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Yunpeng Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Yunpeng Liu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

NaViL: Rethinking Scaling Properties of Native Multimodal Large Language Models under Data Constraints

Compositional training has been the de-facto paradigm in existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), where pre-trained vision encoders are connected with pre-trained LLMs through continuous multimodal pre-training. However, the multimodal scaling property of this paradigm remains difficult to explore due to the separated training. In this paper, we focus on the native training of MLLMs in an end-to-end manner and systematically study its design space and scaling property under a practical setting, i.e., data constraint. Through careful study of various choices in MLLM, we obtain the optimal meta-architecture that best balances performance and training cost. After that, we further explore the scaling properties of the native MLLM and indicate the positively correlated scaling relationship between visual encoders and LLMs. Based on these findings, we propose a native MLLM called NaViL, combined with a simple and cost-effective recipe. Experimental results on 14 multimodal benchmarks confirm the competitive performance of NaViL against existing MLLMs. Besides that, our findings and results provide in-depth insights for the future study of native MLLMs.

cs.CV↗

SpikeSTAG: Spatial-Temporal Forecasting via GNN-SNN Collaboration

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), inspired by the spiking behavior of biological neurons, offer a distinctive approach for capturing the complexities of temporal data. However, their potential for spatial modeling in multivariate time-series forecasting remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce a brand new SNN architecture, which is among the first to seamlessly integrate graph structural learning with spike-based temporal processing for multivariate time-series forecasting. Specifically, we first embed time features and an adaptive matrix, eliminating the need for predefined graph structures. We then further learn sequence features through the Observation (OBS) Block. Building upon this, our Multi-Scale Spike Aggregation (MSSA) hierarchically aggregates neighborhood information through spiking SAGE layers, enabling multi-hop feature extraction while eliminating the need for floating-point operations. Finally, we propose a Dual-Path Spike Fusion (DSF) Block to integrate spatial graph features and temporal dynamics via a spike-gated mechanism, combining LSTM-processed sequences with spiking self-attention outputs, effectively improve the model accuracy of long sequence datasets. Experiments show that our model surpasses the state-of-the-art SNN-based iSpikformer on all datasets and outperforms traditional temporal models at long horizons, thereby establishing a new paradigm for efficient spatial-temporal modeling.

cs.LG↗

Towards Seamless Borders: A Method for Mitigating Inconsistencies in Image Inpainting and Outpainting

Image inpainting is the task of reconstructing missing or damaged parts of an image in a way that seamlessly blends with the surrounding content. With the advent of advanced generative models, especially diffusion models and generative adversarial networks, inpainting has achieved remarkable improvements in visual quality and coherence. However, achieving seamless continuity remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose two novel methods to address discrepancy issues in diffusion-based inpainting models. First, we introduce a modified Variational Autoencoder that corrects color imbalances, ensuring that the final inpainted results are free of color mismatches. Second, we propose a two-step training strategy that improves the blending of generated and existing image content during the diffusion process. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our methods effectively reduce discontinuity and produce high-quality inpainting results that are coherent and visually appealing.

cs.CV↗

EDTformer: An Efficient Decoder Transformer for Visual Place Recognition

Visual place recognition (VPR) aims to determine the general geographical location of a query image by retrieving visually similar images from a large geo-tagged database. To obtain a global representation for each place image, most approaches typically focus on the aggregation of deep features extracted from a backbone through using current prominent architectures (e.g., CNNs, MLPs, pooling layer, and transformer encoder), giving little attention to the transformer decoder. However, we argue that its strong capability to capture contextual dependencies and generate accurate features holds considerable potential for the VPR task. To this end, we propose an Efficient Decoder Transformer (EDTformer) for feature aggregation, which consists of several stacked simplified decoder blocks followed by two linear layers to directly produce robust and discriminative global representations. Specifically, we do this by formulating deep features as the keys and values, as well as a set of learnable parameters as the queries. Our EDTformer can fully utilize the contextual information within deep features, then gradually decode and aggregate the effective features into the learnable queries to output the global representations. Moreover, to provide more powerful deep features for EDTformer and further facilitate the robustness, we use the foundation model DINOv2 as the backbone and propose a Low-rank Parallel Adaptation (LoPA) method to enhance its performance in VPR, which can refine the intermediate features of the backbone progressively in a memory- and parameter-efficient way. As a result, our method not only outperforms single-stage VPR methods on multiple benchmark datasets, but also outperforms two-stage VPR methods which add a re-ranking with considerable cost. Code will be available at https://github.com/Tong-Jin01/EDTformer.

