arXiv subjects

Minghao Fu

Publications and source records attributed to Minghao Fu.

36 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Images Speak Louder Than Scores: Failure Mode Escape for Enhancing Generative Quality

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in class-to-image generation. However, we observe that despite impressive FID scores, state-of-the-art models often generate distorted or low-quality images, especially in certain classes. This gap arises because FID evaluates global distribution alignment, while ignoring the perceptual quality of individual samples. We further examine the role of CFG, a common technique used to enhance generation quality. While effective in improving metrics and suppressing outliers, CFG can introduce distribution shift and visual artifacts due to its misalignment with both training objectives and user expectations. In this work, we propose FaME, a training-free and inference-efficient method for improving perceptual quality. FaME uses an image quality assessment model to identify low-quality generations and stores their sampling trajectories. These failure modes are then used as negative guidance to steer future sampling away from poor-quality regions. Experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that FaME brings consistent improvements in visual quality without compromising FID. FaME also shows the potential to be extended to improve text-to-image generation.

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arXiv2025

Benchmarking Sub-Genre Classification For Mainstage Dance Music

Music classification, a cornerstone of music information retrieval, supports a wide array of applications. To address the lack of comprehensive datasets and effective methods for sub-genre classification in mainstage dance music, we introduce a novel benchmark featuring a new dataset and baseline. Our dataset expands the scope of sub-genres to reflect the diversity of recent mainstage live sets performed by leading DJs at global music festivals, capturing the vibrant and rapidly evolving electronic dance music (EDM) scene that engages millions of fans worldwide. We employ a continuous soft labeling approach to accommodate tracks blending multiple sub-genres, preserving their inherent complexity. Experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with this task, while our specialized baseline models achieve high accuracy. This benchmark supports applications such as music recommendation, DJ set curation, and interactive multimedia systems, with video demos provided. Our code and data are all open-sourced at https://github.com/Gariscat/housex-v2.git.

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arXiv2025

TeEFusion: Blending Text Embeddings to Distill Classifier-Free Guidance

Recent advances in text-to-image synthesis largely benefit from sophisticated sampling strategies and classifier-free guidance (CFG) to ensure high-quality generation. However, CFG's reliance on two forward passes, especially when combined with intricate sampling algorithms, results in prohibitively high inference costs. To address this, we introduce TeEFusion (Text Embeddings Fusion), a novel and efficient distillation method that directly incorporates the guidance magnitude into the text embeddings and distills the teacher model's complex sampling strategy. By simply fusing conditional and unconditional text embeddings using linear operations, TeEFusion reconstructs the desired guidance without adding extra parameters, simultaneously enabling the student model to learn from the teacher's output produced via its sophisticated sampling approach. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models such as SD3 demonstrate that our method allows the student to closely mimic the teacher's performance with a far simpler and more efficient sampling strategy. Consequently, the student model achieves inference speeds up to 6$\times$ faster than the teacher model, while maintaining image quality at levels comparable to those obtained through the teacher's complex sampling approach. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/TeEFusion.

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arXiv2025

Quantization without Tears

Deep neural networks, while achieving remarkable success across diverse tasks, demand significant resources, including computation, GPU memory, bandwidth, storage, and energy. Network quantization, as a standard compression and acceleration technique, reduces storage costs and enables potential inference acceleration by discretizing network weights and activations into a finite set of integer values. However, current quantization methods are often complex and sensitive, requiring extensive task-specific hyperparameters, where even a single misconfiguration can impair model performance, limiting generality across different models and tasks. In this paper, we propose Quantization without Tears (QwT), a method that simultaneously achieves quantization speed, accuracy, simplicity, and generality. The key insight of QwT is to incorporate a lightweight additional structure into the quantized network to mitigate information loss during quantization. This structure consists solely of a small set of linear layers, keeping the method simple and efficient. More importantly, it provides a closed-form solution, allowing us to improve accuracy effortlessly under 2 minutes. Extensive experiments across various vision, language, and multimodal tasks demonstrate that QwT is both highly effective and versatile. In fact, our approach offers a robust solution for network quantization that combines simplicity, accuracy, and adaptability, which provides new insights for the design of novel quantization paradigms. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/wujx2001/QwT

