Xiang An

dblp:132/0889 · DBLP profile ↗
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17ranked-venue papers
3as first author
17since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0008-4652-8296ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 13 · 3 first-author · 13 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 13 · 2 first-author · 13 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 UniME-V2: MLLM-as-a-Judge for Universal Multimodal Embedding Learning
abstract
Universal multimodal embedding models are essential in various tasks. Existing approaches typically use in-batch mining to identify hard negatives by measuring the similarity of query-candidate pairs. However, these methods often struggle to capture subtle semantic differences among candidates and lack diversity in negative samples. Moreover, the embeddings exhibit limited discriminative ability in distinguishing false and hard negatives. In this paper, we leverage the advanced understanding capabilities of MLLMs to enhance representation learning, and present a novel Universal Multimodal Embedding(UniME-V2) model. Our approach first constructs a potential hard negative set through global retrieval. We then introduce the MLLM-as-a-Judge mechanism, which utilizes MLLMs to assess the semantic alignment of query-candidate pairs and generate soft semantic matching scores. These scores serve as a foundation for hard negative mining, mitigating the impact of false negatives and enabling the identification of diverse, high-quality hard negatives. Furthermore, the semantic matching scores are used as soft labels to mitigate the rigid one-to-one mapping constraint. By aligning the similarity matrix with the soft semantic matching score matrix, the model learns semantic distinctions among candidates, significantly enhancing its discriminative capacity. To further improve performance, we propose UniME-V2, a reranking model trained on our mined hard negatives through a joint pairwise and listwise optimization approach. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the MMEB benchmark and multiple retrieval tasks, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks.
Tiancheng Gu, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Kaichen Zhang, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Tom Weidong Cai, Jiankang Deng, Lidong Bing
AAAI4
2026 ViCToR: Improving Visual Comprehension via Token Reconstruction for Pretraining LMMs
abstract
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often face a modality representation gap during pretraining: while language embeddings remain stable, visual representations are highly sensitive to contextual noise (e.g., background clutter). To address this issue, we introduce a visual comprehension stage, which we call ViCToR (Visual Comprehension via Token Reconstruction), a novel pretraining framework for LMMs. ViCToR employs a learnable visual token pool and utilizes the Hungarian matching algorithm to select semantically relevant tokens from this pool for visual token replacement. Furthermore, by integrating a visual token reconstruction loss with dense semantic supervision, ViCToR can learn tokens which retain high visual detail, thereby enhancing the large language model's (LLM's) understanding of visual information. After pretraining on 3 million publicly accessible images and captions, ViCToR achieves state-of-the-art results, improving over LLaVA-NeXT-8B by 10.4%, 3.2%, and 7.2% on the MMStar, SEEDI, and RealWorldQA benchmarks, respectively.
Yin Xie, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Peirou Liang, Xiang An, Yongle Zhao, Ziyong Feng, Roy Miles, Ismail Elezi, Jiankang Deng
AAAI4
2026 CoughLocNet: A refined cough sound recognition and localization model integrating an adaptive time-domain smoothing algorithm
Lifeng Cheng, Hao Bo, Runsheng Zhang, Jingtian Hu, Xiang An
Speech Commun.7
2025 CLIP-CID: Efficient CLIP Distillation via Cluster-Instance Discrimination
abstract
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has achieved excellent performance over a wide range of tasks. However, the effectiveness of CLIP heavily relies on a substantial corpus of pre-training data, resulting in notable consumption of computational resources. Although knowledge distillation has been widely applied in single modality models, how to efficiently expand knowledge distillation to vision-language foundation models with extensive data remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we introduce CLIP-CID, a novel distillation mechanism that effectively transfers knowledge from a large vision-language foundation model to a smaller model. We initially propose a simple but efficient image semantic balance method to reduce transfer learning bias and improve distillation efficiency. This method filters out 43.7% of image-text pairs from the LAION400M while maintaining superior performance. After that, we leverage cluster-instance discrimination to facilitate knowledge transfer from the teacher model to the student model, thereby empowering the student model to acquire a holistic semantic comprehension of the pre-training data. Experimental results demonstrate that CLIP-CID achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks including linear probe and zero-shot classification.
