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Weifeng Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Weifeng Liu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Language Prompt vs. Image Enhancement: Boosting Object Detection With CLIP in Hazy Environments

Object detection in hazy environments is challenging because degraded objects are nearly invisible and their semantics are weakened by environmental noise, making it difficult for detectors to identify. Common approaches involve image enhancement to boost weakened semantics, but these methods are limited by the instability of enhanced modules. This paper proposes a novel solution by employing language prompts to enhance weakened semantics without image enhancement. Specifically, we design Approximation of Mutual Exclusion (AME) to provide credible weights for Cross-Entropy Loss, resulting in CLIP-guided Cross-Entropy Loss (CLIP-CE). The provided weights assess the semantic weakening of objects. Through the backpropagation of CLIP-CE, weakened semantics are enhanced, making degraded objects easier to detect. In addition, we present Fine-tuned AME (FAME) which adaptively fine-tunes the weight of AME based on the predicted confidence. The proposed FAME compensates for the imbalanced optimization in AME. Furthermore, we present HazyCOCO, a large-scale synthetic hazy dataset comprising 61258 images. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code and dataset will be released.

cs.CV

Rethinking Intelligence: Brain-like Neuron Network

Since their inception, artificial neural networks have relied on manually designed architectures and inductive biases to better adapt to data and tasks. With the rise of deep learning and the expansion of parameter spaces, they have begun to exhibit brain-like functional behaviors. Nevertheless, artificial neural networks remain fundamentally different from biological neural systems in structural organization, learning mechanisms, and evolutionary pathways. From the perspective of neuroscience, we rethink the formation and evolution of intelligence and proposes a new neural network paradigm, Brain-like Neural Network (BNN). We further present the first instantiation of a BNN termed LuminaNet that operates without convolutions or self-attention and is capable of autonomously modifying its architecture. We conduct extensive experiments demonstrating that LuminaNet can achieve self-evolution through dynamic architectural changes. On the CIFAR-10, LuminaNet achieves top-1 accuracy improvements of 11.19%, 5.46% over LeNet-5 and AlexNet, respectively, outperforming MLP-Mixer, ResMLP, and DeiT-Tiny among MLP/ViT architectures. On the TinyStories text generation task, LuminaNet attains a perplexity of 8.4, comparable to a single-layer GPT-2-style Transformer, while reducing computational cost by approximately 25% and peak memory usage by nearly 50%. Code and interactive structures are available at https://github.com/aaroncomo/LuminaNet.

cs.NE

Beyond Visual Cues: Leveraging General Semantics as Support for Few-Shot Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment novel classes under the guidance of limited support samples by a meta-learning paradigm. Existing methods mainly mine references from support images as meta guidance. However, due to intra-class variations among visual representations, the meta information extracted from support images cannot produce accurate guidance to segment untrained classes. In this paper, we argue that the references from support images may not be essential, the key to the support role is to provide unbiased meta guidance for both trained and untrained classes. We then introduce a Language-Driven Attribute Generalization (LDAG) architecture to utilize inherent target property language descriptions to build robust support strategy. Specifically, to obtain an unbiased support representation, we design a Multi-attribute Enhancement (MaE) module, which produces multiple detailed attribute descriptions of the target class through Large Language Models (LLMs), and then builds refined visual-text prior guidance utilizing multi-modal matching. Meanwhile, due to text-vision modal shift, attribute text struggles to promote visual feature representation, we design a Multi-modal Attribute Alignment (MaA) to achieve cross-modal interaction between attribute texts and visual feature. Experiments show that our proposed method outperforms existing approaches by a clear margin and achieves the new state-of-the art performance. The code will be released.

cs.CV

Unbiased Semantic Decoding with Vision Foundation Models for Few-shot Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation has garnered significant attention. Many recent approaches attempt to introduce the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to handle this task. With the strong generalization ability and rich object-specific extraction ability of the SAM model, such a solution shows great potential in few-shot segmentation. However, the decoding process of SAM highly relies on accurate and explicit prompts, making previous approaches mainly focus on extracting prompts from the support set, which is insufficient to activate the generalization ability of SAM, and this design is easy to result in a biased decoding process when adapting to the unknown classes. In this work, we propose an Unbiased Semantic Decoding (USD) strategy integrated with SAM, which extracts target information from both the support and query set simultaneously to perform consistent predictions guided by the semantics of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model. Specifically, to enhance the unbiased semantic discrimination of SAM, we design two feature enhancement strategies that leverage the semantic alignment capability of CLIP to enrich the original SAM features, mainly including a global supplement at the image level to provide a generalize category indicate with support image and a local guidance at the pixel level to provide a useful target location with query image. Besides, to generate target-focused prompt embeddings, a learnable visual-text target prompt generator is proposed by interacting target text embeddings and clip visual features. Without requiring re-training of the vision foundation models, the features with semantic discrimination draw attention to the target region through the guidance of prompt with rich target information.

