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Shuiwang Li

Publications and source records attributed to Shuiwang Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Nereus: A Large-Scale Underwater Dataset for Fine-Grained Attribute Understanding and Grounded Counting Perception

Underwater imagery records rich ecological information and supports applications such as science communication, fishery monitoring, ecological conservation, and oceanographic research. Beyond general scene understanding, these applications require models to recognize fine-grained biological traits and reason over spatially grounded evidence. However, existing underwater datasets often provide coarse category labels, generic captions, or total-count supervision, which limits their use for organism-level analysis and ecological reasoning. We introduce Nereus, a large-scale dataset for Underwater Fine-grained Perception that jointly supports Fine-Grained Object Attribute Understanding and Grounded Counting Perception. Nereus contains 88K images and 2.68M question-answer pairs, including annotations for 136K marine organism objects across 2,690 species and 1,515 genera, as well as 65K point annotations and 67K grounded counting QA pairs. Experiments with representative multimodal models show that Nereus improves downstream adaptation over existing underwater-domain data and provides a foundation for future research on fine-grained marine perception.

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Active Visual Perception: Opportunities and Challenges

Active visual perception enables an intelligent system to improve perception by controlling how visual evidence is acquired. However, differences in how active perception is defined and evaluated make approaches difficult to compare across tasks. This review clarifies the field's functional scope by distinguishing active observation acquisition from processing fixed inputs. It then organizes representative literature around four questions about what evidence the task requires, which actions can obtain it, how candidate observations should be valued, and how the next sensing action should be selected and executed. New observations update the perceptual state and guide subsequent decisions, forming a closed loop. To evaluate the benefits of active perception, the review examines datasets, interactive environments, physical platforms, and baseline comparisons, and develops an evaluation framework linking improvements in visual evidence to downstream task outcomes while accounting for acquisition costs and risks. The analysis concludes that predicted observation value does not guarantee that useful evidence can be acquired through feasible actions, while task success alone cannot establish the benefit of active observation selection. Further progress requires reliable value estimation and planning over longer decision sequences under physical and resource constraints. It also requires grounding semantic reasoning in acquired evidence and maintaining effective collaboration under imperfect communication, with these capabilities verified through reproducible evaluation of the complete perception and action loop.

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SBMVTrack: Spike-Budgeted Multi-View Learning for Power-Efficient UAV Tracking

With sparse and event-driven computation, spiking neural networks show great potential for achieving accurate and power-efficient UAV visual tracking. However, existing SNN-based trackers typically use spike firing rates only for power consumption and lack explicit optimization of actual spike activity. Moreover, regulating spike activity alone does not explicitly encourage stable target representations under partial observations and temporal appearance changes. We propose SBMVTrack, a fully spiking tracking framework that combines spike activity regulation with complementary multi-view representation learning. Specifically, SBMVTrack introduces Energy-Weighted Spike Budgeting (EWSB), which incorporates layer-wise computational costs when regulating spike firing rates and penalizing saturated activations, thereby reducing redundant spike computation. To further improve target representations under the spike budget constraint, we introduce Masked Multi-View Target Modeling (MVTM), which treats the initial template, online template, and search region as temporal views of the same target. By aligning target embeddings between masked and corresponding unmasked views and enforcing cross-view identity consistency, MVTM encourages robustness to missing local cues and temporal appearance changes. Experiments on four UAV benchmarks demonstrate competitive tracking performance with a 24.1% reduction in estimated power consumption relative to the baseline. On VisDrone2018, SBMVTrack achieves a success rate of 70.0%, exceeding SpikeTrack by 9.7 percentage points while reducing estimated power consumption by 45.7%. The source code will be released upon acceptance.

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Partition-Invariant Tuning for 3D Scene Understanding

Scene-level point cloud understanding remains challenging due to diverse geometries and spatial layouts. While pre-trained 3D point cloud foundation models (PFMs) offer strong transferability, full fine-tuning (FFT) incurs substantial computational and storage costs. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) provides a promising alternative, but existing PEFT methods largely focus on object-level point clouds and overlook serialization-induced partition variations in large-scale scenes. To address this issue, we propose PointPiT, a partition-invariant tuning framework for scene-level point clouds. Specifically, a Scene-aware Structural Adapter (SSA) integrates local geometric patterns with global scene context to mitigate partition-induced representation shifts. Moreover, Gradient Subspace Optimization (GSO) selects informative and partition-stable update directions, suppressing partition-dependent variations during optimization. Extensive experiments across multiple scene-level benchmarks demonstrate that PointPiT achieves competitive or even superior performance to full fine-tuning with less than 1% of backbone's parameters, while achieving consistent state-of-the-art performance among representative PEFT methods.

