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Guoqiang Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Guoqiang Liang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit broad intelligence about the world, yet translating this intelligence into robot control remains challenging. We present Show-Harness, an Embodied Harness that enables VLMs to "play" robots through a compact semantic interface linking intent to action. Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs can naturally reason over, while embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically ground them into local robot actions, keeping the VLM directly responsible for fine-grained physical decisions. Through the same interface, Show-Harness demonstrates the feasibility of (1) directly unlocking closed-source frontier VLMs for zero-shot robot control, and (2) adapting small-scale open-source VLMs for low-cost deployment with just a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. We further develop GUMI (GUI Manipulation Interface), which extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection, allowing humans and agents to "play" robots across embodiments without specialized teleoperation hardware. Extensive experiments show that Show-Harness-equipped VLM agents generalize robustly across tasks, embodiments, and environments, outperforming representative agentic and VLA paradigms. These results suggest that the right interface can unlock substantial embodied capability from foundation VLMs, without requiring additional model capacity or costly embodiment-specific pretraining.

cs.RO

Zoom-IQA: Image Quality Assessment with Reliable Region-Aware Reasoning

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Previous methods typically focus on predicting numerical scores without explanation or providing low-level descriptions lacking precise scores. Recent reasoning-based vision language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for IQA by jointly generating quality descriptions and scores. However, existing VLM-based IQA methods often suffer from unreliable reasoning due to their limited capability of integrating visual and textual cues. In this work, we introduce Zoom-IQA, a VLM-based IQA model to explicitly emulate key cognitive behaviors: uncertainty awareness, region reasoning, and iterative refinement. Specifically, we present a two-stage training pipeline: 1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our Grounded-Rationale-IQA (GR-IQA) dataset to teach the model to ground its assessments in key regions, and 2) reinforcement learning (RL) for dynamic policy exploration, stabilized by our KL-Coverage regularizer to prevent reasoning and scoring diversity collapse, with a Progressive Re-sampling Strategy for mitigating annotation bias. Extensive experiments show that Zoom-IQA achieves improved robustness, explainability, and generalization. The application to downstream tasks, such as image restoration, further demonstrates the effectiveness of Zoom-IQA.

cs.CV

Multi-level Collaborative Distillation Meets Global Workspace Model: A Unified Framework for OCIL

Online Class-Incremental Learning (OCIL) enables models to learn continuously from non-i.i.d. data streams. Since samples of the data streams can be seen only once, it is more suitable for real-world scenarios compared to offline learning. However, this constraint intensifies the challenge for OCIL in maintaining an appropriate balance between stability and plasticity. Moreover, under stricter memory buffer constraints in real world, current replay-based methods are less effective. While ensemble methods improve plasticity, they often struggle with stability. Inspired by the Global Workspace Theory (GWT), we propose a novel approach that enhances ensemble learning through a Global Workspace Model (GWM)-a shared, implicit memory that guides the learning of multiple student models. The GWM is formed by fusing the parameters of all students within each training batch, capturing the historical learning trajectory and serving as a dynamic anchor for knowledge consolidation. Like the broadcasting mechanism of GWT, the GWM is redistributed periodically to students, stabilizing learning and promoting cross-task consistency. In addition, we introduce a multi-level collaborative distillation mechanism. It enforces peer-to-peer consistency among students and preserves historical knowledge by aligning each student with the GWM. As a result, student models remain adaptable to new tasks while maintaining previously learned knowledge, striking a better balance between stability and plasticity. Extensive experiments on three standard OCIL benchmarks show that our method delivers significant performance improvement for several OCIL models across various memory budgets. The code is available at https://github.com/susususushi/GWM.