cs.CV

HCC-3D: Hierarchical Compensatory Compression for 98% 3D Token Reduction in Vision-Language Models

3D understanding has drawn significant attention recently, leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enable multi-modal reasoning between point cloud and text data. Current 3D-VLMs directly embed the 3D point clouds into 3D tokens, following large 2D-VLMs with powerful reasoning capabilities. However, this framework has a great computational cost limiting its application, where we identify that the bottleneck lies in processing all 3D tokens in the Large Language Model (LLM) part. This raises the question: how can we reduce the computational overhead introduced by 3D tokens while preserving the integrity of their essential information? To address this question, we introduce Hierarchical Compensatory Compression (HCC-3D) to efficiently compress 3D tokens while maintaining critical detail retention. Specifically, we first propose a global structure compression (GSC), in which we design global queries to compress all 3D tokens into a few key tokens while keeping overall structural information. Then, to compensate for the information loss in GSC, we further propose an adaptive detail mining (ADM) module that selectively recompresses salient but under-attended features through complementary scoring. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HCC-3D not only achieves extreme compression ratios (approximately 98%) compared to previous 3D-VLMs, but also achieves new state-of-the-art performance, showing the great improvements on both efficiency and performance.

cs.CV

Reasoning Like Experts: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models for Drawing-based Psychoanalysis

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various objective multimodal perception tasks, yet their application to subjective, emotionally nuanced domains, such as psychological analysis, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce PICK, a multi-step framework designed for Psychoanalytical Image Comprehension through hierarchical analysis and Knowledge injection with MLLMs, specifically focusing on the House-Tree-Person (HTP) Test, a widely used psychological assessment in clinical practice. First, we decompose drawings containing multiple instances into semantically meaningful sub-drawings, constructing a hierarchical representation that captures spatial structure and content across three levels: single-object level, multi-object level, and whole level. Next, we analyze these sub-drawings at each level with a targeted focus, extracting psychological or emotional insights from their visual cues. We also introduce an HTP knowledge base and design a feature extraction module, trained with reinforcement learning, to generate a psychological profile for single-object level analysis. This profile captures both holistic stylistic features and dynamic object-specific features (such as those of the house, tree, or person), correlating them with psychological states. Finally, we integrate these multi-faceted information to produce a well-informed assessment that aligns with expert-level reasoning. Our approach bridges the gap between MLLMs and specialized expert domains, offering a structured and interpretable framework for understanding human mental states through visual expression. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PICK significantly enhances the capability of MLLMs in psychological analysis. It is further validated as a general framework through extensions to emotion understanding tasks.

cs.CV

AI for Service: Proactive Assistance with AI Glasses

In an era where AI is evolving from a passive tool into an active and adaptive companion, we introduce AI for Service (AI4Service), a new paradigm that enables proactive and real-time assistance in daily life. Existing AI services remain largely reactive, responding only to explicit user commands. We argue that a truly intelligent and helpful assistant should be capable of anticipating user needs and taking actions proactively when appropriate. To realize this vision, we propose Alpha-Service, a unified framework that addresses two fundamental challenges: Know When to intervene by detecting service opportunities from egocentric video streams, and Know How to provide both generalized and personalized services. Inspired by the von Neumann computer architecture and based on AI glasses, Alpha-Service consists of five key components: an Input Unit for perception, a Central Processing Unit for task scheduling, an Arithmetic Logic Unit for tool utilization, a Memory Unit for long-term personalization, and an Output Unit for natural human interaction. As an initial exploration, we implement Alpha-Service through a multi-agent system deployed on AI glasses. Case studies, including a real-time Blackjack advisor, a museum tour guide, and a shopping fit assistant, demonstrate its ability to seamlessly perceive the environment, infer user intent, and provide timely and useful assistance without explicit prompts.