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arXiv2025

Ovis-U1 Technical Report

In this report, we introduce Ovis-U1, a 3-billion-parameter unified model that integrates multimodal understanding, text-to-image generation, and image editing capabilities. Building on the foundation of the Ovis series, Ovis-U1 incorporates a diffusion-based visual decoder paired with a bidirectional token refiner, enabling image generation tasks comparable to leading models like GPT-4o. Unlike some previous models that use a frozen MLLM for generation tasks, Ovis-U1 utilizes a new unified training approach starting from a language model. Compared to training solely on understanding or generation tasks, unified training yields better performance, demonstrating the enhancement achieved by integrating these two tasks. Ovis-U1 achieves a score of 69.6 on the OpenCompass Multi-modal Academic Benchmark, surpassing recent state-of-the-art models such as Ristretto-3B and SAIL-VL-1.5-2B. In text-to-image generation, it excels with scores of 83.72 and 0.89 on the DPG-Bench and GenEval benchmarks, respectively. For image editing, it achieves 4.00 and 6.42 on the ImgEdit-Bench and GEdit-Bench-EN, respectively. As the initial version of the Ovis unified model series, Ovis-U1 pushes the boundaries of multimodal understanding, generation, and editing.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

CHATS: Combining Human-Aligned Optimization and Test-Time Sampling for Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models have emerged as a dominant approach for text-to-image generation. Key components such as the human preference alignment and classifier-free guidance play a crucial role in ensuring generation quality. However, their independent application in current text-to-image models continues to face significant challenges in achieving strong text-image alignment, high generation quality, and consistency with human aesthetic standards. In this work, we for the first time, explore facilitating the collaboration of human performance alignment and test-time sampling to unlock the potential of text-to-image models. Consequently, we introduce CHATS (Combining Human-Aligned optimization and Test-time Sampling), a novel generative framework that separately models the preferred and dispreferred distributions and employs a proxy-prompt-based sampling strategy to utilize the useful information contained in both distributions. We observe that CHATS exhibits exceptional data efficiency, achieving strong performance with only a small, high-quality funetuning dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CHATS surpasses traditional preference alignment methods, setting new state-of-the-art across various standard benchmarks.

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arXiv2025

Minimal Interaction Separated Tuning: A New Paradigm for Visual Adaptation

The rapid scaling of large vision pretrained models makes fine-tuning tasks more and more difficult on devices with low computational resources. We explore a new visual adaptation paradigm called separated tuning, which treats large pretrained models as standalone feature extractors that run on powerful cloud servers. The fine-tuning carries out on devices which possess only low computational resources (slow CPU, no GPU, small memory, etc.) Existing methods that are potentially suitable for our separated tuning paradigm are discussed. But, three major drawbacks hinder their application in separated tuning: low adaptation capability, large adapter network, and in particular, high information transfer overhead. To address these issues, we propose Minimal Interaction Separated Tuning, or MIST, which reveals that the sum of intermediate features from pretrained models not only has minimal information transfer but also has high adaptation capability. With a lightweight attention-based adaptor network, MIST achieves information transfer efficiency, parameter efficiency, computational and memory efficiency, and at the same time demonstrates competitive results on various visual adaptation benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

QwT-v2: Practical, Effective and Efficient Post-Training Quantization

Network quantization is arguably one of the most practical network compression approaches for reducing the enormous resource consumption of modern deep neural networks. They usually require diverse and subtle design choices for specific architecture and tasks. Instead, the QwT method is a simple and general approach which introduces lightweight additional structures to improve quantization. But QwT incurs extra parameters and latency. More importantly, QwT is not compatible with many hardware platforms. In this paper, we propose QwT-v2, which not only enjoys all advantages of but also resolves major defects of QwT. By adopting a very lightweight channel-wise affine compensation (CWAC) module, QwT-v2 introduces significantly less extra parameters and computations compared to QwT, and at the same time matches or even outperforms QwT in accuracy. The compensation module of QwT-v2 can be integrated into quantization inference engines with little effort, which not only effectively removes the extra costs but also makes it compatible with most existing hardware platforms.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Infant Cry Detection Using Causal Temporal Representation

This paper addresses a major challenge in acoustic event detection, in particular infant cry detection in the presence of other sounds and background noises: the lack of precise annotated data. We present two contributions for supervised and unsupervised infant cry detection. The first is an annotated dataset for cry segmentation, which enables supervised models to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, we propose a novel unsupervised method, Causal Representation Spare Transition Clustering (CRSTC), based on causal temporal representation, which helps address the issue of data scarcity more generally. By integrating the detected cry segments, we significantly improve the performance of downstream infant cry classification, highlighting the potential of this approach for infant care applications.

