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Jiezhang Cao

Jiezhang Cao contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

EchoPrune: Interpreting Redundancy as Temporal Echoes for Efficient VideoLLMs

Long-form video understanding remains challenging for Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs), as the dense frame sampling introduces massive visual tokens while sparse sampling risks missing critical temporal evidence and leading to LLM hallucination. Existing training-free token reduction methods either treat videos equally as static images or rely on segment-level merging heuristics, which weaken fine-grained spatiotemporal modeling and introduce additional overhead. In this paper, we propose EchoPrune, a lightweight and training-free token pruning method that improves temporal resolution under a fixed LLM-side visual token budget. Our core idea is to interpret redundant video tokens as temporal echoes: if a token is well reconstructed from the previous frame, it is merely a temporally redundant echo; otherwise, it may capture new events, motion, or query-relevant visual evidence. Based on this insight, EchoPrune scores visual tokens by (i) query-guided crossmodal relevance and (ii) temporal reconstruction error, measured by correspondence matching and echo matching across consecutive frames. The selected tokens preserve task-relevant cues and temporal novelty while suppressing predictable redundancy, allowing VideoLLMs to observe more frames without increasing the decoding budget. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-OV, Qwen2.5VL, and Qwen3VL across six video understanding benchmarks show that EchoPrune enables VideoLLMs to process up to 20x frames under the same token budget, yielding improved performance (+8.6%) and inference speedup (5.6x for prefilling) on Qwen2.5VL-7B.

preprint2022arXiv

Reference-based Image Super-Resolution with Deformable Attention Transformer

Reference-based image super-resolution (RefSR) aims to exploit auxiliary reference (Ref) images to super-resolve low-resolution (LR) images. Recently, RefSR has been attracting great attention as it provides an alternative way to surpass single image SR. However, addressing the RefSR problem has two critical challenges: (i) It is difficult to match the correspondence between LR and Ref images when they are significantly different; (ii) How to transfer the relevant texture from Ref images to compensate the details for LR images is very challenging. To address these issues of RefSR, this paper proposes a deformable attention Transformer, namely DATSR, with multiple scales, each of which consists of a texture feature encoder (TFE) module, a reference-based deformable attention (RDA) module and a residual feature aggregation (RFA) module. Specifically, TFE first extracts image transformation (e.g., brightness) insensitive features for LR and Ref images, RDA then can exploit multiple relevant textures to compensate more information for LR features, and RFA lastly aggregates LR features and relevant textures to get a more visually pleasant result. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DATSR achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets quantitatively and qualitatively.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Interpretable Video Super-Resolution via Alternating Optimization

In this paper, we study a practical space-time video super-resolution (STVSR) problem which aims at generating a high-framerate high-resolution sharp video from a low-framerate low-resolution blurry video. Such problem often occurs when recording a fast dynamic event with a low-framerate and low-resolution camera, and the captured video would suffer from three typical issues: i) motion blur occurs due to object/camera motions during exposure time; ii) motion aliasing is unavoidable when the event temporal frequency exceeds the Nyquist limit of temporal sampling; iii) high-frequency details are lost because of the low spatial sampling rate. These issues can be alleviated by a cascade of three separate sub-tasks, including video deblurring, frame interpolation, and super-resolution, which, however, would fail to capture the spatial and temporal correlations among video sequences. To address this, we propose an interpretable STVSR framework by leveraging both model-based and learning-based methods. Specifically, we formulate STVSR as a joint video deblurring, frame interpolation, and super-resolution problem, and solve it as two sub-problems in an alternate way. For the first sub-problem, we derive an interpretable analytical solution and use it as a Fourier data transform layer. Then, we propose a recurrent video enhancement layer for the second sub-problem to further recover high-frequency details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality.

preprint2022arXiv

VRT: A Video Restoration Transformer

Video restoration (e.g., video super-resolution) aims to restore high-quality frames from low-quality frames. Different from single image restoration, video restoration generally requires to utilize temporal information from multiple adjacent but usually misaligned video frames. Existing deep methods generally tackle with this by exploiting a sliding window strategy or a recurrent architecture, which either is restricted by frame-by-frame restoration or lacks long-range modelling ability. In this paper, we propose a Video Restoration Transformer (VRT) with parallel frame prediction and long-range temporal dependency modelling abilities. More specifically, VRT is composed of multiple scales, each of which consists of two kinds of modules: temporal mutual self attention (TMSA) and parallel warping. TMSA divides the video into small clips, on which mutual attention is applied for joint motion estimation, feature alignment and feature fusion, while self attention is used for feature extraction. To enable cross-clip interactions, the video sequence is shifted for every other layer. Besides, parallel warping is used to further fuse information from neighboring frames by parallel feature warping. Experimental results on five tasks, including video super-resolution, video deblurring, video denoising, video frame interpolation and space-time video super-resolution, demonstrate that VRT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by large margins ($\textbf{up to 2.16dB}$) on fourteen benchmark datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

