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Jianqi Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Jianqi Chen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

ProFocus: Interpreting Affective Experience in Artistic Images with Progressive Visual Focusing

Interpreting the emotional responses triggered by images is central to achieving emotional intelligence. Compared with natural images, visual art is intentionally created to elicit emotional responses from its viewers through abstract concepts and visual metaphors, making affective interpretation particularly challenging. However, most existing methods rely on general-purpose visual embeddings (e.g., CLIP), failing to capture the nuanced cues underlying artistic emotion. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{ProFocus}, a novel framework that models affective experience in artistic images via progressive visual focusing. The key idea is to model visual representation learning inspired by a hierarchical cognitive theory of human aesthetic appreciation. Technically, ProFocus contains two core components: a Hierarchical Art Critic (HAC) and a Progressive Hint Fusion (PHF) module. HAC leverages multimodal large language models to generate structured linguistic priors at three cognitive levels--atmospheric style, narrative subjects, and concrete details--thereby translating artistic perception into coherent semantic guidance. Building upon these priors, PHF departs from conventional cross-modal fusion by sequentially injecting the hierarchical hints into visual features, enabling a progressive focusing process that mirrors human perception. This design allows the model to capture subtle affective cues and produce more faithful explanations. Extensive experiments on the ArtEmis v1.0 and v2.0 datasets demonstrate that ProFocus consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both emotion recognition and affective explanation. Project page: https://github.com/Zhang-Zhiyan/ProFocus.

cs.CV

RegHead: Non-Humanoid Head Blendshapes via Feed-Forward Registration

We present RegHead, a framework for constructing semantic blendshape sets for animatable non-humanoid head avatars. With a fixed expression vocabulary, semantic blendshapes provide a low-dimensional and interpretable animation interface and support cross-identity retargeting. Building such blendshape sets remains expensive because (i) expression-consistent supervision is scarce, (ii) generated 4D assets typically lack correspondence, and (iii) facial motion is highly localized. We propose (1) a large-scale dataset of non-humanoid identities paired with a shared expression vocabulary, obtained by expanding a small artist-rigged library via fine-tuned image editing; (2) a dense stochastic anchor motion representation tailored to localized facial deformations; and (3) a fast feed-forward registration model that converts unregistered expression meshes into a corresponded blendshape basis by predicting anchor-based deformations from the neutral shape. Experiments show that our approach produces higher-fidelity expression meshes than baselines, while running orders of magnitude faster than optimization. We further demonstrate real-time retargeting from human face tracking signals to non-humanoid characters, capturing both head pose and localized facial motions. Our project page is available at https://snap-research.github.io/RegHead/.

cs.CV

MeshLoom: Feed-Forward Non-Rigid Registration of Mesh Sequences

We present MeshLoom, a feed-forward registration network that directly reconstructs vertex deformations across mesh sequences. Our approach advances non-rigid registration beyond existing models, which are typically constrained by costly per-instance optimization, narrow object categories, pairwise-only inputs, or merely intermediate outputs. The network is simple and efficient, registering multiple meshes within seconds. At its core lies a topology-aware encoder--decoder design. Specifically, we first introduce a topology-aware point representation that encodes the anchor (reference) mesh's topology into its per-vertex features. This representation strengthens the network's understanding of the anchor-mesh geometry and disambiguates points that are Euclidean-close yet geodesically distant. We then propose a multi-modal encoder that fuses this anchor-mesh representation with complementary cues from each frame, such as shape latents and image features. These multi-source signals are compressed into a compact global motion embedding that captures dense inter-frame correspondence. A lightweight decoder then queries this global embedding with the anchor-mesh point representation, retrieving per-vertex deformations at target timestamps. Through extensive experiments across diverse motions and object categories, we show that MeshLoom achieves state-of-the-art results on non-rigid registration. In addition, we find that our global embedding-then-query paradigm naturally enables the network to generate deformations at intermediate timestamps, which extends MeshLoom to motion interpolation and mesh morphing. Project page: https://meshloom.github.io/ .

