OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Source-Free Object Detection With Detection Transformer
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD) enables knowledge transfer from a source domain to an unsupervised target domain for object detection without access to source data. Most existing SFOD approaches are either confined to conventional object detection (OD) models like Faster R-CNN or designed as general solutions without tailored adaptations for novel OD architectures, especially Detection Transformer (DETR). In this paper, we introduce Feature Reweighting ANd Contrastive Learning NetworK (FRANCK), a novel SFOD framework specifically designed to perform query-centric feature enhancement for DETRs. FRANCK comprises four key components: (1) an Objectness Score-based Sample Reweighting (OSSR) module that computes attention-based objectness scores on multi-scale encoder feature maps, reweighting the detection loss to emphasize less-recognized regions; (2) a Contrastive Learning with Matching-based Memory Bank (CMMB) module that integrates multi-level features into memory banks, enhancing class-wise contrastive learning; (3) an Uncertainty-weighted Query-fused Feature Distillation (UQFD) module that improves feature distillation through prediction quality reweighting and query feature fusion; and (4) an improved self-training pipeline with a Dynamic Teacher Updating Interval (DTUI) that optimizes pseudo-label quality. By leveraging these components, FRANCK effectively adapts a source-pre-trained DETR model to a target domain with enhanced robustness and generalization. Extensive experiments on several widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its effectiveness and compatibility with DETR-based SFOD models.
COLA Context-Aware Language-Driven Test-Time Adaptation
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has gained increasing popularity due to its efficacy in addressing ``distribution shift'' issue while simultaneously protecting data privacy. However, most prior methods assume that a paired source domain model and target domain sharing the same label space coexist, heavily limiting their applicability. In this paper, we investigate a more general source model capable of adaptation to multiple target domains without needing shared labels. This is achieved by using a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM), \egno, CLIP, that can recognize images through matching with class descriptions. While the zero-shot performance of VLMs is impressive, they struggle to effectively capture the distinctive attributes of a target domain. To that end, we propose a novel method -- Context-aware Language-driven TTA (COLA). The proposed method incorporates a lightweight context-aware module that consists of three key components: a task-aware adapter, a context-aware unit, and a residual connection unit for exploring task-specific knowledge, domain-specific knowledge from the VLM and prior knowledge of the VLM, respectively. It is worth noting that the context-aware module can be seamlessly integrated into a frozen VLM, ensuring both minimal effort and parameter efficiency. Additionally, we introduce a Class-Balanced Pseudo-labeling (CBPL) strategy to mitigate the adverse effects caused by class imbalance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method not only in TTA scenarios but also in class generalisation tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/NUDT-Bai-Group/COLA-TTA.
NanoHTNet Nano Human Topology Network for Efficient 3D Human Pose Estimation
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

The widespread application of 3D human pose estimation (HPE) is limited by resource-constrained edge devices, requiring more efficient models. A key approach to enhancing efficiency involves designing networks based on the structural characteristics of input data. However, effectively utilizing the structural priors in human skeletal inputs remains challenging. To address this, we leverage both explicit and implicit spatio-temporal priors of the human body through innovative model design and a pre-training proxy task. First, we propose a Nano Human Topology Network (NanoHTNet), a tiny 3D HPE network with stacked Hierarchical Mixers to capture explicit features. Specifically, the spatial Hierarchical Mixer efficiently learns the human physical topology across multiple semantic levels, while the temporal Hierarchical Mixer with discrete cosine transform and low-pass filtering captures local instantaneous movements and global action coherence. Moreover, Efficient Temporal-Spatial Tokenization (ETST) is introduced to enhance spatio-temporal interaction and reduce computational complexity significantly. Second, PoseCLR is proposed as a general pre-training method based on contrastive learning for 3D HPE, aimed at extracting implicit representations of human topology. By aligning 2D poses from diverse viewpoints in the proxy task, PoseCLR aids 3D HPE encoders like NanoHTNet in more effectively capturing the high-dimensional features of the human body, leading to further performance improvements. Extensive experiments verify that NanoHTNet with PoseCLR outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in efficiency, making it ideal for deployment on edge devices like the Jetson Nano. Code and models are available at https://github.com/vefalun/NanoHTNet.