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STATrack: A Target-Aware Fully Spiking Neural Network for Efficient UAV Tracking

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), characterized by their event-driven computation and low power consumption, have shown great potential for energy-efficient visual tracking on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, existing SNN-based trackers often rely on costly event cameras, which limits their deployment on standard RGB-camera UAV platforms. To address this limitation, we propose STATrack, a fully spiking neural network framework for UAV visual tracking using only RGB inputs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore fully spiking neural networks for RGB-based UAV visual tracking. Considering the challenge of preserving fine-grained target information in deep spiking representations under a limited number of time steps, we introduce Adaptive Mutual Information Maximization (AMIM). AMIM maximizes the statistical dependency between target-centered templates and their deep spiking representations, encouraging the spiking backbone to learn representations that better distinguish the target from surrounding backgrounds. We further develop a sample-difficulty-aware dynamic weighting strategy that adaptively adjusts the mutual-information constraint according to the relative localization difficulty of each training batch. Extensive experiments on four widely used UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that STATrack achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance with low theoretical energy consumption, highlighting its potential for energy-constrained UAV applications. Code is released at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/STATrack.

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SpikingMOT: A Spike-Driven Multi-Object Tracker

Multi-object tracking (MOT) plays a fundamental role in visual perception, where accurate trajectory prediction is essential for reliable target association under complex motion patterns. Recent trackers have improved motion modeling with densely activated artificial neural networks, yet they largely overlook whether such dense responses are necessary for trajectory prediction. In this paper, we formulate activation sparsity preference (ASP) by tackling two key questions: 1. How can we identify a model architecture that appropriately and formally explains ASP, and 2. How can we translate this explanation into competitive tracking performance. Theoretical analysis shows that sparse gating is no worse than state-independent dropout under the same activation rate. Based on this insight, SpikingMOT is proposed as a spike-driven tracker that adaptively models sparse trajectory dynamics with spiking neural networks (SNNs). Specifically, SpikingMOT decomposes each trajectory state into pseudo-trajectory bases and uses the current prediction error to calibrate the posterior for next-frame prediction. With this brain-inspired loop, SpikingMOT achieves state-of-the-art performance in extensive experiments, 74.9 HOTA on SportsMOT and 56.5 HOTA on DanceTrack, while reducing the parameters and energy by 72% and 86.7%, respectively. These results bring SNNs into MOT, opening a promising direction for efficient tracking.

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CapeNext: Rethinking and Refining Dynamic Support Information for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation

Recent research in Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE) has adopted fixed textual keypoint description as semantic prior for two-stage pose matching frameworks. While this paradigm enhances robustness and flexibility by disentangling the dependency of support images, our critical analysis reveals two inherent limitations of static joint embedding: (1) polysemy-induced cross-category ambiguity during the matching process(e.g., the concept "leg" exhibiting divergent visual manifestations across humans and furniture), and (2) insufficient discriminability for fine-grained intra-category variations (e.g., posture and fur discrepancies between a sleeping white cat and a standing black cat). To overcome these challenges, we propose a new framework that innovatively integrates hierarchical cross-modal interaction with dual-stream feature refinement, enhancing the joint embedding with both class-level and instance-specific cues from textual description and specific images. Experiments on the MP-100 dataset demonstrate that, regardless of the network backbone, CapeNext consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CAPE methods by a large margin.

