arXiv subjects

Aoran Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Aoran Xiao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MobileSAM2: Lightweight Segment Anything for Spatial Intelligence

The recent large video foundation model, SAM2, enables segment anything in both images and videos, serving as a powerful base model for various applications. However, many of such use cases require to operate on resource-constrained devices like mobile phones and laptops. In this work, we aim to make SAM2 more mobile-friendly by distilling the heavyweight SAM2 into a lightweight model, facilitating segment anything in both images and videos on mobile devices. To this end, we propose Hypergraphical Knowledge Distill (HyperKD), which introduces the idea of hypergraph into knowledge distillation, aiming to effectively model and transfer SAM2's generalizable and comprehensive knowledge. HyperKD consists of Temporal HyperKD and Granularity HyperKD that construct hypergraphs to explicitly model and extract the generalizable temporal knowledge and the comprehensive multi-granularity knowledge from SAM2 respectively, which are then distilled into the lightweight student model by aligning it with the constructed hypergraphs. Besides, we present MobileSAM2, a new family of lightweight SAM2 that balances efficiency and effectiveness via searching the best model architectures with HyperKD during model size reduction. Extensive experiments validate MobileSAM2 across multiple benchmarks and show promising generalization performance on embodied AI tasks.

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arXiv2026

GeoMMBench and GeoMMAgent: Toward Expert-Level Multimodal Intelligence in Geoscience and Remote Sensing

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have accelerated progress in domain-oriented AI, yet their development in geoscience and remote sensing (RS) remains constrained by distinctive challenges: wide-ranging disciplinary knowledge, heterogeneous sensor modalities, and a fragmented spectrum of tasks. To bridge these gaps, we introduce GeoMMBench, a comprehensive multimodal question-answering benchmark covering diverse RS disciplines, sensors, and tasks, enabling broader and more rigorous evaluation than prior benchmarks. Using GeoMMBench, we assess 36 open-source and proprietary large language models, uncovering systematic deficiencies in domain knowledge, perceptual grounding, and reasoning--capabilities essential for expert-level geospatial interpretation. Beyond evaluation, we propose GeoMMAgent, a multi-agent framework that strategically integrates retrieval, perception, and reasoning through domain-specific RS models and tools. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GeoMMAgent significantly outperforms standalone LLMs, underscoring the importance of tool-augmented agents for dynamically tackling complex geoscience and RS challenges.

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arXiv2026

MM-OVSeg:Multimodal Optical-SAR Fusion for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation in Remote Sensing

Open-vocabulary segmentation enables pixel-level recognition from an open set of textual categories, allowing generalization beyond fixed classes. Despite great potential in remote sensing, progress in this area remains largely limited to clear-sky optical data and struggles under cloudy or haze-contaminated conditions. We present MM-OVSeg, a multimodal Optical-SAR fusion framework for resilient open-vocabulary segmentation under adverse weather conditions. MM-OVSeg leverages the complementary strengths of the two modalities--optical imagery provides rich spectral semantics, while synthetic aperture radar (SAR) offers cloud-penetrating structural cues. To address the cross-modal domain gap and the limited dense prediction capability of current vision-language models, we propose two key designs: a cross-modal unification process for multi-sensor representation alignment, and a dual-encoder fusion module that integrates hierarchical features from multiple vision foundation models for text-aligned multimodal segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MM-OVSeg achieves superior robustness and generalization across diverse cloud conditions. The source dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Jimmyxichen/MM-OVSeg.

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arXiv2025

PacGDC: Label-Efficient Generalizable Depth Completion with Projection Ambiguity and Consistency

Generalizable depth completion enables the acquisition of dense metric depth maps for unseen environments, offering robust perception capabilities for various downstream tasks. However, training such models typically requires large-scale datasets with metric depth labels, which are often labor-intensive to collect. This paper presents PacGDC, a label-efficient technique that enhances data diversity with minimal annotation effort for generalizable depth completion. PacGDC builds on novel insights into inherent ambiguities and consistencies in object shapes and positions during 2D-to-3D projection, allowing the synthesis of numerous pseudo geometries for the same visual scene. This process greatly broadens available geometries by manipulating scene scales of the corresponding depth maps. To leverage this property, we propose a new data synthesis pipeline that uses multiple depth foundation models as scale manipulators. These models robustly provide pseudo depth labels with varied scene scales, affecting both local objects and global layouts, while ensuring projection consistency that supports generalization. To further diversify geometries, we incorporate interpolation and relocation strategies, as well as unlabeled images, extending the data coverage beyond the individual use of foundation models. Extensive experiments show that PacGDC achieves remarkable generalizability across multiple benchmarks, excelling in diverse scene semantics/scales and depth sparsity/patterns under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Code: https://github.com/Wang-xjtu/PacGDC.

