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Ning Liao

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3 papers

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MM-CamObj: A Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset for Camouflaged Object Scenarios

Jiacheng Ruan
Wenzhen Yuan
Zehao Lin
Ning Liao
Zhiyu Li
Feiyu Xiong
Ting Liu
Yuzhuo Fu

Large visual-language models (LVLMs) have achieved great success in multiple applications. However, they still encounter challenges in complex scenes, especially those involving camouflaged objects. This is primarily due to the lack of samples related to camouflaged scenes in the training dataset. To mitigate this issue, we construct the MM-CamObj dataset for the first time, comprising two subsets: CamObj-Align and CamObj-Instruct. Specifically, CamObj-Align contains 11,363 image-text pairs, and it is designed for VL alignment and injecting rich knowledge of camouflaged scenes into LVLMs. CamObj-Instruct is collected for fine-tuning the LVLMs with improved instruction-following capabilities, and it includes 11,363 images and 68,849 conversations with diverse instructions. Based on the MM-CamObj dataset, we propose the CamObj-Llava, an LVLM specifically designed for addressing tasks in camouflaged scenes. To facilitate our model's effective acquisition of knowledge about camouflaged objects and scenes, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy with six distinct modes. Additionally, we construct the CamObj-Bench to evaluate the existing LVLMs' capabilities of understanding, recognition, localization and count in camouflage scenes. This benchmark includes 600 images and 7 tasks, with a total of 9,449 questions. Extensive experiments are conducted on the CamObj-Bench with CamObj-Llava, 8 existing open-source and 3 closed-source LVLMs. Surprisingly, the results indicate that our model achieves a 25.84% improvement in 4 out of 7 tasks compared to GPT-4o.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

NTKMTL: Mitigating Task Imbalance in Multi-Task Learning from Neural Tangent Kernel Perspective

Xiaohan Qin
Xiaoxing Wang
Ning Liao
Junchi Yan

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) enables a single model to learn multiple tasks simultaneously, leveraging knowledge transfer among tasks for enhanced generalization, and has been widely applied across various domains. However, task imbalance remains a major challenge in MTL. Although balancing the convergence speeds of different tasks is an effective approach to address this issue, it is highly challenging to accurately characterize the training dynamics and convergence speeds of multiple tasks within the complex MTL system. To this end, we attempt to analyze the training dynamics in MTL by leveraging Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory and propose a new MTL method, NTKMTL. Specifically, we introduce an extended NTK matrix for MTL and adopt spectral analysis to balance the convergence speeds of multiple tasks, thereby mitigating task imbalance. Based on the approximation via shared representation, we further propose NTKMTL-SR, achieving training efficiency while maintaining competitive performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks, including both multi-task supervised learning and multi-task reinforcement learning. Source code is available at https: //github. com/jianke0604/NTKMTL.

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AIJ Journal 2025 Journal Article

Rethinking visual prompt learning as masked visual token modeling

Ning Liao
Bowen Shi
Xiaopeng Zhang
Min Cao
Junchi Yan
Qi Tian

Prompt learning has achieved great success in efficiently exploiting large-scale pre-trained models in natural language processing (NLP). It reformulates the downstream tasks as the generative pre-training ones to achieve consistency, thus improving the performance stably. However, when transferring it to the vision area, current visual prompt learning methods are almost designed on discriminative pre-trained models, and there is also a lack of careful design to unify the forms of pre-training and downstream tasks. To explore prompt learning on the generative pre-trained visual model, as well as keeping the task consistency, we propose Visual Prompt learning as masked visual Token Modeling (VPTM) to transform the downstream visual classification into the pre-trained masked visual token prediction. In addition, we develop the prototypical verbalizer for mapping the predicted visual token with implicit semantics to explicit downstream labels. To our best knowledge, VPTM is the first visual prompt method on the generative pre-trained visual model, which achieves consistency between pre-training and downstream visual classification by task reformulation. Experiments show that VPTM outperforms other visual prompt methods and achieves excellent efficiency. Moreover, the task consistency of VPTM contributes to the robustness against prompt location, prompt length and prototype dimension, and could be deployed uniformly.

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