cs.AI

CoCo-Bench: A Comprehensive Code Benchmark For Multi-task Large Language Model Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) play a crucial role in software engineering, excelling in tasks like code generation and maintenance. However, existing benchmarks are often narrow in scope, focusing on a specific task and lack a comprehensive evaluation framework that reflects real-world applications. To address these gaps, we introduce CoCo-Bench (Comprehensive Code Benchmark), designed to evaluate LLMs across four critical dimensions: code understanding, code generation, code modification, and code review. These dimensions capture essential developer needs, ensuring a more systematic and representative evaluation. CoCo-Bench includes multiple programming languages and varying task difficulties, with rigorous manual review to ensure data quality and accuracy. Empirical results show that CoCo-Bench aligns with existing benchmarks while uncovering significant variations in model performance, effectively highlighting strengths and weaknesses. By offering a holistic and objective evaluation, CoCo-Bench provides valuable insights to guide future research and technological advancements in code-oriented LLMs, establishing a reliable benchmark for the field.

cs.SE

SFIBA: Spatial-based Full-target Invisible Backdoor Attacks

Multi-target backdoor attacks pose significant security threats to deep neural networks, as they can preset multiple target classes through a single backdoor injection. This allows attackers to control the model to misclassify poisoned samples with triggers into any desired target class during inference, exhibiting superior attack performance compared with conventional backdoor attacks. However, existing multi-target backdoor attacks fail to guarantee trigger specificity and stealthiness in black-box settings, resulting in two main issues. First, they are unable to simultaneously target all classes when only training data can be manipulated, limiting their effectiveness in realistic attack scenarios. Second, the triggers often lack visual imperceptibility, making poisoned samples easy to detect. To address these problems, we propose a Spatial-based Full-target Invisible Backdoor Attack, called SFIBA. It restricts triggers for different classes to specific local spatial regions and morphologies in the pixel space to ensure specificity, while employing a frequency-domain-based trigger injection method to guarantee stealthiness. Specifically, for injection of each trigger, we first apply fast fourier transform to obtain the amplitude spectrum of clean samples in local spatial regions. Then, we employ discrete wavelet transform to extract the features from the amplitude spectrum and use singular value decomposition to integrate the trigger. Subsequently, we selectively filter parts of the trigger in pixel space to implement trigger morphology constraints and adjust injection coefficients based on visual effects. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets and models. The results demonstrate that SFIBA can achieve excellent attack performance and stealthiness, while preserving the model's performance on benign samples, and can also bypass existing backdoor defenses.

cs.CR

FFCBA: Feature-based Full-target Clean-label Backdoor Attacks

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to deep neural networks, as backdoored models would misclassify poisoned samples with specific triggers into target classes while maintaining normal performance on clean samples. Among these, multi-target backdoor attacks can simultaneously target multiple classes. However, existing multi-target backdoor attacks all follow the dirty-label paradigm, where poisoned samples are mislabeled, and most of them require an extremely high poisoning rate. This makes them easily detectable by manual inspection. In contrast, clean-label attacks are more stealthy, as they avoid modifying the labels of poisoned samples. However, they generally struggle to achieve stable and satisfactory attack performance and often fail to scale effectively to multi-target attacks. To address this issue, we propose the Feature-based Full-target Clean-label Backdoor Attacks (FFCBA) which consists of two paradigms: Feature-Spanning Backdoor Attacks (FSBA) and Feature-Migrating Backdoor Attacks (FMBA). FSBA leverages class-conditional autoencoders to generate noise triggers that align perturbed in-class samples with the original category's features, ensuring the effectiveness, intra-class consistency, inter-class specificity and natural-feature correlation of triggers. While FSBA supports swift and efficient attacks, its cross-model attack capability is relatively weak. FMBA employs a two-stage class-conditional autoencoder training process that alternates between using out-of-class samples and in-class samples. This allows FMBA to generate triggers with strong target-class features, making it highly effective for cross-model attacks. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets and models, the results show that FFCBA achieves outstanding attack performance and maintains desirable robustness against the state-of-the-art backdoor defenses.