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arXiv2025

Foundation Models for Remote Sensing and Earth Observation: A Survey

Remote Sensing (RS) is a crucial technology for observing, monitoring, and interpreting our planet, with broad applications across geoscience, economics, humanitarian fields, etc. While artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning, has achieved significant advances in RS, unique challenges persist in developing more intelligent RS systems, including the complexity of Earth's environments, diverse sensor modalities, distinctive feature patterns, varying spatial and spectral resolutions, and temporal dynamics. Meanwhile, recent breakthroughs in large Foundation Models (FMs) have expanded AI's potential across many domains due to their exceptional generalizability and zero-shot transfer capabilities. However, their success has largely been confined to natural data like images and video, with degraded performance and even failures for RS data of various non-optical modalities. This has inspired growing interest in developing Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs) to address the complex demands of Earth Observation (EO) tasks, spanning the surface, atmosphere, and oceans. This survey systematically reviews the emerging field of RSFMs. It begins with an outline of their motivation and background, followed by an introduction of their foundational concepts. It then categorizes and reviews existing RSFM studies including their datasets and technical contributions across Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), Visual-Language Models (VLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and beyond. In addition, we benchmark these models against publicly available datasets, discuss existing challenges, and propose future research directions in this rapidly evolving field. A project associated with this survey has been built at https://github.com/xiaoaoran/awesome-RSFMs .

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arXiv2025

A Vision Centric Remote Sensing Benchmark

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in vision-language tasks but their remote sensing (RS) counterpart are relatively under explored. Unlike natural images, RS imagery presents unique challenges that current MLLMs struggle to handle, particularly in visual grounding and spatial reasoning. This study investigates the limitations of CLIP-based MLLMs in RS, highlighting their failure to differentiate visually distinct yet semantically similar RS images. To address this, we introduce a remote sensing multimodal visual patterns (RSMMVP) benchmark. It is designed to evaluate MLLMs in RS tasks by identifying the CLIP-blind pairs, where CLIP-based models incorrectly assign high similarity scores to visually distinct RS images. Through a visual question answering (VQA) evaluation, we analyze the performance of state-of-the-art MLLMs, revealing significant limitations in RS specific representation learning. The results provide valuable insights into the weaknesses of CLIP-based visual encoding and offer a foundation for future research to develop more effective MLLMs tailored for remote sensing applications.

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arXiv2025

SARLANG-1M: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Modeling in SAR Image Understanding

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a crucial remote sensing technology, enabling all-weather, day-and-night observation with strong surface penetration for precise and continuous environmental monitoring and analysis. However, SAR image interpretation remains challenging due to its complex physical imaging mechanisms and significant visual disparities from human perception. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in RGB image understanding, offering powerful open-vocabulary interpretation and flexible language interaction. However, their application to SAR images is severely constrained by the absence of SAR-specific knowledge in their training distributions, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this limitation, we introduce SARLANG-1M, a large-scale benchmark tailored for multimodal SAR image understanding, with a primary focus on integrating SAR with textual modality. SARLANG-1M comprises more than 1 million high-quality SAR image-text pairs collected from over 59 cities worldwide. It features hierarchical resolutions (ranging from 0.1 to 25 meters), fine-grained semantic descriptions (including both concise and detailed captions), diverse remote sensing categories (1,696 object types and 16 land cover classes), and multi-task question-answering pairs spanning seven applications and 1,012 question types. Extensive experiments on mainstream VLMs demonstrate that fine-tuning with SARLANG-1M significantly enhances their performance in SAR image interpretation, reaching performance comparable to human experts. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Jimmyxichen/SARLANG-1M.

