework that: 1) keeps the loss scale-invariant to prevent shortcut solutions; 2) devises an anchor-guided optimization strategy to alleviate weight drift; 3) uses sample-wise symmetric two-sided perturbation for update direction estimation and inference. EVA-0 requires no BP and performs both inference and adaptation within only two forward passes per sample. Results on ImageNet-C & ViT-Base show that EVA-0 outperforms both BP-based DeYO and BP-free FOA, while achieving a 14x speed-up over FOA. Code will be released.

preprint2026arXiv

Feedback World Model Enables Precise Guidance of Diffusion Policy

World models aim to improve robotic decision making by predicting the consequences of actions. However, in practice, their predictions often become unreliable once the robot encounters states outside the training distribution, limiting their effectiveness at deployment. We observe that execution itself provides a natural but underutilized signal: after each action, the robot directly observes the true next state, revealing the mismatch between predicted and actual outcomes. Building on this insight, we propose feedback world model, a new paradigm that closes the loop between prediction and observation at inference time. Instead of treating the world model as a static open-loop predictor, our method maintains a lightweight feedback state that is updated online to iteratively correct future predictions, compensating for model errors using real-time observations without additional training data or parameter updates. We show that this process can be interpreted as a latent-space observer and admits convergence guarantees under mild conditions. We further introduce action-aware guidance to better translate corrected predictions into control by emphasizing action-controllable components while suppressing irrelevant variations. Experiments on LIBERO-Plus, Robomimic, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that our method substantially improves both prediction accuracy and policy performance under distribution shift. In particular, it reduces world model prediction error by up to 76.4% and improves out-of-distribution (OOD) success rate by 30%. These results show that incorporating real-time feedback at inference time provides a simple yet powerful alternative to static world modeling.

preprint2026arXiv

FLASH: Efficient Visuomotor Policy via Sparse Sampling

Generative models such as diffusion and flow matching have become dominant paradigms for visuomotor policy learning, yet their reliance on iterative denoising incurs high inference latency incompatible with real-time robotic control. We present Fast Legendre-polynomial Action policy via Sparse History-anchored flow (FLASH Policy), which replaces discrete action-chunk generation with continuous Legendre polynomial trajectory representation. Specifically, by fitting expert demonstrations under sparse temporal sampling, FLASH enables a single inference to cover a significantly extended action horizon. To further accelerate generation, FLASH initiates the flow matching process from history polynomial coefficients rather than uninformative Gaussian noise, shortening the transport distance and enabling accurate single-step inference. Moreover, analytic polynomial differentiation directly provides desired velocity feed-forward signals to the torque controller without numerical approximation. Extensive experiments on five simulated and two real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that FLASH achieves state-of-the-art success rates ($\ge 92\%$ across all tasks), a per-episode inference time of $31.40\,ms$ (up to $175\times$ faster than diffusion policies and $18\times$ faster than prior flow matching policies), up to $4\times$ faster training convergence than ACT, and $5\times$ to $7\times$ reduction in controller tracking error compared to discrete-action baselines.

preprint2026arXiv

From Human Intention to Action Prediction: Intention-Driven End-to-End Autonomous Driving

While end-to-end autonomous driving has achieved remarkable progress in geometric control, current systems remain constrained by a command-following paradigm that relies on simple navigational instructions. Transitioning to genuinely intelligent agents requires the capability to interpret and fulfill high-level, abstract human intentions. However, this advancement is hindered by the lack of dedicated benchmarks and semantic-aware evaluation metrics. In this paper, we formally define the task of Intention-Driven End-to-End Autonomous Driving and present Intention-Drive, a comprehensive benchmark designed to bridge this gap. We construct a large-scale dataset featuring complex natural language intentions paired with high-fidelity sensor data. To overcome the limitations of conventional trajectory-based metrics, we introduce the Imagined Future Alignment (IFA), a novel evaluation protocol leveraging generative world models to assess the semantic fulfillment of human goals beyond mere geometric accuracy. Furthermore, we explore the solution space by proposing two distinct paradigms: an end-to-end vision-language planner and a hierarchical agent-based framework. The experiments reveal a critical dichotomy where existing models exhibit satisfactory driving stability but struggle significantly with intention fulfillment. Notably, the proposed frameworks demonstrate superior alignment with human intentions.

