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Tianshuo Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Tianshuo Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

History-informed Lagrangian Neural Networks

Forecasting the long-horizon evolution of mechanical systems from position-only observations is a pivotal yet difficult task, as hidden velocities and trajectory-specific physical properties must be inferred simultaneously. Although physics-guided neural networks like Lagrangian Neural Networks (LNNs) guarantee physical plausibility, they generally require complete state inputs and lack adaptability to changing system parameters. To break these limitations, we introduce History-informed Lagrangian Neural Networks (HiLNN). Grounded in the insight that temporal position sequences implicitly encode underlying dynamics, HiLNN employs a recurrent encoder to extract a latent context from history. This context not only reconstructs the unobserved initial velocity but also adaptively modulates the mass matrix, potential energy, and damping coefficients of a structured Lagrangian system. By leveraging a differentiable RK4 rollout scheme, the entire pipeline is optimized end-to-end under multi-step trajectory supervision and energy-consistency regularization. Empirical evaluations across conservative, dissipative, and heterogeneous variable-parameter systems show that HiLNN delivers superior long-term prediction accuracy and maintains precise energy profiles compared to state-of-the-art baselines. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/yingtian22/History-informed-LNN.

cs.LG

Private Face Recognition Training Dataset Publication via Identity-Decoupled and Geometry-Preserving Face Distillation

Publishing private face recognition~(FR) training datasets is privacy-sensitive because faces expose identity information. Private FR training dataset publication mitigates this risk by releasing protected proxies as substitutes for private training faces. However, training FR models with such data introduces an identity paradox: \emph{the identity cues that make released faces useful for recognition supervision are also the cues that make them linkable to real individuals.} A protected face should be decoupled from the original identity, yet still behave as a reliable identity sample for training. Removing these cues too aggressively may destroy the class structure needed for recognition learning, whereas preserving them too faithfully may increase source-identity linkability. We argue that this paradox stems from conflating source-aligned identity semantics with recognition-useful proxy identity geometry. The former should be suppressed to reduce linkage to private individuals, while the latter should be preserved for FR learning. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{Private Face Distillation}, an identity-decoupling and geometry-preserving framework. It uses Orthogonal Geometry Preservation to construct decoupled proxy identities from private identity representations while maintaining hyperspherical geometry, and Relational Topology Alignment to preserve identity relations for recognition learning. Experiments across multiple domain-shifted FR scenarios show that Private Face Distillation achieves stronger utility than the evaluated publication baselines. On IJB-C surveillance, it improves $\mathrm{TAR}@\mathrm{FAR}{=}1\text{e-}{3}$ by 3.94\% over the baseline while reducing source-identity linkability. These results suggest that private FR training dataset publication should decouple source-identity correspondence while preserving proxy identity geometry.

cs.CV

Self-Supervised Skill Optimization

Agent skills provide frozen large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural guidance, and recent work shows that such skills can be optimized with ground-truth (GT) feedback. Many applications, however, lack GT labels, task scores, rewards, or reliable task-specific evaluators. We therefore introduce Self-Supervised Skill Optimization (SSO), a comparative framework that learns a reusable skill from unlabeled task instances alone. At each step, SSO runs the current skill on an unlabeled batch, uses a subset of the resulting executions to generate complete skill probes, and runs the probes on the same batch. An LLM judge compares the resulting answers, trajectories, artifacts, or terminal states. A separate behavior extractor identifies behavioral differences without seeing the judge's decisions. SSO uses these decisions to aggregate evidence for and against the observed behaviors across instances. It then ranks the behaviors by the resulting evidence and renders a new complete skill from the highest-ranked behaviors. The update is accepted only if the new skill outperforms the current one on an unlabeled validation set. SSO outperforms existing GT-free prompt optimizers on both closed-ended and open-ended tasks. On closed-ended benchmarks, it approaches and sometimes exceeds the strongest GT-based skill optimizer without using any GT feedback.

cs.CL

Direct Discrepancy Replay: Distribution-Discrepancy Condensation and Manifold-Consistent Replay for Continual Face Forgery Detection