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arXiv2024

Segment Anything with Multiple Modalities

Robust and accurate segmentation of scenes has become one core functionality in various visual recognition and navigation tasks. This has inspired the recent development of Segment Anything Model (SAM), a foundation model for general mask segmentation. However, SAM is largely tailored for single-modal RGB images, limiting its applicability to multi-modal data captured with widely-adopted sensor suites, such as LiDAR plus RGB, depth plus RGB, thermal plus RGB, etc. We develop MM-SAM, an extension and expansion of SAM that supports cross-modal and multi-modal processing for robust and enhanced segmentation with different sensor suites. MM-SAM features two key designs, namely, unsupervised cross-modal transfer and weakly-supervised multi-modal fusion, enabling label-efficient and parameter-efficient adaptation toward various sensor modalities. It addresses three main challenges: 1) adaptation toward diverse non-RGB sensors for single-modal processing, 2) synergistic processing of multi-modal data via sensor fusion, and 3) mask-free training for different downstream tasks. Extensive experiments show that MM-SAM consistently outperforms SAM by large margins, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness across various sensors and data modalities.

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arXiv2024

CAT-SAM: Conditional Tuning for Few-Shot Adaptation of Segment Anything Model

The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capability and flexible geometric prompting in general image segmentation. However, SAM often struggles when handling various unconventional images, such as aerial, medical, and non-RGB images. This paper presents CAT-SAM, a ConditionAl Tuning network that adapts SAM toward various unconventional target tasks with just few-shot target samples. CAT-SAM freezes the entire SAM and adapts its mask decoder and image encoder simultaneously with a small number of learnable parameters. The core design is a prompt bridge structure that enables decoder-conditioned joint tuning of the heavyweight image encoder and the lightweight mask decoder. The bridging maps the prompt token of the mask decoder to the image encoder, fostering synergic adaptation of the encoder and the decoder with mutual benefits. We develop two representative tuning strategies for the image encoder which leads to two CAT-SAM variants: one injecting learnable prompt tokens in the input space and the other inserting lightweight adapter networks. Extensive experiments over 11 unconventional tasks show that both CAT-SAM variants achieve superior target segmentation performance consistently even under the very challenging one-shot adaptation setup. Project page: https://xiaoaoran.github.io/projects/CAT-SAM

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arXiv2024

A Survey of Label-Efficient Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds

In the past decade, deep neural networks have achieved significant progress in point cloud learning. However, collecting large-scale precisely-annotated training data is extremely laborious and expensive, which hinders the scalability of existing point cloud datasets and poses a bottleneck for efficient exploration of point cloud data in various tasks and applications. Label-efficient learning offers a promising solution by enabling effective deep network training with much-reduced annotation efforts. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of label-efficient learning of point clouds. We address three critical questions in this emerging research field: i) the importance and urgency of label-efficient learning in point cloud processing, ii) the subfields it encompasses, and iii) the progress achieved in this area. To achieve this, we propose a taxonomy that organizes label-efficient learning methods based on the data prerequisites provided by different types of labels. We categorize four typical label-efficient learning approaches that significantly reduce point cloud annotation efforts: data augmentation, domain transfer learning, weakly-supervised learning, and pretrained foundation models. For each approach, we outline the problem setup and provide an extensive literature review that showcases relevant progress and challenges. Finally, we share insights into current research challenges and potential future directions. A project associated with this survey has been built at https://github.com/xiaoaoran/3D_label_efficient_learning.

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arXiv2024

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation via Iterative Support-Query Correspondence Mining

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) poses the challenge of segmenting novel categories from a distinct domain using only limited exemplars. In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive study of CD-FSS and uncover two crucial insights: (i) the necessity of a fine-tuning stage to effectively transfer the learned meta-knowledge across domains, and (ii) the overfitting risk during the naïve fine-tuning due to the scarcity of novel category examples. With these insights, we propose a novel cross-domain fine-tuning strategy that addresses the challenging CD-FSS tasks. We first design Bi-directional Few-shot Prediction (BFP), which establishes support-query correspondence in a bi-directional manner, crafting augmented supervision to reduce the overfitting risk. Then we further extend BFP into Iterative Few-shot Adaptor (IFA), which is a recursive framework to capture the support-query correspondence iteratively, targeting maximal exploitation of supervisory signals from the sparse novel category samples. Extensive empirical evaluations show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts (+7.8\%), which verifies that IFA tackles the cross-domain challenges and mitigates the overfitting simultaneously. The code is available at: https://github.com/niejiahao1998/IFA.

