GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
FLAME: Learning to Navigate with Multimodal LLM in Urban Environments
Authors: Yunzhe Xu; Yiyuan Pan; Zhe Liu; Hesheng Wang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks, yet current applications face challenges. While LLMs excel in general conversation scenarios, they struggle with specialized navigation tasks, yielding suboptimal performance compared to specialized VLN models. We introduce FLAME (FLAMingo-Architected Embodied Agent), a novel Multimodal LLM-based agent and architecture designed for urban VLN tasks that efficiently handles multiple observations. Our approach implements a three-phase tuning technique for effective adaptation to navigation tasks, including single perception tuning for street view description, multiple perception tuning for route summarization, and end-to-end training on VLN datasets. The augmented datasets are synthesized automatically. Experimental results demonstrate FLAME's superiority over existing methods, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a 7.3% increase in task completion on Touchdown dataset. This work showcases the potential of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) in complex navigation tasks, representing an advancement towards applications of MLLMs in the field of embodied intelligence.
FATE: Feature-Adapted Parameter Tuning for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Zhengqin Xu; Zelin Peng; Xiaokang Yang; Wei Shen
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Following the recent popularity of vision language models, several attempts, e.g., parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), have been made to extend them to different downstream tasks. Previous PEFT works motivate their methods from the view of introducing new parameters for adaptation but still need to learn this part of weight from scratch, i.e., random initialization. In this paper, we present a novel strategy that incorporates the potential of prompts, e.g., vision features, to facilitate the initial parameter space adapting to new scenarios. We introduce a Feature-Adapted parameTer Efficient tuning paradigm for vision-language models, dubbed as FATE, which injects informative features from the vision encoder into language encoder's parameters space. Specifically, we extract vision features from the last layer of CLIP's vision encoder and, after projection, treat them as parameters for fine-tuning each layer of CLIP's language encoder. By adjusting these feature-adapted parameters, we can directly enable communication between the vision and language branches, facilitating CLIP's adaptation to different scenarios. Experimental results show that FATE exhibits superior generalization performance on 11 datasets with a very small amount of extra parameters and computation.
Toward Modality Gap: Vision Prototype Learning for Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation with CLIP
Authors: Zhongxing Xu; Feilong Tang; Zhe Chen; Yingxue Su; Zhiyi Zhao; Ge Zhang; Jionglong Su; Zongyuan Ge
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: The application of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) research demonstrates powerful cross-modal semantic understanding capabilities. Existing methods attempt to optimize input text prompts for improved alignment of images and text, specifically by finely adjusting text prototypes to facilitate semantic matching. Nevertheless, given the modality gap between text and vision spaces, the text prototypes employed by these methods have not effectively established a close correspondence with pixel-level vision features. In this work, our theoretical analysis indicates that the inherent modality gap results in misalignment of text and region features, and that this gap cannot be sufficiently reduced by minimizing contrast loss in CLIP. To mitigate the impact of the modality gap, we propose a Vision Prototype Learning (VPL) framework, by introducing more representative vision prototypes. The core of this framework is to learn class-specific vision prototypes in vision space with the help of text prototypes, to capture high-quality localization maps. Moreover, we propose a regional semantic contrast module that contrasts regions embedding with corresponding prototypes, leading to more comprehensive and robust feature learning. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.
FreeCap: Hybrid Calibration-Free Motion Capture in Open Environments
Authors: Aoru Xue; Yiming Ren; Zining Song; Mao Ye; Xinge Zhu; Yuexin Ma
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: We propose a novel hybrid calibration-free method FreeCap to accurately capture global multi-person motions in open environments. Our system combines a single LiDAR with expandable moving cameras, allowing for flexible and precise motion estimation in a unified world coordinate. In particular, We introduce a local-to-global pose-aware cross-sensor human-matching module that predicts the alignment among each sensor, even in the absence of calibration. Additionally, our coarse-to-fine sensor-expandable pose optimizer further optimizes the 3D human key points and the alignments, it is also capable of incorporating additional cameras to enhance accuracy. Extensive experiments on Human-M3 and FreeMotion datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art single-modal methods, offering an expandable and efficient solution for multi-person motion capture across various applications.
Towards Adversarially Robust Dataset Distillation by Curvature Regularization
Authors: Eric Xue; Yijiang Li; Haoyang Liu; Peiran Wang; Yifan Shen; Haohan Wang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Dataset distillation (DD) allows datasets to be distilled to fractions of their original size while preserving the rich distributional information so that models trained on the distilled datasets can achieve a comparable accuracy while saving significant computational loads. Recent research in this area has been focusing on improving the accuracy of models trained on distilled datasets. In this paper, we aim to explore a new perspective of DD. We study how to embed adversarial robustness in distilled datasets, so that models trained on these datasets maintain the high accuracy and meanwhile acquire better adversarial robustness. We propose a new method that achieves this goal by incorporating curvature regularization into the distillation process with much less computational overhead than standard adversarial training. Extensive empirical experiments suggest that our method not only outperforms standard adversarial training on both accuracy and robustness with less computation overhead but is also capable of generating robust distilled datasets that can withstand various adversarial attacks.