preprint2026arXiv

InterLV-Search: Benchmarking Interleaved Multimodal Agentic Search

Existing benchmarks for multimodal agentic search evaluate multimodal search and visual browsing, but visual evidence is either confined to the input or treated as an answer endpoint rather than part of an interleaved search trajectory. We introduce \textbf{InterLV-Search}, a benchmark for Interleaved Language-Vision Agentic Search, in which textual and visual evidence is repeatedly used to condition later search. It contains 2,061 examples across three levels: active visual evidence seeking, controlled offline interleaved multimodal search, and open-web interleaved multimodal search. Beyond existing benchmarks, it also includes multimodal multi-branch samples that involve comparison between multiple entities during the evidence search. We construct Level 1 and Level 2 with automated pipelines and Level 3 with a machine-led, human-supervised open-web pipeline. We further provide InterLV-Agent for standardized tool use, trajectory logging, and evaluation. Experiments on proprietary and open-source multimodal agents show that current systems remain far from solving interleaved multimodal search, with the best model below 50% overall accuracy, highlighting challenges in visual evidence seeking, search control, and multimodal evidence integration. We release the benchmark data and evaluation code at https://github.com/hbhalpha/InterLV-Search-Bench

preprint2026arXiv

Mamba-VGGT: Persistent Long-Sequence Video Geometry Grounded Transformer via External Sliding Window Mamba Memory

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformers (VGGT) have set new benchmarks in high-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction. However, as the sequence length increases, these models suffer from catastrophic geometric forgetting and accumulation drift, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of global attention which necessitates truncated temporal windows. To overcome the resulting geometric drift, we present Mamba-VGGT, an enhanced VGGT framework capable of persistent long-range reasoning. Our key contribution is a Sliding Window Mamba (SWM) memory module that maintains an explicit external memory token across temporal windows. This module leverages selective state-space modeling to distill and propagate global geometric priors, effectively bypassing the memory constraints of traditional transformers. To integrate these long-term temporal cues without disrupting the highly optimized spatial features of the pre-trained VGGT, we propose a Zero-Init Spatial Memory Injector. Utilizing zero-convolutional layers, this injector adaptively fuses persistent memory into the patch token stream, ensuring structural stability and seamless feature alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing VGGT-based methods in maintaining spatial consistency and reducing trajectory accumulation errors. Our work provides a scalable, linear-complexity solution for geometry-grounded world modeling in extensive 3D environments.

preprint2026arXiv

SkeFi: Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer for Wireless Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition leverages human pose keypoints to categorize human actions, which shows superior generalization and interoperability compared to regular end-to-end action recognition. Existing solutions use RGB cameras to annotate skeletal keypoints, but their performance declines in dark environments and raises privacy concerns, limiting their use in smart homes and hospitals. This paper explores non-invasive wireless sensors, i.e., LiDAR and mmWave, to mitigate these challenges as a feasible alternative. Two problems are addressed: (1) insufficient data on wireless sensor modality to train an accurate skeleton estimation model, and (2) skeletal keypoints derived from wireless sensors are noisier than RGB, causing great difficulties for subsequent action recognition models. Our work, SkeFi, overcomes these gaps through a novel cross-modal knowledge transfer method acquired from the data-rich RGB modality. We propose the enhanced Temporal Correlation Adaptive Graph Convolution (TC-AGC) with frame interactive enhancement to overcome the noise from missing or inconsecutive frames. Additionally, our research underscores the effectiveness of enhancing multiscale temporal modeling through dual temporal convolution. By integrating TC-AGC with temporal modeling for cross-modal transfer, our framework can extract accurate poses and actions from noisy wireless sensors. Experiments demonstrate that SkeFi realizes state-of-the-art performances on mmWave and LiDAR. The code is available at https://github.com/Huang0035/Skefi.

preprint2026arXiv

WaveMan: mmWave-Based Room-Scale Human Interaction Perception for Humanoid Robots

