EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zhixi Cai
dblp:318/2917
· DBLP profile ↗
14ranked-venue papers
6as first author
14since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-7978-0860ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 12 · 5 first-author · 12 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 9 · 3 first-author · 9 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | JRDB-Reasoning: A Difficulty-Graded Benchmark for Visual Reasoning in RoboticsabstractRecent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced visual reasoning, a key capability for embodied AI agents like robots. However, existing visual reasoning benchmarks often suffer from several limitations: they lack a clear definition of reasoning complexity, offer have no control to generate questions over varying difficulty and task customization, and fail to provide structured, step-by-step reasoning annotations (workflows). To bridge these gaps, we formalize reasoning complexity, introduce an adaptive query engine that generates customizable questions of varying complexity with detailed intermediate annotations, and extend the JRDB dataset with human-object interaction and geometric relationship annotations to create JRDB-Reasoning, a benchmark tailored for visual reasoning in human-crowded environments. Our engine and benchmark enable fine-grained evaluation of visual reasoning frameworks and dynamic assessment of visual-language models across reasoning levels. Simindokht Jahangard, Mehrzad Mohammadi, Zhixi Cai, Seyed Hamid Rezatofighi |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2026 | SignMAE: Segmentation-Driven Self-supervised Learning for Sign Language Recognition
Kunyuan Xie, Zhixi Cai, Kalin Stefanov |
ICPR (10) | 2 |
| 2026 | DexAvatar: 3D Sign Language Reconstruction with Hand and Body Pose PriorsabstractThe trend in sign language generation is centered around data-driven generative methods that require vast amounts of precise 2D and 3D human pose data to achieve an acceptable generation quality. However, currently, most sign language datasets are video-based and limited to automatically reconstructed 2D human poses (i.e., keypoints) and lack accurate 3D information. Furthermore, existing state-of-the-art for automatic 3D human pose estimation from sign language videos is prone to self-occlusion, noise, and motion blur effects, resulting in poor reconstruction quality. In response to this, we introduce DexAvatar, a novel framework to reconstruct bio-mechanically accurate fine-grained hand articulations and body movements from in-the-wild monocular sign language videos, guided by learned 3D hand and body priors. DexAvatar achieves strong performance in the SGNify motion capture dataset, the only benchmark available for this task, reaching an improvement of 35.11% in the estimation of body and hand poses compared to the state-of-the-art. The official website of this work is: https://github.com/kaustesseract/DexAvatar. Kaustubh Kundu, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Lucy M. Robertson-Bell, Zhixi Cai, Kalin Stefanov |
WACV | 4 |
| 2025 | Naver: a Neuro-Symbolic Compositional Automaton for Visual Grounding with Explicit Logic ReasoningabstractVisual Grounding (VG) tasks, such as referring expression detection and segmentation tasks are important for linking visual entities to context, especially in complex reasoning tasks that require detailed query interpretation. This paper explores VG beyond basic perception, highlighting challenges for methods that require reasoning like human cognition. Recent advances in large language methods (LLMs) and Vision-Language methods (VLMs) have improved abilities for visual comprehension, contextual understanding, and reasoning. These methods are mainly split into end-to-end and compositional methods, with the latter offering more flexibility. Compositional approaches that integrate LLMs and foundation models show promising performance but still struggle with complex reasoning with language-based logical representations. To address these limitations, we propose NAVER, a compositional visual grounding method that integrates explicit probabilistic logic reasoning within a finite-state automaton, equipped with a self-correcting mechanism. This design improves robustness and interpretability in inference through explicit logic reasoning. Our results show that NAVER achieves SoTA performance comparing to recent end-to-end and compositional baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ControlNet/NAVER . Zhixi Cai, Fucai Ke, Simindokht Jahangard, Maria Garcia de la Banda, Gholamreza Haffari, Peter J. Stuckey, Seyed Hamid Rezatofighi |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2025 | DWIM: Towards Tool-Aware Visual Reasoning via Discrepancy-Aware Workflow Generation & Instruct-Masking Tuning