ShotVL: Human-Centric Highlight Frame Retrieval via Language Queries
Authors: Wangyu Xue; Chen Qian; Jiayi Wu; Yang Zhou; Wentao Liu; Ju Ren; Siming Fan; Yaoxue Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Existing research on human-centric video understanding typically focuses on analyzing specific moments or entire videos. However, many applications require higher precision at the frame level. In this work, we propose a novel task, BestShot, which aims to locate highlight frames within human-centric videos through language queries. This task requires not only a deep semantic understanding of human actions but also precise temporal localization. To support this task, we introduce the BestShot Benchmark. 
The benchmark is meticulously constructed by combining human-annotated highlight frames, duration labels and detailed textual descriptions. These descriptions cover three critical elements: (1) Visual content; (2) Fine-grained actions; and (3) Human pose descriptions. Together, these elements provide the necessary precision to identify the exact highlight frames in videos.

To tackle this problem, we have collected two distinct datasets: (i) ShotGPT4o Dataset, which is algorithmically generated by GPT-4o and (ii) Image-SMPLText Dataset, which features large-scale and accurate per-frame pose descriptions using PoseScript and existing pose estimation datasets. Based on these datasets, we present a strong baseline model, ShotVL, fine-tuned from InternVL, specifically for BestShot. We highlight the impressive zero-shot capabilities of our model and offer comparative analyses with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. ShotVL demonstrates a significant 64% improvement over InternVL on the BestShot Benchmark and a notable 68% improvement on the THUMOS14 Benchmark, while maintaining SOTA performance in general image classification and retrieval.
RetouchGPT: LLM-based Interactive High-Fidelity Face Retouching via Imperfection Prompting
Authors: Wen Xue; Chun Ding; Ruotao Xu; Si Wu; Yong Xu; Hau-San Wong
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Face retouching aims to remove facial imperfections from image and videos while at the same time preserving face attributes. The existing methods are designed to perform non-interactive end-to-end retouching, while the ability to interact with users is highly demanded in downstream applications. In this paper, we propose RetouchGPT, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide the interactive retouching process. Towards this end, we design an instruction-driven imperfection prediction module to accurately identify imperfections by integrating textual and visual features. To learn imperfection prompts, we further incorporate a LLM-based embedding module to fuse multi-modal conditioning information. The prompt-based feature modification is performed in each transformer block, such that the imperfection features are suppressed and replaced with the features of normal skin progressively. Extensive experiments have been performed to verify effectiveness of our design elements and demonstrate that RetouchGPT is a useful tool for interactive face retouching and achieves superior performance over state-of-the-arts.
Physical Marker: Revealing Invisible Hyperlinks Hidden in Printed Trademarks
Authors: Yuliang Xue; Lei Tan; Guobiao Li; Zhenxing Qian; Sheng Li; Xinpeng Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Embedding links in brand logos is a promising technology, which allows consumers to access the online information of products by capturing physical logo images. Previous physical data hiding methods primarily embed data within cover media in a global manner, making them ineffective for processing brand logos in vector graphics format with a transparent background. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a novel physical deep hiding scheme for invisibly embedding links in printed trademarks. Specifically, the encoder embeds links only into the area of the brand logo under the constraints of a mask, which is generated from the transparency information of the logo image. A background variation distortion is introduced into the distortion layer that approximate practical logo print-camera environments, such that the decoder could be learnt to retrieve the link from the camera-captured logo with various backgrounds. A feature prompt subspace modulator is further proposed and employed in the encoder to enhance the invisibility of the encoded logo pattern and in the decoder to boost hyperlink extraction accuracy. Various experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method for embedding links in printed brand logos, which provides reliable extraction accuracy under both simulated and real scenarios.
