EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Weichao Zhao
dblp:171/9872
· DBLP profile ↗
14ranked-venue papers
6as first author
13since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-7098-1690ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 9 · 5 first-author · 9 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 8 · 2 first-author · 8 since 2021Computer networks · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | DocR1: Evidence Page-Guided GRPO for Multi-Page Document UnderstandingabstractUnderstanding multi-page documents poses a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as it requires fine-grained visual comprehension and multi-hop reasoning across pages. While prior work has explored reinforcement learning (RL) for enhancing advanced reasoning in MLLMs, its application to multi-page document understanding remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce DocR1, an MLLM trained with a novel RL framework, Evidence Page-Guided GRPO (EviGRPO). EviGRPO incorporates an evidence-aware reward mechanism that promotes a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, guiding the model to first retrieve relevant pages before generating answers. To support this, we design a rigorous two-stage annotation pipeline and a curriculum learning strategy that enables effective training with limited supervision. Using this pipeline, we construct two datasets: EviBench, a high-quality training set with 4.8k examples, and ArxivFullQA, a benchmark with 8.6k QA examples over full scientific papers. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that DocR1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-page tasks while maintaining strong results on single-page benchmarks. Junyu Xiong, Weichao Zhao, Wengang Zhou 0001, Houqiang Li |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2025 | Uni-Sign: Toward Unified Sign Language Understanding at ScaleabstractSign language pre-training has gained increasing attention for its ability to enhance performance across various sign language understanding (SLU) tasks. However, existing methods often suffer from a gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, leading to suboptimal results. To address this, we propose Uni-Sign, a unified pre-training framework that eliminates the gap between pre-training and downstream SLU tasks through a large-scale generative pre-training strategy and a novel fine-tuning paradigm. First, we introduce CSL-News, a large-scale Chinese Sign Language (CSL) dataset containing 1,985 hours of video paired with textual annotations, which enables effective large-scale pre-training. Second, Uni-Sign unifies SLU tasks by treating downstream tasks as a single sign language translation (SLT) task during fine-tuning, ensuring seamless knowledge transfer between pre-training and fine-tuning. Furthermore, we incorporate a prior-guided fusion (PGF) module and a score-aware sampling strategy to efficiently fuse pose and RGB information, addressing keypoint inaccuracies and improving computational efficiency. Extensive experiments across multiple SLU benchmarks demonstrate that Uni-Sign achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream SLU tasks. Dataset and code are available at github.com/ZechengLi19/Uni-Sign. Zecheng Li 0002, Wengang Zhou 0001, Weichao Zhao, Kepeng Wu, Hezhen Hu, Houqiang Li |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2025 | Scaling up Multimodal Pre-Training for Sign Language UnderstandingabstractSign language pre-training (SLP) has significantly improved the performance of diverse sign language understanding (SLU) tasks. However, many existing methods employ pre-training techniques that are tailored to a specific task with small data scale, resulting in limited model generalization. Some others focus solely on exploring visual cues, neglecting semantically textual cues embedded in sign translation texts. These limitations inherently diminish the representative capacity of pre-trained models. To this end, we present a multimodal SLP framework to leverage rich visual contextual information and vision-language semantic consistency with massively available data to enhance the representative capability of sign language video. Specifically, we first curate a large-scale text-labeled sign pose dataset ($\sim$∼1.5M), namely SL-1.5M, from various sources to alleviate the scarcity of pre-training data. Subsequently, we propose a pre-training framework, which integrates sign-text contrastive learning with masked pose modeling as the pretext task. In this way, our framework is empowered to effectively capture contextual cues within sign pose sequences and learn visual representation by aligning semantical text-rich features in a latent space. Moreover, in order to grasp the comprehensive meaning of sign language videos, we concurrently model manual and non-manual information to ensure the holistic integrity of visual content. To validate the generalization and superiority of our proposed pre-trained framework, we conduct extensive experiments without intricate design on diverse SLU tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. Wengang Zhou 0001, Weichao Zhao, Hezhen Hu, Zecheng Li 0002, Houqiang Li |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 2 |
| 2024 | TabPedia: Towards Comprehensive Visual Table Understanding with Concept SynergyabstractTables contain factual and quantitative data accompanied by various structures and contents that pose challenges for machine comprehension. Previous methods generally design task-specific architectures and objectives for individual tasks, resulting in modal isolation and intricate workflows. In this paper, we present a novel large vision-language model, TabPedia, equipped with a concept synergy mechanism. In this mechanism, all the involved diverse visual table understanding (VTU) tasks and multi-source visual embeddings are abstracted as concepts. This unified framework allows TabPedia to seamlessly integrate VTU tasks, such as table detection, table structure recognition, table querying, and table question answering, by leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Moreover, the concept synergy mechanism enables table perception-related and comprehension-related tasks to work in harmony, as they can effectively leverage the needed clues from the corresponding source perception embeddings. Furthermore, to better evaluate the VTU task in real-world scenarios, we establish a new and comprehensive table VQA benchmark, ComTQA, featuring approximately 9,000 QA pairs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on both table perception and comprehension tasks, conducted across various public benchmarks, validate the effectiveness of our TabPedia. The superior performance further confirms the feasibility of using LLMs for understanding visual tables when all concepts work in synergy. The benchmark ComTQA has been open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ByteDance/ComTQA. The source code and model also have been released at https://github.com/zhaowc-ustc/TabPedia. Weichao Zhao, Hao Feng 0009, Jingqun Tang, Binghong Wu, Shu Wei, Yongjie Ye, Hao Liu 0003, Wengang Zhou 0001, Houqiang Li, Can Huang 0002 |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2024 | XLNet-CNN-GRU dual-channel aspect-level review text sentiment classification method