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arXiv2024

Rewrite Caption Semantics: Bridging Semantic Gaps for Language-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Vision-Language Pre-training has demonstrated its remarkable zero-shot recognition ability and potential to learn generalizable visual representations from language supervision. Taking a step ahead, language-supervised semantic segmentation enables spatial localization of textual inputs by learning pixel grouping solely from image-text pairs. Nevertheless, the state-of-the-art suffers from clear semantic gaps between visual and textual modality: plenty of visual concepts appeared in images are missing in their paired captions. Such semantic misalignment circulates in pre-training, leading to inferior zero-shot performance in dense predictions due to insufficient visual concepts captured in textual representations. To close such semantic gap, we propose Concept Curation (CoCu), a pipeline that leverages CLIP to compensate for the missing semantics. For each image-text pair, we establish a concept archive that maintains potential visually-matched concepts with our proposed vision-driven expansion and text-to-vision-guided ranking. Relevant concepts can thus be identified via cluster-guided sampling and fed into pre-training, thereby bridging the gap between visual and textual semantics. Extensive experiments over a broad suite of 8 segmentation benchmarks show that CoCu achieves superb zero-shot transfer performance and greatly boosts language-supervised segmentation baseline by a large margin, suggesting the value of bridging semantic gap in pre-training data.

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arXiv2023

3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild: Learning Generalized Models for Adverse-Condition Point Clouds

Robust point cloud parsing under all-weather conditions is crucial to level-5 autonomy in autonomous driving. However, how to learn a universal 3D semantic segmentation (3DSS) model is largely neglected as most existing benchmarks are dominated by point clouds captured under normal weather. We introduce SemanticSTF, an adverse-weather point cloud dataset that provides dense point-level annotations and allows to study 3DSS under various adverse weather conditions. We study all-weather 3DSS modeling under two setups: 1) domain adaptive 3DSS that adapts from normal-weather data to adverse-weather data; 2) domain generalizable 3DSS that learns all-weather 3DSS models from normal-weather data. Our studies reveal the challenge while existing 3DSS methods encounter adverse-weather data, showing the great value of SemanticSTF in steering the future endeavor along this very meaningful research direction. In addition, we design a domain randomization technique that alternatively randomizes the geometry styles of point clouds and aggregates their embeddings, ultimately leading to a generalizable model that can improve 3DSS under various adverse weather effectively. The SemanticSTF and related codes are available at \url{https://github.com/xiaoaoran/SemanticSTF}.

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arXiv2023

Unsupervised Point Cloud Representation Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey

Point cloud data have been widely explored due to its superior accuracy and robustness under various adverse situations. Meanwhile, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved very impressive success in various applications such as surveillance and autonomous driving. The convergence of point cloud and DNNs has led to many deep point cloud models, largely trained under the supervision of large-scale and densely-labelled point cloud data. Unsupervised point cloud representation learning, which aims to learn general and useful point cloud representations from unlabelled point cloud data, has recently attracted increasing attention due to the constraint in large-scale point cloud labelling. This paper provides a comprehensive review of unsupervised point cloud representation learning using DNNs. It first describes the motivation, general pipelines as well as terminologies of the recent studies. Relevant background including widely adopted point cloud datasets and DNN architectures is then briefly presented. This is followed by an extensive discussion of existing unsupervised point cloud representation learning methods according to their technical approaches. We also quantitatively benchmark and discuss the reviewed methods over multiple widely adopted point cloud datasets. Finally, we share our humble opinion about several challenges and problems that could be pursued in future research in unsupervised point cloud representation learning. A project associated with this survey has been built at https://github.com/xiaoaoran/3d_url_survey.