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Learning Motion Blur Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is critical for applications like surveillance, search-and-rescue, and autonomous navigation. However, the high-speed movement of UAVs and targets introduces unique challenges, including real-time processing demands and severe motion blur, which degrade the performance of existing generic trackers. While single-stream vision transformer (ViT) architectures have shown promise in visual tracking, their computational inefficiency and lack of UAV-specific optimizations limit their practicality in this domain. In this paper, we boost the efficiency of this framework by tailoring it into an adaptive computation framework that dynamically exits Transformer blocks for real-time UAV tracking. The motivation behind this is that tracking tasks with fewer challenges can be adequately addressed using low-level feature representations. Simpler tasks can often be handled with less demanding, lower-level features. This approach allows the model use computational resources more efficiently by focusing on complex tasks and conserving resources for easier ones. Another significant enhancement introduced in this paper is the improved effectiveness of ViTs in handling motion blur, a common issue in UAV tracking caused by the fast movements of either the UAV, the tracked objects, or both. This is achieved by acquiring motion blur robust representations through enforcing invariance in the feature representation of the target with respect to simulated motion blur. We refer to our proposed approach as BDTrack. Extensive experiments conducted on four tracking benchmarks validate the effectiveness and versatility of our approach, demonstrating its potential as a practical and effective approach for real-time UAV tracking. Code is released at: https://github.com/wuyou3474/BDTrack.

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SMTrack: End-to-End Trained Spiking Neural Networks for Multi-Object Tracking in RGB Videos

Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) exhibit significant potential for low-power computation, yet their application in visual tasks remains largely confined to image classification, object detection, and event-based tracking. In contrast, real-world vision systems still widely use conventional RGB video streams, where the potential of directly-trained SNNs for complex temporal tasks such as multi-object tracking (MOT) remains underexplored. To address this challenge, we propose SMTrack-the first directly trained deep SNN framework for end-to-end multi-object tracking on standard RGB videos. SMTrack introduces an adaptive and scale-aware Normalized Wasserstein Distance loss (Asa-NWDLoss) to improve detection and localization performance under varying object scales and densities. Specifically, the method computes the average object size within each training batch and dynamically adjusts the normalization factor, thereby enhancing sensitivity to small objects. For the association stage, we incorporate the TrackTrack identity module to maintain robust and consistent object trajectories. Extensive evaluations on BEE24, MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack show that SMTrack achieves performance on par with leading ANN-based MOT methods, advancing robust and accurate SNN-based tracking in complex scenarios.

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Learning an Adaptive and View-Invariant Vision Transformer for Real-Time UAV Tracking

Transformer-based models have improved visual tracking, but most still cannot run in real time on resource-limited devices, especially for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking. To achieve a better balance between performance and efficiency, we propose AVTrack, an adaptive computation tracking framework that adaptively activates transformer blocks through an Activation Module (AM), which dynamically optimizes the ViT architecture by selectively engaging relevant components. To address extreme viewpoint variations, we propose to learn view-invariant representations via mutual information (MI) maximization. In addition, we propose AVTrack-MD, an enhanced tracker incorporating a novel MI maximization-based multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework. Leveraging multiple off-the-shelf AVTrack models as teachers, we maximize the MI between their aggregated softened features and the corresponding softened feature of the student model, improving the generalization and performance of the student, especially under noisy conditions. Extensive experiments show that AVTrack-MD achieves performance comparable to AVTrack's performance while reducing model complexity and boosting average tracking speed by over 17\%. Codes is available at: https://github.com/wuyou3474/AVTrack.

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Vision-Based Anti Unmanned Aerial Technology: Opportunities and Challenges

With the rapid advancement of UAV technology and its extensive application in various fields such as military reconnaissance, environmental monitoring, and logistics, achieving efficient and accurate Anti-UAV tracking has become essential. The importance of Anti-UAV tracking is increasingly prominent, especially in scenarios such as public safety, border patrol, search and rescue, and agricultural monitoring, where operations in complex environments can provide enhanced security. Current mainstream Anti-UAV tracking technologies are primarily centered around computer vision techniques, particularly those that integrate multi-sensor data fusion with advanced detection and tracking algorithms. This paper first reviews the characteristics and current challenges of Anti-UAV detection and tracking technologies. Next, it investigates and compiles several publicly available datasets, providing accessible links to support researchers in efficiently addressing related challenges. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the major vision-based and vision-fusion-based Anti-UAV detection and tracking algorithms proposed in recent years. Finally, based on the above research, this paper outlines future research directions, aiming to provide valuable insights for advancing the field.

