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Yong Jae Lee

Yong Jae Lee contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

13 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

From Plans to Pixels: Learning to Plan and Orchestrate for Open-Ended Image Editing

Modern image editing models produce realistic results but struggle with abstract, multi step instructions (e.g., ``make this advertisement more vegetarian-friendly''). Prior agent based methods decompose such tasks but rely on handcrafted pipelines or teacher imitation, limiting flexibility and decoupling learning from actual editing outcomes. We propose an experiential framework for long-horizon image editing, where a planner generates structured atomic decompositions and an orchestrator selects tools and regions to execute each step. A vision language judge provides outcome-based rewards for instruction adherence and visual quality. The orchestrator is trained to maximize these rewards, and successful trajectories are used to refine the planner. By tightly coupling planning with reward driven execution, our approach yields more coherent and reliable edits than single-step or rule-based multistep baselines.

preprint2026arXiv

VideoWeave: A Data-Centric Approach for Efficient Video Understanding

Training video-language models is often prohibitively expensive due to the high cost of processing long frame sequences and the limited availability of annotated long videos. We present VideoWeave, a simple yet effective approach to improve data efficiency by constructing synthetic long-context training samples that splice together short, captioned videos from existing datasets. Rather than modifying model architectures or optimization objectives, VideoWeave reorganizes available video-text pairs to expand temporal diversity within fixed compute. We systematically study how different data composition strategies like random versus visually clustered splicing and caption enrichment affect downstream performance on downstream video question answering. Under identical compute constraints, models trained with VideoWeave achieve higher accuracy than conventional video finetuning. Our results highlight that reorganizing training data, rather than altering architectures, may offer a simple and scalable path for training video-language models. We link our code for all experiments here.

preprint2023arXiv

Learning Customized Visual Models with Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge

Image-text contrastive learning models such as CLIP have demonstrated strong task transfer ability. The high generality and usability of these visual models is achieved via a web-scale data collection process to ensure broad concept coverage, followed by expensive pre-training to feed all the knowledge into model weights. Alternatively, we propose REACT, REtrieval-Augmented CusTomization, a framework to acquire the relevant web knowledge to build customized visual models for target domains. We retrieve the most relevant image-text pairs (~3% of CLIP pre-training data) from the web-scale database as external knowledge, and propose to customize the model by only training new modualized blocks while freezing all the original weights. The effectiveness of REACT is demonstrated via extensive experiments on classification, retrieval, detection and segmentation tasks, including zero, few, and full-shot settings. Particularly, on the zero-shot classification task, compared with CLIP, it achieves up to 5.4% improvement on ImageNet and 3.7% on the ELEVATER benchmark (20 datasets).

preprint2022arXiv

End-to-End Instance Edge Detection

Edge detection has long been an important problem in the field of computer vision. Previous works have explored category-agnostic or category-aware edge detection. In this paper, we explore edge detection in the context of object instances. Although object boundaries could be easily derived from segmentation masks, in practice, instance segmentation models are trained to maximize IoU to the ground-truth mask, which means that segmentation boundaries are not enforced to precisely align with ground-truth edge boundaries. Thus, the task of instance edge detection itself is different and critical. Since precise edge detection requires high resolution feature maps, we design a novel transformer architecture that efficiently combines a FPN and a transformer decoder to enable cross attention on multi-scale high resolution feature maps within a reasonable computation budget. Further, we propose a light weight dense prediction head that is applicable to both instance edge and mask detection. Finally, we use a penalty reduced focal loss to effectively train the model with point supervision on instance edges, which can reduce annotation costs. We demonstrate highly competitive instance edge detection performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, and also show that the proposed task and loss are complementary to instance segmentation and object detection.

preprint2022arXiv

GIRAFFE HD: A High-Resolution 3D-aware Generative Model

3D-aware generative models have shown that the introduction of 3D information can lead to more controllable image generation. In particular, the current state-of-the-art model GIRAFFE can control each object's rotation, translation, scale, and scene camera pose without corresponding supervision. However, GIRAFFE only operates well when the image resolution is low. We propose GIRAFFE HD, a high-resolution 3D-aware generative model that inherits all of GIRAFFE's controllable features while generating high-quality, high-resolution images ($512^2$ resolution and above). The key idea is to leverage a style-based neural renderer, and to independently generate the foreground and background to force their disentanglement while imposing consistency constraints to stitch them together to composite a coherent final image. We demonstrate state-of-the-art 3D controllable high-resolution image generation on multiple natural image datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Masked Discrimination for Self-Supervised Learning on Point Clouds

Masked autoencoding has achieved great success for self-supervised learning in the image and language domains. However, mask based pretraining has yet to show benefits for point cloud understanding, likely due to standard backbones like PointNet being unable to properly handle the training versus testing distribution mismatch introduced by masking during training. In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing a discriminative mask pretraining Transformer framework, MaskPoint}, for point clouds. Our key idea is to represent the point cloud as discrete occupancy values (1 if part of the point cloud; 0 if not), and perform simple binary classification between masked object points and sampled noise points as the proxy task. In this way, our approach is robust to the point sampling variance in point clouds, and facilitates learning rich representations. We evaluate our pretrained models across several downstream tasks, including 3D shape classification, segmentation, and real-word object detection, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results while achieving a significant pretraining speedup (e.g., 4.1x on ScanNet) compared to the prior state-of-the-art Transformer baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/haotian-liu/MaskPoint.

preprint2022arXiv

The Two Dimensions of Worst-case Training and the Integrated Effect for Out-of-domain Generalization