Weichao Zhao |
Multim. Tools Appl. | 3 |
| 2024 | MASA: Motion-Aware Masked Autoencoder With Semantic Alignment for Sign Language RecognitionabstractSign language recognition (SLR) has long been plagued by insufficient model representation capabilities. Although current pre-training approaches have alleviated this dilemma to some extent and yielded promising performance by employing various pretext tasks on sign pose data, these methods still suffer from two primary limitations: i) Explicit motion information is usually disregarded in previous pretext tasks, leading to partial information loss and limited representation capability. ii) Previous methods focus on the local context of a sign pose sequence, without incorporating the guidance of the global meaning of lexical signs. To this end, we propose a Motion-Aware masked autoencoder with Semantic Alignment (MASA) that integrates rich motion cues and global semantic information in a self-supervised learning paradigm for SLR. Our framework contains two crucial components, i.e., a motion-aware masked autoencoder (MA) and a momentum semantic alignment module (SA). Specifically, in MA, we introduce an autoencoder architecture with a motion-aware masked strategy to reconstruct motion residuals of masked frames, thereby explicitly exploring dynamic motion cues among sign pose sequences. Moreover, in SA, we embed our framework with global semantic awareness by aligning the embeddings of different augmented samples from the input sequence in the shared latent space. In this way, our framework can simultaneously learn local motion cues and global semantic features for comprehensive sign language representation. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our method, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on four public benchmarks. The source code are publicly available athttps://github.com/sakura/MASA. Weichao Zhao, Hezhen Hu, Wengang Zhou 0001, Yunyao Mao, Min Wang 0019, Houqiang Li |
IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. | 1 |
| 2024 | Self-Supervised Representation Learning With Spatial-Temporal Consistency for Sign Language RecognitionabstractRecently, there have been efforts to improve the performance in sign language recognition by designing self-supervised learning methods. However, these methods capture limited information from sign pose data in a frame-wise learning manner, leading to sub-optimal solutions. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective self-supervised contrastive learning framework to excavate rich context via spatial-temporal consistency from two distinct perspectives and learn instance discriminative representation for sign language recognition. On one hand, since the semantics of sign language are expressed by the cooperation of fine-grained hands and coarse-grained trunks, we utilize both granularity information and encode them into latent spaces. The consistency between hand and trunk features is constrained to encourage learning consistent representation of instance samples. On the other hand, inspired by the complementary property of motion and joint modalities, we first introduce first-order motion information into sign language modeling. Additionally, we further bridge the interaction between the embedding spaces of both modalities, facilitating bidirectional knowledge transfer to enhance sign language representation. Our method is evaluated with extensive experiments on four public benchmarks, and achieves new state-of-the-art performance with a notable margin. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/sakura/Code. Weichao Zhao, Wengang Zhou 0001, Hezhen Hu, Min Wang 0019, Houqiang Li |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 1 |
| 2024 | Exploiting Spatial-Temporal Context for Interacting Hand Reconstruction on Monocular RGB VideoabstractReconstructing interacting hands from monocular RGB data is a challenging task, as it involves many interfering factors, e.g., self- and mutual occlusion and similar textures. Previous works only leverage information from a single RGB image without modeling their physically plausible relation, which leads to inferior reconstruction results. In this work, we are dedicated to explicitly exploiting spatial-temporal information to achieve better interacting hand reconstruction. On the one hand, we leverage temporal context to complement insufficient information provided by the single frame and design a novel temporal framework with a temporal constraint for interacting hand motion smoothness. On the other hand, we further propose an interpenetration detection module to produce kinetically plausible interacting hands without physical collisions. Extensive experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which achieves new state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks. Weichao Zhao, Hezhen Hu, Wengang Zhou 0001, Li Li 0040, Houqiang Li |
ACM Trans. Multim. Comput. Commun. Appl. | 1 |
