Author name cluster

Ming Tang

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

20 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

AnomalyMoE: Towards a Language-free Generalist Model for Unified Visual Anomaly Detection

Zhaopeng Gu
Bingke Zhu
Guibo Zhu
Yingying Chen
Wei Ge
Ming Tang
Jinqiao Wang

Anomaly detection is a critical task across numerous domains and modalities, yet existing methods are often highly specialized, limiting their generalizability. These specialized models, tailored for specific anomaly types like textural defects or logical errors, typically exhibit limited performance when deployed outside their designated contexts. To overcome this limitation, we propose AnomalyMoE, a novel and universal anomaly detection framework based on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. Our key insight is to decompose the complex anomaly detection problem into three distinct semantic hierarchies: local structural anomalies, component-level semantic anomalies, and global logical anomalies. AnomalyMoE correspondingly employs three dedicated expert networks at the patch, component, and global levels, and is specialized in reconstructing features and identifying deviations at its designated semantic level. This hierarchical design allows a single model to concurrently understand and detect a wide spectrum of anomalies. Furthermore, we introduce an Expert Information Repulsion (EIR) module to promote expert diversity and an Expert Selection Balancing (ESB) module to ensure the comprehensive utilization of all experts. Experiments on 8 challenging datasets spanning industrial imaging, 3D point clouds, medical imaging, video surveillance, and logical anomaly detection demonstrate that AnomalyMoE establishes new state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming specialized methods in their respective domains.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

GeM-VG: Towards Generalized Multi-image Visual Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Models

Shurong Zheng
Yousong Zhu
Hongyin Zhao
Fan Yang
Yufei Zhan
Ming Tang
Jinqiao Wang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive progress in single-image grounding and general multi-image understanding. Recently, some methods begin to address multi-image grounding. However, they are constrained by single-target localization and limited types of practical tasks, due to the lack of unified modeling for generalized grounding tasks. Therefore, we propose GeM-VG, an MLLM capable of Generalized Multi-image Visual Grounding. To support this, we systematically categorize and organize existing multi-image grounding tasks according to cognitive demands and introduce the MG-Data-240K dataset, addressing the limitations of existing datasets regarding target quantity and image relation. To tackle the challenges of robustly handling diverse multi-image grounding tasks, we further propose a hybrid reinforcement finetuning strategy that integrates chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and direct answering, considering their complementary strengths. This strategy adopts an R1-like algorithm guided by a carefully designed rule-based reward, effectively enhancing the model’s overall perception and reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior generalized grounding capabilities of our model. For multi-image grounding, it outperforms the previous leading MLLMs by 2.0% and 9.7% on MIG-Bench and MC-Bench, respectively. In single-image grounding, it achieves a 9.1% improvement over the base model on ODINW. Furthermore, our model retains strong capabilities in general multi-image understanding.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Improving Generalization in LLM Structured Pruning via Function-Aware Neuron Grouping

Tao Yu
Yongqi An
Kuan Zhu
Guibo Zhu
Ming Tang
Jinqiao Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across natural language tasks but incur substantial computational and storage costs due to their scale. Post-training structured pruning offers an efficient solution. However, when few-shot calibration sets fail to adequately reflect the pretraining data distribution, existing methods exhibit limited generalization to downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose Function-Aware Neuron Grouping (FANG), a post-training pruning framework that alleviates calibration bias by identifying and preserving neurons critical to specific function. FANG groups neurons with similar function based on the type of semantic context they process and prunes each group independently. During importance estimation within each group, tokens that strongly correlate with the functional role of the neuron group are given higher weighting. Additionally, FANG also preserves neurons that contribute across multiple context types. To achieve a better trade-off between sparsity and performance, it allocates sparsity to each block adaptively based on its functional complexity. Experiments show that FANG improves downstream accuracy while preserving language modeling performance. It achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results when combined with FLAP and OBC, two representative pruning methods. Specifically, FANG outperforms FLAP and OBC by 1.5%–8.5% in average accuracy under 30% and 40% sparsity.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Quality-Aware Language-Conditioned Local Auto-Regressive Anomaly Synthesis and Detection