Kaicheng Yang 0002, Tiancheng Gu, Xiang An, Haiqiang Jiang, Xiangzi Dai, Ziyong Feng, Tom Weidong Cai, Jiankang Deng
AAAI3
2025 Gradient-Attention Guided Dual-Masking Synergetic Framework for Robust Text-based Person Retrieval
abstract
Although Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) exhibits strong performance across diverse vision tasks, its application to person representation learning faces two critical challenges: (i) the scarcity of large-scale annotated vision-language data focused on person-centric images, and (ii) the inherent limitations of global contrastive learning, which struggles to maintain discriminative local features crucial for fine-grained matching while remaining vulnerable to noisy text tokens.This work advances CLIP for person representation learning through synergistic improvements in data curation and model architecture.First, we develop a noise-resistant data construction pipeline that leverages the in-context learning capabilities of MLLMs to automatically filter and caption web-sourced images.This yields WebPerson, a large-scale dataset of 5M high-quality person-centric image-text pairs.Second, we introduce the GA-DMS (Gradient-Attention Guided Dual-Masking Synergetic) framework, which improves cross-modal alignment by adaptively masking noisy textual tokens based on the gradient-attention similarity score.Additionally, we incorporate masked token prediction objectives that compel the model to predict informative text tokens, enhancing fine-grained semantic representation learning.Extensive experiments show that GA-DMS achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks.
Tianlu Zheng, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Qichuan Ding
EMNLP3
2025 ForCenNet: Foreground-Centric Network for Document Image Rectification
Kaicheng Yang 0002, Xiang An, Ninghua Yang, Jiankang Deng
ICCV7
2025 HUST: High-Fidelity Unbiased Skin Tone Estimation via Texture Quantization
Zimin Ran, Xingyu Ren, Xiang An, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Ziyong Feng, Jing Yang 0038, Rolandos Alexandros Potamias, Linchao Zhu, Jiankang Deng
ICCV3
2025 Region-based Cluster Discrimination for Visual Representation Learning
abstract
Learning visual representations is foundational for a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. Although recent vision-language contrastive models, such as CLIP and SigLIP, have achieved impressive zero-shot performance via large-scale vision-language alignment, their reliance on global representations constrains their effectiveness for dense prediction tasks, such as grounding, OCR, and segmentation. To address this gap, we introduce Region-Aware Cluster Discrimination (RICE), a novel method that enhances region-level visual and OCR capabilities. We first construct a billion-scale candidate region dataset and propose a Region Transformer layer to extract rich regional semantics. We further design a unified region cluster discrimination loss that jointly supports object and OCR learning within a single classification framework, enabling efficient and scalable distributed training on large-scale data. Extensive experiments show that RICE consistently outperforms previous methods on tasks, including segmentation, dense detection, and visual perception for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). The pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/deepglint/MVT.
Yin Xie, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Xiang An, Yongle Zhao, Weimo Deng, Zimin Ran, Ziyong Feng, Roy Miles, Ismail Elezi, Jiankang Deng
ICCV3
2025 RealSyn: An Effective and Scalable Multimodal Interleaved Document Transformation Paradigm
abstract
After pre-training on extensive image-text pairs, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) demonstrates promising performance on a wide variety of benchmarks. However, a substantial volume of multimodal interleaved documents remains underutilized for contrastive vision-language representation learning. To fully leverage these unpaired documents, we initially establish a Real-World Data Extraction pipeline to extract high-quality images and texts. Then we design a hierarchical retrieval method to efficiently associate each image with multiple semantically relevant realistic texts. To further enhance fine-grained visual information, we propose an image semantic augmented generation module for synthetic text production. Furthermore, we employ a semantic balance sampling strategy to improve dataset diversity, enabling better learning of long-tail concepts. Based on these innovations, we construct RealSyn, a dataset combining realistic and synthetic texts, available in three scales: 15M, 30M, and 100M. We compare our dataset with other widely used datasets of equivalent scale for CLIP training. Models pre-trained on RealSyn consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance across various downstream tasks, including linear probe, zero-shot transfer, zero-shot robustness, and zero-shot retrieval. Furthermore, extensive experiments confirm that RealSyn significantly enhances contrastive vision-language representation learning and demonstrates robust scalability. The code will be released in https://garygutc.github.io/RealSyn.