| 2023 | BEST: BERT Pre-training for Sign Language Recognition with Coupling TokenizationabstractIn this work, we are dedicated to leveraging the BERT pre-training success and modeling the domain-specific statistics to fertilize the sign language recognition~(SLR) model. Considering the dominance of hand and body in sign language expression, we organize them as pose triplet units and feed them into the Transformer backbone in a frame-wise manner. Pre-training is performed via reconstructing the masked triplet unit from the corrupted input sequence, which learns the hierarchical correlation context cues among internal and external triplet units. Notably, different from the highly semantic word token in BERT, the pose unit is a low-level signal originally locating in continuous space, which prevents the direct adoption of the BERT cross entropy objective. To this end, we bridge this semantic gap via coupling tokenization of the triplet unit. It adaptively extracts the discrete pseudo label from the pose triplet unit, which represents the semantic gesture / body state. After pre-training, we fine-tune the pre-trained encoder on the downstream SLR task, jointly with the newly added task-specific layer. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on all four benchmarks with a notable gain. Weichao Zhao, Hezhen Hu, Wengang Zhou 0001, Jiaxin Shi, Houqiang Li |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2023 | MS-GTR: Multi-stream Graph Transformer for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Weichao Zhao, Jingliang Peng |
CGI (3) | 1 |
| 2023 | SignBERT+: Hand-Model-Aware Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Sign Language UnderstandingabstractHand gesture serves as a crucial role during the expression of sign language. Current deep learning based methods for sign language understanding (SLU) are prone to over-fitting due to insufficient sign data resource and suffer limited interpretability. In this paper, we propose the first self-supervised pre-trainable SignBERT+ framework with model-aware hand prior incorporated. In our framework, the hand pose is regarded as a visual token, which is derived from an off-the-shelf detector. Each visual token is embedded with gesture state and spatial-temporal position encoding. To take full advantage of current sign data resource, we first perform self-supervised learning to model its statistics. To this end, we design multi-level masked modeling strategies (joint, frame and clip) to mimic common failure detection cases. Jointly with these masked modeling strategies, we incorporate model-aware hand prior to better capture hierarchical context over the sequence. After the pre-training, we carefully design simple yet effective prediction heads for downstream tasks. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we perform extensive experiments on three main SLU tasks, involving isolated and continuous sign language recognition (SLR), and sign language translation (SLT). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving new state-of-the-art performance with a notable gain. Hezhen Hu, Weichao Zhao, Wengang Zhou 0001, Houqiang Li |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 2 |
| 2021 | Model-Aware Gesture-to-Gesture TranslationabstractHand gesture-to-gesture translation is a significant and interesting problem, which serves as a key role in many applications, such as sign language production. This task involves fine-grained structure understanding of the mapping between the source and target gestures. Current works follow a data-driven paradigm based on sparse 2D joint representation. However, given the insufficient representation capability of 2D joints, this paradigm easily leads to blurry generation results with incorrect structure. In this paper, we propose a novel model-aware gesture-to-gesture translation framework, which introduces hand prior with hand meshes as the intermediate representation. To take full advantage of the structured hand model, we first build a dense topology map aligning the image plane with the encoded embedding of the visible hand mesh. Then, a transformation flow is calculated based on the correspondence of the source and target topology map. During the generation stage, we inject the topology information into generation streams by modulating the activations in a spatially-adaptive manner. Further, we incorporate the source local characteristic to enhance the translated gesture image according to the transformation flow. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets have demonstrated that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Hezhen Hu, Weilun Wang, Wengang Zhou 0001, Weichao Zhao, Houqiang Li |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2021 | SignBERT: Pre-Training of Hand-Model-Aware Representation for Sign Language RecognitionabstractHand gesture serves as a critical role in sign language. Current deep-learning-based sign language recognition (SLR) methods may suffer insufficient interpretability and overfitting due to limited sign data sources. In this paper, we introduce the first self-supervised pre-trainable SignBERT with incorporated hand prior for SLR. Sign-BERT views the hand pose as a visual token, which is derived from an off-the-shelf pose extractor. The visual tokens are then embedded with gesture state, temporal and hand chirality information. To take full advantage of available sign data sources, SignBERT first performs self-supervised pre-training by masking and reconstructing visual tokens. Jointly with several mask modeling strategies, we attempt to incorporate hand prior in a model-aware method to better model hierarchical context over the hand sequence. Then with the prediction head added, SignBERT is fine-tuned to perform the downstream SLR task. To validate the effectiveness of our method on SLR, we perform extensive experiments on four public benchmark datasets, i.e., NMFs-CSL, SLR500, MSASL and WLASL. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of both self-supervised learning and imported hand prior. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on all benchmarks with a notable gain. Hezhen Hu, Weichao Zhao, Wengang Zhou 0001, Yuechen Wang, Houqiang Li |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2015 | Intensive analysis of gait in the elderly with Parkinson's disease using center of pressure during walkingabstractGait is usually a crucial indicator for recognizing and evaluating the progression of Parkinson's disease (PD). To assess gait variability in the elderly with PD in a continuous and natural way, we pay more attention to their feet pressure variability while walking, and try to obtain the varying patterns of center of pressure (CoP). In this paper, we propose a framework based on the bimodal distribution probability density functions (BDPDFs) to recognize gait patterns of PD patients. The result evaluated with the 10-fold cross-validation method demonstrates that the Bagging classifier is able to provide classification precision of 82.4% with AUC of 88.3%. The features and the classifiers used in the present study can also be used to study the effect of dopamine and rehabilitation in PD patients. Jiangbo Jia, Hongbo Ni, Tianben Wang, Weichao Zhao, Yalong Song, Junquan Deng, Xingshe Zhou 0001 |
HealthCom | 4 |