arXiv subjects

Shuwen Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Shuwen Zhao.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

VTOS: Learning to Orchestrate Vision Tools by Co-Searching Solutions and Observers

Vision foundation tools such as open-vocabulary detectors, segmentation models, and post-processing operators are powerful building blocks for computer vision, but their effectiveness depends heavily on how they are orchestrated: which tools are used, in what order, with what parameters, and under what visual conditions. Existing visual-programming agents typically generate a fixed solution pipeline, making them brittle under dense objects, occlusion, small targets, and domain shift. We introduce VTOS (Vision Tools Orchestration Search), a framework for adaptive visual tool orchestration through joint solution-observer search. VTOS co-searches executable solution programs that compose vision tools such as Grounding DINO, SAM, NMS, and slice-and-detect, together with observer programs that diagnose candidate solutions, identify failure modes, and generate actionable feedback. These observations are accumulated in a shared VisionThoughts knowledge base to guide subsequent search. We evaluate VTOS through two case studies: dense object counting on LVIS-Count and zero-shot plant-disease segmentation on PlantSeg-OOD, which stress different orchestration challenges including threshold calibration, NMS, slicing, mask refinement, and domain generalization. Across both tasks, VTOS outperforms static tool pipelines and agentic visual-programming baselines, specifically in complex settings such as dense, occluded scenes and out-of-distribution segmentation where static pipelines leave measurable headroom, rather than in standard tasks where a single well-calibrated tool already approaches its ceiling.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

ESA: Annotation-Efficient Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation

Active learning enhances annotation efficiency by selecting the most revealing samples for labeling, thereby reducing reliance on extensive human input. Previous methods in semantic segmentation have centered on individual pixels or small areas, neglecting the rich patterns in natural images and the power of advanced pre-trained models. To address these challenges, we propose three key contributions: Firstly, we introduce Entity-Superpixel Annotation (ESA), an innovative and efficient active learning strategy which utilizes a class-agnostic mask proposal network coupled with super-pixel grouping to capture local structural cues. Additionally, our method selects a subset of entities within each image of the target domain, prioritizing superpixels with high entropy to ensure comprehensive representation. Simultaneously, it focuses on a limited number of key entities, thereby optimizing for efficiency. By utilizing an annotator-friendly design that capitalizes on the inherent structure of images, our approach significantly outperforms existing pixel-based methods, achieving superior results with minimal queries, specifically reducing click cost by 98% and enhancing performance by 1.71%. For instance, our technique requires a mere 40 clicks for annotation, a stark contrast to the 5000 clicks demanded by conventional methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Asymmetric Momentum: A Rethinking of Gradient Descent

Through theoretical and experimental validation, unlike all existing adaptive methods like Adam which penalize frequently-changing parameters and are only applicable to sparse gradients, we propose the simplest SGD enhanced method, Loss-Controlled Asymmetric Momentum(LCAM). By averaging the loss, we divide training process into different loss phases and using different momentum. It not only can accelerates slow-changing parameters for sparse gradients, similar to adaptive optimizers, but also can choose to accelerates frequently-changing parameters for non-sparse gradients, thus being adaptable to all types of datasets. We reinterpret the machine learning training process through the concepts of weight coupling and weight traction, and experimentally validate that weights have directional specificity, which are correlated with the specificity of the dataset. Thus interestingly, we observe that in non-sparse gradients, frequently-changing parameters should actually be accelerated, which is completely opposite to traditional adaptive perspectives. Compared to traditional SGD with momentum, this algorithm separates the weights without additional computational costs. It is noteworthy that this method relies on the network's ability to extract complex features. We primarily use Wide Residual Networks for our research, employing the classic datasets Cifar10 and Cifar100 to test the ability for feature separation and conclude phenomena that are much more important than just accuracy rates. Finally, compared to classic SGD tuning methods, while using WRN on these two datasets and with nearly half the training epochs, we achieve equal or better test accuracy.

cs.LG↗