TG-LLaVA: Text Guided LLaVA via Learnable Latent Embeddings
Authors: Dawei Yan; Pengcheng Li; Yang Li; Hao Chen; Qingguo Chen; Weihua Luo; Wei Dong; Qingsen Yan; Haokui Zhang; Chunhua Shen
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Currently, inspired by the success of vision-language models (VLMs), an increasing number of researchers are focusing on improving VLMs and have achieved promising results. However, most existing methods concentrate on optimizing the connector and enhancing the language model component, while neglecting improvements to the vision encoder itself. In contrast, we propose Text Guided LLaVA (TG-LLaVA) in this paper, which optimizes VLMs by guiding the vision encoder with text, offering a new and orthogonal optimization direction. Specifically, inspired by the purpose-driven logic inherent in human behavior, we use learnable latent embeddings as a bridge to analyze textual instruction and add the analysis results to the vision encoder as guidance, refining it. Subsequently, another set of latent embeddings extracts additional detailed text-guided information from high-resolution local patches as auxiliary information. Finally, with the guidance of text, the vision encoder can extract text-related features, similar to how humans focus on the most relevant parts of an image when considering a question. This results in generating better answers. Experiments on various datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Remarkably, without the need for additional training data, our proposed method can bring more benefits to the baseline (LLaVA-1.5) compared with other concurrent methods. Furthermore, the proposed method consistently brings improvement in different settings.
EvSTVSR: Event Guided Space-Time Video Super-Resolution
Authors: Haojie Yan; Zhan Lu; Zehao Chen; De Ma; Huajin Tang; Qian Zheng; Gang Pan
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: In the domain of space-time video super-resolution, it is typically challenging to handle complex motions (including large and nonlinear motions) and varying illumination scenes due to the lack of inter-frame information. Leveraging the dense temporal information provided by event signals offers a promising solution. Traditional event-based methods typically rely on multiple images, using motion estimation and compensation, which can introduce errors. Accumulated errors from multiple frames often lead to artifacts and blurriness in the output. To mitigate these issues, we propose EvSTVSR, a method that uses fewer adjacent frames and integrates dense temporal information from events to guide alignment. Additionally, we introduce a coordinate-based feature fusion upsampling module to achieve spatial super-resolution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing RGB-based approaches but also excels in handling large motion scenarios.
SymmCompletion: High-Fidelity and High-Consistency Point Cloud Completion with Symmetry Guidance
Authors: Hongyu Yan; Zijun Li; Kunming Luo; Li Lu; Ping Tan
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Point cloud completion aims to recover a complete point shape from a partial point cloud. Although existing methods can form satisfactory point clouds in global completeness, they often lose the original geometry details and face the problem of geometric inconsistency between existing point clouds and reconstructed missing parts. To tackle this problem, we introduce SymmCompletion, a highly effective completion method based on symmetry guidance. Our method comprises two primary components: a Local Symmetry Transformation Network (LSTNet) and a Symmetry-Guidance Transformer (SGFormer). First, LSTNet efficiently estimates point-wise local symmetry transformation to transform key geometries of partial inputs into missing regions, thereby generating geometry-align partial-missing pairs and initial point clouds. Second, SGFormer leverages the geometric features of partial-missing pairs as the explicit symmetric guidance that can constrain the refinement process for initial point clouds. As a result, SGFormer can exploit provided priors to form high-fidelity and geometry-consistency final point clouds. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art completion networks.
Towards Universal Rainy Image Restoration: Benchmark and Baseline
Authors: Hujie Yan
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Despite significant progress has been made in image deraining, most existing methods are limited to handling only a single type of rain degradation or a specific pattern of rain. However, real-world rain scenarios tend to contain diverse rainy patterns due to variations in the rainfall process and lighting conditions. To address this dilemma and advance this field, we introduce a new task: Universal Rainy Image Restoration (URIR), which aims to handle multiple types of rain degradation on a single model. To benchmark this task, we construct a high-quality dataset called URIR-8K, which contains four patterns: rain streak, raindrop, rain accumulation and nighttime rain. Building upon this dataset, we present a comprehensive study on existing approaches by evaluating their universal deraining capabilities and their effect on downstream object detection task. In addition, we design a multi-scale vision Mamba as a baseline model, leveraging the benefits of multi-scale learning for its robustness to diverse rain appearances. Unlike existing methods that use fixed-scale scanning for feature extraction, we employ a multi-scale 2D scanning technique to better help image restoration in the richer scale space. Extensive experimental analysis shows the potential of our proposed task and the effectiveness of our model.
SGTC: Semantic-Guided Triplet Co-training for Sparsely Annotated Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Ke Yan; Qing Cai; Fan Zhang; Ziyan Cao; Zhi Liu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Although semi-supervised learning has made significant advances in the field of medical image segmentation, fully annotating a volumetric sample slice by slice remains a costly and time-consuming task. Even worse, most of the existing approaches pay much attention to image-level information and ignore semantic features, resulting in the inability to perceive weak boundaries. To address these issues, we propose a novel Semantic-Guided Triplet Co-training (SGTC) framework, which achieves high-end medical image segmentation by only annotating three orthogonal slices of a few volumetric samples, significantly alleviating the burden of radiologists. Our method consist of two main components. Specifically, to enable semantic-aware, fine-granular segmentation and enhance the quality of pseudo-labels, a novel semantic-guided auxiliary learning mechanism is proposed based on the pretrained CLIP. In addition, focusing on a more challenging but clinically realistic scenario, a new triple-view disparity training strategy is proposed, which uses sparse annotations (i.e., only three labeled slices of a few volumes)  to perform co-training between three sub-networks, significantly improving the robustness. Extensive experiments on three public medical datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms most state-of-the-art semi-supervised counterparts under sparse annotation settings.
