arXiv subjects

Hongze Shen

Publications and source records attributed to Hongze Shen.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

LensWalk: Agentic Video Understanding by Planning How You See in Videos

The dense, temporal nature of video presents a profound challenge for automated analysis. Despite the use of powerful Vision-Language Models, prevailing methods for video understanding are limited by the inherent disconnect between reasoning and perception: they rely on static, pre-processed information and cannot actively seek raw evidence from video as their understanding evolves. To address this, we introduce LensWalk, a flexible agentic framework that empowers a Large Language Model reasoner to control its own visual observation actively. LensWalk establishes a tight reason-plan-observe loop where the agent dynamically specifies, at each step, the temporal scope and sampling density of the video it observes. Using a suite of versatile, Vision-Language Model based tools parameterized by these specifications, the agent can perform broad scans for cues, focus on specific segments for fact extraction, and stitch evidence from multiple moments for holistic verification. This design allows for progressive, on-demand evidence gathering that directly serves the agent's evolving chain of thought. Without requiring any model fine-tuning, LensWalk delivers substantial, plug-and-play performance gains on multiple model recipes, boosting their accuracy by over 5\% on challenging long-video benchmarks like LVBench and Video-MME. Our analysis reveals that enabling an agent to control how it sees is key to unlocking more accurate, robust, and interpretable video reasoning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DenseMLLM: Standard Multimodal LLMs for Dense Prediction

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in high-level visual understanding. However, extending these models to fine-grained dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation, typically necessitates the incorporation of complex, task-specific decoders and other customizations. This architectural fragmentation increases model complexity and deviates from the generalist design of MLLMs, ultimately limiting their practicality. In this work, we challenge this paradigm by accommodating standard MLLMs to perform dense predictions without requiring additional task-specific decoders. The proposed model is called DenseMLLM, grounded in the standard architecture with a novel vision token supervision strategy for multiple labels and tasks. Despite its minimalist design, our model achieves highly competitive performance across a wide range of dense prediction and vision-language benchmarks, demonstrating that a standard, general-purpose MLLM can effectively support dense perception without architectural specialization. This project is available at github.com/Eli-YiLi/DenseMLLM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Youtu-VL: Unleashing Visual Potential via Unified Vision-Language Supervision

Despite the significant advancements represented by Vision-Language Models (VLMs), current architectures often exhibit limitations in retaining fine-grained visual information, leading to coarse-grained multimodal comprehension. We attribute this deficiency to a suboptimal training paradigm inherent in prevailing VLMs, which exhibits a text-dominant optimization bias by conceptualizing visual signals merely as passive conditional inputs rather than supervisory targets. To mitigate this, we introduce Youtu-VL, a framework leveraging the Vision-Language Unified Autoregressive Supervision (VLUAS) paradigm, which fundamentally shifts the optimization objective from ``vision-as-input'' to ``vision-as-target.'' By integrating visual tokens directly into the prediction stream, Youtu-VL applies unified autoregressive supervision to both visual details and linguistic content. Furthermore, we extend this paradigm to encompass vision-centric tasks, enabling a standard VLM to perform vision-centric tasks without task-specific additions. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that Youtu-VL achieves competitive performance on both general multimodal tasks and vision-centric tasks, establishing a robust foundation for the development of comprehensive generalist visual agents.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

HumanPCR: Probing MLLM Capabilities in Diverse Human-Centric Scenes

The aspiration for artificial general intelligence, fueled by the rapid progress of multimodal models, demands human-comparable performance across diverse environments. We propose HumanPCR, an evaluation suite for probing MLLMs' capacity about human-related visual contexts across three hierarchical levels: Perception, Comprehension, and Reasoning (denoted by Human-P, Human-C, and Human-R, respectively). Human-P and Human-C feature over 6,000 human-verified multiple choice questions, assessing massive tasks of 9 dimensions, including but not limited to essential skills frequently overlooked by existing benchmarks. Human-R offers a challenging manually curated video reasoning test that requires integrating multiple visual evidences, proactively extracting context beyond question cues, and applying human-like expertise. Each question includes human-annotated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales with key visual evidence to support further research. Extensive evaluations on over 30 state-of-the-art models exhibit significant challenges in human-centric visual understanding, particularly in tasks involving detailed space perception, temporal understanding, and mind modeling. Moreover, analysis of Human-R reveals the struggle of models in extracting essential proactive visual evidence from diverse human scenes and their faulty reliance on query-guided retrieval. Even with advanced techniques like scaling visual contexts and test-time thinking yield only limited benefits. We hope HumanPCR and our findings will advance the development, evaluation, and human-centric application of multimodal models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

HERM: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multimodal LLMs for Human-Centric Understanding

The significant advancements in visual understanding and instruction following from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have opened up more possibilities for broader applications in diverse and universal human-centric scenarios. However, existing image-text data may not support the precise modality alignment and integration of multi-grained information, which is crucial for human-centric visual understanding. In this paper, we introduce HERM-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating the human-centric understanding capabilities of MLLMs. Our work reveals the limitations of existing MLLMs in understanding complex human-centric scenarios. To address these challenges, we present HERM-100K, a comprehensive dataset with multi-level human-centric annotations, aimed at enhancing MLLMs' training. Furthermore, we develop HERM-7B, a MLLM that leverages enhanced training data from HERM-100K. Evaluations on HERM-Bench demonstrate that HERM-7B significantly outperforms existing MLLMs across various human-centric dimensions, reflecting the current inadequacy of data annotations used in MLLM training for human-centric visual understanding. This research emphasizes the importance of specialized datasets and benchmarks in advancing the MLLMs' capabilities for human-centric understanding.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Model-guided Multi-path Knowledge Aggregation for Aerial Saliency Prediction

As an emerging vision platform, a drone can look from many abnormal viewpoints which brings many new challenges into the classic vision task of video saliency prediction. To investigate these challenges, this paper proposes a large-scale video dataset for aerial saliency prediction, which consists of ground-truth salient object regions of 1,000 aerial videos, annotated by 24 subjects. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first large-scale video dataset that focuses on visual saliency prediction on drones. Based on this dataset, we propose a Model-guided Multi-path Network (MM-Net) that serves as a baseline model for aerial video saliency prediction. Inspired by the annotation process in eye-tracking experiments, MM-Net adopts multiple information paths, each of which is initialized under the guidance of a classic saliency model. After that, the visual saliency knowledge encoded in the most representative paths is selected and aggregated to improve the capability of MM-Net in predicting spatial saliency in aerial scenarios. Finally, these spatial predictions are adaptively combined with the temporal saliency predictions via a spatiotemporal optimization algorithm. Experimental results show that MM-Net outperforms ten state-of-the-art models in predicting aerial video saliency.

cs.CV↗