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Yaowei Wang

Yaowei Wang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

33 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Beyond Heuristics: Learnable Density Control for 3D Gaussian Splatting

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive real-time rendering performance, its efficacy remains constrained by a reliance on heuristic density control. Despite numerous refinements to these handcrafted rules, such methods inherently lack the flexibility to adapt to diverse scenes with complex geometries. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift for density control from rigid heuristics to fully learnable policies. Specifically, we introduce \textbf{LeGS}, a framework that reformulates density control as a parameterized policy network optimized via Reinforcement Learning (RL). Central to our approach is the tailored effective reward function grounded in sensitivity analysis, which precisely quantifies the marginal contribution of individual Gaussians to reconstruction quality. To maintain computational tractability, we derive a closed-form solution that reduces the complexity of reward calculation from $O(N^2)$ to $O(N)$. Extensive experiments on the Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks \& Temples, and Deep Blending datasets demonstrate that \textbf{LeGS} significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, striking a superior balance between reconstruction quality and efficiency. The code will be released at https://github.com/AaronNZH/LeGS

preprint2026arXiv

CAST: Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models via Caption-Guided Visual Attention Steering

Although Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on downstream tasks, they frequently produce contents that deviate from visual information, leading to object hallucination. To tackle this, recent works mostly depend on expensive manual annotations and training cost, or decoding strategies which significantly increase inference time. In this work, we observe that LVLMs' attention to visual information is significantly enhanced when answering caption queries compared to non-caption queries. Inspired by this phenomenon, we propose Caption-guided Visual Attention Steering (CAST), a training-free, plug-and-play hallucination mitigation method that leverages the attention activation pattern corresponding to caption queries to enhance LVLMs' visual perception capability. Specifically, we use probing techniques to identify attention heads that are highly sensitive to caption queries and estimate optimized steering directions for their outputs. This steering strengthens LVLM's fine-grained visual perception capabilities, thereby effectively mitigating object hallucination. CAST reduced object hallucination by an average of 6.03% across five widely used LVLMs and five benchmarks including both discriminative and generative tasks, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance while adding little inference cost and preserving other foundational capabilities.

preprint2026arXiv

CPC-VAR:Continual Personalized and Compositional Generation in Visual Autoregressive Models

Visual autoregressive (VAR) models have recently emerged as an efficient paradigm for text-to-image generation. Despite their strong generative capability, existing VAR-based personalization methods remain limited to static settings, failing to accommodate evolving user demands. In particular, sequential concept learning leads to severe catastrophic forgetting, while multi-concept synthesis often suffers from feature entanglement and attribute inconsistency. In this work, we present the first systematic study of continual personalized generation in VAR models. We identify two key challenges: (i) preserving previously learned concepts during sequential customization, and (ii) composing multiple personalized concepts in a controllable manner. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework with two core components. For continual single-concept learning, we introduce Gradient-based Concept Neuron Selection (GCNS), which identifies concept-relevant neurons and constrains only conflicting parameters across tasks, effectively mitigating forgetting without additional model expansion. For multi-concept synthesis, we propose a context-aware composition strategy that performs multi-branch feature modeling and localized cross-attention fusion guided by spatial conditions, enabling precise and disentangled concept composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves performance in long-sequence continual personalization while achieving superior results in multi-concept image synthesis compared to existing baselines. These findings highlight the potential of VAR models for scalable and controllable personalized generation.

preprint2026arXiv

Dance Across Shifts: Forward-Facilitation Continual Test-Time Adaptation through Dynamic Style Bridging

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to empower perception systems to handle dynamic distribution shifts encountered after deployment. Existing methods predominantly follow a backward-alignment paradigm, which rigidly aligns incoming data with supervisory surrogates derived from the source domain. Consequently, they struggle with unreliable supervision and evolving distribution shifts. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel forward-facilitation paradigm through a method termed Dynamic Style Bridging. Prior to deployment, we construct a compact knowledge base of generated class exemplars. During test time, to mitigate inherent generative bias and adapt these proxies to incoming data, we propose a multi-level bridging mechanism. This mechanism dynamically injects the proxies with incoming data styles at the input, statistical, and representation levels, while preserving the original semantics of the proxies. These high-fidelity proxies are then used to provide reliable, on-demand supervisory signals, enabling stable adaptation under continual shifts. Extensive experiments across standard CTTA benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves consistent and substantial improvements over recent state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/z1358/DAS}.