Reliable humanoid-robot interaction (HRI) in household environments is constrained by two fundamental requirements, namely robustness to unconstrained user positions and preservation of user privacy. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensing inherently supports privacy-preserving interaction, making it a promising modality for room-scale HRI. However, existing mmWave-based interaction-sensing systems exhibit poor spatial generalization at unseen distances or viewpoints. To address this challenge, we introduce WaveMan, a spatially adaptive room-scale perception system that restores reliable human interaction sensing across arbitrary user positions. WaveMan integrates viewpoint alignment and spectrogram enhancement for spatial consistency, with dual-channel attention for robust feature extraction. Experiments across five participants show that, under fixed-position evaluation, WaveMan achieves the same cross-position accuracy as the baseline with five times fewer training positions. In random free-position testing, accuracy increases from 33.00% to 94.33%, enabled by the proposed method. These results demonstrate the feasibility of reliable, privacy-preserving interaction for household humanoid robots across unconstrained user positions.

preprint2026arXiv

World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey

World models, which are predictive representations of how environments evolve under actions, have become a central component of robot learning. They support policy learning, planning, simulation, evaluation, data generation, and have advanced rapidly with the rise of foundation models and large-scale video generation. However, the literature remains fragmented across architectures, functional roles, and embodied application domains. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive review of world models from a robot-learning perspective. We examine how world models are coupled with robot policies, how they serve as learned simulators for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and how robotic video world models have progressed from imagination-based generation to controllable, structured, and foundation-scale formulations. We further connect these ideas to navigation and autonomous driving, and summarize representative datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation protocols. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the rapidly growing literature on world models for robot learning, clarifies key paradigms and applications, and highlights major challenges and future directions for predictive modeling in embodied agents. To facilitate continued access to newly emerging works, benchmarks, and resources, we will maintain and regularly update the accompanying GitHub repository alongside this survey.

preprint2025arXiv

Improving Few-Shot Change Detection Visual Question Answering via Decision-Ambiguity-guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Change detection visual question answering (CDVQA) requires answering text queries by reasoning about semantic changes in bi-temporal remote sensing images. A straightforward approach is to boost CDVQA performance with generic vision-language models via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Despite recent progress, we observe that a significant portion of failures do not stem from clearly incorrect predictions, but from decision ambiguity, where the model assigns similar confidence to the correct answer and strong distractors. To formalize this challenge, we define Decision-Ambiguous Samples (DAS) as instances with a small probability margin between the ground-truth answer and the most competitive alternative. We argue that explicitly optimizing DAS is crucial for improving the discriminability and robustness of CDVQA models. To this end, we propose DARFT, a Decision-Ambiguity-guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning framework that first mines DAS using an SFT-trained reference policy and then applies group-relative policy optimization on the mined subset. By leveraging multi-sample decoding and intra-group relative advantages, DARFT suppresses strong distractors and sharpens decision boundaries without additional supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent gains over SFT baselines, particularly under few-shot settings.

preprint2022arXiv

AI-enabled Automatic Multimodal Fusion of Cone-Beam CT and Intraoral Scans for Intelligent 3D Tooth-Bone Reconstruction and Clinical Applications

A critical step in virtual dental treatment planning is to accurately delineate all tooth-bone structures from CBCT with high fidelity and accurate anatomical information. Previous studies have established several methods for CBCT segmentation using deep learning. However, the inherent resolution discrepancy of CBCT and the loss of occlusal and dentition information largely limited its clinical applicability. Here, we present a Deep Dental Multimodal Analysis (DDMA) framework consisting of a CBCT segmentation model, an intraoral scan (IOS) segmentation model (the most accurate digital dental model), and a fusion model to generate 3D fused crown-root-bone structures with high fidelity and accurate occlusal and dentition information. Our model was trained with a large-scale dataset with 503 CBCT and 28,559 IOS meshes manually annotated by experienced human experts. For CBCT segmentation, we use a five-fold cross validation test, each with 50 CBCT, and our model achieves an average Dice coefficient and IoU of 93.99% and 88.68%, respectively, significantly outperforming the baselines. For IOS segmentations, our model achieves an mIoU of 93.07% and 95.70% on the maxillary and mandible on a test set of 200 IOS meshes, which are 1.77% and 3.52% higher than the state-of-art method. Our DDMA framework takes about 20 to 25 minutes to generate the fused 3D mesh model following the sequential processing order, compared to over 5 hours by human experts. Notably, our framework has been incorporated into a software by a clear aligner manufacturer, and real-world clinical cases demonstrate that our model can visualize crown-root-bone structures during the entire orthodontic treatment and can predict risks like dehiscence and fenestration. These findings demonstrate the potential of multi-modal deep learning to improve the quality of digital dental models and help dentists make better clinical decisions.