cs.LG

Kiwi-Edit: Versatile Video Editing via Instruction and Reference Guidance

Instruction-based video editing has witnessed rapid progress, yet current methods often struggle with precise visual control, as natural language is inherently limited in describing complex visual nuances. Although reference-guided editing offers a robust solution, its potential is currently bottlenecked by the scarcity of high-quality paired training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce a scalable data generation pipeline that transforms existing video editing pairs into high-fidelity training quadruplets, leveraging image generative models to create synthesized reference scaffolds. Using this pipeline, we construct RefVIE, a large-scale dataset tailored for instruction-reference-following tasks, and establish RefVIE-Bench for comprehensive evaluation. Furthermore, we propose a unified editing architecture, Kiwi-Edit, that synergizes learnable queries and latent visual features for reference semantic guidance. Our model achieves significant gains in instruction following and reference fidelity via a progressive multi-stage training curriculum. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our data and architecture establish a new state-of-the-art in controllable video editing. All datasets, models, and code is released at https://github.com/showlab/Kiwi-Edit.

cs.CV

Sparkle: Realizing Lively Instruction-Guided Video Background Replacement via Decoupled Guidance

In recent years, open-source efforts like Senorita-2M have propelled video editing toward natural language instruction. However, current publicly available datasets predominantly focus on local editing or style transfer, which largely preserve the original scene structure and are easier to scale. In contrast, Background Replacement, a task central to creative applications such as film production and advertising, requires synthesizing entirely new, temporally consistent scenes while maintaining accurate foreground-background interactions, making large-scale data generation significantly more challenging. Consequently, this complex task remains largely underexplored due to a scarcity of high-quality training data. This gap is evident in poorly performing state-of-the-art models, e.g., Kiwi-Edit, because the primary open-source dataset that contains this task, i.e., OpenVE-3M, frequently produces static, unnatural backgrounds. In this paper, we trace this quality degradation to a lack of precise background guidance during data synthesis. Accordingly, we design a scalable pipeline that generates foreground and background guidance in a decoupled manner with strict quality filtering. Building on this pipeline, we introduce Sparkle, a dataset of ~140K video pairs spanning five common background-change themes, alongside Sparkle-Bench, the largest evaluation benchmark tailored for background replacement to date. Experiments demonstrate that our dataset and the model trained on it achieve substantially better performance than all existing baselines on both OpenVE-Bench and Sparkle-Bench. Our proposed dataset, benchmark, and model are fully open-sourced at https://showlab.github.io/Sparkle/.

cs.CV

AuthFace: Towards Authentic Blind Face Restoration with Face-oriented Generative Diffusion Prior

Blind face restoration (BFR) is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer vision. To faithfully restore high-quality (HQ) photos from poor-quality ones, recent research endeavors predominantly rely on facial image priors from the powerful pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. However, such priors often lead to the incorrect generation of non-facial features and insufficient facial details, thus rendering them less practical for real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely AuthFace that achieves highly authentic face restoration results by exploring a face-oriented generative diffusion prior. To learn such a prior, we first collect a dataset of 1.5K high-quality images, with resolutions exceeding 8K, captured by professional photographers. Based on the dataset, we then introduce a novel face-oriented restoration-tuning pipeline that fine-tunes a pretrained T2I model. Identifying key criteria of quality-first and photography-guided annotation, we involve the retouching and reviewing process under the guidance of photographers for high-quality images that show rich facial features. The photography-guided annotation system fully explores the potential of these high-quality photographic images. In this way, the potent natural image priors from pretrained T2I diffusion models can be subtly harnessed, specifically enhancing their capability in facial detail restoration. Moreover, to minimize artifacts in critical facial areas, such as eyes and mouth, we propose a time-aware latent facial feature loss to learn the authentic face restoration process. Extensive experiments on the synthetic and real-world BFR datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach.

cs.CV

Attention Retention for Continual Learning with Vision Transformers

Continual learning (CL) empowers AI systems to progressively acquire knowledge from non-stationary data streams. However, catastrophic forgetting remains a critical challenge. In this work, we identify attention drift in Vision Transformers as a primary source of catastrophic forgetting, where the attention to previously learned visual concepts shifts significantly after learning new tasks. Inspired by neuroscientific insights into the selective attention in the human visual system, we propose a novel attention-retaining framework to mitigate forgetting in CL. Our method constrains attention drift by explicitly modifying gradients during backpropagation through a two-step process: 1) extracting attention maps of the previous task using a layer-wise rollout mechanism and generating instance-adaptive binary masks, and 2) when learning a new task, applying these masks to zero out gradients associated with previous attention regions, thereby preventing disruption of learned visual concepts. For compatibility with modern optimizers, the gradient masking process is further enhanced by scaling parameter updates proportionally to maintain their relative magnitudes. Experiments and visualizations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in mitigating catastrophic forgetting and preserving visual concepts. It achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits robust generalizability across diverse CL scenarios.