cs.CR

Modeling All Response Surfaces in One for Conditional Search Spaces

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient black-box optimizer commonly used in search spaces where hyperparameters are independent. However, in many practical AutoML scenarios, there will be dependencies among hyperparameters, forming a conditional search space, which can be partitioned into structurally distinct subspaces. The structure and dimensionality of hyperparameter configurations vary across these subspaces, challenging the application of BO. Some previous BO works have proposed solutions to develop multiple Gaussian Process models in these subspaces. However, these approaches tend to be inefficient as they require a substantial number of observations to guarantee each GP's performance and cannot capture relationships between hyperparameters across different subspaces. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel approach to model the response surfaces of all subspaces in one, which can model the relationships between hyperparameters elegantly via a self-attention mechanism. Concretely, we design a structure-aware hyperparameter embedding to preserve the structural information. Then, we introduce an attention-based deep feature extractor, capable of projecting configurations with different structures from various subspaces into a unified feature space, where the response surfaces can be formulated using a single standard Gaussian Process. The empirical results on a simulation function, various real-world tasks, and HPO-B benchmark demonstrate that our proposed approach improves the efficacy and efficiency of BO within conditional search spaces.

cs.LG

Lips Are Lying: Spotting the Temporal Inconsistency between Audio and Visual in Lip-Syncing DeepFakes

In recent years, DeepFake technology has achieved unprecedented success in high-quality video synthesis, but these methods also pose potential and severe security threats to humanity. DeepFake can be bifurcated into entertainment applications like face swapping and illicit uses such as lip-syncing fraud. However, lip-forgery videos, which neither change identity nor have discernible visual artifacts, present a formidable challenge to existing DeepFake detection methods. Our preliminary experiments have shown that the effectiveness of the existing methods often drastically decrease or even fail when tackling lip-syncing videos. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a novel approach dedicated to lip-forgery identification that exploits the inconsistency between lip movements and audio signals. We also mimic human natural cognition by capturing subtle biological links between lips and head regions to boost accuracy. To better illustrate the effectiveness and advances of our proposed method, we create a high-quality LipSync dataset, AVLips, by employing the state-of-the-art lip generators. We hope this high-quality and diverse dataset could be well served the further research on this challenging and interesting field. Experimental results show that our approach gives an average accuracy of more than 95.3% in spotting lip-syncing videos, significantly outperforming the baselines. Extensive experiments demonstrate the capability to tackle deepfakes and the robustness in surviving diverse input transformations. Our method achieves an accuracy of up to 90.2% in real-world scenarios (e.g., WeChat video call) and shows its powerful capabilities in real scenario deployment. To facilitate the progress of this research community, we release all resources at https://github.com/AaronComo/LipFD.

cs.CV

Long-context Language Models Fail in Basic Retrieval Tasks Without Sufficient Reasoning Steps

Long-context language models (LCLMs), characterized by their extensive context window, are becoming popular. However, despite the fact that they are nearly perfect at standard long-context retrieval tasks, our evaluations demonstrate they fail in some basic cases. Later, we find they can be well addressed with a sufficient number of reasoning steps, guided by specific CoT prompts. This result emphasizes the potential necessity of solving specific long-context tasks using long-CoT methods, while previous long-context benchmarks always ignore the necessity of long reasoning for long-context tasks and treat them as direct QA tasks.

cs.CL

Nanometer-resolution 3D Tomographic and Vectorial Near-field Imaging in Dielectric Optical Resonators

All-dielectric optical nano-resonators, exhibiting exotic near-field distributions upon excitations, have emerged as low-loss, versatile and highly adaptable components in nanophotonic structures for manipulating electromagnetic waves and enhancing light-matter interactions. However, achieving experimental full three-dimensional characterization of near-fields within dielectric nano-resonators poses significant challenges. Here, we develop a novel technique using high-order sideband generation to image near-field wave patterns inside dielectric optical nano-resonators. By exploiting the phase-sensitivity of various harmonic orders that enables the detection of near-field distributions at distinct depths, we achieve three-dimensional tomographic and near-field imaging with nanometer resolution inside a micrometer-thick silicon anapole resonator. Furthermore, our method offers high-contrast polarization sensitivity and phase-resolving capability, providing comprehensive vectorial near-field information. Our approach can potentially be applied to diverse dielectric metamaterials, and becomes a valuable tool for comprehensive characterization of near-field wave phenomena within dielectric materials.