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Towards Reflected Object Detection: A Benchmark

Object detection has greatly improved over the past decade thanks to advances in deep learning and large-scale datasets. However, detecting objects reflected in surfaces remains an underexplored area. Reflective surfaces are ubiquitous in daily life, appearing in homes, offices, public spaces, and natural environments. Accurate detection and interpretation of reflected objects are essential for various applications. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a extensive benchmark specifically designed for Reflected Object Detection. Our Reflected Object Detection Dataset (RODD) features a diverse collection of images showcasing reflected objects in various contexts, providing standard annotations for both real and reflected objects. This distinguishes it from traditional object detection benchmarks. RODD encompasses 10 categories and includes 21,059 images of real and reflected objects across different backgrounds, complete with standard bounding box annotations and the classification of objects as real or reflected. Additionally, we present baseline results by adapting five state-of-the-art object detection models to address this challenging task. Experimental results underscore the limitations of existing methods when applied to reflected object detection, highlighting the need for specialized approaches. By releasing RODD, we aim to support and advance future research on detecting reflected objects. Dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/jirouvan/ROD.

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Camouflaged Object Tracking: A Benchmark

Visual tracking has seen remarkable advancements, largely driven by the availability of large-scale training datasets that have enabled the development of highly accurate and robust algorithms. While significant progress has been made in tracking general objects, research on more challenging scenarios, such as tracking camouflaged objects, remains limited. Camouflaged objects, which blend seamlessly with their surroundings or other objects, present unique challenges for detection and tracking in complex environments. This challenge is particularly critical in applications such as military, security, agriculture, and marine monitoring, where precise tracking of camouflaged objects is essential. To address this gap, we introduce the Camouflaged Object Tracking Dataset (COTD), a specialized benchmark designed specifically for evaluating camouflaged object tracking methods. The COTD dataset comprises 200 sequences and approximately 80,000 frames, each annotated with detailed bounding boxes. Our evaluation of 20 existing tracking algorithms reveals significant deficiencies in their performance with camouflaged objects. To address these issues, we propose a novel tracking framework, HiPTrack-MLS, which demonstrates promising results in improving tracking performance for camouflaged objects. COTD and code are avialable at https://github.com/openat25/HIPTrack-MLS.

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MambaNUT: Nighttime UAV Tracking via Mamba-based Adaptive Curriculum Learning

Harnessing low-light enhancement and domain adaptation, nighttime UAV tracking has made substantial strides. However, over-reliance on image enhancement, limited high-quality nighttime data, and a lack of integration between daytime and nighttime trackers hinder the development of an end-to-end trainable framework. Additionally, current ViT-based trackers demand heavy computational resources due to their reliance on the self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel pure Mamba-based tracking framework (MambaNUT) that employs a state space model with linear complexity as its backbone, incorporating a single-stream architecture that integrates feature learning and template-search coupling within Vision Mamba. We introduce an adaptive curriculum learning (ACL) approach that dynamically adjusts sampling strategies and loss weights, thereby improving the model's ability of generalization. Our ACL is composed of two levels of curriculum schedulers: (1) sampling scheduler that transforms the data distribution from imbalanced to balanced, as well as from easier (daytime) to harder (nighttime) samples; (2) loss scheduler that dynamically assigns weights based on the size of the training set and IoU of individual instances. Exhaustive experiments on multiple nighttime UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MambaNUT achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring lower computational costs. The code will be available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/MambaNUT.

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Learning Occlusion-Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking

Single-stream architectures using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones show great potential for real-time UAV tracking recently. However, frequent occlusions from obstacles like buildings and trees expose a major drawback: these models often lack strategies to handle occlusions effectively. New methods are needed to enhance the occlusion resilience of single-stream ViT models in aerial tracking. In this work, we propose to learn Occlusion-Robust Representations (ORR) based on ViTs for UAV tracking by enforcing an invariance of the feature representation of a target with respect to random masking operations modeled by a spatial Cox process. Hopefully, this random masking approximately simulates target occlusions, thereby enabling us to learn ViTs that are robust to target occlusion for UAV tracking. This framework is termed ORTrack. Additionally, to facilitate real-time applications, we propose an Adaptive Feature-Based Knowledge Distillation (AFKD) method to create a more compact tracker, which adaptively mimics the behavior of the teacher model ORTrack according to the task's difficulty. This student model, dubbed ORTrack-D, retains much of ORTrack's performance while offering higher efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance. Codes is available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/ORTrack.