cs.CV

The Empowerment of Science of Science by Large Language Models: New Tools and Methods

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, image recognition, and multimodal tasks, charting a course towards AGI and emerging as a central issue in the global technological race. This manuscript conducts a comprehensive review of the core technologies that support LLMs from a user standpoint, including prompt engineering, knowledge-enhanced retrieval augmented generation, fine tuning, pretraining, and tool learning. Additionally, it traces the historical development of Science of Science (SciSci) and presents a forward looking perspective on the potential applications of LLMs within the scientometric domain. Furthermore, it discusses the prospect of an AI agent based model for scientific evaluation, and presents new research fronts detection and knowledge graph building methods with LLMs.

cs.CL

Research on the recommendation framework of foreign enterprises from the perspective of multidimensional proximity

As global economic integration progresses, foreign-funded enterprises play an increasingly crucial role in fostering local economic growth and enhancing industrial development. However, there are not many researches to deal with this aspect in recent years. This study utilizes the multidimensional proximity theory to thoroughly examine the criteria for selecting high-quality foreign-funded companies that are likely to invest in and establish factories in accordance with local conditions during the investment attraction process.First, this study leverages databases such as Wind and Osiris, along with government policy documents, to investigate foreign-funded enterprises and establish a high-quality database. Second, using a two-step method, enterprises aligned with local industrial strategies are identified. Third, a detailed analysis is conducted on key metrics, including industry revenue, concentration (measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index), and geographical distance (calculated using the Haversine formula). Finally, a multi-criteria decision analysis ranks the top five companies as the most suitable candidates for local investment, with the methodology validated through a case study in a district of Beijing.The example results show that the established framework helps local governments identify high-quality foreign-funded enterprises.

stat.AP

Self-supervised Learning of Event-guided Video Frame Interpolation for Rolling Shutter Frames

Most consumer cameras use rolling shutter (RS) exposure, which often leads to distortions such as skew and jelly effects. These videos are further limited by bandwidth and frame rate constraints. In this paper, we explore the potential of event cameras, which offer high temporal resolution. We propose a framework to recover global shutter (GS) high-frame-rate videos without RS distortion by combining an RS camera and an event camera. Due to the lack of real-world datasets, our framework adopts a self-supervised strategy based on a displacement field, a dense 3D spatiotemporal representation of pixel motion during exposure. This enables mutual reconstruction between RS and GS frames and facilitates slow-motion recovery. We combine RS frames with the displacement field to generate GS frames, and integrate inverse mapping and RS frame warping for self-supervision. Experiments on four datasets show that our method removes distortion, reduces bandwidth usage by 94 percent, and achieves 16 ms per frame at 32x interpolation.

cs.CV

Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Based on Pseudo-Labels: A Survey

Semantic segmentation is an important and popular research area in computer vision that focuses on classifying pixels in an image based on their semantics. However, supervised deep learning requires large amounts of data to train models and the process of labeling images pixel by pixel is time-consuming and laborious. This review aims to provide a first comprehensive and organized overview of the state-of-the-art research results on pseudo-label methods in the field of semi-supervised semantic segmentation, which we categorize from different perspectives and present specific methods for specific application areas. In addition, we explore the application of pseudo-label technology in medical and remote-sensing image segmentation. Finally, we also propose some feasible future research directions to address the existing challenges.

cs.CV

MS-DETR: Multispectral Pedestrian Detection Transformer with Loosely Coupled Fusion and Modality-Balanced Optimization