preprint2026arXiv

MARS: Technical Report for the CASTLE Challenge at EgoVis 2026

This report presents MARS, short for Multimodal Agentic Reasoning with Source selection, our system for the CASTLE Challenge at EgoVis 2026. Participants must answer 185 closed-form questions over the CASTLE 2024 dataset. In contrast to prior single-video egocentric benchmarks, CASTLE requires reasoning over four days of activity, 15 synchronized perspectives, official transcripts, and multiple auxiliary modalities, including personal photos, auxiliary videos, gaze, thermal imagery, and heartrate measurements. MARS therefore treats the task as an agentic evidence-selection problem over multimodal sources rather than a purely text-only pipeline. MARS first follows the official CASTLE directory organization to build evidence memories from two primary sources, videos and transcripts, and four auxiliary sources, gaze, heartrate, photos, and thermal imagery. Long videos are converted into captions and DeepSeek-based summaries only because CASTLE videos are too long to fit directly into the model context for every question; this step compresses temporal evidence while keeping photos and other auxiliary media available as source-specific evidence. At inference time, a GPT-5.4 decision agent repeatedly chooses whether to continue reasoning, request a specific missing modality, produce an answer, or fall back to a random option when the evidence remains insufficient. The resulting system achieved second place on the final CASTLE Challenge leaderboard. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Hyu-Zhang/MARS.

preprint2026arXiv

Revisiting Uncertainty: On Evidential Learning for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval

Partially relevant video retrieval aims to retrieve untrimmed videos using text queries that describe only partial content. However, the inherent asymmetry between brief queries and rich video content inevitably introduces uncertainty into the retrieval process. In this setting, vague queries often induce semantic ambiguity across videos, a challenge that is further exacerbated by the sparse temporal supervision within videos, which fails to provide sufficient matching evidence. To address this, we propose Holmes, a hierarchical evidential learning framework that aggregates multi-granular cross-modal evidence to quantify and model uncertainty explicitly. At the inter-video level, similarity scores are interpreted as evidential support and modeled via a Dirichlet distribution. Based on the proposed three-fold principle, we perform fine-grained query identification, which then guides query-adaptive calibrated learning. At the intra-video level, to accumulate denser evidence, we formulate a soft query-clip alignment via flexible optimal transport with an adaptive dustbin, which alleviates sparse temporal supervision while suppressing spurious local responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Holmes outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code is released at https://github.com/lijun2005/ICML26-Holmes.

preprint2026arXiv

Training-free Context-adaptive Attention for Efficient Long Context Modeling

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. These capabilities stem primarily from the self-attention mechanism, which enables modeling of long-range dependencies. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention with respect to sequence length poses significant computational and memory challenges, especially as sequence length extends to extremes. While various sparse attention and KV cache compression methods have been proposed to improve efficiency, they often suffer from limitations such as reliance on fixed patterns, inability to handle both prefilling and decoding stages, or the requirement for additional training. In this paper, we propose Training-free Context-adaptive Attention (TCA-Attention), a training-free sparse attention mechanism that selectively attends to only the informative tokens for efficient long-context inference. Our method consists of two lightweight phases: i) an offline calibration phase that determines head-specific sparsity budgets via a single forward pass, and ii) an online token selection phase that adaptively retains core context tokens using a lightweight redundancy metric. TCA-Attention provides a unified solution that accelerates both prefilling and decoding while reducing KV cache memory footprint, without requiring parameter updates or architectural changes. Theoretical analysis shows that our approach maintains bounded approximation error. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TCA-Attention achieves a 2.8$\times$ speedup and reduces KV cache by 61% at 128K context length while maintaining performance comparable to full attention across various benchmarks, offering a practical plug-and-play solution for efficient long-context inference.

preprint2025arXiv

RS-vHeat: Heat Conduction Guided Efficient Remote Sensing Foundation Model

Remote sensing foundation models largely break away from the traditional paradigm of designing task-specific models, offering greater scalability across multiple tasks. However, they face challenges such as low computational efficiency and limited interpretability, especially when dealing with large-scale remote sensing images. To overcome these, we draw inspiration from heat conduction, a physical process modeling local heat diffusion. Building on this idea, we are the first to explore the potential of using the parallel computing model of heat conduction to simulate the local region correlations in high-resolution remote sensing images, and introduce RS-vHeat, an efficient multi-modal remote sensing foundation model. Specifically, RS-vHeat 1) applies the Heat Conduction Operator (HCO) with a complexity of $O(N^{1.5})$ and a global receptive field, reducing computational overhead while capturing remote sensing object structure information to guide heat diffusion; 2) learns the frequency distribution representations of various scenes through a self-supervised strategy based on frequency domain hierarchical masking and multi-domain reconstruction; 3) significantly improves efficiency and performance over state-of-the-art techniques across 4 tasks and 10 datasets. Compared to attention-based remote sensing foundation models, we reduce memory usage by 84\%, FLOPs by 24\% and improves throughput by 2.7 times. The code will be made publicly available.

preprint2025arXiv

Splatwizard: A Benchmark Toolkit for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression

The recent advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has marked a significant breakthrough in real-time novel view synthesis. However, the rapid proliferation of 3DGS-based algorithms has created a pressing need for standardized and comprehensive evaluation tools, especially for compression task. Existing benchmarks often lack the specific metrics necessary to holistically assess the unique characteristics of different methods, such as rendering speed, rate distortion trade-offs memory efficiency, and geometric accuracy. To address this gap, we introduce Splatwizard, a unified benchmark toolkit designed specifically for benchmarking 3DGS compression models. Splatwizard provides an easy-to-use framework to implement new 3DGS compression model and utilize state-of-the-art techniques proposed by previous work. Besides, an integrated pipeline that automates the calculation of key performance indicators, including image-based quality metrics, chamfer distance of reconstruct mesh, rendering frame rates, and computational resource consumption is included in the framework as well. Code is available at https://github.com/splatwizard/splatwizard

preprint2024arXiv

CLIP-based Synergistic Knowledge Transfer for Text-based Person Retrieval

Text-based Person Retrieval (TPR) aims to retrieve the target person images given a textual query. The primary challenge lies in bridging the substantial gap between vision and language modalities, especially when dealing with limited large-scale datasets. In this paper, we introduce a CLIP-based Synergistic Knowledge Transfer (CSKT) approach for TPR. Specifically, to explore the CLIP's knowledge on input side, we first propose a Bidirectional Prompts Transferring (BPT) module constructed by text-to-image and image-to-text bidirectional prompts and coupling projections. Secondly, Dual Adapters Transferring (DAT) is designed to transfer knowledge on output side of Multi-Head Attention (MHA) in vision and language. This synergistic two-way collaborative mechanism promotes the early-stage feature fusion and efficiently exploits the existing knowledge of CLIP. CSKT outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches across three benchmark datasets when the training parameters merely account for 7.4% of the entire model, demonstrating its remarkable efficiency, effectiveness and generalization.

preprint2024arXiv

Fast-iTPN: Integrally Pre-Trained Transformer Pyramid Network with Token Migration

We propose integrally pre-trained transformer pyramid network (iTPN), towards jointly optimizing the network backbone and the neck, so that transfer gap between representation models and downstream tasks is minimal. iTPN is born with two elaborated designs: 1) The first pre-trained feature pyramid upon vision transformer (ViT). 2) Multi-stage supervision to the feature pyramid using masked feature modeling (MFM). iTPN is updated to Fast-iTPN, reducing computational memory overhead and accelerating inference through two flexible designs. 1) Token migration: dropping redundant tokens of the backbone while replenishing them in the feature pyramid without attention operations. 2) Token gathering: reducing computation cost caused by global attention by introducing few gathering tokens. The base/large-level Fast-iTPN achieve 88.75%/89.5% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. With 1x training schedule using DINO, the base/large-level Fast-iTPN achieves 58.4%/58.8% box AP on COCO object detection, and a 57.5%/58.7% mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation using MaskDINO. Fast-iTPN can accelerate the inference procedure by up to 70%, with negligible performance loss, demonstrating the potential to be a powerful backbone for downstream vision tasks. The code is available at: github.com/sunsmarterjie/iTPN.

preprint2024arXiv

Regressor-Segmenter Mutual Prompt Learning for Crowd Counting

Crowd counting has achieved significant progress by training regressors to predict instance positions. In heavily crowded scenarios, however, regressors are challenged by uncontrollable annotation variance, which causes density map bias and context information inaccuracy. In this study, we propose mutual prompt learning (mPrompt), which leverages a regressor and a segmenter as guidance for each other, solving bias and inaccuracy caused by annotation variance while distinguishing foreground from background. In specific, mPrompt leverages point annotations to tune the segmenter and predict pseudo head masks in a way of point prompt learning. It then uses the predicted segmentation masks, which serve as spatial constraint, to rectify biased point annotations as context prompt learning. mPrompt defines a way of mutual information maximization from prompt learning, mitigating the impact of annotation variance while improving model accuracy. Experiments show that mPrompt significantly reduces the Mean Average Error (MAE), demonstrating the potential to be general framework for down-stream vision tasks.

preprint2024arXiv

Revisiting Color-Event based Tracking: A Unified Network, Dataset, and Metric

Combining the Color and Event cameras (also called Dynamic Vision Sensors, DVS) for robust object tracking is a newly emerging research topic in recent years. Existing color-event tracking framework usually contains multiple scattered modules which may lead to low efficiency and high computational complexity, including feature extraction, fusion, matching, interactive learning, etc. In this paper, we propose a single-stage backbone network for Color-Event Unified Tracking (CEUTrack), which achieves the above functions simultaneously. Given the event points and RGB frames, we first transform the points into voxels and crop the template and search regions for both modalities, respectively. Then, these regions are projected into tokens and parallelly fed into the unified Transformer backbone network. The output features will be fed into a tracking head for target object localization. Our proposed CEUTrack is simple, effective, and efficient, which achieves over 75 FPS and new SOTA performance. To better validate the effectiveness of our model and address the data deficiency of this task, we also propose a generic and large-scale benchmark dataset for color-event tracking, termed COESOT, which contains 90 categories and 1354 video sequences. Additionally, a new evaluation metric named BOC is proposed in our evaluation toolkit to evaluate the prominence with respect to the baseline methods. We hope the newly proposed method, dataset, and evaluation metric provide a better platform for color-event-based tracking. The dataset, toolkit, and source code will be released on: \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/COESOT}.