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Low-Light Object Tracking: A Benchmark

In recent years, the field of visual tracking has made significant progress with the application of large-scale training datasets. These datasets have supported the development of sophisticated algorithms, enhancing the accuracy and stability of visual object tracking. However, most research has primarily focused on favorable illumination circumstances, neglecting the challenges of tracking in low-ligh environments. In low-light scenes, lighting may change dramatically, targets may lack distinct texture features, and in some scenarios, targets may not be directly observable. These factors can lead to a severe decline in tracking performance. To address this issue, we introduce LLOT, a benchmark specifically designed for Low-Light Object Tracking. LLOT comprises 269 challenging sequences with a total of over 132K frames, each carefully annotated with bounding boxes. This specially designed dataset aims to promote innovation and advancement in object tracking techniques for low-light conditions, addressing challenges not adequately covered by existing benchmarks. To assess the performance of existing methods on LLOT, we conducted extensive tests on 39 state-of-the-art tracking algorithms. The results highlight a considerable gap in low-light tracking performance. In response, we propose H-DCPT, a novel tracker that incorporates historical and darkness clue prompts to set a stronger baseline. H-DCPT outperformed all 39 evaluated methods in our experiments, demonstrating significant improvements. We hope that our benchmark and H-DCPT will stimulate the development of novel and accurate methods for tracking objects in low-light conditions. The LLOT and code are available at https://github.com/OpenCodeGithub/H-DCPT.

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Tracking Transforming Objects: A Benchmark

Tracking transforming objects holds significant importance in various fields due to the dynamic nature of many real-world scenarios. By enabling systems accurately represent transforming objects over time, tracking transforming objects facilitates advancements in areas such as autonomous systems, human-computer interaction, and security applications. Moreover, understanding the behavior of transforming objects provides valuable insights into complex interactions or processes, contributing to the development of intelligent systems capable of robust and adaptive perception in dynamic environments. However, current research in the field mainly focuses on tracking generic objects. In this study, we bridge this gap by collecting a novel dedicated Dataset for Tracking Transforming Objects, called DTTO, which contains 100 sequences, amounting to approximately 9.3K frames. We provide carefully hand-annotated bounding boxes for each frame within these sequences, making DTTO the pioneering benchmark dedicated to tracking transforming objects. We thoroughly evaluate 20 state-of-the-art trackers on the benchmark, aiming to comprehend the performance of existing methods and provide a comparison for future research on DTTO. With the release of DTTO, our goal is to facilitate further research and applications related to tracking transforming objects.

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Tracking Reflected Objects: A Benchmark

Visual tracking has advanced significantly in recent years, mainly due to the availability of large-scale training datasets. These datasets have enabled the development of numerous algorithms that can track objects with high accuracy and robustness.However, the majority of current research has been directed towards tracking generic objects, with less emphasis on more specialized and challenging scenarios. One such challenging scenario involves tracking reflected objects. Reflections can significantly distort the appearance of objects, creating ambiguous visual cues that complicate the tracking process. This issue is particularly pertinent in applications such as autonomous driving, security, smart homes, and industrial production, where accurately tracking objects reflected in surfaces like mirrors or glass is crucial. To address this gap, we introduce TRO, a benchmark specifically for Tracking Reflected Objects. TRO includes 200 sequences with around 70,000 frames, each carefully annotated with bounding boxes. This dataset aims to encourage the development of new, accurate methods for tracking reflected objects, which present unique challenges not sufficiently covered by existing benchmarks. We evaluated 20 state-of-the-art trackers and found that they struggle with the complexities of reflections. To provide a stronger baseline, we propose a new tracker, HiP-HaTrack, which uses hierarchical features to improve performance, significantly outperforming existing algorithms. We believe our benchmark, evaluation, and HiP-HaTrack will inspire further research and applications in tracking reflected objects. The TRO and code are available at https://github.com/OpenCodeGithub/HIP-HaTrack.

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