preprint2022arXiv

ARID: A New Dataset for Recognizing Action in the Dark

The task of action recognition in dark videos is useful in various scenarios, e.g., night surveillance and self-driving at night. Though progress has been made in the action recognition task for videos in normal illumination, few have studied action recognition in the dark. This is partly due to the lack of sufficient datasets for such a task. In this paper, we explored the task of action recognition in dark videos. We bridge the gap of the lack of data for this task by collecting a new dataset: the Action Recognition in the Dark (ARID) dataset. It consists of over 3,780 video clips with 11 action categories. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first dataset focused on human actions in dark videos. To gain further understandings of our ARID dataset, we analyze the ARID dataset in detail and exhibited its necessity over synthetic dark videos. Additionally, we benchmarked the performance of several current action recognition models on our dataset and explored potential methods for increasing their performances. Our results show that current action recognition models and frame enhancement methods may not be effective solutions for the task of action recognition in dark videos.

preprint2022arXiv

Calibrating Class Weights with Multi-Modal Information for Partial Video Domain Adaptation

Assuming the source label space subsumes the target one, Partial Video Domain Adaptation (PVDA) is a more general and practical scenario for cross-domain video classification problems. The key challenge of PVDA is to mitigate the negative transfer caused by the source-only outlier classes. To tackle this challenge, a crucial step is to aggregate target predictions to assign class weights by up-weighing target classes and down-weighing outlier classes. However, the incorrect predictions of class weights can mislead the network and lead to negative transfer. Previous works improve the class weight accuracy by utilizing temporal features and attention mechanisms, but these methods may fall short when trying to generate accurate class weight when domain shifts are significant, as in most real-world scenarios. To deal with these challenges, we propose the Multi-modality Cluster-calibrated partial Adversarial Network (MCAN). MCAN enhances video feature extraction with multi-modal features from multiple temporal scales to form more robust overall features. It utilizes a novel class weight calibration method to alleviate the negative transfer caused by incorrect class weights. The calibration method tries to identify and weigh correct and incorrect predictions using distributional information implied by unsupervised clustering. Extensive experiments are conducted on prevailing PVDA benchmarks, and the proposed MCAN achieves significant improvements when compared to state-of-the-art PVDA methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Divide to Adapt: Mitigating Confirmation Bias for Domain Adaptation of Black-Box Predictors

Domain Adaptation of Black-box Predictors (DABP) aims to learn a model on an unlabeled target domain supervised by a black-box predictor trained on a source domain. It does not require access to both the source-domain data and the predictor parameters, thus addressing the data privacy and portability issues of standard domain adaptation. Existing DABP approaches mostly rely on model distillation from the black-box predictor, \emph{i.e.}, training the model with its noisy target-domain predictions, which however inevitably introduces the confirmation bias accumulated from the prediction noises. To mitigate such bias, we propose a new method, named BETA, to incorporate knowledge distillation and noisy label learning into one coherent framework. This is enabled by a new divide-to-adapt strategy. BETA divides the target domain into an easy-to-adapt subdomain with less noise and a hard-to-adapt subdomain. Then it deploys mutually-teaching twin networks to filter the predictor errors for each other and improve them progressively, from the easy to hard subdomains. As such, BETA effectively purifies the noisy labels and reduces error accumulation. We theoretically show that the target error of BETA is minimized by decreasing the noise ratio of the subdomains. Extensive experiments demonstrate BETA outperforms existing methods on all DABP benchmarks, and is even comparable with the standard domain adaptation methods that use the source-domain data.

