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Yingwei Pan

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12 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

FreeInpaint: Tuning-free Prompt Alignment and Visual Rationality Enhancement in Image Inpainting

Chao Gong
Dong Li
Yingwei Pan
Jingjing Chen
Ting Yao
Tao Mei

Text-guided image inpainting endeavors to generate new content within specified regions of images using textual prompts from users. The primary challenge is to accurately align the inpainted areas with the user-provided prompts while maintaining a high degree of visual fidelity. While existing inpainting methods have produced visually convincing results by leveraging the pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, they still struggle to uphold both prompt alignment and visual rationality simultaneously. In this work, we introduce FreeInpaint, a plug-and-play tuning-free approach that directly optimizes the diffusion latents on the fly during inference to improve the faithfulness of the generated images. Technically, we introduce a prior-guided noise optimization method that steers model attention towards valid inpainting regions by optimizing the initial noise. Furthermore, we meticulously design a composite guidance objective tailored specifically for the inpainting task. This objective efficiently directs the denoising process, enhancing prompt alignment and visual rationality by optimizing intermediate latents at each step. Through extensive experiments involving various inpainting diffusion models and evaluation metrics, we demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed FreeInpaint.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Hierarchical Masked Autoregressive Models with Low-Resolution Token Pivots

Guangting Zheng
Yehao Li
Yingwei Pan
Jiajun Deng
Ting Yao 0003
Yanyong Zhang
Tao Mei 0001

Autoregressive models have emerged as a powerful generative paradigm for visual generation. The current de-facto standard of next token prediction commonly operates over a single-scale sequence of dense image tokens, and is incapable of utilizing global context especially for early tokens prediction. In this paper, we introduce a new autoregressive design to model a hierarchy from a few low-resolution image tokens to the typical dense image tokens, and delve into a thorough hierarchical dependency across multi-scale image tokens. Technically, we present a Hierarchical Masked Autoregressive models (Hi-MAR) that pivot on low-resolution image tokens to trigger hierarchical autoregressive modeling in a multi-phase manner. Hi-MAR learns to predict a few image tokens in low resolution, functioning as intermediary pivots to reflect global structure, in the first phase. Such pivots act as the additional guidance to strengthen the next autoregressive modeling phase by shaping global structural awareness of typical dense image tokens. A new Diffusion Transformer head is further devised to amplify the global context among all tokens for mask token prediction. Extensive evaluations on both class-conditional and text-to-image generation tasks demonstrate that Hi-MAR outperforms typical AR baselines, while requiring fewer computational costs.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Incorporating Visual Correspondence into Diffusion Model for Virtual Try-On

Siqi Wan
Jingwen Chen 0001
Yingwei Pan
Ting Yao 0003
Tao Mei 0001

Diffusion models have shown preliminary success in virtual try-on (VTON) task. The typical dual-branch architecture comprises two UNets for implicit garment deformation and synthesized image generation respectively, and has emerged as the recipe for VTON task. Nevertheless, the problem remains challenging to preserve the shape and every detail of the given garment due to the intrinsic stochasticity of diffusion model. To alleviate this issue, we novelly propose to explicitly capitalize on visual correspondence as the prior to tame diffusion process instead of simply feeding the whole garment into UNet as the appearance reference. Specifically, we interpret the fine-grained appearance and texture details as a set of structured semantic points, and match the semantic points rooted in garment to the ones over target person through local flow warping. Such 2D points are then augmented into 3D-aware cues with depth/normal map of target person. The correspondence mimics the way of putting clothing on human body and the 3D-aware cues act as semantic point matching to supervise diffusion model training. A point-focused diffusion loss is further devised to fully take the advantage of semantic point matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong garment detail preservation of our approach, evidenced by state-of-the-art VTON performances on both VITON-HD and DressCode datasets. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/HiDream-ai/SPM-Diff.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

VTON-VLLM: Aligning Virtual Try-On Models with Human Preferences

Siqi Wan
Jingwen Chen
Qi Cai
Yingwei Pan
Ting Yao
Tao Mei

Diffusion models have yielded remarkable success in virtual try-on (VTON) task, yet they often fall short of fully meeting user expectations regarding visual quality and detail preservation. To alleviate this issue, we curate a dataset of synthesized VTON images annotated with human judgments across multiple perceptual criteria. A vision large language model (VLLM), namely VTON-VLLM, is then learnt on these annotations. VTON-VLLM functions as a unified ``fashion expert'' and is capable of both evaluating and steering VTON synthesis towards human preferences. Technically, beyond serving as an automatic VTON evaluator, VTON-VLLM upgrades VTON model through two pivotal ways: (1) providing fine-grained supervisory signals during the training of a plug-and-play VTON refinement model, and (2) enabling adaptive and preference-aware test-time scaling at inference. To benchmark VTON models more holistically, we introduce VITON-Bench, a challenging test suite of complex try-on scenarios, and human-preference–aware metrics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that powering VTON models with our VTON-VLLM markedly enhances alignment with human preferences. Code is publicly available at: https: //github. com/HiDream-ai/VTON-VLLM/.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Out-of-Distribution Detection via Conditional Kernel Independence Model