preprint2023arXiv

FFCA-Net: Stereo Image Compression via Fast Cascade Alignment of Side Information

Multi-view compression technology, especially Stereo Image Compression (SIC), plays a crucial role in car-mounted cameras and 3D-related applications. Interestingly, the Distributed Source Coding (DSC) theory suggests that efficient data compression of correlated sources can be achieved through independent encoding and joint decoding. This motivates the rapidly developed deep-distributed SIC methods in recent years. However, these approaches neglect the unique characteristics of stereo-imaging tasks and incur high decoding latency. To address this limitation, we propose a Feature-based Fast Cascade Alignment network (FFCA-Net) to fully leverage the side information on the decoder. FFCA adopts a coarse-to-fine cascaded alignment approach. In the initial stage, FFCA utilizes a feature domain patch-matching module based on stereo priors. This module reduces redundancy in the search space of trivial matching methods and further mitigates the introduction of noise. In the subsequent stage, we utilize an hourglass-based sparse stereo refinement network to further align inter-image features with a reduced computational cost. Furthermore, we have devised a lightweight yet high-performance feature fusion network, called a Fast Feature Fusion network (FFF), to decode the aligned features. Experimental results on InStereo2K, KITTI, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of our approach over traditional and learning-based SIC methods. In particular, our approach achieves significant gains in terms of 3 to 10-fold faster decoding speed than other methods.

preprint2023arXiv

SgVA-CLIP: Semantic-guided Visual Adapting of Vision-Language Models for Few-shot Image Classification

Although significant progress has been made in few-shot learning, most of existing few-shot image classification methods require supervised pre-training on a large amount of samples of base classes, which limits their generalization ability in real world application. Recently, large-scale Vision-Language Pre-trained models (VLPs) have been gaining increasing attention in few-shot learning because they can provide a new paradigm for transferable visual representation learning with easily available text on the Web. However, the VLPs may neglect detailed visual information that is difficult to describe by language sentences, but important for learning an effective classifier to distinguish different images. To address the above problem, we propose a new framework, named Semantic-guided Visual Adapting (SgVA), which can effectively extend vision-language pre-trained models to produce discriminative adapted visual features by comprehensively using an implicit knowledge distillation, a vision-specific contrastive loss, and a cross-modal contrastive loss. The implicit knowledge distillation is designed to transfer the fine-grained cross-modal knowledge to guide the updating of the vision adapter. State-of-the-art results on 13 datasets demonstrate that the adapted visual features can well complement the cross-modal features to improve few-shot image classification.

preprint2022arXiv

Boost Test-Time Performance with Closed-Loop Inference

Conventional deep models predict a test sample with a single forward propagation, which, however, may not be sufficient for predicting hard-classified samples. On the contrary, we human beings may need to carefully check the sample many times before making a final decision. During the recheck process, one may refine/adjust the prediction by referring to related samples. Motivated by this, we propose to predict those hard-classified test samples in a looped manner to boost the model performance. However, this idea may pose a critical challenge: how to construct looped inference, so that the original erroneous predictions on these hard test samples can be corrected with little additional effort. To address this, we propose a general Closed-Loop Inference (CLI) method. Specifically, we first devise a filtering criterion to identify those hard-classified test samples that need additional inference loops. For each hard sample, we construct an additional auxiliary learning task based on its original top-$K$ predictions to calibrate the model, and then use the calibrated model to obtain the final prediction. Promising results on ImageNet (in-distribution test samples) and ImageNet-C (out-of-distribution test samples) demonstrate the effectiveness of CLI in improving the performance of any pre-trained model.

preprint2022arXiv

Boosting Crowd Counting via Multifaceted Attention

This paper focuses on the challenging crowd counting task. As large-scale variations often exist within crowd images, neither fixed-size convolution kernel of CNN nor fixed-size attention of recent vision transformers can well handle this kind of variation. To address this problem, we propose a Multifaceted Attention Network (MAN) to improve transformer models in local spatial relation encoding. MAN incorporates global attention from a vanilla transformer, learnable local attention, and instance attention into a counting model. Firstly, the local Learnable Region Attention (LRA) is proposed to assign attention exclusively for each feature location dynamically. Secondly, we design the Local Attention Regularization to supervise the training of LRA by minimizing the deviation among the attention for different feature locations. Finally, we provide an Instance Attention mechanism to focus on the most important instances dynamically during training. Extensive experiments on four challenging crowd counting datasets namely ShanghaiTech, UCF-QNRF, JHU++, and NWPU have validated the proposed method. Codes: https://github.com/LoraLinH/Boosting-Crowd-Counting-via-Multifaceted-Attention.