preprint2022arXiv

EfficientFi: Towards Large-Scale Lightweight WiFi Sensing via CSI Compression

WiFi technology has been applied to various places due to the increasing requirement of high-speed Internet access. Recently, besides network services, WiFi sensing is appealing in smart homes since it is device-free, cost-effective and privacy-preserving. Though numerous WiFi sensing methods have been developed, most of them only consider single smart home scenario. Without the connection of powerful cloud server and massive users, large-scale WiFi sensing is still difficult. In this paper, we firstly analyze and summarize these obstacles, and propose an efficient large-scale WiFi sensing framework, namely EfficientFi. The EfficientFi works with edge computing at WiFi APs and cloud computing at center servers. It consists of a novel deep neural network that can compress fine-grained WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) at edge, restore CSI at cloud, and perform sensing tasks simultaneously. A quantized auto-encoder and a joint classifier are designed to achieve these goals in an end-to-end fashion. To the best of our knowledge, the EfficientFi is the first IoT-cloud-enabled WiFi sensing framework that significantly reduces communication overhead while realizing sensing tasks accurately. We utilized human activity recognition and identification via WiFi sensing as two case studies, and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the EfficientFi. The results show that it compresses CSI data from 1.368Mb/s to 0.768Kb/s with extremely low error of data reconstruction and achieves over 98% accuracy for human activity recognition.

preprint2022arXiv

GaitFi: Robust Device-Free Human Identification via WiFi and Vision Multimodal Learning

As an important biomarker for human identification, human gait can be collected at a distance by passive sensors without subject cooperation, which plays an essential role in crime prevention, security detection and other human identification applications. At present, most research works are based on cameras and computer vision techniques to perform gait recognition. However, vision-based methods are not reliable when confronting poor illuminations, leading to degrading performances. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal gait recognition method, namely GaitFi, which leverages WiFi signals and videos for human identification. In GaitFi, Channel State Information (CSI) that reflects the multi-path propagation of WiFi is collected to capture human gaits, while videos are captured by cameras. To learn robust gait information, we propose a Lightweight Residual Convolution Network (LRCN) as the backbone network, and further propose the two-stream GaitFi by integrating WiFi and vision features for the gait retrieval task. The GaitFi is trained by the triplet loss and classification loss on different levels of features. Extensive experiments are conducted in the real world, which demonstrates that the GaitFi outperforms state-of-the-art gait recognition methods based on single WiFi or camera, achieving 94.2% for human identification tasks of 12 subjects.

preprint2022arXiv

MetaFi: Device-Free Pose Estimation via Commodity WiFi for Metaverse Avatar Simulation

Avatar refers to a representative of a physical user in the virtual world that can engage in different activities and interact with other objects in metaverse. Simulating the avatar requires accurate human pose estimation. Though camera-based solutions yield remarkable performance, they encounter the privacy issue and degraded performance caused by varying illumination, especially in smart home. In this paper, we propose a WiFi-based IoT-enabled human pose estimation scheme for metaverse avatar simulation, namely MetaFi. Specifically, a deep neural network is designed with customized convolutional layers and residual blocks to map the channel state information to human pose landmarks. It is enforced to learn the annotations from the accurate computer vision model, thus achieving cross-modal supervision. WiFi is ubiquitous and robust to illumination, making it a feasible solution for avatar applications in smart home. The experiments are conducted in the real world, and the results show that the MetaFi achieves very high performance with a PCK@50 of 95.23%.

preprint2022arXiv

Reliable Label Correction is a Good Booster When Learning with Extremely Noisy Labels

Learning with noisy labels has aroused much research interest since data annotations, especially for large-scale datasets, may be inevitably imperfect. Recent approaches resort to a semi-supervised learning problem by dividing training samples into clean and noisy sets. This paradigm, however, is prone to significant degeneration under heavy label noise, as the number of clean samples is too small for conventional methods to behave well. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, termed as LC-Booster, to explicitly tackle learning under extreme noise. The core idea of LC-Booster is to incorporate label correction into the sample selection, so that more purified samples, through the reliable label correction, can be utilized for training, thereby alleviating the confirmation bias. Experiments show that LC-Booster advances state-of-the-art results on several noisy-label benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Clothing1M and WebVision. Remarkably, under the extreme 90\% noise ratio, LC-Booster achieves 92.9\% and 48.4\% accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