cs.CV↗

Relational Representation Learning Network for Cross-Spectral Image Patch Matching

Recently, feature relation learning has drawn widespread attention in cross-spectral image patch matching. However, existing related research focuses on extracting diverse relations between image patch features and ignores sufficient intrinsic feature representations of individual image patches. Therefore, we propose an innovative relational representation learning idea that simultaneously focuses on sufficiently mining the intrinsic features of individual image patches and the relations between image patch features. Based on this, we construct a Relational Representation Learning Network (RRL-Net). Specifically, we innovatively construct an autoencoder to fully characterize the individual intrinsic features, and introduce a feature interaction learning (FIL) module to extract deep-level feature relations. To further fully mine individual intrinsic features, a lightweight multi-dimensional global-to-local attention (MGLA) module is constructed to enhance the global feature extraction of individual image patches and capture local dependencies within global features. By combining the MGLA module, we further explore the feature extraction network and construct an attention-based lightweight feature extraction (ALFE) network. In addition, we propose a multi-loss post-pruning (MLPP) optimization strategy, which greatly promotes network optimization while avoiding increases in parameters and inference time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RRL-Net achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple public datasets. Our code are available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/RRL-Net.

cs.CV↗

Rolling Ahead Diffusion for Traffic Scene Simulation

Realistic driving simulation requires that NPCs not only mimic natural driving behaviors but also react to the behavior of other simulated agents. Recent developments in diffusion-based scenario generation focus on creating diverse and realistic traffic scenarios by jointly modelling the motion of all the agents in the scene. However, these traffic scenarios do not react when the motion of agents deviates from their modelled trajectories. For example, the ego-agent can be controlled by a stand along motion planner. To produce reactive scenarios with joint scenario models, the model must regenerate the scenario at each timestep based on new observations in a Model Predictive Control (MPC) fashion. Although reactive, this method is time-consuming, as one complete possible future for all NPCs is generated per simulation step. Alternatively, one can utilize an autoregressive model (AR) to predict only the immediate next-step future for all NPCs. Although faster, this method lacks the capability for advanced planning. We present a rolling diffusion based traffic scene generation model which mixes the benefits of both methods by predicting the next step future and simultaneously predicting partially noised further future steps at the same time. We show that such model is efficient compared to diffusion model based AR, achieving a beneficial compromise between reactivity and computational efficiency.

cs.LG↗

Why and How: Knowledge-Guided Learning for Cross-Spectral Image Patch Matching

Recently, cross-spectral image patch matching based on feature relation learning has attracted extensive attention. However, performance bottleneck problems have gradually emerged in existing methods. To address this challenge, we make the first attempt to explore a stable and efficient bridge between descriptor learning and metric learning, and construct a knowledge-guided learning network (KGL-Net), which achieves amazing performance improvements while abandoning complex network structures. Specifically, we find that there is feature extraction consistency between metric learning based on feature difference learning and descriptor learning based on Euclidean distance. This provides the foundation for bridge building. To ensure the stability and efficiency of the constructed bridge, on the one hand, we conduct an in-depth exploration of 20 combined network architectures. On the other hand, a feature-guided loss is constructed to achieve mutual guidance of features. In addition, unlike existing methods, we consider that the feature mapping ability of the metric branch should receive more attention. Therefore, a hard negative sample mining for metric learning (HNSM-M) strategy is constructed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that hard negative sample mining for metric networks has been implemented and brings significant performance gains. Extensive experimental results show that our KGL-Net achieves SOTA performance in three different cross-spectral image patch matching scenarios. Our code are available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/KGL-Net.