preprint2022arXiv

Classification of Single-View Object Point Clouds

Object point cloud classification has drawn great research attention since the release of benchmarking datasets, such as the ModelNet and the ShapeNet. These benchmarks assume point clouds covering complete surfaces of object instances, for which plenty of high-performing methods have been developed. However, their settings deviate from those often met in practice, where, due to (self-)occlusion, a point cloud covering partial surface of an object is captured from an arbitrary view. We show in this paper that performance of existing point cloud classifiers drops drastically under the considered single-view, partial setting; the phenomenon is consistent with the observation that semantic category of a partial object surface is less ambiguous only when its distribution on the whole surface is clearly specified. To this end, we argue for a single-view, partial setting where supervised learning of object pose estimation should be accompanied with classification. Technically, we propose a baseline method of Pose-Accompanied Point cloud classification Network (PAPNet); built upon SE(3)-equivariant convolutions, the PAPNet learns intermediate pose transformations for equivariant features defined on vector fields, which makes the subsequent classification easier (ideally) in the category-level, canonical pose. By adapting existing ModelNet40 and ScanNet datasets to the single-view, partial setting, experiment results can verify the necessity of object pose estimation and superiority of our PAPNet to existing classifiers.

preprint2022arXiv

Conceptor Learning for Class Activation Mapping

Class Activation Mapping (CAM) has been widely adopted to generate saliency maps which provides visual explanations for deep neural networks (DNNs). The saliency maps are conventionally generated by fusing the channels of the target feature map using a weighted average scheme. It is a weak model for the inter-channel relation, in the sense that it only models the relation among channels in a contrastive way (i.e., channels that play key roles in the prediction are given higher weights for them to stand out in the fusion). The collaborative relation, which makes the channels work together to provide cross reference, has been ignored. Furthermore, the model has neglected the intra-channel relation thoroughly.In this paper, we address this problem by introducing Conceptor learning into CAM generation. Conceptor leaning has been originally proposed to model the patterns of state changes in recurrent neural networks (RNNs). By relaxing the dependency of Conceptor learning to RNNs, we make Conceptor-CAM not only generalizable to more DNN architectures but also able to learn both the inter- and intra-channel relations for better saliency map generation. Moreover, we have enabled the use of Boolean operations to combine the positive and pseudo-negative evidences, which has made the CAM inference more robust and comprehensive. The effectiveness of Conceptor-CAM has been validated with both formal verifications and experiments on the dataset of the largest scale in literature. The experimental results show that Conceptor-CAM is compatible with and can bring significant improvement to all well recognized CAM-based methods, and has outperformed the state-of-the-art methods by 43.14%~72.79% (88.39%~168.15%) on ILSVRC2012 in Average Increase (Drop), 15.42%~42.55% (47.09%~372.09%) on VOC, and 17.43%~31.32% (47.54%~206.45%) on COCO, respectively.

preprint2022arXiv

DAS: Densely-Anchored Sampling for Deep Metric Learning

Deep Metric Learning (DML) serves to learn an embedding function to project semantically similar data into nearby embedding space and plays a vital role in many applications, such as image retrieval and face recognition. However, the performance of DML methods often highly depends on sampling methods to choose effective data from the embedding space in the training. In practice, the embeddings in the embedding space are obtained by some deep models, where the embedding space is often with barren area due to the absence of training points, resulting in so called "missing embedding" issue. This issue may impair the sample quality, which leads to degenerated DML performance. In this work, we investigate how to alleviate the "missing embedding" issue to improve the sampling quality and achieve effective DML. To this end, we propose a Densely-Anchored Sampling (DAS) scheme that considers the embedding with corresponding data point as "anchor" and exploits the anchor's nearby embedding space to densely produce embeddings without data points. Specifically, we propose to exploit the embedding space around single anchor with Discriminative Feature Scaling (DFS) and multiple anchors with Memorized Transformation Shifting (MTS). In this way, by combing the embeddings with and without data points, we are able to provide more embeddings to facilitate the sampling process thus boosting the performance of DML. Our method is effortlessly integrated into existing DML frameworks and improves them without bells and whistles. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

preprint2022arXiv

Entity-Graph Enhanced Cross-Modal Pretraining for Instance-level Product Retrieval