Multispectral pedestrian detection is an important task for many around-the-clock applications, since the visible and thermal modalities can provide complementary information especially under low light conditions. Due to the presence of two modalities, misalignment and modality imbalance are the most significant issues in multispectral pedestrian detection. In this paper, we propose M ulti S pectral pedestrian DE tection TR ansformer (MS-DETR) to fix above issues. MS-DETR consists of two modality-specific backbones and Transformer encoders, followed by a multi-modal Transformer decoder, and the visible and thermal features are fused in the multi-modal Transformer decoder. To well resist the misalignment between multi-modal images, we design a loosely coupled fusion strategy by sparsely sampling some keypoints from multi-modal features independently and fusing them with adaptively learned attention weights. Moreover, based on the insight that not only different modalities, but also different pedestrian instances tend to have different confidence scores to final detection, we further propose an instance-aware modality-balanced optimization strategy, which preserves visible and thermal decoder branches and aligns their predicted slots through an instance-wise dynamic loss. Our end-to-end MS-DETR shows superior performance on the challenging KAIST, CVC-14 and LLVIP benchmark datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/YinghuiXing/MS-DETR.

cs.CV

Frequency-Guided Spatial Adaptation for Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment camouflaged objects which exhibit very similar patterns with the surrounding environment. Recent research works have shown that enhancing the feature representation via the frequency information can greatly alleviate the ambiguity problem between the foreground objects and the background.With the emergence of vision foundation models, like InternImage, Segment Anything Model etc, adapting the pretrained model on COD tasks with a lightweight adapter module shows a novel and promising research direction. Existing adapter modules mainly care about the feature adaptation in the spatial domain. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency-guided spatial adaptation method for COD task. Specifically, we transform the input features of the adapter into frequency domain. By grouping and interacting with frequency components located within non overlapping circles in the spectrogram, different frequency components are dynamically enhanced or weakened, making the intensity of image details and contour features adaptively adjusted. At the same time, the features that are conducive to distinguishing object and background are highlighted, indirectly implying the position and shape of camouflaged object. We conduct extensive experiments on four widely adopted benchmark datasets and the proposed method outperforms 26 state-of-the-art methods with large margins. Code will be released.

cs.CV

EvLight++: Low-Light Video Enhancement with an Event Camera: A Large-Scale Real-World Dataset, Novel Method, and More

Event cameras offer significant advantages for low-light video enhancement, primarily due to their high dynamic range. Current research, however, is severely limited by the absence of large-scale, real-world, and spatio-temporally aligned event-video datasets. To address this, we introduce a large-scale dataset with over 30,000 pairs of frames and events captured under varying illumination. This dataset was curated using a robotic arm that traces a consistent non-linear trajectory, achieving spatial alignment precision under 0.03mm and temporal alignment with errors under 0.01s for 90% of the dataset. Based on the dataset, we propose \textbf{EvLight++}, a novel event-guided low-light video enhancement approach designed for robust performance in real-world scenarios. Firstly, we design a multi-scale holistic fusion branch to integrate structural and textural information from both images and events. To counteract variations in regional illumination and noise, we introduce Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)-guided regional feature selection, enhancing features from high SNR regions and augmenting those from low SNR regions by extracting structural information from events. To incorporate temporal information and ensure temporal coherence, we further introduce a recurrent module and temporal loss in the whole pipeline. Extensive experiments on our and the synthetic SDSD dataset demonstrate that EvLight++ significantly outperforms both single image- and video-based methods by 1.37 dB and 3.71 dB, respectively. To further explore its potential in downstream tasks like semantic segmentation and monocular depth estimation, we extend our datasets by adding pseudo segmentation and depth labels via meticulous annotation efforts with foundation models. Experiments under diverse low-light scenes show that the enhanced results achieve a 15.97% improvement in mIoU for semantic segmentation.

cs.CV

UniINR: Event-guided Unified Rolling Shutter Correction, Deblurring, and Interpolation

Video frames captured by rolling shutter (RS) cameras during fast camera movement frequently exhibit RS distortion and blur simultaneously. Naturally, recovering high-frame-rate global shutter (GS) sharp frames from an RS blur frame must simultaneously consider RS correction, deblur, and frame interpolation. A naive way is to decompose the whole process into separate tasks and cascade existing methods; however, this results in cumulative errors and noticeable artifacts. Event cameras enjoy many advantages, e.g., high temporal resolution, making them potential for our problem. To this end, we propose the first and novel approach, named UniINR, to recover arbitrary frame-rate sharp GS frames from an RS blur frame and paired events. Our key idea is unifying spatial-temporal implicit neural representation (INR) to directly map the position and time coordinates to color values to address the interlocking degradations. Specifically, we introduce spatial-temporal implicit encoding (STE) to convert an RS blur image and events into a spatial-temporal representation (STR). To query a specific sharp frame (GS or RS), we embed the exposure time into STR and decode the embedded features pixel-by-pixel to recover a sharp frame. Our method features a lightweight model with only 0.38M parameters, and it also enjoys high inference efficiency, achieving 2.83ms/frame in 31 times frame interpolation of an RS blur frame. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms prior methods. Code is available at https://github.com/yunfanLu/UniINR.