cs.CV↗

See Further When Clear: Curriculum Consistency Model

Significant advances have been made in the sampling efficiency of diffusion models and flow matching models, driven by Consistency Distillation (CD), which trains a student model to mimic the output of a teacher model at a later timestep. However, we found that the learning complexity of the student model varies significantly across different timesteps, leading to suboptimal performance in CD.To address this issue, we propose the Curriculum Consistency Model (CCM), which stabilizes and balances the learning complexity across timesteps. Specifically, we regard the distillation process at each timestep as a curriculum and introduce a metric based on Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) to quantify the learning complexity of this curriculum, then ensure that the curriculum maintains consistent learning complexity across different timesteps by having the teacher model iterate more steps when the noise intensity is low. Our method achieves competitive single-step sampling Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) scores of 1.64 on CIFAR-10 and 2.18 on ImageNet 64x64.Moreover, we have extended our method to large-scale text-to-image models and confirmed that it generalizes well to both diffusion models (Stable Diffusion XL) and flow matching models (Stable Diffusion 3). The generated samples demonstrate improved image-text alignment and semantic structure, since CCM enlarges the distillation step at large timesteps and reduces the accumulated error.

cs.CV↗

Semantically Consistent Video Inpainting with Conditional Diffusion Models

Current state-of-the-art methods for video inpainting typically rely on optical flow or attention-based approaches to inpaint masked regions by propagating visual information across frames. While such approaches have led to significant progress on standard benchmarks, they struggle with tasks that require the synthesis of novel content that is not present in other frames. In this paper, we reframe video inpainting as a conditional generative modeling problem and present a framework for solving such problems with conditional video diffusion models. We introduce inpainting-specific sampling schemes which capture crucial long-range dependencies in the context, and devise a novel method for conditioning on the known pixels in incomplete frames. We highlight the advantages of using a generative approach for this task, showing that our method is capable of generating diverse, high-quality inpaintings and synthesizing new content that is spatially, temporally, and semantically consistent with the provided context.

cs.CV↗

Towards Fine-Grained Webpage Fingerprinting at Scale

Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks can effectively identify the websites visited by Tor clients via analyzing encrypted traffic patterns. Existing attacks focus on identifying different websites, but their accuracy dramatically decreases when applied to identify fine-grained webpages, especially when distinguishing among different subpages of the same website. WebPage Fingerprinting (WPF) attacks face the challenges of highly similar traffic patterns and a much larger scale of webpages. Furthermore, clients often visit multiple webpages concurrently, increasing the difficulty of extracting the traffic patterns of each webpage from the obfuscated traffic. In this paper, we propose Oscar, a WPF attack based on multi-label metric learning that identifies different webpages from obfuscated traffic by transforming the feature space. Oscar can extract the subtle differences among various webpages, even those with similar traffic patterns. In particular, Oscar combines proxy-based and sample-based metric learning losses to extract webpage features from obfuscated traffic and identify multiple webpages. We prototype Oscar and evaluate its performance using traffic collected from 1,000 monitored webpages and over 9,000 unmonitored webpages in the real world. Oscar demonstrates an 88.6% improvement in the multi-label metric Recall@5 compared to the state-of-the-art attacks.

cs.CR↗

Progressive Domain Adaptation for Thermal Infrared Object Tracking

Due to the lack of large-scale labeled Thermal InfraRed (TIR) training datasets, most existing TIR trackers are trained directly on RGB datasets. However, tracking methods trained on RGB datasets suffer a significant drop-off in TIR data due to the domain shift issue. To this end, in this work, we propose a Progressive Domain Adaptation framework for TIR Tracking (PDAT), which transfers useful knowledge learned from RGB tracking to TIR tracking. The framework makes full use of large-scale labeled RGB datasets without requiring time-consuming and labor-intensive labeling of large-scale TIR data. Specifically, we first propose an adversarial-based global domain adaptation module to reduce domain gap on the feature level coarsely. Second, we design a clustering-based subdomain adaptation method to further align the feature distributions of the RGB and TIR datasets finely. These two domain adaptation modules gradually eliminate the discrepancy between the two domains, and thus learn domain-invariant fine-grained features through progressive training. Additionally, we collect a largescale TIR dataset with over 1.48 million unlabeled TIR images for training the proposed domain adaptation framework. Experimental results on five TIR tracking benchmarks show that the proposed method gains a nearly 6% success rate, demonstrating its effectiveness.

cs.CV↗

Refined Infrared Small Target Detection Scheme with Single-Point Supervision

Recently, infrared small target detection with single-point supervision has attracted extensive attention. However, the detection accuracy of existing methods has difficulty meeting actual needs. Therefore, we propose an innovative refined infrared small target detection scheme with single-point supervision, which has excellent segmentation accuracy and detection rate. Specifically, we introduce label evolution with single point supervision (LESPS) framework and explore the performance of various excellent infrared small target detection networks based on this framework. Meanwhile, to improve the comprehensive performance, we construct a complete post-processing strategy. On the one hand, to improve the segmentation accuracy, we use a combination of test-time augmentation (TTA) and conditional random field (CRF) for post-processing. On the other hand, to improve the detection rate, we introduce an adjustable sensitivity (AS) strategy for post-processing, which fully considers the advantages of multiple detection results and reasonably adds some areas with low confidence to the fine segmentation image in the form of centroid points. In addition, to further improve the performance and explore the characteristics of this task, on the one hand, we construct and find that a multi-stage loss is helpful for fine-grained detection. On the other hand, we find that a reasonable sliding window cropping strategy for test samples has better performance for actual multi-size samples. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Notably, the proposed scheme won the third place in the "ICPR 2024 Resource-Limited Infrared Small Target Detection Challenge Track 1: Weakly Supervised Infrared Small Target Detection".

cs.CV↗

LR-Net: A Lightweight and Robust Network for Infrared Small Target Detection

Limited by equipment limitations and the lack of target intrinsic features, existing infrared small target detection methods have difficulty meeting actual comprehensive performance requirements. Therefore, we propose an innovative lightweight and robust network (LR-Net), which abandons the complex structure and achieves an effective balance between detection accuracy and resource consumption. Specifically, to ensure the lightweight and robustness, on the one hand, we construct a lightweight feature extraction attention (LFEA) module, which can fully extract target features and strengthen information interaction across channels. On the other hand, we construct a simple refined feature transfer (RFT) module. Compared with direct cross-layer connections, the RFT module can improve the network's feature refinement extraction capability with little resource consumption. Meanwhile, to solve the problem of small target loss in high-level feature maps, on the one hand, we propose a low-level feature distribution (LFD) strategy to use low-level features to supplement the information of high-level features. On the other hand, we introduce an efficient simplified bilinear interpolation attention module (SBAM) to promote the guidance constraints of low-level features on high-level features and the fusion of the two. In addition, We abandon the traditional resizing method and adopt a new training and inference cropping strategy, which is more robust to datasets with multi-scale samples. Extensive experimental results show that our LR-Net achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Notably, on the basis of the proposed LR-Net, we achieve 3rd place in the "ICPR 2024 Resource-Limited Infrared Small Target Detection Challenge Track 2: Lightweight Infrared Small Target Detection".