preprint2022arXiv

Shuffle Augmentation of Features from Unlabeled Data for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), a branch of transfer learning where labels for target samples are unavailable, has been widely researched and developed in recent years with the help of adversarially trained models. Although existing UDA algorithms are able to guide neural networks to extract transferable and discriminative features, classifiers are merely trained under the supervision of labeled source data. Given the inevitable discrepancy between source and target domains, the classifiers can hardly be aware of the target classification boundaries. In this paper, Shuffle Augmentation of Features (SAF), a novel UDA framework, is proposed to address the problem by providing the classifier with supervisory signals from target feature representations. SAF learns from the target samples, adaptively distills class-aware target features, and implicitly guides the classifier to find comprehensive class borders. Demonstrated by extensive experiments, the SAF module can be integrated into any existing adversarial UDA models to achieve performance improvements.

preprint2022arXiv

Source-free Video Domain Adaptation by Learning Temporal Consistency for Action Recognition

Video-based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (VUDA) methods improve the robustness of video models, enabling them to be applied to action recognition tasks across different environments. However, these methods require constant access to source data during the adaptation process. Yet in many real-world applications, subjects and scenes in the source video domain should be irrelevant to those in the target video domain. With the increasing emphasis on data privacy, such methods that require source data access would raise serious privacy issues. Therefore, to cope with such concern, a more practical domain adaptation scenario is formulated as the Source-Free Video-based Domain Adaptation (SFVDA). Though there are a few methods for Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) on image data, these methods yield degenerating performance in SFVDA due to the multi-modality nature of videos, with the existence of additional temporal features. In this paper, we propose a novel Attentive Temporal Consistent Network (ATCoN) to address SFVDA by learning temporal consistency, guaranteed by two novel consistency objectives, namely feature consistency and source prediction consistency, performed across local temporal features. ATCoN further constructs effective overall temporal features by attending to local temporal features based on prediction confidence. Empirical results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of ATCoN across various cross-domain action recognition benchmarks.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Realistic Visual Dubbing with Heterogeneous Sources

The task of few-shot visual dubbing focuses on synchronizing the lip movements with arbitrary speech input for any talking head video. Albeit moderate improvements in current approaches, they commonly require high-quality homologous data sources of videos and audios, thus causing the failure to leverage heterogeneous data sufficiently. In practice, it may be intractable to collect the perfect homologous data in some cases, for example, audio-corrupted or picture-blurry videos. To explore this kind of data and support high-fidelity few-shot visual dubbing, in this paper, we novelly propose a simple yet efficient two-stage framework with a higher flexibility of mining heterogeneous data. Specifically, our two-stage paradigm employs facial landmarks as intermediate prior of latent representations and disentangles the lip movements prediction from the core task of realistic talking head generation. By this means, our method makes it possible to independently utilize the training corpus for two-stage sub-networks using more available heterogeneous data easily acquired. Besides, thanks to the disentanglement, our framework allows a further fine-tuning for a given talking head, thereby leading to better speaker-identity preserving in the final synthesized results. Moreover, the proposed method can also transfer appearance features from others to the target speaker. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in generating highly realistic videos synchronized with the speech over the state-of-the-art.

preprint2020arXiv

Effective Action Recognition with Embedded Key Point Shifts

Temporal feature extraction is an essential technique in video-based action recognition. Key points have been utilized in skeleton-based action recognition methods but they require costly key point annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal feature extraction module, named Key Point Shifts Embedding Module ($KPSEM$), to adaptively extract channel-wise key point shifts across video frames without key point annotation for temporal feature extraction. Key points are adaptively extracted as feature points with maximum feature values at split regions, while key point shifts are the spatial displacements of corresponding key points. The key point shifts are encoded as the overall temporal features via linear embedding layers in a multi-set manner. Our method achieves competitive performance through embedding key point shifts with trivial computational cost, achieving the state-of-the-art performance of 82.05% on Mini-Kinetics and competitive performance on UCF101, Something-Something-v1, and HMDB51 datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Exploiting Inter-Frame Regional Correlation for Efficient Action Recognition