Tiancheng Gu, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Chaoyi Zhang, Yin Xie, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Dongnan Liu, Tom Weidong Cai, Jiankang Deng
ACM Multimedia5
2025 Grounding Deliberate Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
Yuxuan Liu 0011, Dehu Li, Xiang An, Weimo Deng, Ziyong Feng, Yongle Zhao, Yin Xie
MMM (2)4
2025 UniViT: Unifying Image and Video Understanding in One Vision Encoder
abstract
Despite the impressive progress of recent pretraining methods on multimodal tasks, existing methods are inherently biased towards either spatial modeling (e.g., CLIP) or temporal modeling (e.g., V-JEPA), limiting their joint capture of spatial details and temporal dynamics. To this end, we propose UniViT, a cluster-driven unified self-supervised learning framework that effectively captures the structured semantics of both image spatial content and video temporal dynamics through event-level and object-level clustering and discrimination. Specifically, we leverage offline clustering to generate semantic clusters across both modalities. For videos, multi-granularity event-level clustering progressively expands from single-event to structured multi-event segments, capturing coarse-to-fine temporal semantics; for images, object-level clustering captures fine-grained spatial semantics. However, while global clustering provides semantically consistent clusters, it lacks modeling of structured semantic relations (e.g., temporal event structures). To address this, we introduce a contrastive objective that leverages these semantic clusters as pseudo-label supervision to explicitly enforce structural constraints, including temporal event relations and spatial object co-occurrences, capturing structured semantics beyond categories. Meanwhile, UniViT jointly embeds structured object-level and event-level semantics into a unified representation space. Furthermore, UniViT introduces two key components: (i) Unified Rotary Position Embedding integrates relative positional embedding with frequency-aware dimension allocation to support position-invariant semantic learning and enhance the stability of structured semantics in the discrimination stage; and (ii) Variable Spatiotemporal Streams adapt to inputs of varying frame lengths, addressing the rigidity of conventional fixed-input approaches. Extensive experiments across varying model scales demonstrate that UniViT achieves state-of-the-art performance on linear probing, attentive probing, question answering, and spatial understanding tasks.
Xiang An, Yin Xie, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Zimin Ran, Muhammad Imran Razzak, Ziyong Feng, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Jiankang Deng, ZongYuan Ge
NeurIPS2
2025 ORID: Organ-Regional Information Driven Framework for Radiology Report Generation
abstract
The objective of Radiology Report Generation (RRG) is to automatically generate coherent textual analyses of diseases based on radiological images, thereby alleviating the workload of radiologists. Current AI-based methods for RRG primarily focus on modifications to the encoder-decoder model architecture. To advance these approaches, this paper introduces an Organ-Regional Information Driven (ORID) framework which can effectively integrate multi-modal information and reduce the influence of noise from unrelated organs. Specifically, based on the LLaVA-Med, we first construct an RRG-related instruction dataset to improve organ-regional diagnosis description ability and get the LLaVA-Med-RRG. After that, we propose an organ-based cross-modal fusion module to effectively combine the information from the organ-regional diagnosis description and radiology image. To further reduce the influence of noise from unrelated organs on the radiology report generation, we introduce an organ importance coefficient analysis module, which leverages Graph Neural Network (GNN) to examine the interconnections of the cross-modal information of each organ region. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods across various evaluation metrics demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.