Training with an emphasis on "hard-to-learn" components of the data has been proven as an effective method to improve the generalization of machine learning models, especially in the settings where robustness (e.g., generalization across distributions) is valued. Existing literature discussing this "hard-to-learn" concept are mainly expanded either along the dimension of the samples or the dimension of the features. In this paper, we aim to introduce a simple view merging these two dimensions, leading to a new, simple yet effective, heuristic to train machine learning models by emphasizing the worst-cases on both the sample and the feature dimensions. We name our method W2D following the concept of "Worst-case along Two Dimensions". We validate the idea and demonstrate its empirical strength over standard benchmarks.

preprint2022arXiv

Toward Learning Human-aligned Cross-domain Robust Models by Countering Misaligned Features

Machine learning has demonstrated remarkable prediction accuracy over i.i.d data, but the accuracy often drops when tested with data from another distribution. In this paper, we aim to offer another view of this problem in a perspective assuming the reason behind this accuracy drop is the reliance of models on the features that are not aligned well with how a data annotator considers similar across these two datasets. We refer to these features as misaligned features. We extend the conventional generalization error bound to a new one for this setup with the knowledge of how the misaligned features are associated with the label. Our analysis offers a set of techniques for this problem, and these techniques are naturally linked to many previous methods in robust machine learning literature. We also compared the empirical strength of these methods demonstrated the performance when these previous techniques are combined, with an implementation available at https://github.com/OoDBag/WR

preprint2020arXiv

Action Graphs: Weakly-supervised Action Localization with Graph Convolution Networks

We present a method for weakly-supervised action localization based on graph convolutions. In order to find and classify video time segments that correspond to relevant action classes, a system must be able to both identify discriminative time segments in each video, and identify the full extent of each action. Achieving this with weak video level labels requires the system to use similarity and dissimilarity between moments across videos in the training data to understand both how an action appears, as well as the sub-actions that comprise the action's full extent. However, current methods do not make explicit use of similarity between video moments to inform the localization and classification predictions. We present a novel method that uses graph convolutions to explicitly model similarity between video moments. Our method utilizes similarity graphs that encode appearance and motion, and pushes the state of the art on THUMOS '14, ActivityNet 1.2, and Charades for weakly supervised action localization.

preprint2020arXiv

Audiovisual SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition

We present Audiovisual SlowFast Networks, an architecture for integrated audiovisual perception. AVSlowFast has Slow and Fast visual pathways that are deeply integrated with a Faster Audio pathway to model vision and sound in a unified representation. We fuse audio and visual features at multiple layers, enabling audio to contribute to the formation of hierarchical audiovisual concepts. To overcome training difficulties that arise from different learning dynamics for audio and visual modalities, we introduce DropPathway, which randomly drops the Audio pathway during training as an effective regularization technique. Inspired by prior studies in neuroscience, we perform hierarchical audiovisual synchronization to learn joint audiovisual features. We report state-of-the-art results on six video action classification and detection datasets, perform detailed ablation studies, and show the generalization of AVSlowFast to learn self-supervised audiovisual features. Code will be made available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast.

preprint2020arXiv

Delving Deeper into Anti-aliasing in ConvNets

Aliasing refers to the phenomenon that high frequency signals degenerate into completely different ones after sampling. It arises as a problem in the context of deep learning as downsampling layers are widely adopted in deep architectures to reduce parameters and computation. The standard solution is to apply a low-pass filter (e.g., Gaussian blur) before downsampling. However, it can be suboptimal to apply the same filter across the entire content, as the frequency of feature maps can vary across both spatial locations and feature channels. To tackle this, we propose an adaptive content-aware low-pass filtering layer, which predicts separate filter weights for each spatial location and channel group of the input feature maps. We investigate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method across multiple tasks including ImageNet classification, COCO instance segmentation, and Cityscapes semantic segmentation. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our approach effectively adapts to the different feature frequencies to avoid aliasing while preserving useful information for recognition. Code is available at https://maureenzou.github.io/ddac/.

preprint2020arXiv

Don't Judge an Object by Its Context: Learning to Overcome Contextual Bias

Existing models often leverage co-occurrences between objects and their context to improve recognition accuracy. However, strongly relying on context risks a model's generalizability, especially when typical co-occurrence patterns are absent. This work focuses on addressing such contextual biases to improve the robustness of the learnt feature representations. Our goal is to accurately recognize a category in the absence of its context, without compromising on performance when it co-occurs with context. Our key idea is to decorrelate feature representations of a category from its co-occurring context. We achieve this by learning a feature subspace that explicitly represents categories occurring in the absence of context along side a joint feature subspace that represents both categories and context. Our very simple yet effective method is extensible to two multi-label tasks -- object and attribute classification. On 4 challenging datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in reducing contextual bias.

preprint2020arXiv

MixNMatch: Multifactor Disentanglement and Encoding for Conditional Image Generation

We present MixNMatch, a conditional generative model that learns to disentangle and encode background, object pose, shape, and texture from real images with minimal supervision, for mix-and-match image generation. We build upon FineGAN, an unconditional generative model, to learn the desired disentanglement and image generator, and leverage adversarial joint image-code distribution matching to learn the latent factor encoders. MixNMatch requires bounding boxes during training to model background, but requires no other supervision. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate MixNMatch's ability to accurately disentangle, encode, and combine multiple factors for mix-and-match image generation, including sketch2color, cartoon2img, and img2gif applications. Our code/models/demo can be found at https://github.com/Yuheng-Li/MixNMatch