cs.CV

Helix4D: Complex 4D Mesh Generation

Current video-to-4D methods struggle with complex topology changes, transparent materials, thin structures, and inner surfaces. We present Helix4D, a dynamic mesh generation framework by inheriting the expressive representation of Trellis2, adapting it from image-to-3D to video-conditioned 4D generation. Our design arises from two key questions: (a) how to enable Trellis2's frame-local attention to share information across frames while preserving its pretrained quality on rare cases such as transparent objects and inner surfaces, and (b) how to inject temporal information into a purely 3D positional encoding without breaking pretrained capabilities. We address (a) with a sliding-window cross-frame attention and anchor on the first frame. The first frame is generated by the base Trellis2 model and injected into our model, letting it inherit Trellis2's quality in rare cases through cross-frame attention. We address (b) with a 4D temporal encoding that repurposes redundant low-frequency spatial RoPE bands for time, extending the encoding from 3D with no additional parameters. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of Helix4D for high-quality dynamic mesh generation on ActionBench and our own challenging complex dynamics set.

cs.CV

Symmetry Is Almost All You Need: Robust Stability with Uncertainty Induced by Symmetric SRG Regions

This paper investigates the robust stability problem of a feedback system in the presence of uncertainties induced by graphical regions in the plane where the scaled relative graphs (SRGs) reside. Our main results are developed using a novel and intuitive concept, the Davis-Wielandt shell, together with its connection to SRGs and related variants. We first study a matrix robust nonsingularity (MRN) problem for two types of graphically induced uncertainty sets: one with prior information on $θ$ and one without. In the former case, we show that, whenever the uncertainty-inducing region is mirror symmetric about the $θ$-axis, the separation between a specific variant of the SRG and the region provides a necessary and sufficient condition for MRN. When the region is asymmetric, the necessity generally fails. This recovers the necessity of the small gain condition, and reveals the necessity of small angle conditions and sectored-disc conditions at the matrix level. In the latter case, we show that an additional $θ$-circular connectivity property is required to obtain necessary and sufficient conditions. Building on these MRN results, we then derive sufficient conditions for robust stability of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) linear time-invariant (LTI) systems under frequencywise symmetric uncertainties. In addition, connections with existing system characteristics such as disc-boundedness are discussed and exploited to obtain state-space characterisations for angle-bounded and mixed gain-angle-bounded systems. Based on these results, we construct a $θ$-angle-gain profile of a system that provides an intuitive visualisation of its feedback robustness against conic and sectorial uncertainties.

eess.SY

Nonlinear atomic tunnelling boosted by bright squeezed vacuum

Nonlinear optical processes, mediated by multiphoton interactions rather than single-photon response, are routinely exploited to enable a range of light-based functionalities in devices and applications. Nonlinear effects are enhanced through higher intensity fields, which is a limiting strategy owing to potential radiation damage. An alternative strategy relies on the fluctuation redistribution typical of quantum light, but experimental demonstrations at the most fundamental level have been limited. Here we report experimental nonlinear tunnelling ionization of isolated atoms, a pivotal nonlinear process that drives high-harmonic generation and forms the basis of attosecond science, boosted by quantum light -- bright squeezed vacuum (BSV). A BSV light with an average pulse energy of 300 nJ achieves an effective intensity equivalent to that of a coherent light with 7.1 {\textmu}J, demonstrating a more than 20-fold quantum boost in nonlinear effect from BSV light. This boost is revealed by matching the peaks of the photoelectron momentum spectra produced by the BSV and coherent light using angular streaking. Furthermore, we demonstrate control of the effective intensity of the BSV by tuning the correlation function at fixed average pulse energy, establishing a robust method to tailor nonlinear processes via quantum statistics rather than classical intensity scaling. These findings may facilitate the development of quantum-controlled strong-field dynamics using tailored quantum light sources.

quant-ph

PoseGAM: Robust Unseen Object Pose Estimation via Geometry-Aware Multi-View Reasoning