Our goal in this research is to study a more realistic environment in which we can conduct weakly-supervised multi-modal instance-level product retrieval for fine-grained product categories. We first contribute the Product1M datasets, and define two real practical instance-level retrieval tasks to enable the evaluations on the price comparison and personalized recommendations. For both instance-level tasks, how to accurately pinpoint the product target mentioned in the visual-linguistic data and effectively decrease the influence of irrelevant contents is quite challenging. To address this, we exploit to train a more effective cross-modal pertaining model which is adaptively capable of incorporating key concept information from the multi-modal data, by using an entity graph whose node and edge respectively denote the entity and the similarity relation between entities. Specifically, a novel Entity-Graph Enhanced Cross-Modal Pretraining (EGE-CMP) model is proposed for instance-level commodity retrieval, that explicitly injects entity knowledge in both node-based and subgraph-based ways into the multi-modal networks via a self-supervised hybrid-stream transformer, which could reduce the confusion between different object contents, thereby effectively guiding the network to focus on entities with real semantic. Experimental results well verify the efficacy and generalizability of our EGE-CMP, outperforming several SOTA cross-modal baselines like CLIP, UNITER and CAPTURE.

preprint2022arXiv

Fine-Grained Object Classification via Self-Supervised Pose Alignment

Semantic patterns of fine-grained objects are determined by subtle appearance difference of local parts, which thus inspires a number of part-based methods. However, due to uncontrollable object poses in images, distinctive details carried by local regions can be spatially distributed or even self-occluded, leading to a large variation on object representation. For discounting pose variations, this paper proposes to learn a novel graph based object representation to reveal a global configuration of local parts for self-supervised pose alignment across classes, which is employed as an auxiliary feature regularization on a deep representation learning network.Moreover, a coarse-to-fine supervision together with the proposed pose-insensitive constraint on shallow-to-deep sub-networks encourages discriminative features in a curriculum learning manner. We evaluate our method on three popular fine-grained object classification benchmarks, consistently achieving the state-of-the-art performance. Source codes are available at https://github.com/yangxh11/P2P-Net.

preprint2022arXiv

Global-Supervised Contrastive Loss and View-Aware-Based Post-Processing for Vehicle Re-Identification

In this paper, we propose a Global-Supervised Contrastive loss and a view-aware-based post-processing (VABPP) method for the field of vehicle re-identification. The traditional supervised contrastive loss calculates the distances of features within the batch, so it has the local attribute. While the proposed Global-Supervised Contrastive loss has new properties and has good global attributes, the positive and negative features of each anchor in the training process come from the entire training set. The proposed VABPP method is the first time that the view-aware-based method is used as a post-processing method in the field of vehicle re-identification. The advantages of VABPP are that, first, it is only used during testing and does not affect the training process. Second, as a post-processing method, it can be easily integrated into other trained re-id models. We directly apply the view-pair distance scaling coefficient matrix calculated by the model trained in this paper to another trained re-id model, and the VABPP method greatly improves its performance, which verifies the feasibility of the VABPP method.

preprint2022arXiv

High-throughput calculations combining machine learning to investigate the corrosion properties of binary Mg alloys

Magnesium (Mg) alloys have shown great prospects as both structural and biomedical materials, while poor corrosion resistance limits their further application. In this work, to avoid the time-consuming and laborious experiment trial, a high-throughput computational strategy based on first-principles calculations is designed for screening corrosion-resistant binary Mg alloy with intermetallics, from both the thermodynamic and kinetic perspectives. The stable binary Mg intermetallics with low equilibrium potential difference with respect to the Mg matrix are firstly identified. Then, the hydrogen adsorption energies on the surfaces of these Mg intermetallics are calculated, and the corrosion exchange current density is further calculated by a hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) kinetic model. Several intermetallics, e.g. Y3Mg, Y2Mg and La5Mg, are identified to be promising intermetallics which might effectively hinder the cathodic HER. Furthermore, machine learning (ML) models are developed to predict Mg intermetallics with proper hydrogen adsorption energy employing work function (W_f) and weighted first ionization energy (WFIE). The generalization of the ML models is tested on five new binary Mg intermetallics with the average root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.11 eV. This study not only predicts some promising binary Mg intermetallics which may suppress the galvanic corrosion, but also provides a high-throughput screening strategy and ML models for the design of corrosion-resistant alloy, which can be extended to ternary Mg alloys or other alloy systems.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning to Share in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we study the problem of networked multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where a number of agents are deployed as a partially connected network and each interacts only with nearby agents. Networked MARL requires all agents to make decisions in a decentralized manner to optimize a global objective with restricted communication between neighbors over the network. Inspired by the fact that sharing plays a key role in human's learning of cooperation, we propose LToS, a hierarchically decentralized MARL framework that enables agents to learn to dynamically share reward with neighbors so as to encourage agents to cooperate on the global objective through collectives. For each agent, the high-level policy learns how to share reward with neighbors to decompose the global objective, while the low-level policy learns to optimize the local objective induced by the high-level policies in the neighborhood. The two policies form a bi-level optimization and learn alternately. We empirically demonstrate that LToS outperforms existing methods in both social dilemma and networked MARL scenarios across scales.

