arXiv subjects

Fanjie Kong

Publications and source records attributed to Fanjie Kong.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

AugCodec: A Low-Bitrate Disentangled Neural Speech Codec via Data Augmentation

We propose AugCodec, a low-bitrate disentangled neural speech codec that leverages data augmentation to decompose speech into three distinct components: semantic, speaker, and prosody tokens. Specifically, we employ tailored augmenta tion strategies to transform speech into distinct variants, each serving as input for extracting tokens that preserve the target attribute while suppressing others. This disentanglement strategy enables substantial reduction in token rate. Further more, we introduce an augmentation loss that aligns semantic encoder outputs between source and voice-converted speech, encouraging speaker-agnostic embeddings while mitigating the acoustic mismatch induced by voice conversion. Experiments on LibriSpeech test-clean demonstrate that AugCodec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both reconstruction quality and disentanglement, while operating at only 12.5Hz with three token streams.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Ground4D: Spatially-Grounded Feedforward 4D Reconstruction for Unstructured Off-Road Scenes

Feedforward Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as an efficient paradigm for 4D reconstruction in autonomous driving. However, in unstructured off-road scenes, its performance degrades due to high-frequency geometry, ego-motion jitter, and increased non-rigid dynamics. These factors introduce conflicting Gaussian observations across timestamps, leading to either over-smoothed renderings or structural artifacts. To address this issue, we propose Ground4D, a spatially-grounded 4D feedforward framework for pose-free off-road reconstruction. The key idea is to resolve temporal conflicts through spatially localized conditioning. Specifically, we introduce voxel-grounded temporal Gaussian aggregation, which partitions the canonical Gaussian space into spatial voxels and performs query-conditioned temporal attention within each voxel. Intra-voxel softmax normalization ensures that temporal selectivity and spatial occupancy become mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting. We furthermore introduce surface normal cues as auxiliary geometric guidance to regularize the geometry of Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments on ORAD-3D and RELLIS-3D demonstrate that Ground4D consistently outperforms existing feedforward methods in reconstruction quality and generalizes zero-shot to unseen off-road domains. Project page and code:https://github.com/wsnbws/Ground4D.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Vision-Language-Action Model with Visual Prompt for OFF-Road Autonomous Driving

Efficient trajectory planning in off-road terrains presents a formidable challenge for autonomous vehicles, often necessitating complex multi-step pipelines. However, traditional approaches exhibit limited adaptability in dynamic environments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes OFF-EMMA, a novel end-to-end multimodal framework designed to overcome the deficiencies of insufficient spatial perception and unstable reasoning in visual-language-action (VLA) models for off-road autonomous driving scenarios. The framework explicitly annotates input images through the design of a visual prompt block and introduces a chain-of-thought with self-consistency (COT-SC) reasoning strategy to enhance the accuracy and robustness of trajectory planning. The visual prompt block utilizes semantic segmentation masks as visual prompts, enhancing the spatial understanding ability of pre-trained visual-language models for complex terrains. The COT- SC strategy effectively mitigates the error impact of outliers on planning performance through a multi-path reasoning mechanism. Experimental results on the RELLIS-3D off-road dataset demonstrate that OFF-EMMA significantly outperforms existing methods, reducing the average L2 error of the Qwen backbone model by 13.3% and decreasing the failure rate from 16.52% to 6.56%.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

GenDet: Painting Colored Bounding Boxes on Images via Diffusion Model for Object Detection

This paper presents GenDet, a novel framework that redefines object detection as an image generation task. In contrast to traditional approaches, GenDet adopts a pioneering approach by leveraging generative modeling: it conditions on the input image and directly generates bounding boxes with semantic annotations in the original image space. GenDet establishes a conditional generation architecture built upon the large-scale pre-trained Stable Diffusion model, formulating the detection task as semantic constraints within the latent space. It enables precise control over bounding box positions and category attributes, while preserving the flexibility of the generative model. This novel methodology effectively bridges the gap between generative models and discriminative tasks, providing a fresh perspective for constructing unified visual understanding systems. Systematic experiments demonstrate that GenDet achieves competitive accuracy compared to discriminative detectors, while retaining the flexibility characteristic of generative methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Advancing Off-Road Autonomous Driving: The Large-Scale ORAD-3D Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmarks

A major bottleneck in off-road autonomous driving research lies in the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality datasets and benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we present ORAD-3D, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the largest dataset specifically curated for off-road autonomous driving. ORAD-3D covers a wide spectrum of terrains, including woodlands, farmlands, grasslands, riversides, gravel roads, cement roads, and rural areas, while capturing diverse environmental variations across weather conditions (sunny, rainy, foggy, and snowy) and illumination levels (bright daylight, daytime, twilight, and nighttime). Building upon this dataset, we establish a comprehensive suite of benchmark evaluations spanning five fundamental tasks: 2D free-space detection, 3D occupancy prediction, rough GPS-guided path planning, vision-language model-driven autonomous driving, and world model for off-road environments. Together, the dataset and benchmarks provide a unified and robust resource for advancing perception and planning in challenging off-road scenarios. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/chaytonmin/ORAD-3D.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Speaker Identity: Text Guided Target Speech Extraction

Target Speech Extraction (TSE) traditionally relies on explicit clues about the speaker's identity like enrollment audio, face images, or videos, which may not always be available. In this paper, we propose a text-guided TSE model StyleTSE that uses natural language descriptions of speaking style in addition to the audio clue to extract the desired speech from a given mixture. Our model integrates a speech separation network adapted from SepFormer with a bi-modality clue network that flexibly processes both audio and text clues. To train and evaluate our model, we introduce a new dataset TextrolMix with speech mixtures and natural language descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively separates speech based not only on who is speaking, but also on how they are speaking, enhancing TSE in scenarios where traditional audio clues are absent. Demos are at: https://mingyue66.github.io/TextrolMix/demo/

eess.AS↗

arXiv2024

Hyperbolic Learning with Synthetic Captions for Open-World Detection

Open-world detection poses significant challenges, as it requires the detection of any object using either object class labels or free-form texts. Existing related works often use large-scale manual annotated caption datasets for training, which are extremely expensive to collect. Instead, we propose to transfer knowledge from vision-language models (VLMs) to enrich the open-vocabulary descriptions automatically. Specifically, we bootstrap dense synthetic captions using pre-trained VLMs to provide rich descriptions on different regions in images, and incorporate these captions to train a novel detector that generalizes to novel concepts. To mitigate the noise caused by hallucination in synthetic captions, we also propose a novel hyperbolic vision-language learning approach to impose a hierarchy between visual and caption embeddings. We call our detector ``HyperLearner''. We conduct extensive experiments on a wide variety of open-world detection benchmarks (COCO, LVIS, Object Detection in the Wild, RefCOCO) and our results show that our model consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, such as GLIP, GLIPv2 and Grounding DINO, when using the same backbone.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Neural Insights for Digital Marketing Content Design

In digital marketing, experimenting with new website content is one of the key levers to improve customer engagement. However, creating successful marketing content is a manual and time-consuming process that lacks clear guiding principles. This paper seeks to close the loop between content creation and online experimentation by offering marketers AI-driven actionable insights based on historical data to improve their creative process. We present a neural-network-based system that scores and extracts insights from a marketing content design, namely, a multimodal neural network predicts the attractiveness of marketing contents, and a post-hoc attribution method generates actionable insights for marketers to improve their content in specific marketing locations. Our insights not only point out the advantages and drawbacks of a given current content, but also provide design recommendations based on historical data. We show that our scoring model and insights work well both quantitatively and qualitatively.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Mitigating Test-Time Bias for Fair Image Retrieval

We address the challenge of generating fair and unbiased image retrieval results given neutral textual queries (with no explicit gender or race connotations), while maintaining the utility (performance) of the underlying vision-language (VL) model. Previous methods aim to disentangle learned representations of images and text queries from gender and racial characteristics. However, we show these are inadequate at alleviating bias for the desired equal representation result, as there usually exists test-time bias in the target retrieval set. So motivated, we introduce a straightforward technique, Post-hoc Bias Mitigation (PBM), that post-processes the outputs from the pre-trained vision-language model. We evaluate our algorithm on real-world image search datasets, Occupation 1 and 2, as well as two large-scale image-text datasets, MS-COCO and Flickr30k. Our approach achieves the lowest bias, compared with various existing bias-mitigation methods, in text-based image retrieval result while maintaining satisfactory retrieval performance. The source code is publicly available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Fair_Text_based_Image_Retrieval-D8B2}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Efficient Classification of Very Large Images with Tiny Objects

An increasing number of applications in computer vision, specially, in medical imaging and remote sensing, become challenging when the goal is to classify very large images with tiny informative objects. Specifically, these classification tasks face two key challenges: $i$) the size of the input image is usually in the order of mega- or giga-pixels, however, existing deep architectures do not easily operate on such big images due to memory constraints, consequently, we seek a memory-efficient method to process these images; and $ii$) only a very small fraction of the input images are informative of the label of interest, resulting in low region of interest (ROI) to image ratio. However, most of the current convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are designed for image classification datasets that have relatively large ROIs and small image sizes (sub-megapixel). Existing approaches have addressed these two challenges in isolation. We present an end-to-end CNN model termed Zoom-In network that leverages hierarchical attention sampling for classification of large images with tiny objects using a single GPU. We evaluate our method on four large-image histopathology, road-scene and satellite imaging datasets, and one gigapixel pathology dataset. Experimental results show that our model achieves higher accuracy than existing methods while requiring less memory resources.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Proactive Pseudo-Intervention: Causally Informed Contrastive Learning For Interpretable Vision Models

Deep neural networks excel at comprehending complex visual signals, delivering on par or even superior performance to that of human experts. However, ad-hoc visual explanations of model decisions often reveal an alarming level of reliance on exploiting non-causal visual cues that strongly correlate with the target label in training data. As such, deep neural nets suffer compromised generalization to novel inputs collected from different sources, and the reverse engineering of their decision rules offers limited interpretability. To overcome these limitations, we present a novel contrastive learning strategy called {\it Proactive Pseudo-Intervention} (PPI) that leverages proactive interventions to guard against image features with no causal relevance. We also devise a novel causally informed salience mapping module to identify key image pixels to intervene, and show it greatly facilitates model interpretability. To demonstrate the utility of our proposals, we benchmark on both standard natural images and challenging medical image datasets. PPI-enhanced models consistently deliver superior performance relative to competing solutions, especially on out-of-domain predictions and data integration from heterogeneous sources. Further, our causally trained saliency maps are more succinct and meaningful relative to their non-causal counterparts.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Quantum Tensor Network in Machine Learning: An Application to Tiny Object Classification

Tiny object classification problem exists in many machine learning applications like medical imaging or remote sensing, where the object of interest usually occupies a small region of the whole image. It is challenging to design an efficient machine learning model with respect to tiny object of interest. Current neural network structures are unable to deal with tiny object efficiently because they are mainly developed for images featured by large scale objects. However, in quantum physics, there is a great theoretical foundation guiding us to analyze the target function for image classification regarding to specific objects size ratio. In our work, we apply Tensor Networks to solve this arising tough machine learning problem. First, we summarize the previous work that connects quantum spin model to image classification and bring the theory into the scenario of tiny object classification. Second, we propose using 2D multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) to classify tiny objects in image. In the end, our experimental results indicate that tensor network models are effective for tiny object classification problem and potentially will beat state-of-the-art. Our codes will be available online https://github.com/timqqt/MERA_Image_Classification.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Physics-enhanced machine learning for virtual fluorescence microscopy

This paper introduces a new method of data-driven microscope design for virtual fluorescence microscopy. Our results show that by including a model of illumination within the first layers of a deep convolutional neural network, it is possible to learn task-specific LED patterns that substantially improve the ability to infer fluorescence image information from unstained transmission microscopy images. We validated our method on two different experimental setups, with different magnifications and different sample types, to show a consistent improvement in performance as compared to conventional illumination methods. Additionally, to understand the importance of learned illumination on inference task, we varied the dynamic range of the fluorescent image targets (from one to seven bits), and showed that the margin of improvement for learned patterns increased with the information content of the target. This work demonstrates the power of programmable optical elements at enabling better machine learning algorithm performance and at providing physical insight into next generation of machine-controlled imaging systems.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

The Synthinel-1 dataset: a collection of high resolution synthetic overhead imagery for building segmentation

Recently deep learning - namely convolutional neural networks (CNNs) - have yielded impressive performance for the task of building segmentation on large overhead (e.g., satellite) imagery benchmarks. However, these benchmark datasets only capture a small fraction of the variability present in real-world overhead imagery, limiting the ability to properly train, or evaluate, models for real-world application. Unfortunately, developing a dataset that captures even a small fraction of real-world variability is typically infeasible due to the cost of imagery, and manual pixel-wise labeling of the imagery. In this work we develop an approach to rapidly and cheaply generate large and diverse virtual environments from which we can capture synthetic overhead imagery for training segmentation CNNs. Using this approach, generate and publicly-release a collection of synthetic overhead imagery - termed Synthinel-1 with full pixel-wise building labels. We use several benchmark dataset to demonstrate that Synthinel-1 is consistently beneficial when used to augment real-world training imagery, especially when CNNs are tested on novel geographic locations or conditions.

cs.CV↗