Continual face forgery detection (CFFD) requires detectors to learn emerging forgery paradigms without forgetting previously seen manipulations. Existing CFFD methods commonly rely on replaying a small amount of past data to mitigate forgetting. Such replay is typically implemented either by storing a few historical samples or by synthesizing pseudo-forgeries from detector-dependent perturbations. Under strict memory budgets, the former cannot adequately cover diverse forgery cues and may expose facial identities, while the latter remains strongly tied to past decision boundaries. We argue that the core role of replay in CFFD is to reinstate the distributions of previous forgery tasks during subsequent training. To this end, we directly condense the discrepancy between real and fake distributions and leverage real faces from the current stage to perform distribution-level replay. Specifically, we introduce Distribution-Discrepancy Condensation (DDC), which models the real-to-fake discrepancy via a surrogate factorization in characteristic-function space and condenses it into a tiny bank of distribution discrepancy maps. We further propose Manifold-Consistent Replay (MCR), which synthesizes replay samples through variance-preserving composition of these maps with current-stage real faces, yielding samples that reflect previous-task forgery cues while remaining compatible with current real-face statistics. Operating under an extremely small memory budget and without directly storing raw historical face images, our framework consistently outperforms prior CFFD baselines and significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Replay-level privacy analysis further suggests reduced identity leakage risk relative to selection-based replay.

cs.CV

From Intuition to Investigation: A Tool-Augmented Reasoning MLLM Framework for Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing

Face recognition remains vulnerable to presentation attacks, calling for robust Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) solutions. Recent MLLM-based FAS methods reformulate the binary classification task as the generation of brief textual descriptions to improve cross-domain generalization. However, their generalizability is still limited, as such descriptions mainly capture intuitive semantic cues (e.g., mask contours) while struggling to perceive fine-grained visual patterns. To address this limitation, we incorporate external visual tools into MLLMs to encourage deeper investigation of subtle spoof clues. Specifically, we propose the Tool-Augmented Reasoning FAS (TAR-FAS) framework, which reformulates the FAS task as a Chain-of-Thought with Visual Tools (CoT-VT) paradigm, allowing MLLMs to begin with intuitive observations and adaptively invoke external visual tools for fine-grained investigation. To this end, we design a tool-augmented data annotation pipeline and construct the ToolFAS-16K dataset, which contains multi-turn tool-use reasoning trajectories. Furthermore, we introduce a tool-aware FAS training pipeline, where Diverse-Tool Group Relative Policy Optimization (DT-GRPO) enables the model to autonomously learn efficient tool use. Extensive experiments under a challenging one-to-eleven cross-domain protocol demonstrate that TAR-FAS achieves SOTA performance while providing fine-grained visual investigation for trustworthy spoof detection.

cs.CV

One Ring to Rule Them All: Unifying Group-Based RL via Dynamic Power-Mean Geometry

Group-based reinforcement learning has evolved from the arithmetic mean of GRPO to the geometric mean of GMPO. While GMPO improves stability by constraining a conservative objective, it shares a fundamental limitation with GRPO: reliance on a fixed aggregation geometry that ignores the evolving and heterogeneous nature of each trajectory. In this work, we unify these approaches under Power-Mean Policy Optimization (PMPO), a generalized framework that parameterizes the aggregation geometry via the power-mean geometry exponent p. Within this framework, GRPO and GMPO are recovered as special cases. Theoretically, we demonstrate that adjusting p modulates the concentration of gradient updates, effectively reweighting tokens based on their advantage contribution. To determine p adaptively, we introduce a Clip-aware Effective Sample Size (ESS) mechanism. Specifically, we propose a deterministic rule that maps a trajectory clipping fraction to a target ESS. Then, we solve for the specific p to align the trajectory induced ESS with this target one. This allows PMPO to dynamically transition between the aggressive arithmetic mean for reliable trajectories and the conservative geometric mean for unstable ones. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that PMPO outperforms strong baselines.

cs.CL

UPA: Unsupervised Prompt Agent via Tree-Based Search and Selection

Prompt agents have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for automated prompt optimization, framing prompt discovery as a sequential decision-making problem over a structured prompt space. While this formulation enables the use of advanced planning algorithms, these methods typically assume access to supervised reward signals, which are often unavailable in practical scenarios. In this work, we propose UPA, an Unsupervised Prompt Agent that realizes structured search and selection without relying on ground-truth (GT) rewards. Specifically, during search, UPA iteratively constructs an evolving tree structure to navigate the prompt space, guided by fine-grained and position-debiased pairwise comparisons from Large Language Models (LLMs). Crucially, as these local comparisons do not inherently yield a consistent global scale, we decouple systematic prompt exploration from final selection, introducing a two-stage framework grounded in the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model. This framework first performs path-wise Bayesian aggregation of local comparisons to filter candidates under uncertainty, followed by global tournament-style comparisons to infer latent prompt quality and identify the optimal prompt. Experiments across multiple tasks demonstrate that UPA consistently outperforms existing prompt optimization methods, showing that agent-style optimization can remain highly effective even in unsupervised settings.