preprint2022arXiv

M5Product: Self-harmonized Contrastive Learning for E-commercial Multi-modal Pretraining

Despite the potential of multi-modal pre-training to learn highly discriminative feature representations from complementary data modalities, current progress is being slowed by the lack of large-scale modality-diverse datasets. By leveraging the natural suitability of E-commerce, where different modalities capture complementary semantic information, we contribute a large-scale multi-modal pre-training dataset M5Product. The dataset comprises 5 modalities (image, text, table, video, and audio), covers over 6,000 categories and 5,000 attributes, and is 500 larger than the largest publicly available dataset with a similar number of modalities. Furthermore, M5Product contains incomplete modality pairs and noise while also having a long-tailed distribution, resembling most real-world problems. We further propose Self-harmonized ContrAstive LEarning (SCALE), a novel pretraining framework that integrates the different modalities into a unified model through an adaptive feature fusion mechanism, where the importance of each modality is learned directly from the modality embeddings and impacts the inter-modality contrastive learning and masked tasks within a multi-modal transformer model. We evaluate the current multi-modal pre-training state-of-the-art approaches and benchmark their ability to learn from unlabeled data when faced with the large number of modalities in the M5Product dataset. We conduct extensive experiments on four downstream tasks and demonstrate the superiority of our SCALE model, providing insights into the importance of dataset scale and diversity.

preprint2022arXiv

MFGNet: Dynamic Modality-Aware Filter Generation for RGB-T Tracking

Many RGB-T trackers attempt to attain robust feature representation by utilizing an adaptive weighting scheme (or attention mechanism). Different from these works, we propose a new dynamic modality-aware filter generation module (named MFGNet) to boost the message communication between visible and thermal data by adaptively adjusting the convolutional kernels for various input images in practical tracking. Given the image pairs as input, we first encode their features with the backbone network. Then, we concatenate these feature maps and generate dynamic modality-aware filters with two independent networks. The visible and thermal filters will be used to conduct a dynamic convolutional operation on their corresponding input feature maps respectively. Inspired by residual connection, both the generated visible and thermal feature maps will be summarized with input feature maps. The augmented feature maps will be fed into the RoI align module to generate instance-level features for subsequent classification. To address issues caused by heavy occlusion, fast motion and out-of-view, we propose to conduct a joint local and global search by exploiting a new direction-aware target driven attention mechanism. The spatial and temporal recurrent neural network is used to capture the direction-aware context for accurate global attention prediction. Extensive experiments on three large-scale RGB-T tracking benchmark datasets validated the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The source code of this paper is available at \textcolor{magenta}{\url{https://github.com/wangxiao5791509/MFG_RGBT_Tracking_PyTorch}}.

preprint2022arXiv

Peng Cheng Object Detection Benchmark for Smart City

Object detection is an algorithm that recognizes and locates the objects in the image and has a wide range of applications in the visual understanding of complex urban scenes. Existing object detection benchmarks mainly focus on a single specific scenario and their annotation attributes are not rich enough, these make the object detection model is not generalized for the smart city scenes. Considering the diversity and complexity of scenes in intelligent city governance, we build a large-scale object detection benchmark for the smart city. Our benchmark contains about 500K images and includes three scenarios: intelligent transportation, intelligent security, and drones. For the complexity of the real scene in the smart city, the diversity of weather, occlusion, and other complex environment diversity attributes of the images in the three scenes are annotated. The characteristics of the benchmark are analyzed and extensive experiments of the current state-of-the-art target detection algorithm are conducted based on our benchmark to show their performance.

preprint2022arXiv

Self-Supervised Tracking via Target-Aware Data Synthesis

While deep-learning based tracking methods have achieved substantial progress, they entail large-scale and high-quality annotated data for sufficient training. To eliminate expensive and exhaustive annotation, we study self-supervised learning for visual tracking. In this work, we develop the Crop-Transform-Paste operation, which is able to synthesize sufficient training data by simulating various appearance variations during tracking, including appearance variations of objects and background interference. Since the target state is known in all synthesized data, existing deep trackers can be trained in routine ways using the synthesized data without human annotation. The proposed target-aware data-synthesis method adapts existing tracking approaches within a self-supervised learning framework without algorithmic changes. Thus, the proposed self-supervised learning mechanism can be seamlessly integrated into existing tracking frameworks to perform training. Extensive experiments show that our method 1) achieves favorable performance against supervised learning schemes under the cases with limited annotations; 2) helps deal with various tracking challenges such as object deformation, occlusion, or background clutter due to its manipulability; 3) performs favorably against state-of-the-art unsupervised tracking methods; 4) boosts the performance of various state-of-the-art supervised learning frameworks, including SiamRPN++, DiMP, and TransT.