Yu Wang
Jingjing Zou
Jingyang Lin
Qing Ling
Yingwei Pan
Ting Yao
Tao Mei

Recently, various methods have been introduced to address the OOD detection problem with training outlier exposure. These methods usually count on discriminative softmax metric or energy method to screen OOD samples. In this paper, we probe an alternative hypothesis on OOD detection by constructing a novel latent variable model based on independent component analysis (ICA) techniques. This novel method named Conditional-i builds upon the probabilistic formulation, and applies the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criteria that offers a convenient solution for optimizing variable dependencies. Conditional-i exclusively encodes the useful class condition into the probabilistic model, which provides the desired convenience in delivering theoretical support for the OOD detection task. To facilitate the implementation of the Conditional-i model, we construct unique memory bank architectures that allow for convenient end-to-end training within a tractable budget. Empirical results demonstrate an evident performance boost on benchmarks against SOTA methods. We also provide valuable theoretical justifications that our training strategy is guaranteed to bound the error in the context of OOD detection. Code is available at: https: //github. com/OODHSIC/conditional-i.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Improving Self-supervised Learning with Automated Unsupervised Outlier Arbitration

Yu Wang
Jingyang Lin
Jingjing Zou
Yingwei Pan
Ting Yao
Tao Mei

Our work reveals a structured shortcoming of the existing mainstream self-supervised learning methods. Whereas self-supervised learning frameworks usually take the prevailing perfect instance level invariance hypothesis for granted, we carefully investigate the pitfalls behind. Particularly, we argue that the existing augmentation pipeline for generating multiple positive views naturally introduces out-of-distribution (OOD) samples that undermine the learning of the downstream tasks. Generating diverse positive augmentations on the input does not always pay off in benefiting downstream tasks. To overcome this inherent deficiency, we introduce a lightweight latent variable model UOTA, targeting the view sampling issue for self-supervised learning. UOTA adaptively searches for the most important sampling region to produce views, and provides viable choice for outlier-robust self-supervised learning approaches. Our method directly generalizes to many mainstream self-supervised learning approaches, regardless of the loss's nature contrastive or not. We empirically show UOTA's advantage over the state-of-the-art self-supervised paradigms with evident margin, which well justifies the existence of the OOD sample issue embedded in the existing approaches. Especially, we theoretically prove that the merits of the proposal boil down to guaranteed estimator variance and bias reduction. Code is available: https: //github. com/ssl-codelab/uota.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Scheduled Sampling in Vision-Language Pretraining with Decoupled Encoder-Decoder Network

Yehao Li
Yingwei Pan
Ting Yao
Jingwen Chen
Tao Mei

Despite having impressive vision-language (VL) pretraining with BERT-based encoder for VL understanding, the pretraining of a universal encoder-decoder for both VL understanding and generation remains challenging. The difficulty originates from the inherently different peculiarities of the two disciplines, e. g. , VL understanding tasks capitalize on the unrestricted message passing across modalities, while generation tasks only employ visual-to-textual message passing. In this paper, we start with a two-stream decoupled design of encoder-decoder structure, in which two decoupled cross-modal encoder and decoder are involved to separately perform each type of proxy tasks, for simultaneous VL understanding and generation pretraining. Moreover, for VL pretraining, the dominant way is to replace some input visual/word tokens with mask tokens and enforce the multimodal encoder/decoder to reconstruct the original tokens, but no mask token is involved when fine-tuning on downstream tasks. As an alternative, we propose a primary scheduled sampling strategy that elegantly mitigates such discrepancy via pretraining encoder-decoder in a two-pass manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the compelling generalizability of our pretrained encoder-decoder by fine-tuning on four VL understanding and generation downstream tasks. Source code is available at https: //github. com/YehLi/TDEN.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

SeCo: Exploring Sequence Supervision for Unsupervised Representation Learning

Ting Yao
Yiheng Zhang
Zhaofan Qiu
Yingwei Pan
Tao Mei

A steady momentum of innovations and breakthroughs has convincingly pushed the limits of unsupervised image representation learning. Compared to static 2D images, video has one more dimension (time). The inherent supervision existing in such sequential structure offers a fertile ground for building unsupervised learning models. In this paper, we compose a trilogy of exploring the basic and generic supervision in the sequence from spatial, spatiotemporal and sequential perspectives. We materialize the supervisory signals through determining whether a pair of samples is from one frame or from one video, and whether a triplet of samples is in the correct temporal order. We uniquely regard the signals as the foundation in contrastive learning and derive a particular form named Sequence Contrastive Learning (SeCo). SeCo shows superior results under the linear protocol on action recognition (Kinetics), untrimmed activity recognition (ActivityNet) and object tracking (OTB- 100). More remarkably, SeCo demonstrates considerable improvements over recent unsupervised pre-training techniques, and leads the accuracy by 2. 96% and 6. 47% against fully-supervised ImageNet pre-training in action recognition task on UCF101 and HMDB51, respectively. Source code is available at https: //github. com/YihengZhang-CV/SeCo- Sequence-Contrastive-Learning.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Joint Contrastive Learning with Infinite Possibilities

