arXiv subjects

Tao Gong

Publications and source records attributed to Tao Gong.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Training-Free In-Context Forensic Chain for Image Manipulation Detection and Localization

Advances in image tampering pose serious security threats, underscoring the need for effective image manipulation localization (IML). While supervised IML achieves strong performance, it depends on costly pixel-level annotations. Existing weakly supervised or training-free alternatives often underperform and lack interpretability. We propose the In-Context Forensic Chain (ICFC), a training-free framework that leverages multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) for interpretable IML tasks. ICFC integrates an objectified rule construction with adaptive filtering to build a reliable knowledge base and a multi-step progressive reasoning pipeline that mirrors expert forensic workflows from coarse proposals to fine-grained forensics results. This design enables systematic exploitation of MLLM reasoning for image-level classification, pixel-level localization, and text-level interpretability. Across multiple benchmarks, ICFC not only surpasses state-of-the-art training-free methods but also achieves competitive or superior performance compared to weakly and fully supervised approaches.

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arXiv2026

SAPL: Semantic-Agnostic Prompt Learning in CLIP for Weakly Supervised Image Manipulation Localization

Malicious image manipulation threatens public safety and requires efficient localization methods. Existing approaches depend on costly pixel-level annotations which make training expensive. Existing weakly supervised methods rely only on image-level binary labels and focus on global classification, often overlooking local edge cues that are critical for precise localization. We observe that feature variations at manipulated boundaries are substantially larger than in interior regions. To address this gap, we propose Semantic-Agnostic Prompt Learning (SAPL) in CLIP, which learns text prompts that intentionally encode non-semantic, boundary-centric cues so that CLIPs multimodal similarity highlights manipulation edges rather than high-level object semantics. SAPL combines two complementary modules Edge-aware Contextual Prompt Learning (ECPL) and Hierarchical Edge Contrastive Learning (HECL) to exploit edge information in both textual and visual spaces. The proposed ECPL leverages edge-enhanced image features to generate learnable textual prompts via an attention mechanism, embedding semantic-irrelevant information into text features, to guide CLIP focusing on manipulation edges. The proposed HECL extract genuine and manipulated edge patches, and utilize contrastive learning to boost the discrimination between genuine edge patches and manipulated edge patches. Finally, we predict the manipulated regions from the similarity map after processing. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that SAPL significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving state-of-the-art localization performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

GuardTrace-VL: Detecting Unsafe Multimodel Reasoning via Iterative Safety Supervision

Multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) are increasingly deployed for vision-language tasks that produce explicit intermediate rationales. However, reasoning traces can contain unsafe content even when the final answer is non-harmful, creating deployment risks. Existing multimodal safety guards primarily evaluate only the input question and the final answer, neglecting the intermediate reasoning process. This oversight allows undetected harm, such as biased inferences or policy-violating use of visual context, to emerge during reasoning. We introduce GuardTrace-VL, a vision-aware safety auditor that monitors the full Question-Thinking-Answer (QTA) pipeline via joint image-text analysis, enabling detection of unsafe content as it emerges in the reasoning stage. To support training and evaluation, we construct the GuardTrace dataset, which is generated through diverse prompting strategies and refined via a MLRM- and human-based voting and verification pipeline. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage progressive training scheme combined with the data refinement process, enabling the model to learn nuanced and context-dependent safety preferences according to different risk levels. On our proposed test set covering both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, GuardTrace-VL model achieves an F1 score of 93.1% on unsafe reasoning detection tasks, representing a 13.5% improvement in F1 score compared to the previous strongest multimodal safety defense methods. The codes will be made publicly available.

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arXiv2025

Frame-Difference Guided Dynamic Region Perception for CLIP Adaptation in Text-Video Retrieval

With the rapid growth of video data, text-video retrieval technology has become increasingly important in numerous application scenarios such as recommendation and search. Early text-video retrieval methods suffer from two critical drawbacks: first, they heavily rely on large-scale annotated video-text pairs, leading to high data acquisition costs; second, there is a significant modal gap between video and text features, which limits cross-modal alignment accuracy. With the development of vision-language model, adapting CLIP to video tasks has attracted great attention. However, existing adaptation methods generally lack enhancement for dynamic video features and fail to effectively suppress static redundant features. To address this issue, this paper proposes FDA-CLIP (Frame Difference Alpha-CLIP), which is a concise CLIP-based training framework for text-video alignment. Specifically, the method uses frame differences to generate dynamic region masks, which are input into Alpha-CLIP as an additional Alpha channel. This proactively guides the model to focus on semantically critical dynamic regions while suppressing static background redundancy. Experiments demonstrate that frame difference-guided video semantic encoding can effectively balance retrieval efficiency and accuracy.