A Thorough Comparison Study on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses for Common Thorax Disease Classification in Chest X-rays

Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have made great progress on automated diagnosis with chest X-rays images. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which may cause misdiagnoses to patients when applying the DNN based methods in disease detection. Recently, there is few comprehensive studies exploring the influence of attack and defense methods on disease detection, especially for the multi-label classification problem. In this paper, we aim to review various adversarial attack and defense methods on chest X-rays. First, the motivations and the mathematical representations of attack and defense methods are introduced in details. Second, we evaluate the influence of several state-of-the-art attack and defense methods for common thorax disease classification in chest X-rays. We found that the attack and defense methods have poor performance with excessive iterations and large perturbations. To address this, we propose a new defense method that is robust to different degrees of perturbations. This study could provide new insights into methodological development for the community.

preprint2020arXiv

Closed-loop Matters: Dual Regression Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution

Deep neural networks have exhibited promising performance in image super-resolution (SR) by learning a nonlinear mapping function from low-resolution (LR) images to high-resolution (HR) images. However, there are two underlying limitations to existing SR methods. First, learning the mapping function from LR to HR images is typically an ill-posed problem, because there exist infinite HR images that can be downsampled to the same LR image. As a result, the space of the possible functions can be extremely large, which makes it hard to find a good solution. Second, the paired LR-HR data may be unavailable in real-world applications and the underlying degradation method is often unknown. For such a more general case, existing SR models often incur the adaptation problem and yield poor performance. To address the above issues, we propose a dual regression scheme by introducing an additional constraint on LR data to reduce the space of the possible functions. Specifically, besides the mapping from LR to HR images, we learn an additional dual regression mapping estimates the down-sampling kernel and reconstruct LR images, which forms a closed-loop to provide additional supervision. More critically, since the dual regression process does not depend on HR images, we can directly learn from LR images. In this sense, we can easily adapt SR models to real-world data, e.g., raw video frames from YouTube. Extensive experiments with paired training data and unpaired real-world data demonstrate our superiority over existing methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Generative Low-bitwidth Data Free Quantization

Neural network quantization is an effective way to compress deep models and improve their execution latency and energy efficiency, so that they can be deployed on mobile or embedded devices. Existing quantization methods require original data for calibration or fine-tuning to get better performance. However, in many real-world scenarios, the data may not be available due to confidential or private issues, thereby making existing quantization methods not applicable. Moreover, due to the absence of original data, the recently developed generative adversarial networks (GANs) cannot be applied to generate data. Although the full-precision model may contain rich data information, such information alone is hard to exploit for recovering the original data or generating new meaningful data. In this paper, we investigate a simple-yet-effective method called Generative Low-bitwidth Data Free Quantization (GDFQ) to remove the data dependence burden. Specifically, we propose a knowledge matching generator to produce meaningful fake data by exploiting classification boundary knowledge and distribution information in the pre-trained model. With the help of generated data, we can quantize a model by learning knowledge from the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments on three data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. More critically, our method achieves much higher accuracy on 4-bit quantization than the existing data free quantization method. Code is available at https://github.com/xushoukai/GDFQ.

preprint2020arXiv

Improving Generative Adversarial Networks with Local Coordinate Coding

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown remarkable success in generating realistic data from some predefined prior distribution (e.g., Gaussian noises). However, such prior distribution is often independent of real data and thus may lose semantic information (e.g., geometric structure or content in images) of data. In practice, the semantic information might be represented by some latent distribution learned from data. However, such latent distribution may incur difficulties in data sampling for GANs. In this paper, rather than sampling from the predefined prior distribution, we propose an LCCGAN model with local coordinate coding (LCC) to improve the performance of generating data. First, we propose an LCC sampling method in LCCGAN to sample meaningful points from the latent manifold. With the LCC sampling method, we can exploit the local information on the latent manifold and thus produce new data with promising quality. Second, we propose an improved version, namely LCCGAN++, by introducing a higher-order term in the generator approximation. This term is able to achieve better approximation and thus further improve the performance. More critically, we derive the generalization bound for both LCCGAN and LCCGAN++ and prove that a low-dimensional input is sufficient to achieve good generalization performance. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing GANs.

preprint2020arXiv

Joint Wasserstein Distribution Matching

Joint distribution matching (JDM) problem, which aims to learn bidirectional mappings to match joint distributions of two domains, occurs in many machine learning and computer vision applications. This problem, however, is very difficult due to two critical challenges: (i) it is often difficult to exploit sufficient information from the joint distribution to conduct the matching; (ii) this problem is hard to formulate and optimize. In this paper, relying on optimal transport theory, we propose to address JDM problem by minimizing the Wasserstein distance of the joint distributions in two domains. However, the resultant optimization problem is still intractable. We then propose an important theorem to reduce the intractable problem into a simple optimization problem, and develop a novel method (called Joint Wasserstein Distribution Matching (JWDM)) to solve it. In the experiments, we apply our method to unsupervised image translation and cross-domain video synthesis. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate the superior performance of our method over several state-of-the-arts.