An Adaptor for Triggering Semi-Supervised Learning to Out-of-Box Serve Deep Image Clustering
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Recently, some works integrate SSL techniques into deep clustering frameworks to enhance image clustering performance. However, they all need pretraining, clustering learning, or a trained clustering model as prerequisites, limiting the flexible and out-of-box application of SSL learners in the image clustering task. This work introduces ASD, an adaptor that enables the cold-start of SSL learners for deep image clustering without any prerequisites. Specifically, we first randomly sample pseudo-labeled data from all unlabeled data, and set an instance-level classifier to learn them with semantically aligned instance-level labels. With the ability of instance-level classification, we track the class transitions of predictions on unlabeled data to extract high-level similarities of instance-level classes, which can be utilized to assign cluster-level labels to pseudo-labeled data. Finally, we use the pseudo-labeled data with assigned cluster-level labels to trigger a general SSL learner trained on the unlabeled data for image clustering. We show the superior performance of ASD across various benchmarks against the latest deep image clustering approaches and very slight accuracy gaps compared to SSL methods using ground-truth, e.g., only 1.33% on CIFAR-10. Moreover, ASD can also further boost the performance of existing SSL-embedded deep image clustering methods.
Revisiting RGBT Tracking Benchmarks From the Perspective of Modality Validity A New Benchmark Problem and Solution
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

RGBT tracking draws increasing attention because its robustness in multi-modal warranting (MMW) scenarios, such as nighttime and adverse weather conditions, where relying on a single sensing modality fails to ensure stable tracking results. However, existing benchmarks predominantly contain videos collected in common scenarios where both RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) information are of sufficient quality. This weakens the representativeness of existing benchmarks in severe imaging conditions, leading to tracking failures in MMW scenarios. To bridge this gap, we present a new benchmark considering the modality validity, MV-RGBT, captured specifically from MMW scenarios where either RGB (extreme illumination) or TIR (thermal truncation) modality is invalid. Hence, it is further divided into two subsets according to the valid modality, offering a new compositional perspective for evaluation and providing valuable insights for future designs. Moreover, MV-RGBT is the most diverse benchmark of its kind, featuring 36 different object categories captured across 19 distinct scenes. Furthermore, considering severe imaging conditions in MMW scenarios, a new problem is posed in RGBT tracking, named `when to fuse', to stimulate the development of fusion strategies for such scenarios. To facilitate its discussion, we propose a new solution with a mixture of experts, named MoETrack, where each expert generates independent tracking results along with a confidence score. Extensive results demonstrate the significant potential of MV-RGBT in advancing RGBT tracking and elicit the conclusion that fusion is not always beneficial, especially in MMW scenarios. Besides, MoETrack achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks, including MV-RGBT, GTOT, and LasHeR. Github: https://github.com/Zhangyong-Tang/MVRGBT.
Consistent Assistant Domains Transformer for Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to address the challenge of adapting to a target domain without accessing the source domain directly. However, due to the inaccessibility of source domain data, deterministic invariable features cannot be obtained. Current mainstream methods primarily focus on evaluating invariant features in the target domain that closely resemble those in the source domain, subsequently aligning the target domain with the source domain. However, these methods are susceptible to hard samples and influenced by domain bias. In this paper, we propose a Consistent Assistant Domains Transformer for SFDA, abbreviated as CADTrans, which solves the issue by constructing invariable feature representations of domain consistency. Concretely, we develop an assistant domain module for CADTrans to obtain diversified representations from the intermediate aggregated global attentions, which addresses the limitation of existing methods in adequately representing diversity. Based on assistant and target domains, invariable feature representations are obtained by multiple consistent strategies, which can be used to distinguish easy and hard samples. Finally, to align the hard samples to the corresponding easy samples, we construct a conditional multi-kernel max mean discrepancy (CMK-MMD) strategy to distinguish between samples of the same category and those of different categories. Extensive experiments are conducted on various benchmarks such as Office-31, Office-Home, VISDA-C, and DomainNet-126, proving the significant performance improvements achieved by our proposed approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/RoryShao/CADTrans.git.