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arXiv2025

Semantic Relation-Enhanced CLIP Adapter for Domain Adaptive Zero-Shot Learning

The high cost of data annotation has spurred research on training deep learning models in data-limited scenarios. Existing paradigms, however, fail to balance cross-domain transfer and cross-category generalization, giving rise to the demand for Domain-Adaptive Zero-Shot Learning (DAZSL). Although vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have inherent advantages in the DAZSL field, current studies do not fully exploit their potential. Applying CLIP to DAZSL faces two core challenges: inefficient cross-category knowledge transfer due to the lack of semantic relation guidance, and degraded cross-modal alignment during target domain fine-tuning. To address these issues, we propose a Semantic Relation-Enhanced CLIP (SRE-CLIP) Adapter framework, integrating a Semantic Relation Structure Loss and a Cross-Modal Alignment Retention Strategy. As the first CLIP-based DAZSL method, SRE-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on the I2AwA and I2WebV benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches.

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arXiv2025

Flora: Effortless Context Construction to Arbitrary Length and Scale

Effectively handling long contexts is challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to the rarity of long texts, high computational demands, and substantial forgetting of short-context abilities. Recent approaches have attempted to construct long contexts for instruction tuning, but these methods often require LLMs or human interventions, which are both costly and limited in length and diversity. Also, the drop in short-context performances of present long-context LLMs remains significant. In this paper, we introduce Flora, an effortless (human/LLM-free) long-context construction strategy. Flora can markedly enhance the long-context performance of LLMs by arbitrarily assembling short instructions based on categories and instructing LLMs to generate responses based on long-context meta-instructions. This enables Flora to produce contexts of arbitrary length and scale with rich diversity, while only slightly compromising short-context performance. Experiments on Llama3-8B-Instruct and QwQ-32B show that LLMs enhanced by Flora excel in three long-context benchmarks while maintaining strong performances in short-context tasks. Our data-construction code is available at \href{https://github.com/txchen-USTC/Flora}{https://github.com/txchen-USTC/Flora}.

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arXiv2025

MARS-Bench: A Multi-turn Athletic Real-world Scenario Benchmark for Dialogue Evaluation

Large Language Models (\textbf{LLMs}), e.g. ChatGPT, have been widely adopted in real-world dialogue applications. However, LLMs' robustness, especially in handling long complex dialogue sessions, including frequent motivation transfer, sophisticated cross-turn dependency, is criticized all along. Nevertheless, no existing benchmarks can fully reflect these weaknesses. We present \textbf{MARS-Bench}, a \textbf{M}ulti-turn \textbf{A}thletic \textbf{R}eal-world \textbf{S}cenario Dialogue \textbf{Bench}mark, designed to remedy the gap. MARS-Bench is constructed from play-by-play text commentary so to feature realistic dialogues specifically designed to evaluate three critical aspects of multi-turn conversations: Ultra Multi-turn, Interactive Multi-turn, and Cross-turn Tasks. Extensive experiments on MARS-Bench also reveal that closed-source LLMs significantly outperform open-source alternatives, explicit reasoning significantly boosts LLMs' robustness on handling long complex dialogue sessions, and LLMs indeed face significant challenges when handling motivation transfer and sophisticated cross-turn dependency. Moreover, we provide mechanistic interpretability on how attention sinks due to special tokens lead to LLMs' performance degradation when handling long complex dialogue sessions based on attention visualization experiment in Qwen2.5-7B-Instruction.