Qi Cai
Yu Wang
Yingwei Pan
Ting Yao
Tao Mei

This paper explores useful modifications of the recent development in contrastive learning via novel probabilistic modeling. We derive a particular form of contrastive loss named Joint Contrastive Learning (JCL). JCL implicitly involves the simultaneous learning of an infinite number of query-key pairs, which poses tighter constraints when searching for invariant features. We derive an upper bound on this formulation that allows analytical solutions in an end-to-end training manner. While JCL is practically effective in numerous computer vision applications, we also theoretically unveil the certain mechanisms that govern the behavior of JCL. We demonstrate that the proposed formulation harbors an innate agency that strongly favors similarity within each instance-specific class, and therefore remains advantageous when searching for discriminative features among distinct instances. We evaluate these proposals on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating considerable improvements over existing algorithms. Code is publicly available at: https: //github. com/caiqi/Joint-Contrastive-Learning.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Convolutional Auto-encoding of Sentence Topics for Image Paragraph Generation

Jing Wang
Yingwei Pan
Ting Yao
Jinhui Tang
Tao Mei

Image paragraph generation is the task of producing a coherent story (usually a paragraph) that describes the visual content of an image. The problem nevertheless is not trivial especially when there are multiple descriptive and diverse gists to be considered for paragraph generation, which often happens in real images. A valid question is how to encapsulate such gists/topics that are worthy of mention from an image, and then describe the image from one topic to another but holistically with a coherent structure. In this paper, we present a new design --- Convolutional Auto-Encoding (CAE) that purely employs convolutional and deconvolutional auto-encoding framework for topic modeling on the region-level features of an image. Furthermore, we propose an architecture, namely CAE plus Long Short-Term Memory (dubbed as CAE-LSTM), that novelly integrates the learnt topics in support of paragraph generation. Technically, CAE-LSTM capitalizes on a two-level LSTM-based paragraph generation framework with attention mechanism. The paragraph-level LSTM captures the inter-sentence dependency in a paragraph, while sentence-level LSTM is to generate one sentence which is conditioned on each learnt topic. Extensive experiments are conducted on Stanford image paragraph dataset, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. More remarkably, CAE-LSTM increases CIDEr performance from 20. 93% to 25. 15%.

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AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Temporal Deformable Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks for Video Captioning

Jingwen Chen
Yingwei Pan
Yehao Li
Ting Yao
Hongyang Chao
Tao Mei

It is well believed that video captioning is a fundamental but challenging task in both computer vision and artificial intelligence fields. The prevalent approach is to map an input video to a variable-length output sentence in a sequence to sequence manner via Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Nevertheless, the training of RNN still suffers to some degree from vanishing/exploding gradient problem, making the optimization difficult. Moreover, the inherently recurrent dependency in RNN prevents parallelization within a sequence during training and therefore limits the computations. In this paper, we present a novel design — Temporal Deformable Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks (dubbed as TD- ConvED) that fully employ convolutions in both encoder and decoder networks for video captioning. Technically, we exploit convolutional block structures that compute intermediate states of a fixed number of inputs and stack several blocks to capture long-term relationships. The structure in encoder is further equipped with temporal deformable convolution to enable free-form deformation of temporal sampling. Our model also capitalizes on temporal attention mechanism for sentence generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on both MSVD and MSR-VTT video captioning datasets, and superior results are reported when comparing to conventional RNN-based encoder-decoder techniques. More remarkably, TDConvED increases CIDEr-D performance from 58. 8% to 67. 2% on MSVD.

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IJCAI Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Learning Deep Intrinsic Video Representation by Exploring Temporal Coherence and Graph Structure

Yingwei Pan
Yehao Li
Ting Yao
Tao Mei
Houqiang Li
Yong Rui

Learning video representation is not a trivial task, as video is an information-intensive media where each frame does not exist independently. Locally, a video frame is visually and semantically similar with its adjacent frames. Holistically, a video has its inherent structure - the correlations among video frames. For example, even the frames far from each other may also hold similar semantics. Such context information is therefore important to characterize the intrinsic representation of a video frame. In this paper, we present a novel approach to learn the deep video representation by exploring both local and holistic contexts. Specifically, we propose a triplet sampling mechanism to encode the local temporal relationship of adjacent frames based on their deep representations. In addition, we incorporate the graph structure of the video, as a priori, to holistically preserve the inherent correlations among video frames. Our approach is fully unsupervised and trained in an end-to-end deep convolutional neural network architecture. By extensive experiments, we show that our learned representation can significantly boost several video recognition tasks (retrieval, classification, and highlight detection) over traditional video representations.

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