OLiDM: Object-aware LiDAR Diffusion Models for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Tianyi Yan; Junbo Yin; Xianpeng Lang; Ruigang Yang; Cheng-Zhong Xu; Jianbing Shen
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: To enhance autonomous driving, innovative approaches have been proposed to generate simulated LiDAR data. However, these methods often face challenges in producing high-quality and controllable foreground objects. To cater to the needs of object-aware tasks in 3D perception, we introduce OLiDM, a novel framework capable of generating controllable and high-fidelity LiDAR data at both the object and scene levels.
OLiDM consists of two pivotal components: the Object-Scene Progressive Generation (OPG) module and the Object Semantic Alignment (OSA) module.
OPG adapts to user-specific prompts to generate desired foreground objects, which are subsequently employed as conditions in scene generation, ensuring controllable and diverse output at both the object and scene levels. This also facilitates the association of user-defined object-level annotations with the generated LiDAR scenes. Moreover, OSA aims to rectify the misalignment between foreground objects and background scenes, enhancing the overall quality of the generated objects.
The broad efficacy of OLiDM is demonstrated across both unconditional and conditional LiDAR generation tasks, as well as 3D perception tasks. Specifically, on the KITTI-360 dataset, OLiDM surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods such as UltraLiDAR by 11.8 in FPD, producing data that closely mirrors real-world distributions. Additionally, in sparse-to-dense LiDAR completion, OLiDM achieves a significant improvement over LiDARGen, with a 57.47% increase in semantic IoU. Moreover, in 3D object detection, OLiDM enhances the performance of mainstream detectors by 2.4% in mAP and 1.9% in NDS, underscoring its potential in advancing 3D perception models.
Data-Free Universal Attack by Exploiting the Intrinsic Vulnerability of Deep Models
Authors: YangTian Yan; Jinyu Tian
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs), which are instance-agnostic perturbations that can deceive a target model across a wide range of samples. Unlike instance-specific adversarial examples, UAPs present a greater challenge as they must generalize across different samples and models. Generating UAPs typically requires access to numerous examples, which is a strong assumption in real-world tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel data-free method called Intrinsic UAP(IntriUAP), by exploiting the intrinsic vulnerabilities of deep models. We analyze a series of popular deep models composed of linear and nonlinear layers with a Lipschitz constant of 1, revealing that the vulnerability of these models is predominantly influenced by their linear components. Based on this observation, we leverage the ill-conditioned nature of the linear components by aligning the UAP with the right singular vectors corresponding to the maximum singular value of each linear layer. Remarkably, our method achieves highly competitive performance in attacking popular image classification deep models without using any image samples. We also evaluate the black-box attack performance of our method, showing that it matches the state-of-the-art baseline for data-free methods on models that conform to our theoretical framework. Beyond the data-free assumption, IntriUAP also operates under a weaker assumption, where the adversary only can access a few of the victim model's layers. Experiments demonstrate that the attack success rate decreases by only 4% when the adversary has access to just 50% of the linear layers in the victim model.
PBECount: Prompt-Before-Extract Paradigm for Class-Agnostic Counting
Authors: Canchen Yang; Tianyu Geng; Jian Peng; Chun Xu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: In the field of class-agnostic counting (CAC), counting only objects of interest that are similar to exemplars in multi-class scenarios has been a challenging task. To address this challenge, recent research has proposed the extract-and-match paradigm based on the vision transformer (ViT) architecture. However, although this paradigm can improve the accuracy of exemplar-similar object identification, it overly emphasizes the role of the ViT structure. To address this shortcoming, this work introduces a more generalized prompt-before-extract paradigm on top of the extract-and-match paradigm and designs a pure convolutional neural network (CNN) model named PBECount. In addition, an innovative loss function, a post-processing strategy, and a dynamic threshold method are proposed to enhance the detection performance of the proposed model when the probability maps are used as ground truth during model training. The experimental results on the FSC-147 and CARPK datasets demonstrate that the proposed PBECount can identify whether unknown class objects are similar to exemplars and outperform the state-of-the-art CAC methods in terms of accuracy and generalization.