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arXiv2024

Unified Low-rank Compression Framework for Click-through Rate Prediction

Deep Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction models play an important role in modern industrial recommendation scenarios. However, high memory overhead and computational costs limit their deployment in resource-constrained environments. Low-rank approximation is an effective method for computer vision and natural language processing models, but its application in compressing CTR prediction models has been less explored. Due to the limited memory and computing resources, compression of CTR prediction models often confronts three fundamental challenges, i.e., (1). How to reduce the model sizes to adapt to edge devices? (2). How to speed up CTR prediction model inference? (3). How to retain the capabilities of original models after compression? Previous low-rank compression research mostly uses tensor decomposition, which can achieve a high parameter compression ratio, but brings in AUC degradation and additional computing overhead. To address these challenges, we propose a unified low-rank decomposition framework for compressing CTR prediction models. We find that even with the most classic matrix decomposition SVD method, our framework can achieve better performance than the original model. To further improve the effectiveness of our framework, we locally compress the output features instead of compressing the model weights. Our unified low-rank compression framework can be applied to embedding tables and MLP layers in various CTR prediction models. Extensive experiments on two academic datasets and one real industrial benchmark demonstrate that, with 3-5x model size reduction, our compressed models can achieve both faster inference and higher AUC than the uncompressed original models. Our code is at https://github.com/yuhao318/Atomic_Feature_Mimicking.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Low-rank Attention Side-Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

In finetuning a large pretrained model to downstream tasks, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods can effectively finetune pretrained models with few trainable parameters, but suffer from high GPU memory consumption and slow training speed. Because learnable parameters from these methods are entangled with the pretrained model, gradients related to the frozen pretrained model's parameters have to be computed and stored during finetuning. We propose Low-rank Attention Side-Tuning (LAST), which disentangles the trainable module from the pretrained model by freezing not only parameters but also outputs of the pretrained network. LAST trains a side-network composed of only low-rank self-attention modules. By viewing the pretrained model as a frozen feature extractor, the side-network takes intermediate output from the pretrained model and focus on learning task-specific knowledge. We also show that LAST can be highly parallel across multiple optimization objectives, making it very efficient in downstream task adaptation, for example, in finding optimal hyperparameters. LAST outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on VTAB-1K and other visual adaptation tasks with roughly only 30\% of GPU memory footprint and 60\% of training time compared to existing PEFT methods, but achieves significantly higher accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

DTL: Disentangled Transfer Learning for Visual Recognition

When pre-trained models become rapidly larger, the cost of fine-tuning on downstream tasks steadily increases, too. To economically fine-tune these models, parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) is proposed, which only tunes a tiny subset of trainable parameters to efficiently learn quality representations. However, current PETL methods are facing the dilemma that during training the GPU memory footprint is not effectively reduced as trainable parameters. PETL will likely fail, too, if the full fine-tuning encounters the out-of-GPU-memory issue. This phenomenon happens because trainable parameters from these methods are generally entangled with the backbone, such that a lot of intermediate states have to be stored in GPU memory for gradient propagation. To alleviate this problem, we introduce Disentangled Transfer Learning (DTL), which disentangles the trainable parameters from the backbone using a lightweight Compact Side Network (CSN). By progressively extracting task-specific information with a few low-rank linear mappings and appropriately adding the information back to the backbone, CSN effectively realizes knowledge transfer in various downstream tasks. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our method. The proposed method not only reduces a large amount of GPU memory usage and trainable parameters, but also outperforms existing PETL methods by a significant margin in accuracy, achieving new state-of-the-art on several standard benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/heekhero/DTL.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Rectify the Regression Bias in Long-Tailed Object Detection

Long-tailed object detection faces great challenges because of its extremely imbalanced class distribution. Recent methods mainly focus on the classification bias and its loss function design, while ignoring the subtle influence of the regression branch. This paper shows that the regression bias exists and does adversely and seriously impact the detection accuracy. While existing methods fail to handle the regression bias, the class-specific regression head for rare classes is hypothesized to be the main cause of it in this paper. As a result, three kinds of viable solutions to cater for the rare categories are proposed, including adding a class-agnostic branch, clustering heads and merging heads. The proposed methods brings in consistent and significant improvements over existing long-tailed detection methods, especially in rare and common classes. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the large vocabulary LVIS dataset with different backbones and architectures. It generalizes well to more difficult evaluation metrics, relatively balanced datasets, and the mask branch. This is the first attempt to reveal and explore rectifying of the regression bias in long-tailed object detection.

