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Qian-Wei Wang

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6 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Imagine with Layout and Sketch: Enhancing Vision-Language Retrieval with Dual-Stream Multi-Modal Query Refinement

GuangHao Meng
Jinpeng Wang
Qian-Wei Wang
Xudong Ren
Dan Zhao

Vision-Language Retrieval (VLR) aims to retrieve relevant visual or textual information from multimodal data using language or image queries. However, traditional VLR methods often rely on data-driven shallow semantic alignment and fail to understand the deeper structural and fine-grained entity features of queries, resulting in poor performance on multi-entity layouts and challenging entities. In this paper, we propose the Layout-Aware and Sketch-Enhanced (LASE) VLR framework, which refines query representations by incorporating multimodal layout and sketch knowledge. Specifically, layout knowledge encodes the spatial arrangement of entities, while sketch knowledge refines entity perception by capturing essential structural details. To extract these knowledge representations, we leverage Large Language Models' (LLMs) powerful semantic understanding for layout generation, and Diffusion Models' (DMs) fine-grained cross-modal generative capabilities for sketch generation. However, integrating knowledge into queries may introduce biases and query-specific preferences due to varying visual content and knowledge demands. To address this, we propose the Gated Dual-Stream Knowledge Module (GDKM), which consists of a multi-instance fusion network with a sample-aware gating network. The fusion network aggregates diverse knowledge using multi-head attention to reduce bias, while the gating network adjusts knowledge weights based on query characteristics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the LASE significantly enhances VLR performance across multiple benchmarks, with superior generalization and transferability.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Pre-Trained Vision-Language Models as Noisy Partial Annotators

Qian-Wei Wang
Yuqiu Xie
Letian Zhang
Zimo Liu
Shu-Tao Xia

In noisy partial label learning, each training sample is associated with a set of candidate labels, and the ground-truth label may be contained within this set. With the emergence of powerful pre-trained vision-language models, e.g. CLIP, it is natural to consider using these models to automatically label training samples instead of relying on laborious manual annotation. In this paper, we investigate the pipeline of learning with CLIP annotated noisy partial labels and propose a novel collaborative consistency regularization method, in which we simultaneously train two neural networks, which collaboratively purify training labels for each other, called Co-Pseudo-Labeling, and perform consistency regularization between label and representation levels. For instance-dependent noise that embodies the underlying patterns of the pre-trained model, our method employs multiple mechanisms to avoid overfitting to noisy annotations, effectively mines information from potentially noisy sample set while iteratively optimizing both representations and pseudo-labels during the training process. Comparison experiments with various kinds of annotations and weakly supervised methods, as well as other pre-trained model application methods demonstrates the effectiveness of method and the feasibility of incorporating weakly supervised learning into the distillation of pre-trained models.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Controller-Guided Partial Label Consistency Regularization with Unlabeled Data

Qian-Wei Wang
Bowen Zhao
Mingyan Zhu
Tianxiang Li
Zimo Liu
Shu-Tao Xia

Partial label learning (PLL) learns from training examples each associated with multiple candidate labels, among which only one is valid. In recent years, benefiting from the strong capability of dealing with ambiguous supervision and the impetus of modern data augmentation methods, consistency regularization-based PLL methods have achieved a series of successes and become mainstream. However, as the partial annotation becomes insufficient, their performances drop significantly. In this paper, we leverage easily accessible unlabeled examples to facilitate the partial label consistency regularization. In addition to a partial supervised loss, our method performs a controller-guided consistency regularization at both the label-level and representation-level with the help of unlabeled data. To minimize the disadvantages of insufficient capabilities of the initial supervised model, we use the controller to estimate the confidence of each current prediction to guide the subsequent consistency regularization. Furthermore, we dynamically adjust the confidence thresholds so that the number of samples of each class participating in consistency regularization remains roughly equal to alleviate the problem of class-imbalance. Experiments show that our method achieves satisfactory performances in more practical situations, and its modules can be applied to existing PLL methods to enhance their capabilities.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Combating Unknown Bias with Effective Bias-Conflicting Scoring and Gradient Alignment

Bowen Zhao
Chen Chen
Qian-Wei Wang
Anfeng He
Shu-Tao Xia

Models notoriously suffer from dataset biases which are detrimental to robustness and generalization. The identify-emphasize paradigm shows a promising effect in dealing with unknown biases. However, we find that it is still plagued by two challenges: A, the quality of the identified bias-conflicting samples is far from satisfactory; B, the emphasizing strategies just yield suboptimal performance. In this work, for challenge A, we propose an effective bias-conflicting scoring method to boost the identification accuracy with two practical strategies --- peer-picking and epoch-ensemble. For challenge B, we point out that the gradient contribution statistics can be a reliable indicator to inspect whether the optimization is dominated by bias-aligned samples. Then, we propose gradient alignment, which employs gradient statistics to balance the contributions of the mined bias-aligned and bias-conflicting samples dynamically throughout the learning process, forcing models to leverage intrinsic features to make fair decisions. Experiments are conducted on multiple datasets in various settings, demonstrating that the proposed solution can alleviate the impact of unknown biases and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Learning from Weak-Label Data: A Deep Forest Expedition

Qian-Wei Wang
Liang Yang
Yu-Feng Li

Weak-label learning deals with the problem where each training example is associated with multiple ground-truth labels simultaneously but only partially provided. This circumstance is frequently encountered when the number of classes is very large or when there exists a large ambiguity between class labels, and signiﬁcantly inﬂuences the performance of multi-label learning. In this paper, we propose LCForest, which is the ﬁrst tree ensemble based deep learning method for weak-label learning. Rather than formulating the problem as a regularized framework, we employ the recently proposed cascade forest structure, which processes information layerby-layer, and endow it with the ability of exploiting from weak-label data by a concise and highly efﬁcient label complement structure. Speciﬁcally, in each layer, the label vector of each instance from testing-fold is modiﬁed with the predictions of random forests trained with the corresponding training-fold. Since the ground-truth label matrix is inaccessible, we can not estimate the performance via cross-validation directly. In order to control the growth of cascade forest, we adopt label frequency estimation and the complement ﬂag mechanism. Experiments show that the proposed LCForest method compares favorably against the existing state-of-theart multi-label and weak-label learning methods.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Partial Label Learning with Unlabeled Data

Qian-Wei Wang
Yu-Feng Li
Zhi-Hua Zhou

Partial label learning deals with training examples each associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one label is valid. Previous studies typically assume that the candidate label sets are provided for all training examples. In many real-world applications such as video character classification, however, it is generally difficult to label a large number of instances and there exists much data left to be unlabeled. We call this kind of problem semi-supervised partial label learning. In this paper, we propose the SSPL method to address this problem. Specifically, an iterative label propagation procedure between partial label examples and unlabeled instances is employed to disambiguate the candidate label sets of partial label examples as well as assign valid labels to unlabeled instances. The importance of unlabeled instances increases adaptively as the number of iteration increases, since they carry richer labeling information. Finally, unseen instances are classified based on the minimum reconstruction error on both partial label and unlabeled instances. Experiments on real-world data sets clearly validate the effectiveness of the proposed SSPL method.

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