Tiancheng Gu, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Dongnan Liu, Tom Weidong Cai
WACV3
2024 Multi-label Cluster Discrimination for Visual Representation Learning
Xiang An, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Xiangzi Dai, Ziyong Feng, Jiankang Deng
ECCV (27)1
2024 RWKV-CLIP: A Robust Vision-Language Representation Learner
abstract
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has significantly improved performance in various vision-language tasks by expanding the dataset with image-text pairs obtained from the web.This paper further explores CLIP from the perspectives of data and model architecture.To mitigate the impact of the noise data and enhance the quality of large-scale image-text data crawled from the internet, we introduce a diverse description generation framework that can leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to combine and refine information from web-based image-text pairs, synthetic captions, and detection tags.Additionally, we propose RWKV-CLIP, the first RWKV-driven vision-language representation learning model that combines the effective parallel training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs.Extensive experiments across different model scales and pre-training datasets demonstrate that RWKV-CLIP is a robust vision-language representation learner and it achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream tasks, including linear probing, zero-shot classification, and zero-shot image-text retrieval.To facilitate future research, the code and pre-trained models are released at https: //github.com/deepglint/RWKV-CLIP.
Tiancheng Gu, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Dongnan Liu, Tom Weidong Cai, Jiankang Deng
EMNLP3
2023 ALIP: Adaptive Language-Image Pre-training with Synthetic Caption
abstract
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has significantly boosted the performance of various vision-language tasks by scaling up the dataset with image-text pairs collected from the web. However, the presence of intrinsic noise and unmatched image-text pairs in web data can potentially affect the performance of representation learning. To address this issue, we first utilize the OFA model to generate synthetic captions that focus on the image content. The generated captions contain complementary information that is beneficial for pre-training. Then, we propose an Adaptive Language-Image Pre-training (ALIP), a bi-path model that integrates supervision from both raw text and synthetic caption. As the core components of ALIP, the Language Consistency Gate (LCG) and Description Consistency Gate (DCG) dynamically adjust the weights of samples and image-text/caption pairs during the training process. Meanwhile, the adaptive contrastive loss can effectively reduce the impact of noise data and enhances the efficiency of pre-training data. We validate ALIP with experiments on different scales of models and pre-training datasets. Experiments results show that ALIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream tasks including zero-shot image-text retrieval and linear probe. To facilitate future research, the code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/deepglint/ALIP.
Kaicheng Yang 0002, Jiankang Deng, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Jia Guo 0003, Jing Yang 0038, Tongliang Liu
ICCV3
2023 Unicom: Universal and Compact Representation Learning for Image Retrieval
Xiang An, Jiankang Deng, Kaicheng Yang 0002, Jaiwei Li, Ziyong Feng, Jia Guo 0003, Jing Yang 0038, Tongliang Liu
ICLR1
2022 Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Efficient and Robust Training of Face Recognition CNNs by Partial FC
abstract
Learning discriminative deep feature embeddings by using million-scale in-the-wild datasets and margin-based softmax loss is the current state-of-the-art approach for face recognition. However, the memory and computing cost of the Fully Connected (FC) layer linearly scales up to the number of identities in the training set. Besides, the largescale training data inevitably suffers from inter-class conflict and long-tailed distribution. In this paper, we propose a sparsely updating variant of the FC layer, named Partial FC (PFC). In each iteration, positive class centers and a random subset of negative class centers are selected to compute the margin-based softmax loss. All class centers are still maintained throughout the whole training process, but only a subset is selected and updated in each iteration. Therefore, the computing requirement, the probability of inter-class conflict, and the frequency of passive update on tail class centers, are dramatically reduced. Extensive experiments across different training data and backbones (e.g. CNN and ViT) confirm the effectiveness, robustness and efficiency of the proposed PFC. The source code is available at https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/recognition.
Xiang An, Jiankang Deng, Jia Guo 0003, Ziyong Feng, Xuhan Zhu, Jing Yang 0038, Tongliang Liu
CVPR1