Fucai Ke, Xingjian Leng, Zhixi Cai, Zaid Khan 0001, Weiqing Wang 0001, Pari Delir Haghighi, Seyed Hamid Rezatofighi, Manmohan Krishna Chandraker |
ICCV | 4 |
| 2025 | Hier-SLAM: Scaling-Up Semantics in SLAM with a Hierarchically Categorical Gaussian SplattingabstractWe propose Hier-SLAM, a semantic 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM method featuring a novel hierarchical categorical representation, which enables accurate global 3D semantic mapping, scaling-up capability, and explicit semantic label prediction in the 3D world. The parameter usage in semantic SLAM systems increases significantly with the growing complexity of the environment, making it particularly challenging and costly for scene understanding. To address this problem, we introduce a novel hierarchical representation that encodes semantic information in a compact form into 3D Gaussian Splatting, leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We further introduce a novel semantic loss designed to optimize hierarchical semantic information through both inter-level and cross-level optimization. Furthermore, we enhance the whole SLAM system, resulting in improved tracking and mapping performance. Our Hier-SLAM outperforms existing dense SLAM methods in both mapping and tracking accuracy, while achieving a 2x operation speed-up. Additionally, it achieves on-par semantic rendering performance compared to existing methods while significantly reducing storage and training time requirements. Rendering FPS impressively reaches 2,000 with semantic information and 3,000 without it. Most notably, it showcases the capability of handling the complex real-world scene with more than 500 semantic classes, highlighting its valuable scaling-up capability. The open-source code is available at https://github.com/LeeBY68/Hier-SLAM. Boying Li, Zhixi Cai, Yuan-Fang Li, Ian D. Reid 0001, Seyed Hamid Rezatofighi |
ICRA | 2 |
| 2025 | MRAC 2025: 3rd International Workshop on Multimodal, Generative and Responsible Affective ComputingabstractMultimodal, generative, and responsible affective computing aims to enhance people's lives. In recent years, the AI revolution has already begun to impact daily life, with virtual assistants being deployed across various sectors such as healthcare, banking, transportation, and education. It is clear that, in the near future, humans may interact with AI-powered systems as much or maybe even more than direct human-to-human interactions. Affective computing has numerous applications, including innovative approaches to forecasting and preventing anxiety, stress, and mental health issues; enhancing robotic empathy; assisting individuals with communication, behavior, and emotion regulation challenges; and promoting awareness of health and well-being. Many of these applications require enhanced control and protection of sensitive, private, and personal data. Therefore, it is crucial to further develop the creation, evaluation, and deployment of emotionally intelligent systems that are both responsive and responsible. Additionally, improving the accuracy and interpretability of emotion prediction results can significantly enhance the application of this technology in the downstream tasks mentioned above. MRAC'25 is the continuation of MRAC'23 and MRAC'24. Through this workshop, we aim to bring together researchers to discuss the potential and development of affective computing. Zheng Lian 0004, Shreya Ghosh 0001, Erik Cambria, Zhixi Cai, Guoying Zhao 0001, Abhinav Dhall, Björn W. Schuller, Roland Göcke, Jianhua Tao 0001, Tom Gedeon |
ACM Multimedia | 4 |
| 2025 | AV-Deepfake1M++: A Large-Scale Audio-Visual Deepfake Benchmark with Real-World PerturbationsabstractThe rapid surge of text-to-speech and face-voice reenactment models makes video fabrication easier and highly realistic. To encounter this problem, we require datasets that rich in type of generation methods and perturbation strategy which is usually common for online videos. To this end, we propose AV-Deepfake1M++, an extension of the AV-Deepfake1M having 2 million video clips with diversified manipulation strategy and audio-visual perturbation. This paper includes the description of data generation strategies along with benchmarking of AV-Deepfake1M++ using state-of-the-art methods. We believe that this dataset will play a pivotal role in facilitating research in Deepfake domain. Based on this dataset, we host the 2025 1M-Deepfakes Detection Challenge. The challenge details, dataset and evaluation scripts are available online under a research-only license at https://deepfakes1m.github.io/2025. Zhixi Cai, Kartik Kuckreja, Shreya Ghosh 0001, Akanksha Chuchra, Muhammad Haris Khan, Usman Tariq, Tom Gedeon, Abhinav Dhall |
ACM Multimedia | 1 |