Long Qian
Bingke Zhu
Yingying Chen
Ming Tang
Jinqiao Wang

Despite substantial progress in anomaly synthesis, existing diffusion-based and coarse inpainting pipelines commonly suffer from structural deficiencies such as micro-structural discontinuities, limited semantic controllability, and inefficient generation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ARAS, a language-conditioned, auto-regressive anomaly synthesis approach that precisely injects local, text-specified defects into normal images via token-anchored latent editing. Leveraging a hard-gated auto-regressive operator and a training-free, context-preserving masked sampling kernel, ARAS significantly enhances defect realism, preserves fine-grained material textures, and provides continuous semantic control over synthesized anomalies. Integrated within our Quality-Aware Re-weighted Anomaly Detection (QARAD) framework, we propose a dynamic weighting strategy that emphasizes high-quality synthetic samples by computing an image-text similarity score with a dual-encoder model. Extensive experiments across three datasets, MVTec AD, VisA, and BTAD, demonstrate that our QARAD outperforms SOTA methods in both image- and pixel-level anomaly detection tasks, achieving improved accuracy, robustness, and a 5× synthesis speedup compared to diffusion-based alternatives.

PDF Details DOI

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FLARE: A Framework for Stellar Flare Forecasting Using Stellar Physical Properties and Historical Records

Bingke Zhu
Xiaoxiao Wang
Minghui Jia
Yihan Tao
Xiao Kong
Ali Luo
Yingying Chen
Ming Tang

Stellar flare events are critical observational samples for astronomical research; however, recorded flare events remain limited. Stellar flare forecasting can provide additional flare event samples to support research efforts. Despite this potential, no specialized models for stellar flare forecasting have been proposed to date. In this paper, we present extensive experimental evidence demonstrating that both stellar physical properties and historical flare records are valuable inputs for flare forecasting tasks. We then introduce FLARE (Forecasting Light-curve-based Astronomical Records via features Ensemble), the first-of-its-kind large model specifically designed for stellar flare forecasting. FLARE integrates stellar physical properties and historical flare records through a novel Soft Prompt Module and Residual Record Fusion Module. Experiments on the Kepler light curve dataset demonstrate that FLARE achieves superior performance compared to other methods across all evaluation metrics. Finally, we validate the forecast capability of our model through a comprehensive case study.

PDF Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FOCUS: Unified Vision-Language Modeling for Interactive Editing Driven by Referential Segmentation

Fan Yang
Yousong Zhu
Xin Li
Yufei Zhan
Hongyin Zhao
Shurong Zheng
Yaowei Wang
Ming Tang

Recent Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in unifying visual understanding and generative modeling, enabling both accurate content understanding and flexible editing. However, current approaches treat \textbf{\textit{"what to see"}} and \textbf{\textit{"how to edit"}} separately: they either perform isolated object segmentation or utilize segmentation masks merely as conditional prompts for local edit generation tasks, often relying on multiple disjointed models. To bridge these gaps, we introduce FOCUS, a unified LVLM that integrates segmentation-aware perception and controllable object-centric generation within an end-to-end framework. FOCUS employs a dual-branch visual encoder to simultaneously capture global semantic context and fine-grained spatial details. In addition, we leverage a MoVQGAN-based visual tokenizer to produce discrete visual tokens that enhance generation quality. To enable accurate and controllable image editing, we propose a progressive multi-stage training pipeline, where segmentation masks are jointly optimized and used as spatial condition prompts to guide the diffusion decoder. This strategy aligns visual encoding, segmentation, and generation modules, effectively bridging segmentation-aware perception with fine-grained visual synthesis. Extensive experiments across three core tasks, including multimodal understanding, referring segmentation accuracy, and controllable image generation, demonstrate that FOCUS achieves strong performance by jointly optimizing visual perception and generative capabilities.

PDF Details

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Learning Heterogeneous Performance-Fairness Trade-offs in Federated Learning

Rongguang Ye
Ming Tang

Recent methods leverage a hypernet to handle the performance-fairness trade-offs in federated learning. This hypernet maps the clients' preferences between model performance and fairness to preference-specifc models on the trade-off curve, known as local Pareto front. However, existing methods typically adopt a uniform preference sampling distribution to train the hypernet across clients, neglecting the inherent heterogeneity of their local Pareto fronts. Meanwhile, from the perspective of generalization, they do not consider the gap between local and global Pareto fronts on the global dataset. To address these limitations, we propose HetPFL to effectively learn both local and global Pareto fronts. HetPFL comprises Preference Sampling Adaptation (PSA) and Preference-aware Hypernet Fusion (PHF). PSA adaptively determines the optimal preference sampling distribution for each client to accommodate heterogeneous local Pareto fronts. While PHF performs preference-aware fusion of clients' hypernets to ensure the performance of the global Pareto front. We prove that HetPFL converges linearly with respect to the number of rounds, under weaker assumptions than existing methods. Extensive experiments on four datasets show that HetPFL significantly outperforms seven baselines in terms of the quality of learned local and global Pareto fronts.