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arXiv2025

FAS-ARIS: Turning Multipath Challenges Into Localization Opportunities

Traditional single-input single-output (SISO) systems face fundamental limitations in achieving accurate three-dimensional (3D) localization due to limited spatial degrees of freedom (DoF) and the adverse impact of multipath propagation. This paper proposes a novel fluid antenna system (FAS)-active reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS) framework that transforms multipath effects from a hindrance into a resource for enhanced localization. By synergistically combining the signal amplification capabilities of ARIS with the spatial diversity enabled by FAS, the proposed system achieves robust 3D user equipment (UE) positioning -- without relying on auxiliary information such as time-of-arrival (ToA) or frequency diversity. The system exploits both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) components through a tailored signal decoupling strategy. We design novel UE pilot sequences and ARIS phase configurations to effectively separate LoS and NLoS channels, enabling independent parameter estimation. A multi-stage estimation algorithm is then applied: the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm estimates angle-of-arrival (AoA) from the direct path, while maximum likelihood estimation with interior-point refinement recovers cascaded channel parameters from the reflected path. Finally, geometric triangulation using least-squares estimation determines the UE's 3D position based on the extracted AoA information. Comprehensive performance analysis, including the derivation of Cramér-Rao bounds for both channel and position estimation, establishes theoretical benchmarks. Simulation results confirm that the proposed FAS-ARIS framework achieves near-optimal localization accuracy while maintaining robustness in rich multipath environments -- effectively turning conventional localization challenges into advantages.

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arXiv2025

MFFI: Multi-Dimensional Face Forgery Image Dataset for Real-World Scenarios

Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) have enabled increasingly sophisticated face forgeries, posing a significant threat to social security. However, current Deepfake detection methods are limited by constraints in existing datasets, which lack the diversity necessary in real-world scenarios. Specifically, these data sets fall short in four key areas: unknown of advanced forgery techniques, variability of facial scenes, richness of real data, and degradation of real-world propagation. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-dimensional Face Forgery Image (\textbf{MFFI}) dataset, tailored for real-world scenarios. MFFI enhances realism based on four strategic dimensions: 1) Wider Forgery Methods; 2) Varied Facial Scenes; 3) Diversified Authentic Data; 4) Multi-level Degradation Operations. MFFI integrates $50$ different forgery methods and contains $1024K$ image samples. Benchmark evaluations show that MFFI outperforms existing public datasets in terms of scene complexity, cross-domain generalization capability, and detection difficulty gradients. These results validate the technical advance and practical utility of MFFI in simulating real-world conditions. The dataset and additional details are publicly available at {https://github.com/inclusionConf/MFFI}.

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arXiv2025

Benchmarking Unified Face Attack Detection via Hierarchical Prompt Tuning

PAD and FFD are proposed to protect face data from physical media-based Presentation Attacks and digital editing-based DeepFakes, respectively. However, isolated training of these two models significantly increases vulnerability towards unknown attacks, burdening deployment environments. The lack of a Unified Face Attack Detection model to simultaneously handle attacks in these two categories is mainly attributed to two factors: (1) A benchmark that is sufficient for models to explore is lacking. Existing UAD datasets only contain limited attack types and samples, leading to the model's confined ability to address abundant advanced threats. In light of these, through an explainable hierarchical way, we propose the most extensive and sophisticated collection of forgery techniques available to date, namely UniAttackDataPlus. Our UniAttackData+ encompasses 2,875 identities and their 54 kinds of corresponding falsified samples, in a total of 697,347 videos. (2) The absence of a trustworthy classification criterion. Current methods endeavor to explore an arbitrary criterion within the same semantic space, which fails to exist when encountering diverse attacks. Thus, we present a novel Visual-Language Model-based Hierarchical Prompt Tuning Framework that adaptively explores multiple classification criteria from different semantic spaces. Specifically, we construct a VP-Tree to explore various classification rules hierarchically. Then, by adaptively pruning the prompts, the model can select the most suitable prompts guiding the encoder to extract discriminative features at different levels in a coarse-to-fine manner. Finally, to help the model understand the classification criteria in visual space, we propose a DPI module to project the visual prompts to the text encoder to help obtain a more accurate semantics.

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arXiv2025

Inclusion 2024 Global Multimedia Deepfake Detection Challenge: Towards Multi-dimensional Face Forgery Detection

In this paper, we present the Global Multimedia Deepfake Detection held concurrently with the Inclusion 2024. Our Multimedia Deepfake Detection aims to detect automatic image and audio-video manipulations including but not limited to editing, synthesis, generation, Photoshop,etc. Our challenge has attracted 1500 teams from all over the world, with about 5000 valid result submission counts. We invite the top 20 teams to present their solutions to the challenge, from which the top 3 teams are awarded prizes in the grand finale. In this paper, we present the solutions from the top 3 teams of the two tracks, to boost the research work in the field of image and audio-video forgery detection. The methodologies developed through the challenge will contribute to the development of next-generation deepfake detection systems and we encourage participants to open source their methods.