cs.CL

DevFD: Developmental Face Forgery Detection by Learning Shared and Orthogonal LoRA Subspaces

The rise of realistic digital face generation and manipulation poses significant social risks. The primary challenge lies in the rapid and diverse evolution of generation techniques, which often outstrip the detection capabilities of existing models. To defend against the ever-evolving new types of forgery, we need to enable our model to quickly adapt to new domains with limited computation and data while avoiding forgetting previously learned forgery types. In this work, we posit that genuine facial samples are abundant and relatively stable in acquisition methods, while forgery faces continuously evolve with the iteration of manipulation techniques. Given the practical infeasibility of exhaustively collecting all forgery variants, we frame face forgery detection as a continual learning problem and allow the model to develop as new forgery types emerge. Specifically, we employ a Developmental Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture that uses LoRA models as its individual experts. These experts are organized into two groups: a Real-LoRA to learn and refine knowledge of real faces, and multiple Fake-LoRAs to capture incremental information from different forgery types. To prevent catastrophic forgetting, we ensure that the learning direction of Fake-LoRAs is orthogonal to the established subspace. Moreover, we integrate orthogonal gradients into the orthogonal loss of Fake-LoRAs, preventing gradient interference throughout the training process of each task. Experimental results under both the datasets and manipulation types incremental protocols demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

cs.CV

Floating-Body Hydrodynamic Neural Networks

Fluid-structure interaction is common in engineering and natural systems, where floating-body motion is governed by added mass, drag, and background flows. Modeling these dissipative dynamics is difficult: black-box neural models regress state derivatives with limited interpretability and unstable long-horizon predictions. We propose Floating-Body Hydrodynamic Neural Networks (FHNN), a physics-structured framework that predicts interpretable hydrodynamic parameters such as directional added masses, drag coefficients, and a streamfunction-based flow, and couples them with analytic equations of motion. This design constrains the hypothesis space, enhances interpretability, and stabilizes integration. On synthetic vortex datasets, FHNN achieves up to an order-of-magnitude lower error than Neural ODEs, recovers physically consistent flow fields. Compared with Hamiltonian and Lagrangian neural networks, FHNN more effectively handles dissipative dynamics while preserving interpretability, which bridges the gap between black-box learning and transparent system identification.

cs.LG

Unifying Locality of KANs and Feature Drift Compensation Projection for Data-free Replay based Continual Face Forgery Detection

The rapid advancements in face forgery techniques necessitate that detectors continuously adapt to new forgery methods, thus situating face forgery detection within a continual learning paradigm. However, when detectors learn new forgery types, their performance on previous types often degrades rapidly, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) utilize locally plastic splines as their activation functions, enabling them to learn new tasks by modifying only local regions of the functions while leaving other areas unaffected. Therefore, they are naturally suitable for addressing catastrophic forgetting. However, KANs have two significant limitations: 1) the splines are ineffective for modeling high-dimensional images, while alternative activation functions that are suitable for images lack the essential property of locality; 2) in continual learning, when features from different domains overlap, the mapping of different domains to distinct curve regions always collapses due to repeated modifications of the same regions. In this paper, we propose a KAN-based Continual Face Forgery Detection (KAN-CFD) framework, which includes a Domain-Group KAN Detector (DG-KD) and a data-free replay Feature Separation strategy via KAN Drift Compensation Projection (FS-KDCP). DG-KD enables KANs to fit high-dimensional image inputs while preserving locality and local plasticity. FS-KDCP avoids the overlap of the KAN input spaces without using data from prior tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance while notably reducing forgetting.

cs.CV

DiffusionFF: A Diffusion-based Framework for Joint Face Forgery Detection and Fine-Grained Artifact Localization