preprint2022arXiv

Semi-supervised Crowd Counting via Density Agency

In this paper, we propose a new agency-guided semi-supervised counting approach. First, we build a learnable auxiliary structure, namely the density agency to bring the recognized foreground regional features close to corresponding density sub-classes (agents) and push away background ones. Second, we propose a density-guided contrastive learning loss to consolidate the backbone feature extractor. Third, we build a regression head by using a transformer structure to refine the foreground features further. Finally, an efficient noise depression loss is provided to minimize the negative influence of annotation noises. Extensive experiments on four challenging crowd counting datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art semi-supervised counting methods by a large margin. Code is available.

preprint2022arXiv

Unpaired Image Captioning by Image-level Weakly-Supervised Visual Concept Recognition

The goal of unpaired image captioning (UIC) is to describe images without using image-caption pairs in the training phase. Although challenging, we except the task can be accomplished by leveraging a training set of images aligned with visual concepts. Most existing studies use off-the-shelf algorithms to obtain the visual concepts because the Bounding Box (BBox) labels or relationship-triplet labels used for the training are expensive to acquire. In order to resolve the problem in expensive annotations, we propose a novel approach to achieve cost-effective UIC. Specifically, we adopt image-level labels for the optimization of the UIC model in a weakly-supervised manner. For each image, we assume that only the image-level labels are available without specific locations and numbers. The image-level labels are utilized to train a weakly-supervised object recognition model to extract object information (e.g., instance) in an image, and the extracted instances are adopted to infer the relationships among different objects based on an enhanced graph neural network (GNN). The proposed approach achieves comparable or even better performance compared with previous methods without the expensive cost of annotations. Furthermore, we design an unrecognized object (UnO) loss combined with a visual concept reward to improve the alignment of the inferred object and relationship information with the images. It can effectively alleviate the issue encountered by existing UIC models about generating sentences with nonexistent objects. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to solve the problem of Weakly-Supervised visual concept recognition for UIC (WS-UIC) based only on image-level labels. Extensive experiments have been carried out to demonstrate that the proposed WS-UIC model achieves inspiring results on the COCO dataset while significantly reducing the cost of labeling.

preprint2020arXiv

Compositional Few-Shot Recognition with Primitive Discovery and Enhancing

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims at recognizing novel classes given only few training samples, which still remains a great challenge for deep learning. However, humans can easily recognize novel classes with only few samples. A key component of such ability is the compositional recognition that human can perform, which has been well studied in cognitive science but is not well explored in FSL. Inspired by such capability of humans, to imitate humans' ability of learning visual primitives and composing primitives to recognize novel classes, we propose an approach to FSL to learn a feature representation composed of important primitives, which is jointly trained with two parts, i.e. primitive discovery and primitive enhancing. In primitive discovery, we focus on learning primitives related to object parts by self-supervision from the order of image splits, avoiding extra laborious annotations and alleviating the effect of semantic gaps. In primitive enhancing, inspired by current studies on the interpretability of deep networks, we provide our composition view for the FSL baseline model. To modify this model for effective composition, inspired by both mathematical deduction and biological studies (the Hebbian Learning rule and the Winner-Take-All mechanism), we propose a soft composition mechanism by enlarging the activation of important primitives while reducing that of others, so as to enhance the influence of important primitives and better utilize these primitives to compose novel classes. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks are conducted on both the few-shot image classification and video recognition tasks. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on all these datasets and shows better interpretability.

preprint2020arXiv

P-ODN: Prototype based Open Deep Network for Open Set Recognition

Most of the existing recognition algorithms are proposed for closed set scenarios, where all categories are known beforehand. However, in practice, recognition is essentially an open set problem. There are categories we know called "knowns", and there are more we do not know called "unknowns". Enumerating all categories beforehand is never possible, consequently it is infeasible to prepare sufficient training samples for those unknowns. Applying closed set recognition methods will naturally lead to unseen-category errors. To address this problem, we propose the prototype based Open Deep Network (P-ODN) for open set recognition tasks. Specifically, we introduce prototype learning into open set recognition. Prototypes and prototype radiuses are trained jointly to guide a CNN network to derive more discriminative features. Then P-ODN detects the unknowns by applying a multi-class triplet thresholding method based on the distance metric between features and prototypes. Manual labeling the unknowns which are detected in the previous process as new categories. Predictors for new categories are added to the classification layer to "open" the deep neural networks to incorporate new categories dynamically. The weights of new predictors are initialized exquisitely by applying a distances based algorithm to transfer the learned knowledge. Consequently, this initialization method speed up the fine-tuning process and reduce the samples needed to train new predictors. Extensive experiments show that P-ODN can effectively detect unknowns and needs only few samples with human intervention to recognize a new category. In the real world scenarios, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the UCF11, UCF50, UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets.