arXiv subjects

Qingpei Guo

Publications and source records attributed to Qingpei Guo.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

EvoMoE: Expert Evolution in Mixture of Experts for Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent advancements have shown that the Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach significantly enhances the capacity of large language models (LLMs) and improves performance on downstream tasks. Building on these promising results, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have increasingly adopted MoE techniques. However, existing multi-modal MoE tuning methods typically face two key challenges: expert uniformity and router rigidity. Expert uniformity occurs because MoE experts are often initialized by simply replicating the FFN parameters from LLMs, leading to homogenized expert functions and weakening the intended diversification of the MoE architecture. Meanwhile, router rigidity stems from the prevalent use of static linear routers for expert selection, which fail to distinguish between visual and textual tokens, resulting in similar expert distributions for image and text. To address these limitations, we propose EvoMoE, an innovative MoE tuning framework. EvoMoE introduces a meticulously designed expert initialization strategy that progressively evolves multiple robust experts from a single trainable expert, a process termed expert evolution that specifically targets severe expert homogenization. Furthermore, we introduce the Dynamic Token-aware Router (DTR), a novel routing mechanism that allocates input tokens to appropriate experts based on their modality and intrinsic token values. This dynamic routing is facilitated by hypernetworks, which dynamically generate routing weights tailored for each individual token. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoMoE significantly outperforms other sparse MLLMs across a variety of multi-modal benchmarks, including MME, MMBench, TextVQA, and POPE. Our results highlight the effectiveness of EvoMoE in enhancing the performance of MLLMs by addressing the critical issues of expert uniformity and router rigidity.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

From Mapping to Composing: A Two-Stage Framework for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a challenging multimodal task that retrieves a target image based on a reference image and accompanying modification text. Due to the high cost of annotating CIR triplet datasets, zero-shot (ZS) CIR has gained traction as a promising alternative. Existing studies mainly focus on projection-based methods, which map an image to a single pseudo-word token. However, these methods face three critical challenges: (1) insufficient pseudo-word token representation capacity, (2) discrepancies between training and inference phases, and (3) reliance on large-scale synthetic data. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage framework where the training is accomplished from mapping to composing. In the first stage, we enhance image-to-pseudo-word token learning by introducing a visual semantic injection module and a soft text alignment objective, enabling the token to capture richer and fine-grained image information. In the second stage, we optimize the text encoder using a small amount of synthetic triplet data, enabling it to effectively extract compositional semantics by combining pseudo-word tokens with modification text for accurate target image retrieval. The strong visual-to-pseudo mapping established in the first stage provides a solid foundation for the second stage, making our approach compatible with both high- and low-quality synthetic data, and capable of achieving significant performance gains with only a small amount of synthetic data. Extensive experiments were conducted on three public datasets, achieving superior performance compared to existing approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

M2-omni: Advancing Omni-MLLM for Comprehensive Modality Support with Competitive Performance

We present M2-omni, a cutting-edge, open-source omni-MLLM that achieves competitive performance to GPT-4o. M2-omni employs a unified multimodal sequence modeling framework, which empowers Large Language Models(LLMs) to acquire comprehensive cross-modal understanding and generation capabilities. Specifically, M2-omni can process arbitrary combinations of audio, video, image, and text modalities as input, generating multimodal sequences interleaving with audio, image, or text outputs, thereby enabling an advanced and interactive real-time experience. The training of such an omni-MLLM is challenged by significant disparities in data quantity and convergence rates across modalities. To address these challenges, we propose a step balance strategy during pre-training to handle the quantity disparities in modality-specific data. Additionally, a dynamically adaptive balance strategy is introduced during the instruction tuning stage to synchronize the modality-wise training progress, ensuring optimal convergence. Notably, we prioritize preserving strong performance on pure text tasks to maintain the robustness of M2-omni's language understanding capability throughout the training process. To our best knowledge, M2-omni is currently a very competitive open-source model to GPT-4o, characterized by its comprehensive modality and task support, as well as its exceptional performance. We expect M2-omni will advance the development of omni-MLLMs, thus facilitating future research in this domain.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

DynFocus: Dynamic Cooperative Network Empowers LLMs with Video Understanding

The challenge in LLM-based video understanding lies in preserving visual and semantic information in long videos while maintaining a memory-affordable token count. However, redundancy and correspondence in videos have hindered the performance potential of existing methods. Through statistical learning on current datasets, we observe that redundancy occurs in both repeated and answer-irrelevant frames, and the corresponding frames vary with different questions. This suggests the possibility of adopting dynamic encoding to balance detailed video information preservation with token budget reduction. To this end, we propose a dynamic cooperative network, DynFocus, for memory-efficient video encoding in this paper. Specifically, i) a Dynamic Event Prototype Estimation (DPE) module to dynamically select meaningful frames for question answering; (ii) a Compact Cooperative Encoding (CCE) module that encodes meaningful frames with detailed visual appearance and the remaining frames with sketchy perception separately. We evaluate our method on five publicly available benchmarks, and experimental results consistently demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SegAgent: Exploring Pixel Understanding Capabilities in MLLMs by Imitating Human Annotator Trajectories

While MLLMs have demonstrated adequate image understanding capabilities, they still struggle with pixel-level comprehension, limiting their practical applications. Current evaluation tasks like VQA and visual grounding remain too coarse to assess fine-grained pixel comprehension accurately. Though segmentation is foundational for pixel-level understanding, existing methods often require MLLMs to generate implicit tokens, decoded through external pixel decoders. This approach disrupts the MLLM's text output space, potentially compromising language capabilities and reducing flexibility and extensibility, while failing to reflect the model's intrinsic pixel-level understanding. Thus, we introduce the Human-Like Mask Annotation Task (HLMAT), a new paradigm where MLLMs mimic human annotators using interactive segmentation tools. Modeling segmentation as a multi-step Markov Decision Process, HLMAT enables MLLMs to iteratively generate text-based click points, achieving high-quality masks without architectural changes or implicit tokens. Through this setup, we develop SegAgent, a model fine-tuned on human-like annotation trajectories, which achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and supports additional tasks like mask refinement and annotation filtering. HLMAT provides a protocol for assessing fine-grained pixel understanding in MLLMs and introduces a vision-centric, multi-step decision-making task that facilitates exploration of MLLMs' visual reasoning abilities. Our adaptations of policy improvement method StaR and PRM-guided tree search further enhance model robustness in complex segmentation tasks, laying a foundation for future advancements in fine-grained visual perception and multi-step decision-making for MLLMs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SHE-Net: Syntax-Hierarchy-Enhanced Text-Video Retrieval

The user base of short video apps has experienced unprecedented growth in recent years, resulting in a significant demand for video content analysis. In particular, text-video retrieval, which aims to find the top matching videos given text descriptions from a vast video corpus, is an essential function, the primary challenge of which is to bridge the modality gap. Nevertheless, most existing approaches treat texts merely as discrete tokens and neglect their syntax structures. Moreover, the abundant spatial and temporal clues in videos are often underutilized due to the lack of interaction with text. To address these issues, we argue that using texts as guidance to focus on relevant temporal frames and spatial regions within videos is beneficial. In this paper, we propose a novel Syntax-Hierarchy-Enhanced text-video retrieval method (SHE-Net) that exploits the inherent semantic and syntax hierarchy of texts to bridge the modality gap from two perspectives. First, to facilitate a more fine-grained integration of visual content, we employ the text syntax hierarchy, which reveals the grammatical structure of text descriptions, to guide the visual representations. Second, to further enhance the multi-modal interaction and alignment, we also utilize the syntax hierarchy to guide the similarity calculation. We evaluated our method on four public text-video retrieval datasets of MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo, and ActivityNet. The experimental results and ablation studies confirm the advantages of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Referencing Where to Focus: Improving VisualGrounding with Referential Query

Visual Grounding aims to localize the referring object in an image given a natural language expression. Recent advancements in DETR-based visual grounding methods have attracted considerable attention, as they directly predict the coordinates of the target object without relying on additional efforts, such as pre-generated proposal candidates or pre-defined anchor boxes. However, existing research primarily focuses on designing stronger multi-modal decoder, which typically generates learnable queries by random initialization or by using linguistic embeddings. This vanilla query generation approach inevitably increases the learning difficulty for the model, as it does not involve any target-related information at the beginning of decoding. Furthermore, they only use the deepest image feature during the query learning process, overlooking the importance of features from other levels. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, called RefFormer. It consists of the query adaption module that can be seamlessly integrated into CLIP and generate the referential query to provide the prior context for decoder, along with a task-specific decoder. By incorporating the referential query into the decoder, we can effectively mitigate the learning difficulty of the decoder, and accurately concentrate on the target object. Additionally, our proposed query adaption module can also act as an adapter, preserving the rich knowledge within CLIP without the need to tune the parameters of the backbone network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on five visual grounding benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

LoTLIP: Improving Language-Image Pre-training for Long Text Understanding

Understanding long text is of great demands in practice but beyond the reach of most language-image pre-training (LIP) models. In this work, we empirically confirm that the key reason causing such an issue is that the training images are usually paired with short captions, leaving certain tokens easily overshadowed by salient tokens. Towards this problem, our initial attempt is to relabel the data with long captions, however, directly learning with which may lead to performance degradation in understanding short text (e.g., in the image classification task). Then, after incorporating corner tokens to aggregate diverse textual information, we manage to help the model catch up to its original level of short text understanding yet greatly enhance its capability of long text understanding. We further look into whether the model can continuously benefit from longer captions and notice a clear trade-off between the performance and the efficiency. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our approach using a self-constructed large-scale dataset, which consists of 100M long caption oriented text-image pairs. Our method demonstrates superior performance in long-text-image retrieval tasks. The project page is available at https://wuw2019.github.io/lot-lip.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

HOTVCOM: Generating Buzzworthy Comments for Videos

In the era of social media video platforms, popular ``hot-comments'' play a crucial role in attracting user impressions of short-form videos, making them vital for marketing and branding purpose. However, existing research predominantly focuses on generating descriptive comments or ``danmaku'' in English, offering immediate reactions to specific video moments. Addressing this gap, our study introduces \textsc{HotVCom}, the largest Chinese video hot-comment dataset, comprising 94k diverse videos and 137 million comments. We also present the \texttt{ComHeat} framework, which synergistically integrates visual, auditory, and textual data to generate influential hot-comments on the Chinese video dataset. Empirical evaluations highlight the effectiveness of our framework, demonstrating its excellence on both the newly constructed and existing datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Pink: Unveiling the Power of Referential Comprehension for Multi-modal LLMs

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various multi-modal tasks. Nevertheless, their performance in fine-grained image understanding tasks is still limited. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new framework to enhance the fine-grained image understanding abilities of MLLMs. Specifically, we present a new method for constructing the instruction tuning dataset at a low cost by leveraging annotations in existing datasets. A self-consistent bootstrapping method is also introduced to extend existing dense object annotations into high-quality referring-expression-bounding-box pairs. These methods enable the generation of high-quality instruction data which includes a wide range of fundamental abilities essential for fine-grained image perception. Moreover, we argue that the visual encoder should be tuned during instruction tuning to mitigate the gap between full image perception and fine-grained image perception. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method. For instance, our model exhibits a 5.2% accuracy improvement over Qwen-VL on GQA and surpasses the accuracy of Kosmos-2 by 24.7% on RefCOCO_val. We have also attained the top rank on the leaderboard of MMBench. This promising performance is achieved by training on only publicly available data, making it easily reproducible. The models, datasets, and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SY-Xuan/Pink.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

M2-Encoder: Advancing Bilingual Image-Text Understanding by Large-scale Efficient Pretraining

Vision-language foundation models like CLIP have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, VLM models supporting multi-language, e.g., in both Chinese and English, have lagged due to the relative scarcity of large-scale pretraining datasets. Toward this end, we introduce a comprehensive bilingual (Chinese-English) dataset BM-6B with over 6 billion image-text pairs, aimed at enhancing multimodal foundation models to well understand images in both languages. To handle such a scale of dataset, we propose a novel grouped aggregation approach for image-text contrastive loss computation, which reduces the communication overhead and GPU memory demands significantly, facilitating a 60% increase in training speed. We pretrain a series of bilingual image-text foundation models with an enhanced fine-grained understanding ability on BM-6B, the resulting models, dubbed as $M^2$-Encoders (pronounced "M-Square"), set new benchmarks in both languages for multimodal retrieval and classification tasks. Notably, Our largest $M^2$-Encoder-10B model has achieved top-1 accuracies of 88.5% on ImageNet and 80.7% on ImageNet-CN under a zero-shot classification setting, surpassing previously reported SoTA methods by 2.2% and 21.1%, respectively. The $M^2$-Encoder series represents one of the most comprehensive bilingual image-text foundation models to date, so we are making it available to the research community for further exploration and development.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

M2-RAAP: A Multi-Modal Recipe for Advancing Adaptation-based Pre-training towards Effective and Efficient Zero-shot Video-text Retrieval

We present a Multi-Modal Recipe for Advancing Adaptation-based Pre-training towards effective and efficient zero-shot video-text retrieval, dubbed M2-RAAP. Upon popular image-text models like CLIP, most current adaptation-based video-text pre-training methods are confronted by three major issues, i.e., noisy data corpus, time-consuming pre-training, and limited performance gain. Towards this end, we conduct a comprehensive study including four critical steps in video-text pre-training. Specifically, we investigate 1) data filtering and refinement, 2) video input type selection, 3) temporal modeling, and 4) video feature enhancement. We then summarize this empirical study into the M2-RAAP recipe, where our technical contributions lie in 1) the data filtering and text re-writing pipeline resulting in 1M high-quality bilingual video-text pairs, 2) the replacement of video inputs with key-frames to accelerate pre-training, and 3) the Auxiliary-Caption-Guided (ACG) strategy to enhance video features. We conduct extensive experiments by adapting three image-text foundation models on two refined video-text datasets from different languages, validating the robustness and reproducibility of M2-RAAP for adaptation-based pre-training. Results demonstrate that M2-RAAP yields superior performance with significantly reduced data (-90%) and time consumption (-95%), establishing a new SOTA on four English zero-shot retrieval datasets and two Chinese ones. We are preparing our refined bilingual data annotations and codebase, which will be available at https://github.com/alipay/Ant-Multi-Modal-Framework/tree/main/prj/M2_RAAP.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SNP-S3: Shared Network Pre-training and Significant Semantic Strengthening for Various Video-Text Tasks

We present a framework for learning cross-modal video representations by directly pre-training on raw data to facilitate various downstream video-text tasks. Our main contributions lie in the pre-training framework and proxy tasks. First, based on the shortcomings of two mainstream pixel-level pre-training architectures (limited applications or less efficient), we propose Shared Network Pre-training (SNP). By employing one shared BERT-type network to refine textual and cross-modal features simultaneously, SNP is lightweight and could support various downstream applications. Second, based on the intuition that people always pay attention to several "significant words" when understanding a sentence, we propose the Significant Semantic Strengthening (S3) strategy, which includes a novel masking and matching proxy task to promote the pre-training performance. Experiments conducted on three downstream video-text tasks and six datasets demonstrate that, we establish a new state-of-the-art in pixel-level video-text pre-training; we also achieve a satisfactory balance between the pre-training efficiency and the fine-tuning performance. The codebase are available at https://github.com/alipay/Ant-Multi-Modal-Framework/tree/main/prj/snps3_vtp.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Dual-Modal Attention-Enhanced Text-Video Retrieval with Triplet Partial Margin Contrastive Learning

In recent years, the explosion of web videos makes text-video retrieval increasingly essential and popular for video filtering, recommendation, and search. Text-video retrieval aims to rank relevant text/video higher than irrelevant ones. The core of this task is to precisely measure the cross-modal similarity between texts and videos. Recently, contrastive learning methods have shown promising results for text-video retrieval, most of which focus on the construction of positive and negative pairs to learn text and video representations. Nevertheless, they do not pay enough attention to hard negative pairs and lack the ability to model different levels of semantic similarity. To address these two issues, this paper improves contrastive learning using two novel techniques. First, to exploit hard examples for robust discriminative power, we propose a novel Dual-Modal Attention-Enhanced Module (DMAE) to mine hard negative pairs from textual and visual clues. By further introducing a Negative-aware InfoNCE (NegNCE) loss, we are able to adaptively identify all these hard negatives and explicitly highlight their impacts in the training loss. Second, our work argues that triplet samples can better model fine-grained semantic similarity compared to pairwise samples. We thereby present a new Triplet Partial Margin Contrastive Learning (TPM-CL) module to construct partial order triplet samples by automatically generating fine-grained hard negatives for matched text-video pairs. The proposed TPM-CL designs an adaptive token masking strategy with cross-modal interaction to model subtle semantic differences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods on four widely-used text-video retrieval datasets, including MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo and ActivityNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Knowledge-enhanced Multi-perspective Video Representation Learning for Scene Recognition

With the explosive growth of video data in real-world applications, a comprehensive representation of videos becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we address the problem of video scene recognition, whose goal is to learn a high-level video representation to classify scenes in videos. Due to the diversity and complexity of video contents in realistic scenarios, this task remains a challenge. Most existing works identify scenes for videos only from visual or textual information in a temporal perspective, ignoring the valuable information hidden in single frames, while several earlier studies only recognize scenes for separate images in a non-temporal perspective. We argue that these two perspectives are both meaningful for this task and complementary to each other, meanwhile, externally introduced knowledge can also promote the comprehension of videos. We propose a novel two-stream framework to model video representations from multiple perspectives, i.e. temporal and non-temporal perspectives, and integrate the two perspectives in an end-to-end manner by self-distillation. Besides, we design a knowledge-enhanced feature fusion and label prediction method that contributes to naturally introducing knowledge into the task of video scene recognition. Experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SyCoCa: Symmetrizing Contrastive Captioners with Attentive Masking for Multimodal Alignment

Multimodal alignment between language and vision is the fundamental topic in current vision-language model research. Contrastive Captioners (CoCa), as a representative method, integrates Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) and Image Caption (IC) into a unified framework, resulting in impressive results. CLIP imposes a bidirectional constraints on global representation of entire images and sentences. Although IC conducts an unidirectional image-to-text generation on local representation, it lacks any constraint on local text-to-image reconstruction, which limits the ability to understand images at a fine-grained level when aligned with texts. To achieve multimodal alignment from both global and local perspectives, this paper proposes Symmetrizing Contrastive Captioners (SyCoCa), which introduces bidirectional interactions on images and texts across the global and local representation levels. Specifically, we expand a Text-Guided Masked Image Modeling (TG-MIM) head based on ITC and IC heads. The improved SyCoCa can further leverage textual cues to reconstruct contextual images and visual cues to predict textual contents. When implementing bidirectional local interactions, the local contents of images tend to be cluttered or unrelated to their textual descriptions. Thus, we employ an attentive masking strategy to select effective image patches for interaction. Extensive experiments on five vision-language tasks, including image-text retrieval, image-captioning, visual question answering, and zero-shot/finetuned image classification, validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Text as Image: Learning Transferable Adapter for Multi-Label Classification

Pre-trained vision-language models have notably accelerated progress of open-world concept recognition. Their impressive zero-shot ability has recently been transferred to multi-label image classification via prompt tuning, enabling to discover novel labels in an open-vocabulary manner. However, this paradigm suffers from non-trivial training costs, and becomes computationally prohibitive for a large number of candidate labels. To address this issue, we note that vision-language pre-training aligns images and texts in a unified embedding space, making it potential for an adapter network to identify labels in visual modality while be trained in text modality. To enhance such cross-modal transfer ability, a simple yet effective method termed random perturbation is proposed, which enables the adapter to search for potential visual embeddings by perturbing text embeddings with noise during training, resulting in better performance in visual modality. Furthermore, we introduce an effective approach to employ large language models for multi-label instruction-following text generation. In this way, a fully automated pipeline for visual label recognition is developed without relying on any manual data. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show the superiority of our method in various multi-label classification tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

EVE: Efficient zero-shot text-based Video Editing with Depth Map Guidance and Temporal Consistency Constraints

Motivated by the superior performance of image diffusion models, more and more researchers strive to extend these models to the text-based video editing task. Nevertheless, current video editing tasks mainly suffer from the dilemma between the high fine-tuning cost and the limited generation capacity. Compared with images, we conjecture that videos necessitate more constraints to preserve the temporal consistency during editing. Towards this end, we propose EVE, a robust and efficient zero-shot video editing method. Under the guidance of depth maps and temporal consistency constraints, EVE derives satisfactory video editing results with an affordable computational and time cost. Moreover, recognizing the absence of a publicly available video editing dataset for fair comparisons, we construct a new benchmark ZVE-50 dataset. Through comprehensive experimentation, we validate that EVE could achieve a satisfactory trade-off between performance and efficiency. We will release our dataset and codebase to facilitate future researchers.

cs.CV↗