Temporal feature extraction is an important issue in video-based action recognition. Optical flow is a popular method to extract temporal feature, which produces excellent performance thanks to its capacity of capturing pixel-level correlation information between consecutive frames. However, such a pixel-level correlation is extracted at the cost of high computational complexity and large storage resource. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal feature extraction method, named Attentive Correlated Temporal Feature (ACTF), by exploring inter-frame correlation within a certain region. The proposed ACTF exploits both bilinear and linear correlation between successive frames on the regional level. Our method has the advantage of achieving performance comparable to or better than optical flow-based methods while avoiding the introduction of optical flow. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performances of 96.3% on UCF101 and 76.3% on HMDB51 benchmark datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Kervolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have enabled the state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks. However, little effort has been devoted to establishing convolution in non-linear space. Existing works mainly leverage on the activation layers, which can only provide point-wise non-linearity. To solve this problem, a new operation, kervolution (kernel convolution), is introduced to approximate complex behaviors of human perception systems leveraging on the kernel trick. It generalizes convolution, enhances the model capacity, and captures higher order interactions of features, via patch-wise kernel functions, but without introducing additional parameters. Extensive experiments show that kervolutional neural networks (KNN) achieve higher accuracy and faster convergence than baseline CNN.

preprint2020arXiv

PNL: Efficient Long-Range Dependencies Extraction with Pyramid Non-Local Module for Action Recognition

Long-range spatiotemporal dependencies capturing plays an essential role in improving video features for action recognition. The non-local block inspired by the non-local means is designed to address this challenge and have shown excellent performance. However, the non-local block brings significant increase in computation cost to the original network. It also lacks the ability to model regional correlation in videos. To address the above limitations, we propose Pyramid Non-Local (PNL) module, which extends the non-local block by incorporating regional correlation at multiple scales through a pyramid structured module. This extension upscales the effectiveness of non-local operation by attending to the interaction between different regions. Empirical results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of our PNL module, which achieves state-of-the-art performance of 83.09% on the Mini-Kinetics dataset, with decreased computation cost compared to the non-local block.

preprint2020arXiv

Suppressing Uncertainties for Large-Scale Facial Expression Recognition

Annotating a qualitative large-scale facial expression dataset is extremely difficult due to the uncertainties caused by ambiguous facial expressions, low-quality facial images, and the subjectiveness of annotators. These uncertainties lead to a key challenge of large-scale Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in deep learning era. To address this problem, this paper proposes a simple yet efficient Self-Cure Network (SCN) which suppresses the uncertainties efficiently and prevents deep networks from over-fitting uncertain facial images. Specifically, SCN suppresses the uncertainty from two different aspects: 1) a self-attention mechanism over mini-batch to weight each training sample with a ranking regularization, and 2) a careful relabeling mechanism to modify the labels of these samples in the lowest-ranked group. Experiments on synthetic FER datasets and our collected WebEmotion dataset validate the effectiveness of our method. Results on public benchmarks demonstrate that our SCN outperforms current state-of-the-art methods with \textbf{88.14}\% on RAF-DB, \textbf{60.23}\% on AffectNet, and \textbf{89.35}\% on FERPlus. The code will be available at \href{https://github.com/kaiwang960112/Self-Cure-Network}{https://github.com/kaiwang960112/Self-Cure-Network}.

preprint2020arXiv

Towards Stable and Comprehensive Domain Alignment: Max-Margin Domain-Adversarial Training

Domain adaptation tackles the problem of transferring knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a label-scarce or even unlabeled target domain. Recently domain-adversarial training (DAT) has shown promising capacity to learn a domain-invariant feature space by reversing the gradient propagation of a domain classifier. However, DAT is still vulnerable in several aspects including (1) training instability due to the overwhelming discriminative ability of the domain classifier in adversarial training, (2) restrictive feature-level alignment, and (3) lack of interpretability or systematic explanation of the learned feature space. In this paper, we propose a novel Max-margin Domain-Adversarial Training (MDAT) by designing an Adversarial Reconstruction Network (ARN). The proposed MDAT stabilizes the gradient reversing in ARN by replacing the domain classifier with a reconstruction network, and in this manner ARN conducts both feature-level and pixel-level domain alignment without involving extra network structures. Furthermore, ARN demonstrates strong robustness to a wide range of hyper-parameters settings, greatly alleviating the task of model selection. Extensive empirical results validate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art domain alignment methods. Moreover, reconstructing adapted features reveals the domain-invariant feature space which conforms with our intuition.