physics.optics

Rethinking Prior Information Generation with CLIP for Few-Shot Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation remains challenging due to the limitations of its labeling information for unseen classes. Most previous approaches rely on extracting high-level feature maps from the frozen visual encoder to compute the pixel-wise similarity as a key prior guidance for the decoder. However, such a prior representation suffers from coarse granularity and poor generalization to new classes since these high-level feature maps have obvious category bias. In this work, we propose to replace the visual prior representation with the visual-text alignment capacity to capture more reliable guidance and enhance the model generalization. Specifically, we design two kinds of training-free prior information generation strategy that attempts to utilize the semantic alignment capability of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training model (CLIP) to locate the target class. Besides, to acquire more accurate prior guidance, we build a high-order relationship of attention maps and utilize it to refine the initial prior information. Experiments on both the PASCAL-5{i} and COCO-20{i} datasets show that our method obtains a clearly substantial improvement and reaches the new state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV

Adaptive Bidirectional Displacement for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Consistency learning is a central strategy to tackle unlabeled data in semi-supervised medical image segmentation (SSMIS), which enforces the model to produce consistent predictions under the perturbation. However, most current approaches solely focus on utilizing a specific single perturbation, which can only cope with limited cases, while employing multiple perturbations simultaneously is hard to guarantee the quality of consistency learning. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Bidirectional Displacement (ABD) approach to solve the above challenge. Specifically, we first design a bidirectional patch displacement based on reliable prediction confidence for unlabeled data to generate new samples, which can effectively suppress uncontrollable regions and still retain the influence of input perturbations. Meanwhile, to enforce the model to learn the potentially uncontrollable content, a bidirectional displacement operation with inverse confidence is proposed for the labeled images, which generates samples with more unreliable information to facilitate model learning. Extensive experiments show that ABD achieves new state-of-the-art performances for SSMIS, significantly improving different baselines. Source code is available at https://github.com/chy-upc/ABD.

cs.CV

Transfer Learning of Real Image Features with Soft Contrastive Loss for Fake Image Detection

In the last few years, the artifact patterns in fake images synthesized by different generative models have been inconsistent, leading to the failure of previous research that relied on spotting subtle differences between real and fake. In our preliminary experiments, we find that the artifacts in fake images always change with the development of the generative model, while natural images exhibit stable statistical properties. In this paper, we employ natural traces shared only by real images as an additional target for a classifier. Specifically, we introduce a self-supervised feature mapping process for natural trace extraction and develop a transfer learning based on soft contrastive loss to bring them closer to real images and further away from fake ones. This motivates the detector to make decisions based on the proximity of images to the natural traces. To conduct a comprehensive experiment, we built a high-quality and diverse dataset that includes generative models comprising GANs and diffusion models, to evaluate the effectiveness in generalizing unknown forgery techniques and robustness in surviving different transformations. Experimental results show that our proposed method gives 96.2% mAP significantly outperforms the baselines. Extensive experiments conducted on popular commercial platforms reveal that our proposed method achieves an accuracy exceeding 78.4%, underscoring its practicality for real-world application deployment.

cs.CV

Building Accurate Translation-Tailored LLMs with Language Aware Instruction Tuning

Translation-tailored Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable translation capabilities, even competing with supervised-trained commercial translation systems. However, off-target translation remains an unsolved problem, especially for low-resource languages, hindering us from developing accurate LLMs-based translation models. To mitigate the off-target translation problem and enhance the performance of LLMs on translation, recent works have either designed advanced prompting strategies to highlight the functionality of translation instructions or exploited the in-context learning ability of LLMs by feeding few-shot demonstrations. However, these methods essentially do not improve LLM's ability to follow translation instructions, especially the language direction information. In this work, we design a two-stage fine-tuning algorithm to improve the instruction-following ability (especially the translation direction) of LLMs. Specifically, we first tune LLMs with the maximum likelihood estimation loss on the translation dataset to elicit the basic translation capabilities. In the second stage, we construct instruction-conflicting samples by randomly replacing the translation directions with a wrong one within the instruction, and then introduce an extra unlikelihood loss to learn those samples. Experiments on IWSLT and WMT benchmarks upon the LLaMA model spanning 16 zero-shot directions show that, compared to the competitive baseline -- translation-finetuned LLama, our method could effectively reduce the off-target translation ratio (averagely -53.3\%), thus improving translation quality with average +5.7 SacreBLEU and +16.4 BLEURT. Analysis shows that our method could preserve the model's general task performance on AlpacaEval. Code and models will be released at \url{https://github.com/alphadl/LanguageAware_Tuning}.

cs.CL