6D object pose estimation, which predicts the transformation of an object relative to the camera, remains challenging for unseen objects. Existing approaches typically rely on explicitly constructing feature correspondences between the query image and either the object model or template images. In this work, we propose PoseGAM, a geometry-aware multi-view framework that directly predicts object pose from a query image and multiple template images, eliminating the need for explicit matching. Built upon recent multi-view-based foundation model architectures, the method integrates object geometry information through two complementary mechanisms: explicit point-based geometry and learned features from geometry representation networks. In addition, we construct a large-scale synthetic dataset containing more than 190k objects under diverse environmental conditions to enhance robustness and generalization. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance, yielding an average AR improvement of 5.1% over prior methods and achieving up to 17.6% gains on individual datasets, indicating strong generalization to unseen objects. Project page: https://windvchen.github.io/PoseGAM/ .

cs.CV

ShapeGen4D: Towards High Quality 4D Shape Generation from Videos

Video-conditioned 4D shape generation aims to recover time-varying 3D geometry and view-consistent appearance directly from an input video. In this work, we introduce a native video-to-4D shape generation framework that synthesizes a single dynamic 3D representation end-to-end from the video. Our framework introduces three key components based on large-scale pre-trained 3D models: (i) a temporal attention that conditions generation on all frames while producing a time-indexed dynamic representation; (ii) a time-aware point sampling and 4D latent anchoring that promote temporally consistent geometry and texture; and (iii) noise sharing across frames to enhance temporal stability. Our method accurately captures non-rigid motion, volume changes, and even topological transitions without per-frame optimization. Across diverse in-the-wild videos, our method improves robustness and perceptual fidelity and reduces failure modes compared with the baselines.

cs.CV

V2M4: 4D Mesh Animation Reconstruction from a Single Monocular Video

We present V2M4, a novel 4D reconstruction method that directly generates a usable 4D mesh animation asset from a single monocular video. Unlike existing approaches that rely on priors from multi-view image and video generation models, our method is based on native 3D mesh generation models. Naively applying 3D mesh generation models to generate a mesh for each frame in a 4D task can lead to issues such as incorrect mesh poses, misalignment of mesh appearance, and inconsistencies in mesh geometry and texture maps. To address these problems, we propose a structured workflow that includes camera search and mesh reposing, condition embedding optimization for mesh appearance refinement, pairwise mesh registration for topology consistency, and global texture map optimization for texture consistency. Our method outputs high-quality 4D animated assets that are compatible with mainstream graphics and game software. Experimental results across a variety of animation types and motion amplitudes demonstrate the generalization and effectiveness of our method. Project page: https://windvchen.github.io/V2M4/.

cs.GR

A Cyclic Small Phase Theorem

This paper introduces a brand-new phase definition called the segmental phase for multi-input multi-output linear time-invariant systems. The underpinning of the definition lies in the matrix segmental phase which, as its name implies, is graphically based on the smallest circular segment covering the matrix normalized numerical range in the unit disk. The matrix segmental phase has the crucial product eigen-phase bound, which makes itself stand out from several existing phase notions in the literature. The proposed bound paves the way for stability analysis of a single-loop cyclic feedback system consisting of multiple subsystems. A cyclic small phase theorem is then established as our main result, which requires the loop system phase to lie between $-π$ and $π$. The proposed theorem complements a cyclic version of the celebrated small gain theorem. In addition, a generalization of the proposed theorem is made via the use of angular scaling techniques for reducing conservatism.

eess.SY

Sitcom-Crafter: A Plot-Driven Human Motion Generation System in 3D Scenes

Recent advancements in human motion synthesis have focused on specific types of motions, such as human-scene interaction, locomotion or human-human interaction, however, there is a lack of a unified system capable of generating a diverse combination of motion types. In response, we introduce Sitcom-Crafter, a comprehensive and extendable system for human motion generation in 3D space, which can be guided by extensive plot contexts to enhance workflow efficiency for anime and game designers. The system is comprised of eight modules, three of which are dedicated to motion generation, while the remaining five are augmentation modules that ensure consistent fusion of motion sequences and system functionality. Central to the generation modules is our novel 3D scene-aware human-human interaction module, which addresses collision issues by synthesizing implicit 3D Signed Distance Function (SDF) points around motion spaces, thereby minimizing human-scene collisions without additional data collection costs. Complementing this, our locomotion and human-scene interaction modules leverage existing methods to enrich the system's motion generation capabilities. Augmentation modules encompass plot comprehension for command generation, motion synchronization for seamless integration of different motion types, hand pose retrieval to enhance motion realism, motion collision revision to prevent human collisions, and 3D retargeting to ensure visual fidelity. Experimental evaluations validate the system's ability to generate high-quality, diverse, and physically realistic motions, underscoring its potential for advancing creative workflows. Project page: https://windvchen.github.io/Sitcom-Crafter.

cs.CV

Linear Convergence Analysis of Single-loop Algorithm for Bilevel Optimization via Small-gain Theorem

Bilevel optimization has gained considerable attention due to its broad applicability across various fields. While several studies have investigated the convergence rates in the strongly-convex-strongly-convex (SC-SC) setting, no prior work has proven that a single-loop algorithm can achieve linear convergence. This paper employs a small-gain theorem in {robust control theory} to demonstrate that a single-loop algorithm based on the implicit function theorem attains a linear convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(ρ^{k})$, where $ρ\in(0,1)$ is specified in Theorem 3. Specifically, We model the algorithm as a dynamical system by identifying its two interconnected components: the controller (the gradient or approximate gradient functions) and the plant (the update rule of variables). We prove that each component exhibits a bounded gain and that, with carefully designed step sizes, their cascade accommodates a product gain strictly less than one. Consequently, the overall algorithm can be proven to achieve a linear convergence rate, as guaranteed by the small-gain theorem. The gradient boundedness assumption adopted in the single-loop algorithm (\cite{hong2023two, chen2022single}) is replaced with a gradient Lipschitz assumption in Assumption 2.2. To the best of our knowledge, this work is first-known result on linear convergence for a single-loop algorithm.

math.OC

StoryAgent: Customized Storytelling Video Generation via Multi-Agent Collaboration

The advent of AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has spurred research into automated video generation to streamline conventional processes. However, automating storytelling video production, particularly for customized narratives, remains challenging due to the complexity of maintaining subject consistency across shots. While existing approaches like Mora and AesopAgent integrate multiple agents for Story-to-Video (S2V) generation, they fall short in preserving protagonist consistency and supporting Customized Storytelling Video Generation (CSVG). To address these limitations, we propose StoryAgent, a multi-agent framework designed for CSVG. StoryAgent decomposes CSVG into distinct subtasks assigned to specialized agents, mirroring the professional production process. Notably, our framework includes agents for story design, storyboard generation, video creation, agent coordination, and result evaluation. Leveraging the strengths of different models, StoryAgent enhances control over the generation process, significantly improving character consistency. Specifically, we introduce a customized Image-to-Video (I2V) method, LoRA-BE, to enhance intra-shot temporal consistency, while a novel storyboard generation pipeline is proposed to maintain subject consistency across shots. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in synthesizing highly consistent storytelling videos, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our contributions include the introduction of StoryAgent, a versatile framework for video generation tasks, and novel techniques for preserving protagonist consistency.

cs.CV

Zero-Shot Image Harmonization with Generative Model Prior

We propose a zero-shot approach to image harmonization, aiming to overcome the reliance on large amounts of synthetic composite images in existing methods. These methods, while showing promising results, involve significant training expenses and often struggle with generalization to unseen images. To this end, we introduce a fully modularized framework inspired by human behavior. Leveraging the reasoning capabilities of recent foundation models in language and vision, our approach comprises three main stages. Initially, we employ a pretrained vision-language model (VLM) to generate descriptions for the composite image. Subsequently, these descriptions guide the foreground harmonization direction of a text-to-image generative model (T2I). We refine text embeddings for enhanced representation of imaging conditions and employ self-attention and edge maps for structure preservation. Following each harmonization iteration, an evaluator determines whether to conclude or modify the harmonization direction. The resulting framework, mirroring human behavior, achieves harmonious results without the need for extensive training. We present compelling visual results across diverse scenes and objects, along with a user study validating the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.CV

Prototypical Information Bottlenecking and Disentangling for Multimodal Cancer Survival Prediction

Multimodal learning significantly benefits cancer survival prediction, especially the integration of pathological images and genomic data. Despite advantages of multimodal learning for cancer survival prediction, massive redundancy in multimodal data prevents it from extracting discriminative and compact information: (1) An extensive amount of intra-modal task-unrelated information blurs discriminability, especially for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) with many patches in pathology and thousands of pathways in genomic data, leading to an ``intra-modal redundancy" issue. (2) Duplicated information among modalities dominates the representation of multimodal data, which makes modality-specific information prone to being ignored, resulting in an ``inter-modal redundancy" issue. To address these, we propose a new framework, Prototypical Information Bottlenecking and Disentangling (PIBD), consisting of Prototypical Information Bottleneck (PIB) module for intra-modal redundancy and Prototypical Information Disentanglement (PID) module for inter-modal redundancy. Specifically, a variant of information bottleneck, PIB, is proposed to model prototypes approximating a bunch of instances for different risk levels, which can be used for selection of discriminative instances within modality. PID module decouples entangled multimodal data into compact distinct components: modality-common and modality-specific knowledge, under the guidance of the joint prototypical distribution. Extensive experiments on five cancer benchmark datasets demonstrated our superiority over other methods.

cs.CV

Errors Dynamics in Affine Group Systems

Errors dynamics captures the evolution of the state errors between two distinct trajectories, that are governed by the same system rule but initiated or perturbed differently. In particular, state observer error dynamics analysis in matrix Lie group is fundamental in practice. In this paper, we focus on the error dynamics analysis for an affine group system under external disturbances or random noises. To this end, we first discuss the connections between the notions of affine group systems and linear group systems. We provide two equivalent characterizations of a linear group system. Such characterizations are based on the homeomorphism of its transition flow and linearity of its Lie algebra counterpart, respectively. Next, we investigate the evolution of a linear group system and we assume it is diffused by a Brownian motion in tangent spaces. We further show that the dynamics projected in the Lie algebra is governed by a stochastic differential equation with a linear drift term. We apply these findings in analyzing the error dynamics. Under differentiable disturbance, we derive an ordinary differential equation characterizing the evolution of the projected errors in the Lie algebra. In addition, the counterpart with stochastic disturbances is derived for the projected errors in terms of a stochastic differential equation. Explicit and accurate derivation of error dynamics is provided for matrix group $SE_N(3)$, which plays a vital role especially in robotic applications.

eess.SY

Diffusion Models for Imperceptible and Transferable Adversarial Attack

Many existing adversarial attacks generate $L_p$-norm perturbations on image RGB space. Despite some achievements in transferability and attack success rate, the crafted adversarial examples are easily perceived by human eyes. Towards visual imperceptibility, some recent works explore unrestricted attacks without $L_p$-norm constraints, yet lacking transferability of attacking black-box models. In this work, we propose a novel imperceptible and transferable attack by leveraging both the generative and discriminative power of diffusion models. Specifically, instead of direct manipulation in pixel space, we craft perturbations in the latent space of diffusion models. Combined with well-designed content-preserving structures, we can generate human-insensitive perturbations embedded with semantic clues. For better transferability, we further "deceive" the diffusion model which can be viewed as an implicit recognition surrogate, by distracting its attention away from the target regions. To our knowledge, our proposed method, DiffAttack, is the first that introduces diffusion models into the adversarial attack field. Extensive experiments on various model structures, datasets, and defense methods have demonstrated the superiority of our attack over the existing attack methods.

cs.CV

Dense Pixel-to-Pixel Harmonization via Continuous Image Representation

High-resolution (HR) image harmonization is of great significance in real-world applications such as image synthesis and image editing. However, due to the high memory costs, existing dense pixel-to-pixel harmonization methods are mainly focusing on processing low-resolution (LR) images. Some recent works resort to combining with color-to-color transformations but are either limited to certain resolutions or heavily depend on hand-crafted image filters. In this work, we explore leveraging the implicit neural representation (INR) and propose a novel image Harmonization method based on Implicit neural Networks (HINet), which to the best of our knowledge, is the first dense pixel-to-pixel method applicable to HR images without any hand-crafted filter design. Inspired by the Retinex theory, we decouple the MLPs into two parts to respectively capture the content and environment of composite images. A Low-Resolution Image Prior (LRIP) network is designed to alleviate the Boundary Inconsistency problem, and we also propose new designs for the training and inference process. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, some interesting and practical applications of the proposed method are explored. Our code is available at https://github.com/WindVChen/INR-Harmonization.

cs.CV