cs.CV

Towards Robust Event-guided Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Large-Scale Real-World Event-Image Dataset and Novel Approach

Event camera has recently received much attention for low-light image enhancement (LIE) thanks to their distinct advantages, such as high dynamic range. However, current research is prohibitively restricted by the lack of large-scale, real-world, and spatial-temporally aligned event-image datasets. To this end, we propose a real-world (indoor and outdoor) dataset comprising over 30K pairs of images and events under both low and normal illumination conditions. To achieve this, we utilize a robotic arm that traces a consistent non-linear trajectory to curate the dataset with spatial alignment precision under 0.03mm. We then introduce a matching alignment strategy, rendering 90% of our dataset with errors less than 0.01s. Based on the dataset, we propose a novel event-guided LIE approach, called EvLight, towards robust performance in real-world low-light scenes. Specifically, we first design the multi-scale holistic fusion branch to extract holistic structural and textural information from both events and images. To ensure robustness against variations in the regional illumination and noise, we then introduce a Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR)-guided regional feature selection to selectively fuse features of images from regions with high SNR and enhance those with low SNR by extracting regional structure information from events. Extensive experiments on our dataset and the synthetic SDSD dataset demonstrate our EvLight significantly surpasses the frame-based methods. Code and datasets are available at https://vlislab22.github.io/eg-lowlight/.

cs.CV

CoLeCLIP: Open-Domain Continual Learning via Joint Task Prompt and Vocabulary Learning

This paper explores the problem of continual learning (CL) of vision-language models (VLMs) in open domains, where the models need to perform continual updating and inference on a streaming of datasets from diverse seen and unseen domains with novel classes. Such a capability is crucial for various applications in open environments, e.g., AI assistants, autonomous driving systems, and robotics. Current CL studies mostly focus on closed-set scenarios in a single domain with known classes. Large pre-trained VLMs like CLIP have demonstrated superior zero-shot recognition ability, and a number of recent studies leverage this ability to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in CL, but they focus on closed-set CL in a single domain dataset. Open-domain CL of large VLMs is significantly more challenging due to 1) large class correlations and domain gaps across the datasets and 2) the forgetting of zero-shot knowledge in the pre-trained VLMs in addition to the knowledge learned from the newly adapted datasets. In this work we introduce a novel approach, termed CoLeCLIP, that learns an open-domain CL model based on CLIP. It addresses these challenges by a joint learning of a set of task prompts and a cross-domain class vocabulary. Extensive experiments on 11 domain datasets show that CoLeCLIP outperforms state-of-the-art methods for open-domain CL under both task- and class-incremental learning settings.

cs.CV

Text-based Person Search in Full Images via Semantic-Driven Proposal Generation

Finding target persons in full scene images with a query of text description has important practical applications in intelligent video surveillance.However, different from the real-world scenarios where the bounding boxes are not available, existing text-based person retrieval methods mainly focus on the cross modal matching between the query text descriptions and the gallery of cropped pedestrian images. To close the gap, we study the problem of text-based person search in full images by proposing a new end-to-end learning framework which jointly optimize the pedestrian detection, identification and visual-semantic feature embedding tasks. To take full advantage of the query text, the semantic features are leveraged to instruct the Region Proposal Network to pay more attention to the text-described proposals. Besides, a cross-scale visual-semantic embedding mechanism is utilized to improve the performance. To validate the proposed method, we collect and annotate two large-scale benchmark datasets based on the widely adopted image-based person search datasets CUHK-SYSU and PRW. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on the two datasets and compared with the baseline methods, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV