Author name cluster

Yiheng Li

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8 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Explicit Temporal-Semantic Modeling for Dense Video Captioning via Context-Aware Cross-Modal Interaction

Mingda Jia
Weiliang Meng
Zenghuang Fu
Yiheng Li
Qi Zeng
Yifan Zhang
Ju Xin
Rongtao Xu

Dense video captioning jointly localizes and captions salient events in untrimmed videos. Recent methods primarily focus on leveraging additional prior knowledge and advanced multi-task architectures to achieve competitive performance. However, these pipelines rely on implicit modeling that uses frame-level or fragmented video features, failing to capture the temporal coherence across event sequences and comprehensive semantics within visual contexts. To address this, we propose an explicit temporal-semantic modeling framework called Context-Aware Cross-Modal Interaction (CACMI), which leverages both latent temporal characteristics within videos and linguistic semantics from text corpus. Specifically, our model consists of two core components: Cross-modal Frame Aggregation aggregates relevant frames to extract temporally coherent, event-aligned textual features through cross-modal retrieval; and Context-aware Feature Enhancement utilizes query-guided attention to integrate visual dynamics with pseudo-event semantics. Extensive experiments on the ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 datasets demonstrate that CACMI achieves the state-of-the-art performance on dense video captioning task.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Fine-Grained Representation for Lane Topology Reasoning

Guoqing Xu
Yiheng Li
Yang Yang

Precise modeling of lane topology is essential for autonomous driving, as it directly impacts navigation and control decisions. Existing methods typically represent each lane with a single query and infer topological connectivity based on the similarity between lane queries. However, this kind of design struggles to accurately model complex lane structures, leading to unreliable topology prediction. In this view, we propose a Fine-Grained lane topology reasoning framework (TopoFG). It divides the procedure from bird’s-eye-view (BEV) features to topology prediction via fine-grained queries into three phases, i.e., Hierarchical Prior Extractor (HPE), Region-Focused Decoder (RFD), and Robust Boundary-Point Topology Reasoning (RBTR). Specifically, HPE extracts global spatial priors from the BEV mask and local sequential priors from in-lane keypoint sequences to guide subsequent fine-grained query modeling. RFD constructs fine-grained queries by integrating the spatial and sequential priors. It then samples reference points in RoI regions of the mask and applies cross-attention with BEV features to refine the query representations of each lane. RBTR models lane connectivity based on boundary-point query features and further employs a topological denoising strategy to reduce matching ambiguity. By integrating spatial and sequential priors into fine-grained queries and applying a denoising strategy to boundary-point topology reasoning, our method precisely models complex lane structures and delivers trustworthy topology predictions. Extensive experiments on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark demonstrate that TopoFG achieves new state-of-the-art performance, with an OLS of 48.0% on subset_A and 45.4% on subset_B.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

From Blind Transfer to Wise Selection: Prototype-Driven Neighbor-Domain Adaptation for Fake News Detection

Wayne Lu
Yiheng Li

Multimodal fake news detection across different domains is hampered by the critical challenge of negative transfer, which arises from the indiscriminate fusion of knowledge from all available source domains. Existing methods attempt to learn domain-invariant features or leverage external knowledge but often aggregate information from all domains equally. However, these approaches largely ignore the asymmetric relationships between domains, leading to performance degradation when irrelevant or conflicting knowledge is introduced. To address this, we propose a novel PANDA (Prototype-driven Asymmetric Neighbor-Domain Adaptation) framework that dynamically selects and integrates knowledge from only the most beneficial domains. Initially, PANDA employs a Domain-aware Modal Prompt Generation (DMPG) module to learn transferable knowledge representations for each domain. We then introduce a novel Prototype-based Asymmetric Distance (PAD) to quantify directional domain transferability, which guides a Gumbel-based Neighbor Selector (GNS) to identify the most relevant neighbor domains. Subsequently, a Domain-Collaborative Attention (DCA) module adaptively fuses the selected knowledge to enhance the target domain's representation. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate PANDA's superiority, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines with an F1-score improvement of 1.5% on the Weibo-21 dataset.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

RCTrans: Radar-Camera Transformer via Radar Densifier and Sequential Decoder for 3D Object Detection

Yiheng Li
Yang Yang
Zhen Lei

In radar-camera 3D object detection, the radar point clouds are sparse and noisy, which causes difficulties in fusing camera and radar modalities. To solve this, we introduce a novel query-based detection method named Radar-Camera Transformer (RCTrans). Specifically, we first design a Radar Dense Encoder to enrich the sparse valid radar tokens, and then concatenate them with the image tokens. By doing this, we can fully explore the 3D information of each interest region and reduce the interference of empty tokens during the fusing stage. We then design a Pruning Sequential Decoder to predict 3D boxes based on the obtained tokens and random initialized queries. To alleviate the effect of elevation ambiguity in radar point clouds, we gradually locate the position of the object via a sequential fusion structure. It helps to get more precise and flexible correspondences between tokens and queries. A pruning training strategy is adopted in the decoder, which can save much time during inference and inhibit queries from losing their distinctiveness. Extensive experiments on the large-scale nuScenes dataset prove the superiority of our method, and we also achieve new state-of-the-art radar-camera 3D detection results.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

WOMD-Reasoning: A Large-Scale Dataset for Interaction Reasoning in Driving

Yiheng Li
Cunxin Fan
Chongjian Ge
Seth Z. Zhao
Chenran Li
Chenfeng Xu
Huaxiu Yao
Masayoshi Tomizuka

Language models uncover unprecedented abilities in analyzing driving scenarios, owing to their limitless knowledge accumulated from text-based pre-training. Naturally, they should particularly excel in analyzing rule-based interactions, such as those triggered by traffic laws, which are well documented in texts. However, such interaction analysis remains underexplored due to the lack of dedicated language datasets that address it. Therefore, we propose Waymo Open Motion Dataset-Reasoning (WOMD-Reasoning), a comprehensive large-scale Q&As dataset built on WOMD focusing on describing and reasoning traffic rule-induced interactions in driving scenarios. WOMD-Reasoning also presents by far the largest multi-modal Q&A dataset, with 3 million Q&As on real-world driving scenarios, covering a wide range of driving topics from map descriptions and motion status descriptions to narratives and analyses of agents’ interactions, behaviors, and intentions. To showcase the applications of WOMD-Reasoning, we design Motion-LLaVA, a motion-language model fine-tuned on WOMD-Reasoning. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations are performed on WOMD-Reasoning dataset as well as the outputs of Motion-LLaVA, supporting the data quality and wide applications of WOMD-Reasoning, in interaction predictions, traffic rule compliance plannings, etc. The dataset and its vision modal extension are available on https: //waymo. com/open/download/. The codes & prompts to build it are available on https: //github. com/yhli123/WOMD-Reasoning.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Immiscible Diffusion: Accelerating Diffusion Training with Noise Assignment

Yiheng Li
Heyang Jiang
Akio Kodaira
Masayoshi Tomizuka
Kurt Keutzer
Chenfeng Xu

In this paper, we point out that suboptimal noise-data mapping leads to slow training of diffusion models. During diffusion training, current methods diffuse each image across the entire noise space, resulting in a mixture of all images at every point in the noise layer. We emphasize that this random mixture of noise-data mapping complicates the optimization of the denoising function in diffusion models. Drawing inspiration from the immiscibility phenomenon in physics, we propose Immiscible Diffusion, a simple and effective method to improve the random mixture of noise-data mapping. In physics, miscibility can vary according to various intermolecular forces. Thus, immiscibility means that the mixing of molecular sources is distinguishable. Inspired by this concept, we propose an assignment-then-diffusion training strategy to achieve Immiscible Diffusion. As one example, prior to diffusing the image data into noise, we assign diffusion target noise for the image data by minimizing the total image-noise pair distance in a mini-batch. The assignment functions analogously to external forces to expel the diffuse-able areas of images, thus mitigating the inherent difficulties in diffusion training. Our approach is remarkably simple, requiring only one line of code to restrict the diffuse-able area for each image while preserving the Gaussian distribution of noise. In this way, each image is preferably projected to nearby noise. To address the high complexity of the assignment algorithm, we employ a quantized assignment strategy, which significantly reduces the computational overhead to a negligible level (e. g. 22. 8ms for a large batch size of 1024 on an A6000). Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve up to 3x faster training for unconditional Consistency Models on the CIFAR dataset, as well as for DDIM and Stable Diffusion on CelebA and ImageNet dataset, and in class-conditional training and fine-tuning. In addition, we conducted a thorough analysis that sheds light on how it improves diffusion training speed while improving fidelity. The code is available at https: //yhli123. github. io/immiscible-diffusion

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Mitigating Object Hallucination via Concentric Causal Attention

Yun Xing
Yiheng Li
Ivan Laptev
Shijian Lu

Recent Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) present remarkable zero-shot conversational and reasoning capabilities given multimodal queries. Nevertheless, they suffer from object hallucination, a phenomenon where LVLMs are prone to generate textual responses not factually aligned with image inputs. Our pilot study reveals that object hallucination is closely tied with Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE), a widely adopted positional dependency modeling design in existing LVLMs. Due to the long-term decay in RoPE, LVLMs tend to hallucinate more when relevant visual cues are distant from instruction tokens in the multimodal input sequence, Additionally, we observe a similar effect when reversing the sequential order of visual tokens during multimodal alignment. Our tests indicate that long-term decay in RoPE poses challenges to LVLMs while capturing visual-instruction interactions across long distances. We propose Concentric Causal Attention (CCA), a simple yet effective positional alignment strategy that mitigates the impact of RoPE long-term decay in LVLMs by naturally reducing relative distance between visual and instruction tokens. With CCA, visual tokens can better interact with instruction tokens, thereby enhancing model's perception capability and alleviating object hallucination. Without bells and whistles, our positional alignment method surpasses existing hallucination mitigation strategies by large margins on multiple object hallucination benchmarks.

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IROS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Pre-training on Synthetic Driving Data for Trajectory Prediction

Yiheng Li
Seth Z. Zhao
Chenfeng Xu
Chen Tang 0001
Chenran Li
Mingyu Ding
Masayoshi Tomizuka
Wei Zhan

Accumulating substantial volumes of real-world driving data proves pivotal in the realm of trajectory forecasting for autonomous driving. Given the heavy reliance of current trajectory forecasting models on data-driven methodologies, we aim to tackle the challenge of learning general trajectory forecasting representations under limited data availability. We propose a pipeline-level solution to mitigate the issue of data scarcity in trajectory forecasting. The solution is composed of two parts: firstly, we adopt HD map augmentation and trajectory synthesis for generating driving data, and then we learn representations by pre-training on them. Specifically, we apply vector transformations to reshape the maps, and then employ a rule-based model to generate trajectories on both original and augmented scenes; thus enlarging the driving data without collecting additional real ones. To foster the learning of general representations within this augmented dataset, we comprehensively explore the different pre-training strategies, including extending the concept of a Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) for trajectory forecasting. Without bells and whistles, our proposed pipeline-level solution is general, simple, yet effective: we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our data expansion and pre-training strategies, which outperform the baseline prediction model by large margins, e. g. 5. 04%, 3. 84% and 8. 30% in terms of MR 6, minADE 6 and minFDE 6. The pre-training dataset and the codes for pre-training and fine-tuning are released at https://github.com/yhli123/Pretraining_on_Synthetic_Driving_Data_for_Trajectory_Prediction.

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