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arXiv2025

Physics-informed Deep Diffusion MRI Reconstruction with Synthetic Data: Break Training Data Bottleneck in Artificial Intelligence

Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the only imaging modality for non-invasive movement detection of in vivo water molecules, with significant clinical and research applications. Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) MRI acquired by multi-shot techniques can achieve higher resolution, better signal-to-noise ratio, and lower geometric distortion than single-shot, but suffers from inter-shot motion-induced artifacts. These artifacts cannot be removed prospectively, leading to the absence of artifact-free training labels. Thus, the potential of deep learning in multi-shot DWI reconstruction remains largely untapped. To break the training data bottleneck, here, we propose a Physics-Informed Deep DWI reconstruction method (PIDD) to synthesize high-quality paired training data by leveraging the physical diffusion model (magnitude synthesis) and inter-shot motion-induced phase model (motion phase synthesis). The network is trained only once with 100,000 synthetic samples, achieving encouraging results on multiple realistic in vivo data reconstructions. Advantages over conventional methods include: (a) Better motion artifact suppression and reconstruction stability; (b) Outstanding generalization to multi-scenario reconstructions, including multi-resolution, multi-b-value, multi-under-sampling, multi-vendor, and multi-center; (c) Excellent clinical adaptability to patients with verifications by seven experienced doctors (p<0.001). In conclusion, PIDD presents a novel deep learning framework by exploiting the power of MRI physics, providing a cost-effective and explainable way to break the data bottleneck in deep learning medical imaging.

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arXiv2025

Context-Aware Weakly Supervised Image Manipulation Localization with SAM Refinement

Malicious image manipulation poses societal risks, increasing the importance of effective image manipulation detection methods. Recent approaches in image manipulation detection have largely been driven by fully supervised approaches, which require labor-intensive pixel-level annotations. Thus, it is essential to explore weakly supervised image manipulation localization methods that only require image-level binary labels for training. However, existing weakly supervised image manipulation methods overlook the importance of edge information for accurate localization, leading to suboptimal localization performance. To address this, we propose a Context-Aware Boundary Localization (CABL) module to aggregate boundary features and learn context-inconsistency for localizing manipulated areas. Furthermore, by leveraging Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and Segment Anything Model (SAM), we introduce the CAM-Guided SAM Refinement (CGSR) module to generate more accurate manipulation localization maps. By integrating two modules, we present a novel weakly supervised framework based on a dual-branch Transformer-CNN architecture. Our method achieves outstanding localization performance across multiple datasets.

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arXiv2024

Llama SLayer 8B: Shallow Layers Hold the Key to Knowledge Injection

As a manner to augment pre-trained large language models (LLM), knowledge injection is critical to develop vertical domain large models and has been widely studied. Although most current approaches, including parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and block expansion methods, uniformly apply knowledge across all LLM layers, it raises the question: are all layers equally crucial for knowledge injection? We begin by evaluating the importance of each layer in finding the optimal layer range for knowledge injection. Intuitively, the more important layers should play a more critical role in knowledge injection and deserve a denser injection. We observe performance dips in question-answering benchmarks after the removal or expansion of the shallow layers, and the degradation shrinks as the layer gets deeper, indicating that the shallow layers hold the key to knowledge injection. This insight leads us to propose the S strategy, a post-pretraining strategy of selectively enhancing shallow layers while pruning the less effective deep ones. Based on this strategy, we introduce Llama Slayer-8B and Llama Slayer-8B-Instruct. We experimented on the corpus of code $\&$ math and demonstrated the effectiveness of our strategy. Further experiments across different LLM, Mistral-7B, and a legal corpus confirmed the general applicability of the approach, underscoring its wide-ranging efficacy. Our code is available at: \https://github.com/txchen-USTC/Llama-Slayer

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arXiv2024

Mixture-of-Noises Enhanced Forgery-Aware Predictor for Multi-Face Manipulation Detection and Localization