Neural Scene Designer Self-Styled Semantic Image Manipulation
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Maintaining stylistic consistency is crucial for the cohesion and aesthetic appeal of images, a fundamental requirement in effective image editing and inpainting. However, existing methods primarily focus on the semantic control of generated content, often neglecting the critical task of preserving this consistency. In this work, we introduce the Neural Scene Designer (NSD), a novel framework that enables photo-realistic manipulation of user-specified scene regions while ensuring both semantic alignment with user intent and stylistic consistency with the surrounding environment. NSD leverages an advanced diffusion model, incorporating two parallel cross-attention mechanisms that separately process text and style information to achieve the dual objectives of semantic control and style consistency. To capture fine-grained style representations, we propose the Progressive Self-style Representational Learning (PSRL) module. This module is predicated on the intuitive premise that different regions within a single image share a consistent style, whereas regions from different images exhibit distinct styles. The PSRL module employs a style contrastive loss that encourages high similarity between representations from the same image while enforcing dissimilarity between those from different images. Furthermore, to address the lack of standardized evaluation protocols for this task, we establish a comprehensive benchmark. This benchmark includes competing algorithms, dedicated style-related metrics, and diverse datasets and settings to facilitate fair comparisons. Extensive experiments conducted on our benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
UniUIR Considering Underwater Image Restoration as an All-in-One Learner
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Existing underwater image restoration (UIR) methods generally only handle color distortion or jointly address color and haze issues, but they often overlook the more complex degradations that can occur in underwater scenes. To address this limitation, we propose a Universal Underwater Image Restoration method, termed as UniUIR, considering the complex scenario of real-world underwater mixed distortions as an all-in-one manner. To decouple degradation-specific issues and explore the inter-correlations among various degradations in UIR task, we designed the Mamba Mixture-of-Experts module. This module enables each expert to identify distinct types of degradation and collaboratively extract task-specific priors while maintaining global feature representation based on linear complexity. Building upon this foundation, to enhance degradation representation and address the task conflicts that arise when handling multiple types of degradation, we introduce the spatial-frequency prior generator. This module extracts degradation prior information in both spatial and frequency domains, and adaptively selects the most appropriate task-specific prompts based on image content, thereby improving the accuracy of image restoration. Finally, to more effectively address complex, region-dependent distortions in UIR task, we incorporate depth information derived from a large-scale pre-trained depth prediction model, thereby enabling the network to perceive and leverage depth variations across different image regions to handle localized degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniUIR can produce more attractive results across qualitative and quantitative comparisons, and shows strong generalization than state-of-the-art methods.
LIX Implicitly Infusing Spatial Geometric Prior Knowledge Into Visual Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Despite the impressive performance achieved by data-fusion networks with duplex encoders for visual semantic segmentation, they become ineffective when spatial geometric data are not available. Implicitly infusing the spatial geometric prior knowledge acquired by a data-fusion teacher network into a single-modal student network is a practical, albeit less explored research avenue. This article delves into this topic and resorts to knowledge distillation approaches to address this problem. We introduce the Learning to Infuse ''X'' (LIX) framework, with novel contributions in both logit distillation and feature distillation aspects. We present a mathematical proof that underscores the limitation of using a single, fixed weight in decoupled knowledge distillation and introduce a logit-wise dynamic weight controller as a solution to this issue. Furthermore, we develop an adaptively-recalibrated feature distillation algorithm, including two novel techniques: feature recalibration via kernel regression and in-depth feature consistency quantification via centered kernel alignment. Extensive experiments conducted with intermediate-fusion and late-fusion networks across various public datasets provide both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, demonstrating the superior performance of our LIX framework when compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.
Hierarchical Semantic Compression for Consistent Image Semantic Restoration
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

The emerging semantic compression has been receiving increasing research efforts most recently, capable of achieving high fidelity restoration during compression, even at extremely low bitrates. However, existing semantic compression methods typically combine standard pipelines with either pre-defined or high-dimensional semantics, thus suffering from deficiency in compression. To address this issue, we propose a novel hierarchical semantic compression (HSC) framework that purely operates within intrinsic semantic spaces from generative models, which is able to achieve efficient compression for consistent semantic restoration. More specifically, we first analyse the entropy models for the semantic compression, which motivates us to employ a hierarchical architecture based on a newly developed general inversion encoder. Then, we propose the feature compression network (FCN) and semantic compression network (SCN), such that the middle-level semantic feature and core semantics are hierarchically compressed to restore both accuracy and consistency of image semantics, via an entropy model progressively shared by channel-wise context. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed HSC framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on subjective quality and consistency for human vision, together with superior performances on machine vision tasks given compressed bitstreams. This essentially coincides with human visual system in understanding images, thus providing a new framework for future image/video compression paradigms. Our code shall be released upon acceptance.