The rapid evolution of deepfake technologies demands robust and reliable face forgery detection algorithms. While determining whether an image has been manipulated remains essential, the ability to precisely localize forgery clues is also important for enhancing model explainability and building user trust. To address this dual challenge, we introduce DiffusionFF, a diffusion-based framework that simultaneously performs face forgery detection and fine-grained artifact localization. Our key idea is to establish a novel encoder-decoder architecture: a pretrained forgery detector serves as a powerful "artifact encoder", and a denoising diffusion model is repurposed as an "artifact decoder". Conditioned on multi-scale forgery-related features extracted by the encoder, the decoder progressively synthesizes a detailed artifact localization map. We then fuse this fine-grained localization map with high-level semantic features from the forgery detector, leading to substantial improvements in detection capability. Extensive experiments show that DiffusionFF achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple benchmarks, underscoring its superior effectiveness and explainability.

cs.CV

SemiOccam: A Robust Semi-Supervised Image Recognition Network Using Sparse Labels

We present SemiOccam, an image recognition network that leverages semi-supervised learning in a highly efficient manner. Existing works often rely on complex training techniques and architectures, requiring hundreds of GPU hours for training, while their generalization ability with extremely limited labeled data remains to be improved. To address these limitations, we construct a hierarchical mixture density classification mechanism by optimizing mutual information between feature representations and target classes, compressing redundant information while retaining crucial discriminative components. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three commonly used datasets, with accuracy exceeding 95% on two of them using only 4 labeled samples per class, and its simple architecture keeps training time at the minute level. Notably, this paper reveals a long-overlooked data leakage issue in the STL-10 dataset for semi-supervised learning and removes duplicates to ensure reliable experimental results. We release the deduplicated CleanSTL-10 dataset to facilitate fair and reproducible research. Code available at https://github.com/Shu1L0n9/SemiOccam.

cs.CV

Shackled Dancing: A Bit-Locked Diffusion Algorithm for Lossless and Controllable Image Steganography

Data steganography aims to conceal information within visual content, yet existing spatial- and frequency-domain approaches suffer from trade-offs between security, capacity, and perceptual quality. Recent advances in generative models, particularly diffusion models, offer new avenues for adaptive image synthesis, but integrating precise information embedding into the generative process remains challenging. We introduce Shackled Dancing Diffusion, or SD$^2$, a plug-and-play generative steganography method that combines bit-position locking with diffusion sampling injection to enable controllable information embedding within the generative trajectory. SD$^2$ leverages the expressive power of diffusion models to synthesize diverse carrier images while maintaining full message recovery with $100\%$ accuracy. Our method achieves a favorable balance between randomness and constraint, enhancing robustness against steganalysis without compromising image fidelity. Extensive experiments show that SD$^2$ substantially outperforms prior methods in security, embedding capacity, and stability. This algorithm offers new insights into controllable generation and opens promising directions for secure visual communication.

cs.LG

MLLM-Enhanced Face Forgery Detection: A Vision-Language Fusion Solution

Reliable face forgery detection algorithms are crucial for countering the growing threat of deepfake-driven disinformation. Previous research has demonstrated the potential of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in identifying manipulated faces. However, existing methods typically depend on either the Large Language Model (LLM) alone or an external detector to generate classification results, which often leads to sub-optimal integration of visual and textual modalities. In this paper, we propose VLF-FFD, a novel Vision-Language Fusion solution for MLLM-enhanced Face Forgery Detection. Our key contributions are twofold. First, we present EFF++, a frame-level, explainability-driven extension of the widely used FaceForensics++ (FF++) dataset. In EFF++, each manipulated video frame is paired with a textual annotation that describes both the forgery artifacts and the specific manipulation technique applied, enabling more effective and informative MLLM training. Second, we design a Vision-Language Fusion Network (VLF-Net) that promotes bidirectional interaction between visual and textual features, supported by a three-stage training pipeline to fully leverage its potential. VLF-FFD achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both cross-dataset and intra-dataset evaluations, underscoring its exceptional effectiveness in face forgery detection.