With the advancement of face manipulation technology, forgery images in multi-face scenarios are gradually becoming a more complex and realistic challenge. Despite this, detection and localization methods for such multi-face manipulations remain underdeveloped. Traditional manipulation localization methods either indirectly derive detection results from localization masks, resulting in limited detection performance, or employ a naive two-branch structure to simultaneously obtain detection and localization results, which cannot effectively benefit the localization capability due to limited interaction between two tasks. This paper proposes a new framework, namely MoNFAP, specifically tailored for multi-face manipulation detection and localization. The MoNFAP primarily introduces two novel modules: the Forgery-aware Unified Predictor (FUP) Module and the Mixture-of-Noises Module (MNM). The FUP integrates detection and localization tasks using a token learning strategy and multiple forgery-aware transformers, which facilitates the use of classification information to enhance localization capability. Besides, motivated by the crucial role of noise information in forgery detection, the MNM leverages multiple noise extractors based on the concept of the mixture of experts to enhance the general RGB features, further boosting the performance of our framework. Finally, we establish a comprehensive benchmark for multi-face detection and localization and the proposed \textit{MoNFAP} achieves significant performance. The codes will be made available.

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arXiv2024

Homotopy Types Of Toric Orbifolds From Weyl Polytopes

Given a reduced crystallographic root system with a fixed simple system, it is associated to a Weyl group $W$, parabolic subgroups $W_K$'s and a polytope $P$ which is the convex hull of a dominant weight. The quotient $P/W_K$ can be identified with a polytope. Polytopes $P$ and $P/W_K$ are associated to toric varieties $X_P$ and $X_{P/W_K}$ respectively. It turns out the underlying topological spaces $X_P/W_K$ and $X_{P/W_K}$ are homotopy equivalent, when considering the polytopes in the real span of the root lattice or of the weight lattice.

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arXiv2024

Multi-spectral Class Center Network for Face Manipulation Detection and Localization

As deepfake content proliferates online, advancing face manipulation forensics has become crucial. To combat this emerging threat, previous methods mainly focus on studying how to distinguish authentic and manipulated face images. Although impressive, image-level classification lacks explainability and is limited to specific application scenarios, spurring recent research on pixel-level prediction for face manipulation forensics. However, existing forgery localization methods suffer from exploring frequency-based forgery traces in the localization network. In this paper, we observe that multi-frequency spectrum information is effective for identifying tampered regions. To this end, a novel Multi-Spectral Class Center Network (MSCCNet) is proposed for face manipulation detection and localization. Specifically, we design a Multi-Spectral Class Center (MSCC) module to learn more generalizable and multi-frequency features. Based on the features of different frequency bands, the MSCC module collects multi-spectral class centers and computes pixel-to-class relations. Applying multi-spectral class-level representations suppresses the semantic information of the visual concepts which is insensitive to manipulated regions of forgery images. Furthermore, we propose a Multi-level Features Aggregation (MFA) module to employ more low-level forgery artifacts and structural textures. Meanwhile, we conduct a comprehensive localization benchmark based on pixel-level FF++ and Dolos datasets. Experimental results quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed MSCCNet. We expect this work to inspire more studies on pixel-level face manipulation localization. The codes are available (https://github.com/miaoct/MSCCNet).

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arXiv2024

MiM-ISTD: Mamba-in-Mamba for Efficient Infrared Small Target Detection

Recently, infrared small target detection (ISTD) has made significant progress, thanks to the development of basic models. Specifically, the models combining CNNs with transformers can successfully extract both local and global features. However, the disadvantage of the transformer is also inherited, i.e., the quadratic computational complexity to sequence length. Inspired by the recent basic model with linear complexity for long-distance modeling, Mamba, we explore the potential of this state space model for ISTD task in terms of effectiveness and efficiency in the paper. However, directly applying Mamba achieves suboptimal performances due to the insufficient harnessing of local features, which are imperative for detecting small targets. Instead, we tailor a nested structure, Mamba-in-Mamba (MiM-ISTD), for efficient ISTD. It consists of Outer and Inner Mamba blocks to adeptly capture both global and local features. Specifically, we treat the local patches as "visual sentences" and use the Outer Mamba to explore the global information. We then decompose each visual sentence into sub-patches as "visual words" and use the Inner Mamba to further explore the local information among words in the visual sentence with negligible computational costs. By aggregating the visual word and visual sentence features, our MiM-ISTD can effectively explore both global and local information. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST and IRSTD-1k show the superior accuracy and efficiency of our method. Specifically, MiM-ISTD is $8 \times$ faster than the SOTA method and reduces GPU memory usage by 62.2$\%$ when testing on $2048 \times 2048$ images, overcoming the computation and memory constraints on high-resolution infrared images.

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