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Qianru Sun

Qianru Sun contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

13 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Dual-Diffusional Generative Fashion Recommendation

Personalized generative recommender systems have emerged as a promising solution for fashion recommendation. However, existing methods primarily rely on implicit visual embeddings from historical interactions, which often contain preference-irrelevant information and result in insufficient user behavior modeling. Moreover, these models typically generate only item images, providing limited interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose DualFashion, a Dual-Diffusional Generative Fashion Recommendation Architecture that jointly models image and text modalities for personalized and explainable recommendation. DualFashion adopts a dual-diffusion Transformer with image and text branches, where structured attribute-level captions and visual outfit information are jointly used as conditioning signals to model user behavior. The proposed architecture produces both fashion item images and textual descriptions, ensuring visual compatibility while providing explicit semantic interpretability. Furthermore, we introduce a text-augmented fine-tuning strategy that enhances generation diversity and enables effective cross-modal knowledge transfer without incurring heavy computational costs. Extensive experiments on iFashion and Polyvore-U across Personalized Fill-in-the-Blank and Generative Outfit Recommendation tasks demonstrate that DualFashion achieves strong performance in behavior modeling, interpretability, and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/LinkMingzhe/DualFashion.

preprint2026arXiv

Generalized Logit Adjustment: Calibrating Fine-tuned Models by Removing Label Bias in Foundation Models

Foundation models like CLIP allow zero-shot transfer on various tasks without additional training data. Yet, the zero-shot performance is less competitive than a fully supervised one. Thus, to enhance the performance, fine-tuning and ensembling are also commonly adopted to better fit the downstream tasks. However, we argue that such prior work has overlooked the inherent biases in foundation models. Due to the highly imbalanced Web-scale training set, these foundation models are inevitably skewed toward frequent semantics, and thus the subsequent fine-tuning or ensembling is still biased. In this study, we systematically examine the biases in foundation models and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed Generalized Logit Adjustment (GLA) method. Note that bias estimation in foundation models is challenging, as most pre-train data cannot be explicitly accessed like in traditional long-tailed classification tasks. To this end, GLA has an optimization-based bias estimation approach for debiasing foundation models. As our work resolves a fundamental flaw in the pre-training, the proposed GLA demonstrates significant improvements across a diverse range of tasks: it achieves 1.5 pp accuracy gains on ImageNet, an large average improvement (1.4-4.6 pp) on 11 few-shot datasets, 2.4 pp gains on long-tailed classification. Codes are in https://github.com/BeierZhu/GLA.

preprint2023arXiv

RMM: Reinforced Memory Management for Class-Incremental Learning

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) [40] trains classifiers under a strict memory budget: in each incremental phase, learning is done for new data, most of which is abandoned to free space for the next phase. The preserved data are exemplars used for replaying. However, existing methods use a static and ad hoc strategy for memory allocation, which is often sub-optimal. In this work, we propose a dynamic memory management strategy that is optimized for the incremental phases and different object classes. We call our method reinforced memory management (RMM), leveraging reinforcement learning. RMM training is not naturally compatible with CIL as the past, and future data are strictly non-accessible during the incremental phases. We solve this by training the policy function of RMM on pseudo CIL tasks, e.g., the tasks built on the data of the 0-th phase, and then applying it to target tasks. RMM propagates two levels of actions: Level-1 determines how to split the memory between old and new classes, and Level-2 allocates memory for each specific class. In essence, it is an optimizable and general method for memory management that can be used in any replaying-based CIL method. For evaluation, we plug RMM into two top-performing baselines (LUCIR+AANets and POD+AANets [30]) and conduct experiments on three benchmarks (CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset, and ImageNet-Full). Our results show clear improvements, e.g., boosting POD+AANets by 3.6%, 4.4%, and 1.9% in the 25-Phase settings of the above benchmarks, respectively.

preprint2022arXiv

Class Re-Activation Maps for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Extracting class activation maps (CAM) is arguably the most standard step of generating pseudo masks for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Yet, we find that the crux of the unsatisfactory pseudo masks is the binary cross-entropy loss (BCE) widely used in CAM. Specifically, due to the sum-over-class pooling nature of BCE, each pixel in CAM may be responsive to multiple classes co-occurring in the same receptive field. As a result, given a class, its hot CAM pixels may wrongly invade the area belonging to other classes, or the non-hot ones may be actually a part of the class. To this end, we introduce an embarrassingly simple yet surprisingly effective method: Reactivating the converged CAM with BCE by using softmax cross-entropy loss (SCE), dubbed \textbf{ReCAM}. Given an image, we use CAM to extract the feature pixels of each single class, and use them with the class label to learn another fully-connected layer (after the backbone) with SCE. Once converged, we extract ReCAM in the same way as in CAM. Thanks to the contrastive nature of SCE, the pixel response is disentangled into different classes and hence less mask ambiguity is expected. The evaluation on both PASCAL VOC and MS~COCO shows that ReCAM not only generates high-quality masks, but also supports plug-and-play in any CAM variant with little overhead.