Physically Consistent Image Augmentation for Deep Learning in Mueller Matrix Polarimetry
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Mueller matrix polarimetry captures essential information about polarized light interactions with a sample, presenting unique challenges for data augmentation in deep learning due to its distinct structure. While augmentations are an effective and affordable way to enhance dataset diversity and reduce overfitting, standard transformations like rotations and flips do not preserve the polarization properties in Mueller matrix images. To this end, we introduce a versatile simulation framework that applies physically consistent rotations and flips to Mueller matrices, tailored to maintain polarization fidelity. Our experimental results across multiple datasets reveal that conventional augmentations can lead to falsified results when applied to polarimetric data, underscoring the necessity of our physics-based approach. In our experiments, we first compare our polarization-specific augmentations against real-world captures to validate their physical consistency. We then apply these augmentations in a semantic segmentation task, achieving substantial improvements in model generalization and performance. This study underscores the necessity of physics-informed data augmentation for polarimetric imaging in deep learning (DL), paving the way for broader adoption and more robust applications across diverse research in the field. In particular, our framework unlocks the potential of DL models for polarimetric datasets with limited sample sizes. Our code implementation is available at github.com/hahnec/polar_augment.
Advancing Weakly-Supervised Change Detection in Satellite Images via Adversarial Class Prompting
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Weakly-Supervised Change Detection (WSCD) aims to distinguish specific object changes (e.g., objects appearing or disappearing) from background variations (e.g., environmental changes due to light, weather, or seasonal shifts) in paired satellite images, relying only on paired image (i.e., image-level) classification labels. This technique significantly reduces the need for dense annotations required in fully-supervised change detection. However, as image-level supervision only indicates whether objects have changed in a scene, WSCD methods often misclassify background variations as object changes, especially in complex remote-sensing scenarios. In this work, we propose an Adversarial Class Prompting (AdvCP) method to address this co-occurring noise problem, including two phases: a) Adversarial Prompt Mining: After each training iteration, we introduce adversarial prompting perturbations, using incorrect one-hot image-level labels to activate erroneous feature mappings. This process reveals co-occurring adversarial samples under weak supervision, namely background variation features that are likely to be misclassified as object changes. b) Adversarial Sample Rectification: We integrate these adversarially prompt-activated pixel samples into training by constructing an online global prototype. This prototype is built from an exponentially weighted moving average of the current batch and all historical training data. Our AdvCP can be seamlessly integrated into current WSCD methods without adding additional inference cost. Experiments on ConvNet, Transformer, and Segment Anything Model (SAM)-based baselines demonstrate significant performance enhancements. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generalizability of AdvCP to other multi-class weakly-supervised dense prediction scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenghuizhao/AdvCP
Consistent Image Layout Editing With Diffusion Models
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Despite the great success of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models in image generation and image editing, existing methods still struggle to edit the layout of real images. Although a few works have been proposed to tackle this problem, they either fail to adjust the layout of images, or have difficulty in preserving visual appearance of objects after the layout adjustment. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a novel image layout editing method that can not only re-arrange a real image to a specified layout, but also can ensure the visual appearance of the objects consistent with their appearance before editing. Concretely, the proposed method consists of two key components. Firstly, a multi-concept learning scheme is used to learn the concepts of different objects from a single image, which is crucial for keeping visual consistency in the layout editing. Secondly, it leverages the semantic consistency within intermediate features of diffusion models to project the appearance information of objects to the desired regions directly. Besides, a novel initialization noise design is adopted to facilitate the process of re-arranging the layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous works in both layout alignment and visual consistency for the task of image layout editing
Text-Derived Relational Graph-Enhanced Network for Skeleton-Based Action Segmentation
Venue: Journal TIP 2025
Year: 2025

Skeleton-based Temporal Action Segmentation (STAS) aims to segment and recognize various actions from long, untrimmed sequences of human skeletal movements. Current STAS methods typically employ spatio-temporal modeling to establish dependencies among joints as well as frames, and utilize one-hot encoding with cross-entropy loss for frame-wise classification supervision. However, these methods overlook the intrinsic correlations among joints and actions within skeletal features, leading to a limited understanding of human movements. To address this, we propose a Text-Derived Relational Graph-Enhanced Network (TRG-Net) that leverages prior graphs generated by Large Language Models (LLM) to enhance both modeling and supervision. For modeling, the Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Fusion Modeling (DSFM) method incorporates Text-Derived Joint Graphs (TJG) with channel- and frame-level dynamic adaptation to effectively model spatial relations, while integrating spatio-temporal core features during temporal modeling. For supervision, the Absolute-Relative Inter-Class Supervision (ARIS) method employs contrastive learning between action features and text embeddings to regularize the absolute class distributions, and utilizes Text-Derived Action Graphs (TAG) to capture the relative inter-class relationships among action features. Additionally, we propose a Spatial-Aware Enhancement Processing (SAEP) method, which incorporates random joint occlusion and axial rotation to enhance spatial generalization. Performance evaluations on four public datasets demonstrate that TRG-Net achieves state-of-the-art results.