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arXiv2023

Multi-Label Self-Supervised Learning with Scene Images

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods targeting scene images have seen a rapid growth recently, and they mostly rely on either a dedicated dense matching mechanism or a costly unsupervised object discovery module. This paper shows that instead of hinging on these strenuous operations, quality image representations can be learned by treating scene/multi-label image SSL simply as a multi-label classification problem, which greatly simplifies the learning framework. Specifically, multiple binary pseudo-labels are assigned for each input image by comparing its embeddings with those in two dictionaries, and the network is optimized using the binary cross entropy loss. The proposed method is named Multi-Label Self-supervised learning (MLS). Visualizations qualitatively show that clearly the pseudo-labels by MLS can automatically find semantically similar pseudo-positive pairs across different images to facilitate contrastive learning. MLS learns high quality representations on MS-COCO and achieves state-of-the-art results on classification, detection and segmentation benchmarks. At the same time, MLS is much simpler than existing methods, making it easier to deploy and for further exploration.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

ESTISR: Adapting Efficient Scene Text Image Super-resolution for Real-Scenes

While scene text image super-resolution (STISR) has yielded remarkable improvements in accurately recognizing scene text, prior methodologies have placed excessive emphasis on optimizing performance, rather than paying due attention to efficiency - a crucial factor in ensuring deployment of the STISR-STR pipeline. In this work, we propose a novel Efficient Scene Text Image Super-resolution (ESTISR) Network for resource-limited deployment platform. ESTISR's functionality primarily depends on two critical components: a CNN-based feature extractor and an efficient self-attention mechanism used for decoding low-resolution images. We designed a re-parameterized inverted residual block specifically suited for resource-limited circumstances as the feature extractor. Meanwhile, we proposed a novel self-attention mechanism, softmax shrinking, based on a kernel-based approach. This innovative technique offers linear complexity while also naturally incorporating discriminating low-level features into the self-attention structure. Extensive experiments on TextZoom show that ESTISR retains a high image restoration quality and improved STR accuracy of low-resolution images. Furthermore, ESTISR consistently outperforms current methods in terms of actual running time and peak memory consumption, while achieving a better trade-off between performance and efficiency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Instance-based Max-margin for Practical Few-shot Recognition

In order to mimic the human few-shot learning (FSL) ability better and to make FSL closer to real-world applications, this paper proposes a practical FSL (pFSL) setting. pFSL is based on unsupervised pretrained models (analogous to human prior knowledge) and recognizes many novel classes simultaneously. Compared to traditional FSL, pFSL is simpler in its formulation, easier to evaluate, more challenging and more practical. To cope with the rarity of training examples, this paper proposes IbM2, an instance-based max-margin method not only for the new pFSL setting, but also works well in traditional FSL scenarios. Based on the Gaussian Annulus Theorem, IbM2 converts random noise applied to the instances into a mechanism to achieve maximum margin in the many-way pFSL (or traditional FSL) recognition task. Experiments with various self-supervised pretraining methods and diverse many- or few-way FSL tasks show that IbM2 almost always leads to improvements compared to its respective baseline methods, and in most cases the improvements are significant. With both the new pFSL setting and novel IbM2 method, this paper shows that practical few-shot learning is both viable and promising.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Worst Case Matters for Few-Shot Recognition

Few-shot recognition learns a recognition model with very few (e.g., 1 or 5) images per category, and current few-shot learning methods focus on improving the average accuracy over many episodes. We argue that in real-world applications we may often only try one episode instead of many, and hence maximizing the worst-case accuracy is more important than maximizing the average accuracy. We empirically show that a high average accuracy not necessarily means a high worst-case accuracy. Since this objective is not accessible, we propose to reduce the standard deviation and increase the average accuracy simultaneously. In turn, we devise two strategies from the bias-variance tradeoff perspective to implicitly reach this goal: a simple yet effective stability regularization (SR) loss together with model ensemble to reduce variance during fine-tuning, and an adaptability calibration mechanism to reduce the bias. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategies, which outperforms current state-of-the-art methods with a significant margin in terms of not only average, but also worst-case accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/heekhero/ACSR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Deeply Aligned Adaptation for Cross-domain Object Detection

Cross-domain object detection has recently attracted more and more attention for real-world applications, since it helps build robust detectors adapting well to new environments. In this work, we propose an end-to-end solution based on Faster R-CNN, where ground-truth annotations are available for source images (e.g., cartoon) but not for target ones (e.g., watercolor) during training. Motivated by the observation that the transferabilities of different neural network layers differ from each other, we propose to apply a number of domain alignment strategies to different layers of Faster R-CNN, where the alignment strength is gradually reduced from low to higher layers. Moreover, after obtaining region proposals in our network, we develop a foreground-background aware alignment module to further reduce the domain mismatch by separately aligning features of the foreground and background regions from the source and target domains. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

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