cs.CV↗

Layerwise Proximal Replay: A Proximal Point Method for Online Continual Learning

In online continual learning, a neural network incrementally learns from a non-i.i.d. data stream. Nearly all online continual learning methods employ experience replay to simultaneously prevent catastrophic forgetting and underfitting on past data. Our work demonstrates a limitation of this approach: neural networks trained with experience replay tend to have unstable optimization trajectories, impeding their overall accuracy. Surprisingly, these instabilities persist even when the replay buffer stores all previous training examples, suggesting that this issue is orthogonal to catastrophic forgetting. We minimize these instabilities through a simple modification of the optimization geometry. Our solution, Layerwise Proximal Replay (LPR), balances learning from new and replay data while only allowing for gradual changes in the hidden activation of past data. We demonstrate that LPR consistently improves replay-based online continual learning methods across multiple problem settings, regardless of the amount of available replay memory.

cs.LG↗

Nearest Neighbour Score Estimators for Diffusion Generative Models

Score function estimation is the cornerstone of both training and sampling from diffusion generative models. Despite this fact, the most commonly used estimators are either biased neural network approximations or high variance Monte Carlo estimators based on the conditional score. We introduce a novel nearest neighbour score function estimator which utilizes multiple samples from the training set to dramatically decrease estimator variance. We leverage our low variance estimator in two compelling applications. Training consistency models with our estimator, we report a significant increase in both convergence speed and sample quality. In diffusion models, we show that our estimator can replace a learned network for probability-flow ODE integration, opening promising new avenues of future research.

cs.LG↗

TorchDriveEnv: A Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Autonomous Driving with Reactive, Realistic, and Diverse Non-Playable Characters

The training, testing, and deployment, of autonomous vehicles requires realistic and efficient simulators. Moreover, because of the high variability between different problems presented in different autonomous systems, these simulators need to be easy to use, and easy to modify. To address these problems we introduce TorchDriveSim and its benchmark extension TorchDriveEnv. TorchDriveEnv is a lightweight reinforcement learning benchmark programmed entirely in Python, which can be modified to test a number of different factors in learned vehicle behavior, including the effect of varying kinematic models, agent types, and traffic control patterns. Most importantly unlike many replay based simulation approaches, TorchDriveEnv is fully integrated with a state of the art behavioral simulation API. This allows users to train and evaluate driving models alongside data driven Non-Playable Characters (NPC) whose initializations and driving behavior are reactive, realistic, and diverse. We illustrate the efficiency and simplicity of TorchDriveEnv by evaluating common reinforcement learning baselines in both training and validation environments. Our experiments show that TorchDriveEnv is easy to use, but difficult to solve.

cs.AI↗

Finite size effect on gluon dissociation of J/psi in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Thermal quantities, including the the entropy density and gluon spectrum, of quark matter within a box that is finite in the longitudinal direction are calculated using a bag model. Under the assumption of entropy conservation, the corresponding gluon dissociation rate of J/psi is studied. It reaches a maximum at a certain longitudinal size L_m, below which the suppression is weak even if the temperature becomes higher than that without the finite size effect, and above which the dissociation rate approaches to the thermodynamic limit gradually with increasing longitudinal size of the fireball.

nucl-th↗

Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have strong capabilities in solving diverse natural language processing tasks. However, the safety and security issues of LLM systems have become the major obstacle to their widespread application. Many studies have extensively investigated risks in LLM systems and developed the corresponding mitigation strategies. Leading-edge enterprises such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic have also made lots of efforts on responsible LLMs. Therefore, there is a growing need to organize the existing studies and establish comprehensive taxonomies for the community. In this paper, we delve into four essential modules of an LLM system, including an input module for receiving prompts, a language model trained on extensive corpora, a toolchain module for development and deployment, and an output module for exporting LLM-generated content. Based on this, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy, which systematically analyzes potential risks associated with each module of an LLM system and discusses the corresponding mitigation strategies. Furthermore, we review prevalent benchmarks, aiming to facilitate the risk assessment of LLM systems. We hope that this paper can help LLM participants embrace a systematic perspective to build their responsible LLM systems.

cs.CL↗