preprint2022arXiv

Revisiting Local Descriptor for Improved Few-Shot Classification

Few-shot classification studies the problem of quickly adapting a deep learner to understanding novel classes based on few support images. In this context, recent research efforts have been aimed at designing more and more complex classifiers that measure similarities between query and support images, but left the importance of feature embeddings seldom explored. We show that the reliance on sophisticated classifiers is not necessary, and a simple classifier applied directly to improved feature embeddings can instead outperform most of the leading methods in the literature. To this end, we present a new method named \textbf{DCAP} for few-shot classification, in which we investigate how one can improve the quality of embeddings by leveraging \textbf{D}ense \textbf{C}lassification and \textbf{A}ttentive \textbf{P}ooling. Specifically, we propose to train a learner on base classes with abundant samples to solve dense classification problem first and then meta-train the learner on a bunch of randomly sampled few-shot tasks to adapt it to few-shot scenario or the test time scenario. During meta-training, we suggest to pool feature maps by applying attentive pooling instead of the widely used global average pooling (GAP) to prepare embeddings for few-shot classification. Attentive pooling learns to reweight local descriptors, explaining what the learner is looking for as evidence for decision making. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show the proposed method to be superior in multiple few-shot settings while being simpler and more explainable. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/Ukeyboard/dcap/}.

preprint2021arXiv

Adaptive Aggregation Networks for Class-Incremental Learning

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to learn a classification model with the number of classes increasing phase-by-phase. An inherent problem in CIL is the stability-plasticity dilemma between the learning of old and new classes, i.e., high-plasticity models easily forget old classes, but high-stability models are weak to learn new classes. We alleviate this issue by proposing a novel network architecture called Adaptive Aggregation Networks (AANets), in which we explicitly build two types of residual blocks at each residual level (taking ResNet as the baseline architecture): a stable block and a plastic block. We aggregate the output feature maps from these two blocks and then feed the results to the next-level blocks. We adapt the aggregation weights in order to balance these two types of blocks, i.e., to balance stability and plasticity, dynamically. We conduct extensive experiments on three CIL benchmarks: CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset, and ImageNet, and show that many existing CIL methods can be straightforwardly incorporated into the architecture of AANets to boost their performances.

preprint2021arXiv

Counterfactual Zero-Shot and Open-Set Visual Recognition

We present a novel counterfactual framework for both Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and Open-Set Recognition (OSR), whose common challenge is generalizing to the unseen-classes by only training on the seen-classes. Our idea stems from the observation that the generated samples for unseen-classes are often out of the true distribution, which causes severe recognition rate imbalance between the seen-class (high) and unseen-class (low). We show that the key reason is that the generation is not Counterfactual Faithful, and thus we propose a faithful one, whose generation is from the sample-specific counterfactual question: What would the sample look like, if we set its class attribute to a certain class, while keeping its sample attribute unchanged? Thanks to the faithfulness, we can apply the Consistency Rule to perform unseen/seen binary classification, by asking: Would its counterfactual still look like itself? If ``yes'', the sample is from a certain class, and ``no'' otherwise. Through extensive experiments on ZSL and OSR, we demonstrate that our framework effectively mitigates the seen/unseen imbalance and hence significantly improves the overall performance. Note that this framework is orthogonal to existing methods, thus, it can serve as a new baseline to evaluate how ZSL/OSR models generalize. Codes are available at https://github.com/yue-zhongqi/gcm-cf.

preprint2021arXiv

Deconfounded Visual Grounding

We focus on the confounding bias between language and location in the visual grounding pipeline, where we find that the bias is the major visual reasoning bottleneck. For example, the grounding process is usually a trivial language-location association without visual reasoning, e.g., grounding any language query containing sheep to the nearly central regions, due to that most queries about sheep have ground-truth locations at the image center. First, we frame the visual grounding pipeline into a causal graph, which shows the causalities among image, query, target location and underlying confounder. Through the causal graph, we know how to break the grounding bottleneck: deconfounded visual grounding. Second, to tackle the challenge that the confounder is unobserved in general, we propose a confounder-agnostic approach called: Referring Expression Deconfounder (RED), to remove the confounding bias. Third, we implement RED as a simple language attention, which can be applied in any grounding method. On popular benchmarks, RED improves various state-of-the-art grounding methods by a significant margin. Code will soon be available at: https://github.com/JianqiangH/Deconfounded_VG.

