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Zhenhong Sun

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6 papers

2 author rows

TMLR Journal 2026 Journal Article

T$^3$-S2S: Training-free Triplet Tuning for Sketch to Scene Synthesis in Controllable Concept Art Generation

Zhenhong Sun
Yifu Wang
Yonhon Ng
Yongzhi Xu
Daoyi Dong
Hongdong Li
Pan Ji

2D concept art generation for 3D scenes is a crucial yet challenging task in computer graphics, as creating natural intuitive environments still demands extensive manual effort in concept design. While generative AI has simplified 2D concept design via text-to-image synthesis, it struggles with complex multi-instance scenes and offers limited support for structured terrain layout. In this paper, we propose a Training-free Triplet Tuning for Sketch-to-Scene (T3-S2S) generation after reviewing the entire cross-attention mechanism. This scheme revitalizes the ControlNet model for detailed multi-instance generation via three key modules: Prompt Balance ensures keyword representation and minimizes the risk of missing critical instances; Characteristic Priority emphasizes sketch-based features by highlighting TopK indices in feature channels; and Dense Tuning refines contour details within instance-related regions of the attention map. Leveraging the controllability of T3-S2S, we also introduce a feature-sharing strategy with dual prompt sets to generate layer-aware isometric and terrain-view representations for the terrain layout. Experiments show that our sketch-to-scene workflow consistently produces multi-instance 2D scenes with details aligned with input prompts.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Text-to-Decision Agent: Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning from Natural Language Supervision

Shilin Zhang
Zican Hu
Wenhao Wu
Xinyi Xie
Jianxiang Tang
Chunlin Chen
Daoyi Dong
Yu Cheng

Offline meta-RL usually tackles generalization by inferring task beliefs from high-quality samples or warmup explorations. The restricted form limits their generality and usability since these supervision signals are expensive and even infeasible to acquire in advance for unseen tasks. Learning directly from the raw text about decision tasks is a promising alternative to leverage a much broader source of supervision. In the paper, we propose T ext-to- D ecision A gent ( T2DA ), a simple and scalable framework that supervises offline meta-RL with natural language. We first introduce a generalized world model to encode multi-task decision data into a dynamics-aware embedding space. Then, inspired by CLIP, we predict which textual description goes with which decision embedding, effectively bridging their semantic gap via contrastive language-decision pre-training and aligning the text embeddings to comprehend the environment dynamics. After training the text-conditioned generalist policy, the agent can directly realize zero-shot text-to-decision generation in response to language instructions. Comprehensive experiments on MuJoCo and Meta-World benchmarks show that T2DA facilitates high-capacity zero-shot generalization and outperforms various types of baselines. Our code is available at https: //github. com/NJU-RL/T2DA.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Maximizing Spatio-Temporal Entropy of Deep 3D CNNs for Efficient Video Recognition

Junyan Wang 0001
Zhenhong Sun
Yichen Qian
Dong Gong
Xiuyu Sun
Ming Lin 0002
Maurice Pagnucco
Yang Song 0001

3D convolution neural networks (CNNs) have been the prevailing option for video recognition. To capture the temporal information, 3D convolutions are computed along the sequences, leading to cubically growing and expensive computations. To reduce the computational cost, previous methods resort to manually designed 3D/2D CNN structures with approximations or automatic search, which sacrifice the modeling ability or make training time-consuming. In this work, we propose to automatically design efficient 3D CNN architectures via a novel training-free neural architecture search approach tailored for 3D CNNs considering the model complexity. To measure the expressiveness of 3D CNNs efficiently, we formulate a 3D CNN as an information system and derive an analytic entropy score, based on the Maximum Entropy Principle. Specifically, we propose a spatio-temporal entropy score (STEntr-Score) with a refinement factor to handle the discrepancy of visual information in spatial and temporal dimensions, through dynamically leveraging the correlation between the feature map size and kernel size depth-wisely. Highly efficient and expressive 3D CNN architectures, i.e., entropy-based 3D CNNs (E3D family), can then be efficiently searched by maximizing the STEntr-Score under a given computational budget, via an evolutionary algorithm without training the network parameters. Extensive experiments on Something-Something V1&V2 and Kinetics400 demonstrate that the E3D family achieves state-of-the-art performance with higher computational efficiency.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Entropy-Driven Mixed-Precision Quantization for Deep Network Design

Zhenhong Sun
Ce Ge
Junyan Wang
Ming Lin
Hesen Chen
Hao Li
Xiuyu Sun

Deploying deep convolutional neural networks on Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is challenging due to the limited computational resources, such as limited SRAM memory and Flash storage. Previous works re-design a small network for IoT devices, and then compress the network size by mixed-precision quantization. This two-stage procedure cannot optimize the architecture and the corresponding quantization jointly, leading to sub-optimal tiny deep models. In this work, we propose a one-stage solution that optimizes both jointly and automatically. The key idea of our approach is to cast the joint architecture design and quantization as an Entropy Maximization process. Particularly, our algorithm automatically designs a tiny deep model such that: 1) Its representation capacity measured by entropy is maximized under the given computational budget; 2) Each layer is assigned with a proper quantization precision; 3) The overall design loop can be done on CPU, and no GPU is required. More impressively, our method can directly search high-expressiveness architecture for IoT devices within less than half a CPU hour. Extensive experiments on three widely adopted benchmarks, ImageNet, VWW and WIDER FACE, demonstrate that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance in the tiny deep model regime. Code and pre-trained models are available at https: //github. com/alibaba/lightweight-neural-architecture-search.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

MAE-DET: Revisiting Maximum Entropy Principle in Zero-Shot NAS for Efficient Object Detection

Zhenhong Sun
Ming Lin 0002
Xiuyu Sun
Zhiyu Tan
Hao Li 0030
Rong Jin 0001

In object detection, the detection backbone consumes more than half of the overall inference cost. Recent researches attempt to reduce this cost by optimizing the backbone architecture with the help of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). However, existing NAS methods for object detection require hundreds to thousands of GPU hours of searching, making them impractical in fast-paced research and development. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot NAS method to address this issue. The proposed method, named MAE-DET, automatically designs efficient detection backbones via the Maximum Entropy Principle without training network parameters, reducing the architecture design cost to nearly zero yet delivering the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Under the hood, MAE-DET maximizes the differential entropy of detection backbones, leading to a better feature extractor for object detection under the same computational budgets. After merely one GPU day of fully automatic design, MAE-DET innovates SOTA detection backbones on multiple detection benchmark datasets with little human intervention. Comparing to ResNet-50 backbone, MAE-DET is $+2. 0%$ better in mAP when using the same amount of FLOPs/parameters, and is $1. 54$ times faster on NVIDIA V100 at the same mAP. Code and pre-trained models are available here (https: //github. com/alibaba/lightweight-neural-architecture-search).

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Learning Accurate Entropy Model with Global Reference for Image Compression

Yichen Qian
Zhiyu Tan
Xiuyu Sun
Ming Lin 0002
Dongyang Li
Zhenhong Sun
Hao Li 0030
Rong Jin 0001

In recent deep image compression neural networks, the entropy model plays a critical role in estimating the prior distribution of deep image encodings. Existing methods combine hyperprior with local context in the entropy estimation function. This greatly limits their performance due to the absence of a global vision. In this work, we propose a novel Global Reference Model for image compression to effectively leverage both the local and the global context information, leading to an enhanced compression rate. The proposed method scans decoded latents and then finds the most relevant latent to assist the distribution estimating of the current latent. A by-product of this work is the innovation of a mean-shifting GDN module that further improves the performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the rate-distortion performance of most of the state-of-the-art methods in the industry.

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