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arXiv2022

PolarMix: A General Data Augmentation Technique for LiDAR Point Clouds

LiDAR point clouds, which are usually scanned by rotating LiDAR sensors continuously, capture precise geometry of the surrounding environment and are crucial to many autonomous detection and navigation tasks. Though many 3D deep architectures have been developed, efficient collection and annotation of large amounts of point clouds remain one major challenge in the analytic and understanding of point cloud data. This paper presents PolarMix, a point cloud augmentation technique that is simple and generic but can mitigate the data constraint effectively across different perception tasks and scenarios. PolarMix enriches point cloud distributions and preserves point cloud fidelity via two cross-scan augmentation strategies that cut, edit, and mix point clouds along the scanning direction. The first is scene-level swapping which exchanges point cloud sectors of two LiDAR scans that are cut along the azimuth axis. The second is instance-level rotation and paste which crops point instances from one LiDAR scan, rotates them by multiple angles (to create multiple copies), and paste the rotated point instances into other scans. Extensive experiments show that PolarMix achieves superior performance consistently across different perception tasks and scenarios. In addition, it can work as plug-and-play for various 3D deep architectures and also performs well for unsupervised domain adaptation.

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arXiv2022

Bi-level Feature Alignment for Versatile Image Translation and Manipulation

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved great success in image translation and manipulation. However, high-fidelity image generation with faithful style control remains a grand challenge in computer vision. This paper presents a versatile image translation and manipulation framework that achieves accurate semantic and style guidance in image generation by explicitly building a correspondence. To handle the quadratic complexity incurred by building the dense correspondences, we introduce a bi-level feature alignment strategy that adopts a top-$k$ operation to rank block-wise features followed by dense attention between block features which reduces memory cost substantially. As the top-$k$ operation involves index swapping which precludes the gradient propagation, we approximate the non-differentiable top-$k$ operation with a regularized earth mover's problem so that its gradient can be effectively back-propagated. In addition, we design a novel semantic position encoding mechanism that builds up coordinate for each individual semantic region to preserve texture structures while building correspondences. Further, we design a novel confidence feature injection module which mitigates mismatch problem by fusing features adaptively according to the reliability of built correspondences. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior performance qualitatively and quantitatively as compared with the state-of-the-art.

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arXiv2022

MLAN: Multi-Level Adversarial Network for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Recent progresses in domain adaptive semantic segmentation demonstrate the effectiveness of adversarial learning (AL) in unsupervised domain adaptation. However, most adversarial learning based methods align source and target distributions at a global image level but neglect the inconsistency around local image regions. This paper presents a novel multi-level adversarial network (MLAN) that aims to address inter-domain inconsistency at both global image level and local region level optimally. MLAN has two novel designs, namely, region-level adversarial learning (RL-AL) and co-regularized adversarial learning (CR-AL). Specifically, RL-AL models prototypical regional context-relations explicitly in the feature space of a labelled source domain and transfers them to an unlabelled target domain via adversarial learning. CR-AL fuses region-level AL and image-level AL optimally via mutual regularization. In addition, we design a multi-level consistency map that can guide domain adaptation in both input space ($i.e.$, image-to-image translation) and output space ($i.e.$, self-training) effectively. Extensive experiments show that MLAN outperforms the state-of-the-art with a large margin consistently across multiple datasets.

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arXiv2022

Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to align a labeled source domain and an unlabeled target domain, but it requires to access the source data which often raises concerns in data privacy, data portability and data transmission efficiency. We study unsupervised model adaptation (UMA), or called Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data, an alternative setting that aims to adapt source-trained models towards target distributions without accessing source data. To this end, we design an innovative historical contrastive learning (HCL) technique that exploits historical source hypothesis to make up for the absence of source data in UMA. HCL addresses the UMA challenge from two perspectives. First, it introduces historical contrastive instance discrimination (HCID) that learns from target samples by contrasting their embeddings which are generated by the currently adapted model and the historical models. With the historical models, HCID encourages UMA to learn instance-discriminative target representations while preserving the source hypothesis. Second, it introduces historical contrastive category discrimination (HCCD) that pseudo-labels target samples to learn category-discriminative target representations. Specifically, HCCD re-weights pseudo labels according to their prediction consistency across the current and historical models. Extensive experiments show that HCL outperforms and state-of-the-art methods consistently across a variety of visual tasks and setups.

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