PDF Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

PhysVLM-AVR: Active Visual Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models in Physical Environments

Weijie Zhou
Xuantang Xiong
Yi Peng
Manli Tao
Chaoyang Zhao
Honghui Dong
Ming Tang
Jinqiao Wang

Visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has primarily been studied in passive, static settings, limiting their effectiveness in real-world physical environments where an embodied agent must contend with incomplete information due to occlusion or a limited field of view. Humans, in contrast, leverage their embodiment to actively explore and interact with their environment—moving, examining, and manipulating objects—to gather information through a closed-loop process integrating perception, reasoning, and action. Inspired by this capability, we introduce the Active Visual Reasoning (AVR) task, extending visual reasoning to a paradigm of embodied interaction in partially observable environments. AVR necessitates embodied agents to: (1) actively acquire information via sequential physical actions, (2) integrate observations across multiple steps for coherent reasoning, and (3) dynamically adjust decisions based on evolving visual feedback. To rigorously evaluate AVR, we introduce CLEVR-AVR, a simulation benchmark featuring multi-round interactive environments designed to assess both reasoning correctness and information-gathering efficiency. We present AVR-152k, a large-scale dataset that offers rich Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations detailing iterative reasoning for uncertainty identification, action-conditioned information gain prediction, and information-maximizing action selection, crucial for training agents in a higher-order Markov Decision Process. Building on this, we develop PhysVLM-AVR, an embodied MLLM achieving state-of-the-art performance on CLEVR-AVR, embodied reasoning (OpenEQA, RoboVQA), and passive visual reasoning (GeoMath, Geometry30K). Our analysis also reveals that current embodied MLLMs, despite detecting information incompleteness, struggle to actively acquire and integrate new information through interaction, highlighting a fundamental gap in active reasoning capabilities.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SCOUT: Teaching Pre-trained Language Models to Enhance Reasoning via Flow Chain-of-Thought

Guanghao Li
Wenhao Jiang
Mingfeng Chen
Yan Li
Hao Yu
Shuting Dong
Tao Ren
Ming Tang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by encouraging step-by-step thinking. However, CoT-based methods depend on intermediate reasoning steps, which limits scalability and generalization. Recent work explores recursive reasoning, where LLMs reuse internal layers across iterations to refine latent representations without explicit CoT supervision. While promising, these approaches often require costly pretraining and lack a principled framework for how reasoning should evolve across iterations. We address this gap by introducing Flow Chain-of-Thought (Flow CoT), a reasoning paradigm that models recursive inference as a progressive trajectory of latent cognitive states. Flow CoT frames each iteration as a distinct cognitive stage—deepening reasoning across iterations without relying on manual supervision. To realize this, we propose SCOUT ( Stepwise Cognitive Optimization Using Teachers ), a lightweight fine-tuning framework that enables Flow CoT-style reasoning without the need for pretraining. SCOUT uses progressive distillation to align each iteration with a teacher of appropriate capacity, and a cross-attention-based retrospective module that integrates outputs from previous iterations while preserving the model’s original computation flow. Experiments across eight reasoning benchmarks show that SCOUT consistently improves both accuracy and explanation quality, achieving up to 1. 8\% gains under fine-tuning. Qualitative analyses further reveal that SCOUT enables progressively deeper reasoning across iterations—refining both belief formation and explanation granularity. These results not only validate the effectiveness of SCOUT, but also demonstrate the practical viability of Flow CoT as a scalable framework for enhancing reasoning in LLMs.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Tackling Biased Evaluators in Dueling Bandits

Ming Tang
Yuxuan Zhou
Chao Huang

In dueling bandits, an agent explores and exploits choices (i. e. , arms) by learning from their stochastic feedback in the form of relative preferences. Prior related studies focused on unbiased feedback. In practice, however, the feedback provided by evaluators can be biased. For example, human users are likely to provide biased evaluation towards large language models due to their heterogeneous background. In this work, we aim to minimize the regret in dueling bandits considering evaluators’ biased feedback. We begin with a benchmark case where evaluators’ bias information is known. Solving the known-bias case is nontrivial, because the bias cannot be easily decoupled from the feedback. We overcome this challenge and propose an unbiased arm performance estimator and a bias-sensitive dueling bandits algorithm. We manage to analyze the regret, dealing with the complex form of the estimator, and show that the feedback either matching or opposing the ground-truth reduces the regret. Then, we study the case where evaluators’ bias information is unknown. The associated estimator can hardly be solved in closed-form due to the non-convexity of the estimator solving problem. We address this challenge and propose an extended bias-sensitive algorithm by incorporating block coordinate descent. This algorithm is proven to achieve the same order of regret (as in the known bias case) with a bounded error. Experiments show that when compared with baselines, our algorithms reduces the regret by up to 86. 9%.

PDF Details

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

AnomalyGPT: Detecting Industrial Anomalies Using Large Vision-Language Models

Zhaopeng Gu
Bingke Zhu
Guibo Zhu
Yingying Chen
Ming Tang
Jinqiao Wang

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) such as MiniGPT-4 and LLaVA have demonstrated the capability of understanding images and achieved remarkable performance in various visual tasks. Despite their strong abilities in recognizing common objects due to extensive training datasets, they lack specific domain knowledge and have a weaker understanding of localized details within objects, which hinders their effectiveness in the Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) task. On the other hand, most existing IAD methods only provide anomaly scores and necessitate the manual setting of thresholds to distinguish between normal and abnormal samples, which restricts their practical implementation. In this paper, we explore the utilization of LVLM to address the IAD problem and propose AnomalyGPT, a novel IAD approach based on LVLM. We generate training data by simulating anomalous images and producing corresponding textual descriptions for each image. We also employ an image decoder to provide fine-grained semantic and design a prompt learner to fine-tune the LVLM using prompt embeddings. Our AnomalyGPT eliminates the need for manual threshold adjustments, thus directly assesses the presence and locations of anomalies. Additionally, AnomalyGPT supports multi-turn dialogues and exhibits impressive few-shot in-context learning capabilities. With only one normal shot, AnomalyGPT achieves the state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of 86.1%, an image-level AUC of 94.1%, and a pixel-level AUC of 95.3% on the MVTec-AD dataset.

PDF Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Convergence Analysis of Split Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Data

Pengchao Han
Chao Huang
Geng Tian
Ming Tang
Xin Liu

Split federated learning (SFL) is a recent distributed approach for collaborative model training among multiple clients. In SFL, a global model is typically split into two parts, where clients train one part in a parallel federated manner, and a main server trains the other. Despite the recent research on SFL algorithm development, the convergence analysis of SFL is missing in the literature, and this paper aims to fill this gap. The analysis of SFL can be more challenging than that of federated learning (FL), due to the potential dual-paced updates at the clients and the main server. We provide convergence analysis of SFL for strongly convex and general convex objectives on heterogeneous data. The convergence rates are $O(1/T)$ and $O(1/\sqrt[3]{T})$, respectively, where $T$ denotes the total number of rounds for SFL training. We further extend the analysis to non-convex objectives and where some clients may be unavailable during training. Numerical experiments validate our theoretical results and show that SFL outperforms FL and split learning (SL) when data is highly heterogeneous across a large number of clients.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Fluctuation-Based Adaptive Structured Pruning for Large Language Models

Yongqi An
Xu Zhao
Tao Yu
Ming Tang
Jinqiao Wang

Network Pruning is a promising way to address the huge computing resource demands of the deployment and inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). Retraining-free is important for LLMs' pruning methods. However, almost all of the existing retraining-free pruning approaches for LLMs focus on unstructured pruning, which requires specific hardware support for acceleration. In this paper, we propose a novel retraining-free structured pruning framework for LLMs, named FLAP (FLuctuation-based Adaptive Structured Pruning). It is hardware-friendly by effectively reducing storage and enhancing inference speed. For effective structured pruning of LLMs, we highlight three critical elements that demand the utmost attention: formulating structured importance metrics, adaptively searching the global compressed model, and implementing compensation mechanisms to mitigate performance loss. First, FLAP determines whether the output feature map is easily recoverable when a column of weight is removed, based on the fluctuation pruning metric. Then it standardizes the importance scores to adaptively determine the global compressed model structure. At last, FLAP adds additional bias terms to recover the output feature maps using the baseline values. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on a variety of language benchmarks. Without any retraining, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, including LLM-Pruner and the extension of Wanda in structured pruning. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FLAP.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Fractional Deep Reinforcement Learning for Age-Minimal Mobile Edge Computing

Lyudong Jin
Ming Tang
Meng Zhang
Hao Wang

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm for real-time applications with intensive computational needs (e.g., autonomous driving), as it can reduce the processing delay. In this work, we focus on the timeliness of computational-intensive updates, measured by Age-of-Information (AoI), and study how to jointly optimize the task updating and offloading policies for AoI with fractional form. Specifically, we consider edge load dynamics and formulate a task scheduling problem to minimize the expected time-average AoI. The uncertain edge load dynamics, the nature of the fractional objective, and hybrid continuous-discrete action space (due to the joint optimization) make this problem challenging and existing approaches not directly applicable. To this end, we propose a fractional reinforcement learning (RL) framework and prove its convergence. We further design a model-free fractional deep RL (DRL) algorithm, where each device makes scheduling decisions with the hybrid action space without knowing the system dynamics and decisions of other devices. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms reduce the average AoI by up to 57.6% compared with several non-fractional benchmarks.

PDF Details DOI

EAAI Journal 2023 Journal Article

Outranking-based failure mode and effects analysis considering interactions between risk factors and its application to food cold chain management

Huchang Liao
Zhiyao Hu
Zhiying Zhang
Ming Tang
Audrius Banaitis

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is helpful to control potential risks of enterprises by ranking failure modes based on their evaluation values regarding multiple risk factors. However, due to the cognitive limitation of experts, obtaining explicit evaluation of failure modes is difficult; in addition, existing literature on FMEA rarely considered interactions between risk factors. To bridge these research gaps, this paper proposes an outranking-based hesitant fuzzy linguistic FMEA method. Firstly, inspired by the PROMETHEE-II and the best-worst method, the outranking relation between each failure mode and the best or the worst failure mode is determined, so as to reduce the number of pairwise comparisons. Also, the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set is used to express the ambiguity of expert judgments regarding the comparisons of failure modes. The Choquet integral is applied to integrate the scores of risk factors considering their interactions. Finally, the proposed method is implemented in an example of food cold chain risk assessment. Results shows that failure modes with high risks are the illness of cold chain workers, product loss and long-time transportation. This study contributes theories about managing ranking efficiency of failure modes in FMEA under fuzzy evaluation environment with interactive risk factors when addressing food cold chain risk evaluation problems.

Details DOI

EAAI Journal 2022 Journal Article

An interactive consensus reaching model with updated weights of clusters in large-scale group decision making

Huchang Liao
Zheng Wu
Ming Tang
Zhengjun Wan

Consensus reaching process generates a group decision approved by all experts despite their possible divergent preferences. To circumvent a calculated and nominal consensus without exchanges of views, an interactive consensus reaching strategy is necessary even though it may bring costs, especially for large-scale group decision making problems. To allow experts to make cost-effective preference modifications to reach consensus in large-scale group decision making, this study proposes a dynamic interactive consensus reaching model. Firstly, a minimum-cost-consensus model that focuses on clusters in a large-scale context is introduced, in which the unit preference adjustment cost can be determined objectively. Then, we apply the minimum-cost-consensus solution to develop a feedback mechanism to activate discussions between experts and support preference modifications. The modification degree is defined towards each expert cluster to measure the cost performance of a cluster pertaining to the modifications. On this basis, we update the weights of clusters so as to improve the cost performance. An illustrative example about the grading management of high-alert medication is presented. By comparison, the interactive consensus model only costs 10. 1 percent more than an automatic consensus model but gets group consensus with the exchanges of expert views.

Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Obj2Seq: Formatting Objects as Sequences with Class Prompt for Visual Tasks

Zhiyang Chen
Yousong Zhu
Zhaowen Li
Fan Yang
Wei Li
Haixin Wang
Chaoyang Zhao
Liwei Wu

Visual tasks vary a lot in their output formats and concerned contents, therefore it is hard to process them with an identical structure. One main obstacle lies in the high-dimensional outputs in object-level visual tasks. In this paper, we propose an object-centric vision framework, Obj2Seq. Obj2Seq takes objects as basic units, and regards most object-level visual tasks as sequence generation problems of objects. Therefore, these visual tasks can be decoupled into two steps. First recognize objects of given categories, and then generate a sequence for each of these objects. The definition of the output sequences varies for different tasks, and the model is supervised by matching these sequences with ground-truth targets. Obj2Seq is able to flexibly determine input categories to satisfy customized requirements, and be easily extended to different visual tasks. When experimenting on MS COCO, Obj2Seq achieves 45. 7% AP on object detection, 89. 0% AP on multi-label classification and 65. 0% AP on human pose estimation. These results demonstrate its potential to be generally applied to different visual tasks. Code has been made available at: https: //github. com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/Obj2Seq.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

MST: Masked Self-Supervised Transformer for Visual Representation

Zhaowen Li
Zhiyang Chen
Fan Yang
Wei Li
Yousong Zhu
Chaoyang Zhao
Rui Deng
Liwei Wu

Transformer has been widely used for self-supervised pre-training in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and achieved great success. However, it has not been fully explored in visual self-supervised learning. Meanwhile, previous methods only consider the high-level feature and learning representation from a global perspective, which may fail to transfer to the downstream dense prediction tasks focusing on local features. In this paper, we present a novel Masked Self-supervised Transformer approach named MST, which can explicitly capture the local context of an image while preserving the global semantic information. Specifically, inspired by the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) in NLP, we propose a masked token strategy based on the multi-head self-attention map, which dynamically masks some tokens of local patches without damaging the crucial structure for self-supervised learning. More importantly, the masked tokens together with the remaining tokens are further recovered by a global image decoder, which preserves the spatial information of the image and is more friendly to the downstream dense prediction tasks. The experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method. For instance, MST achieves Top-1 accuracy of 76. 9% with DeiT-S only using 300-epoch pre-training by linear evaluation, which outperforms supervised methods with the same epoch by 0. 4% and its comparable variant DINO by 1. 0%. For dense prediction tasks, MST also achieves 42. 7% mAP on MS COCO object detection and 74. 04% mIoU on Cityscapes segmentation only with 100-epoch pre-training.

PDF Details

IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Learning Robust Gaussian Process Regression for Visual Tracking

Linyu Zheng
Ming Tang
Jinqiao Wang

Recent developments of Correlation Filter based trackers (CF trackers) have attracted much attention because of their top performance. However, the boundary effect imposed by the basic periodic assumption in their fast optimization seriously degrades the performance of CF trackers. Although there existed many recent works to relax the boundary effect in CF trackers, the cost was that they can not utilize the kernel trick to improve the accuracy further. In this paper, we propose a novel Gaussian Process Regression based tracker (GPRT) which is a conceptually natural tracking approach. Compared to all the existing CF trackers, the boundary effect is eliminated thoroughly and the kernel trick can be employed in our GPRT. In addition, we present two efficient and effective update methods for our GPRT. Experiments are performed on two public datasets: OTB-2013 and OTB-2015. Without bells and whistles, on these two datasets, our GPRT obtains 84. 1% and 79. 2% in mean overlap precision, respectively, outperforming all the existing trackers with hand-crafted features.

PDF Details

AAAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Progressive Cognitive Human Parsing

Bingke Zhu
Yingying Chen
Ming Tang
Jinqiao Wang

Human parsing is an important task for human-centric understanding. Generally, two mainstreams are used to deal with this challenging and fundamental problem. The ﬁrst one is employing extra human pose information to generate hierarchical parse graph to deal with human parsing task. Another one is training an end-to-end network with the semantic information in image level. In this paper, we develop an end-to-end progressive cognitive network to segment human parts. In order to establish a hierarchical relationship, a novel component-aware region convolution structure is proposed. With this structure, latter layers inherit prior component information from former layers and pay its attention to a ﬁner component. In this way, we deal with human parsing as a progressive recognition task, that is, we ﬁrst locate the whole human and then segment the hierarchical components gradually. The experiments indicate that our method has a better location capacity for the small objects and a better classiﬁcation capacity for the large objects. Moreover, our framework can be embedded into any fully convolutional network to enhance the performance signiﬁcantly.

PDF Details