preprint2020arXiv

An Ensemble of Epoch-wise Empirical Bayes for Few-shot Learning

Few-shot learning aims to train efficient predictive models with a few examples. The lack of training data leads to poor models that perform high-variance or low-confidence predictions. In this paper, we propose to meta-learn the ensemble of epoch-wise empirical Bayes models (E3BM) to achieve robust predictions. "Epoch-wise" means that each training epoch has a Bayes model whose parameters are specifically learned and deployed. "Empirical" means that the hyperparameters, e.g., used for learning and ensembling the epoch-wise models, are generated by hyperprior learners conditional on task-specific data. We introduce four kinds of hyperprior learners by considering inductive vs. transductive, and epoch-dependent vs. epoch-independent, in the paradigm of meta-learning. We conduct extensive experiments for five-class few-shot tasks on three challenging benchmarks: miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, and FC100, and achieve top performance using the epoch-dependent transductive hyperprior learner, which captures the richest information. Our ablation study shows that both "epoch-wise ensemble" and "empirical" encourage high efficiency and robustness in the model performance.

preprint2020arXiv

Feature Pyramid Transformer

Feature interactions across space and scales underpin modern visual recognition systems because they introduce beneficial visual contexts. Conventionally, spatial contexts are passively hidden in the CNN's increasing receptive fields or actively encoded by non-local convolution. Yet, the non-local spatial interactions are not across scales, and thus they fail to capture the non-local contexts of objects (or parts) residing in different scales. To this end, we propose a fully active feature interaction across both space and scales, called Feature Pyramid Transformer (FPT). It transforms any feature pyramid into another feature pyramid of the same size but with richer contexts, by using three specially designed transformers in self-level, top-down, and bottom-up interaction fashion. FPT serves as a generic visual backbone with fair computational overhead. We conduct extensive experiments in both instance-level (i.e., object detection and instance segmentation) and pixel-level segmentation tasks, using various backbones and head networks, and observe consistent improvement over all the baselines and the state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Joint Visual Grounding with Language Scene Graphs

Visual grounding is a task to ground referring expressions in images, e.g., localize "the white truck in front of the yellow one". To resolve this task fundamentally, the model should first find out the contextual objects (e.g., the "yellow" truck) and then exploit them to disambiguate the referent from other similar objects by using the attributes and relationships (e.g., "white", "yellow", "in front of"). However, due to the lack of annotations on contextual objects and their relationships, existing methods degenerate the above joint grounding process into a holistic association between the expression and regions, thus suffering from unsatisfactory performance and limited interpretability. In this paper, we alleviate the missing-annotation problem and enable the joint reasoning by leveraging the language scene graph which covers both labeled referent and unlabeled contexts (other objects, attributes, and relationships). Specifically, the language scene graph is a graphical representation where the nodes are objects with attributes and the edges are relationships. We construct a factor graph based on it and then perform marginalization over the graph, such that we can ground both referent and contexts on corresponding image regions to achieve the joint visual grounding (JVG). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective and interpretable, e.g., on three benchmarks, it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods while offers a complete grounding of all the objects mentioned in the referring expression.

preprint2020arXiv

Self-Refining Deep Symmetry Enhanced Network for Rain Removal

Rain removal aims to remove the rain streaks on rain images. The state-of-the-art methods are mostly based on Convolutional Neural Network~(CNN). However, as CNN is not equivariant to object rotation, these methods are unsuitable for dealing with the tilted rain streaks. To tackle this problem, we propose Deep Symmetry Enhanced Network~(DSEN) that is able to explicitly extract the rotation equivariant features from rain images. In addition, we design a self-refining mechanism to remove the accumulated rain streaks in a coarse-to-fine manner. This mechanism reuses DSEN with a novel information link which passes the gradient flow to the higher stages. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world rain images show that our self-refining DSEN yields the top performance.

preprint2020arXiv

Visual Commonsense R-CNN

We present a novel unsupervised feature representation learning method, Visual Commonsense Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (VC R-CNN), to serve as an improved visual region encoder for high-level tasks such as captioning and VQA. Given a set of detected object regions in an image (e.g., using Faster R-CNN), like any other unsupervised feature learning methods (e.g., word2vec), the proxy training objective of VC R-CNN is to predict the contextual objects of a region. However, they are fundamentally different: the prediction of VC R-CNN is by using causal intervention: P(Y|do(X)), while others are by using the conventional likelihood: P(Y|X). This is also the core reason why VC R-CNN can learn "sense-making" knowledge like chair can be sat -- while not just "common" co-occurrences such as chair is likely to exist if table is observed. We extensively apply VC R-CNN features in prevailing models of three popular tasks: Image Captioning, VQA, and VCR, and observe consistent performance boosts across them, achieving many new state-of-the-arts. Code and feature are available at https://github.com/Wangt-CN/VC-R-CNN.