cs.CV

WMamba: Wavelet-based Mamba for Face Forgery Detection

The rapid evolution of deepfake generation technologies necessitates the development of robust face forgery detection algorithms. Recent studies have demonstrated that wavelet analysis can enhance the generalization abilities of forgery detectors. Wavelets effectively capture key facial contours, often slender, fine-grained, and globally distributed, that may conceal subtle forgery artifacts imperceptible in the spatial domain. However, current wavelet-based approaches fail to fully exploit the distinctive properties of wavelet data, resulting in sub-optimal feature extraction and limited performance gains. To address this challenge, we introduce WMamba, a novel wavelet-based feature extractor built upon the Mamba architecture. WMamba maximizes the utility of wavelet information through two key innovations. First, we propose Dynamic Contour Convolution (DCConv), which employs specially crafted deformable kernels to adaptively model slender facial contours. Second, by leveraging the Mamba architecture, our method captures long-range spatial relationships with linear complexity. This efficiency allows for the extraction of fine-grained, globally distributed forgery artifacts from small image patches. Extensive experiments show that WMamba achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, highlighting its effectiveness in face forgery detection.

cs.CV

S2TD-Face: Reconstruct a Detailed 3D Face with Controllable Texture from a Single Sketch

3D textured face reconstruction from sketches applicable in many scenarios such as animation, 3D avatars, artistic design, missing people search, etc., is a highly promising but underdeveloped research topic. On the one hand, the stylistic diversity of sketches leads to existing sketch-to-3D-face methods only being able to handle pose-limited and realistically shaded sketches. On the other hand, texture plays a vital role in representing facial appearance, yet sketches lack this information, necessitating additional texture control in the reconstruction process. This paper proposes a novel method for reconstructing controllable textured and detailed 3D faces from sketches, named S2TD-Face. S2TD-Face introduces a two-stage geometry reconstruction framework that directly reconstructs detailed geometry from the input sketch. To keep geometry consistent with the delicate strokes of the sketch, we propose a novel sketch-to-geometry loss that ensures the reconstruction accurately fits the input features like dimples and wrinkles. Our training strategies do not rely on hard-to-obtain 3D face scanning data or labor-intensive hand-drawn sketches. Furthermore, S2TD-Face introduces a texture control module utilizing text prompts to select the most suitable textures from a library and seamlessly integrate them into the geometry, resulting in a 3D detailed face with controllable texture. S2TD-Face surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. Our project is available at https://github.com/wang-zidu/S2TD-Face .

cs.CV

3D Face Reconstruction with the Geometric Guidance of Facial Part Segmentation

3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) provide promising 3D face reconstructions in various applications. However, existing methods struggle to reconstruct faces with extreme expressions due to deficiencies in supervisory signals, such as sparse or inaccurate landmarks. Segmentation information contains effective geometric contexts for face reconstruction. Certain attempts intuitively depend on differentiable renderers to compare the rendered silhouettes of reconstruction with segmentation, which is prone to issues like local optima and gradient instability. In this paper, we fully utilize the facial part segmentation geometry by introducing Part Re-projection Distance Loss (PRDL). Specifically, PRDL transforms facial part segmentation into 2D points and re-projects the reconstruction onto the image plane. Subsequently, by introducing grid anchors and computing different statistical distances from these anchors to the point sets, PRDL establishes geometry descriptors to optimize the distribution of the point sets for face reconstruction. PRDL exhibits a clear gradient compared to the renderer-based methods and presents state-of-the-art reconstruction performance in extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. Our project is available at https://github.com/wang-zidu/3DDFA-V3 .

cs.CV

Safe Self-Refinement for Transformer-based Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to leverage a label-rich source domain to solve tasks on a related unlabeled target domain. It is a challenging problem especially when a large domain gap lies between the source and target domains. In this paper we propose a novel solution named SSRT (Safe Self-Refinement for Transformer-based domain adaptation), which brings improvement from two aspects. First, encouraged by the success of vision transformers in various vision tasks, we arm SSRT with a transformer backbone. We find that the combination of vision transformer with simple adversarial adaptation surpasses best reported Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based results on the challenging DomainNet benchmark, showing its strong transferable feature representation. Second, to reduce the risk of model collapse and improve the effectiveness of knowledge transfer between domains with large gaps, we propose a Safe Self-Refinement strategy. Specifically, SSRT utilizes predictions of perturbed target domain data to refine the model. Since the model capacity of vision transformer is large and predictions in such challenging tasks can be noisy, a safe training mechanism is designed to adaptively adjust learning configuration. Extensive evaluations are conducted on several widely tested UDA benchmarks and SSRT achieves consistently the best performances, including 85.43% on Office-Home, 88.76% on VisDA-2017 and 45.2% on DomainNet.

cs.CV