| 2024 | JRDB-Social: A Multifaceted Robotic Dataset for Understanding of Context and Dynamics of Human Interactions Within Social GroupsabstractUnderstanding human social behaviour is crucial in Computer vision and robotics. Micro-level observations like in-dividual actions fall short, necessitating a comprehensive approach that considers individual behaviour, intra-group dynamics, and social group levels for a thorough under-standing. To address dataset limitations, this paper intro-duces JRDB-Social, an extension of JRDB [2]. Designed to fill gaps in human understanding across diverse indoor and outdoor social contexts, JRDB-Social provides annotations at three levels: individual attributes, intra-group in-teractions, and social group context. This dataset aims to enhance our grasp of human social dynamics for robotic applications. Utilizing the recent cutting-edge multi-modal large language models, we evaluated our benchmark to ex-plore their capacity to decipher social human behaviour. Simindokht Jahangard, Zhixi Cai, Shiki Wen, Seyed Hamid Rezatofighi |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2024 | HYDRA: A Hyper Agent for Dynamic Compositional Visual Reasoning
Fucai Ke, Zhixi Cai, Simindokht Jahangard, Weiqing Wang 0001, Pari Delir Haghighi, Seyed Hamid Rezatofighi |
ECCV (20) | 2 |
| 2024 | AV-Deepfake1M: A Large-Scale LLM-Driven Audio-Visual Deepfake DatasetabstractThe detection and localization of highly realistic deepfake audio-visual content are challenging even for the most advanced state-of-the-art methods. While most of the research efforts in this domain are focused on detecting high-quality deepfake images and videos, only a few works address the problem of the localization of small segments of audio-visual manipulations embedded in real videos. In this research, we emulate the process of such content generation and propose the AV-Deepfake1M dataset. The dataset contains content-driven (i) video manipulations, (ii) audio manipulations, and (iii) audio-visual manipulations for more than 2K subjects resulting in a total of more than 1M videos. The paper provides a thorough description of the proposed data generation pipeline accompanied by a rigorous analysis of the quality of the generated data. The comprehensive benchmark of the proposed dataset utilizing state-of-the-art deepfake detection and localization methods indicates a significant drop in performance compared to previous datasets. The proposed dataset will play a vital role in building the next-generation deepfake localization methods. The dataset and associated code are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/AV-Deepfake1M. Zhixi Cai, Shreya Ghosh 0001, Aman Pankaj Adatia, Munawar Hayat, Abhinav Dhall, Tom Gedeon, Kalin Stefanov |
ACM Multimedia | 1 |
| 2024 | 1M-Deepfakes Detection ChallengeabstractThe detection and localization of deepfake content, particularly when small fake segments are seamlessly mixed with real videos, remains a significant challenge in the field of digital media security. Based on the recently released AV-Deepfake1M dataset, which contains more than 1 million manipulated videos across more than 2,000 subjects, we introduce the 1M-Deepfakes Detection Challenge. This challenge is designed to engage the research community in developing advanced methods for detecting and localizing deepfake manipulations within the large-scale high-realistic audio-visual dataset. The participants can access the AV-Deepfake1M dataset and are required to submit their inference results for evaluation across the metrics for detection or localization tasks. The methodologies developed through the challenge will contribute to the development of next-generation deepfake detection and localization systems. Evaluation scripts, baseline models, and accompanying code will be available on https://github.com/ControlNet/AV-Deepfake1M. Zhixi Cai, Abhinav Dhall, Shreya Ghosh 0001, Munawar Hayat, Dimitris Kollias, Kalin Stefanov, Usman Tariq |
ACM Multimedia | 1 |
| 2023 | MARLIN: Masked Autoencoder for facial video Representation LearnINgabstractThis paper proposes a self-supervised approach to learn universal facial representations from videos, that can transfer across a variety of facial analysis tasks such as Facial Attribute Recognition (FAR), Facial Expression Recognition (FER), DeepFake Detection (DFD), and Lip Synchronization (LS). Our proposed framework, named MARLIN, is a facial video masked autoencoder, that learns highly robust and generic facial embeddings from abundantly available non-annotated web crawled facial videos. As a challenging auxiliary task, MARLIN reconstructs the spatio-temporal details of the face from the densely masked facial regions which mainly include eyes, nose, mouth, lips, and skin to capture local and global aspects that in turn help in encoding generic and transferable features. Through a variety of experiments on diverse downstream tasks, we demonstrate MARLIN to be an excellent facial video encoder as well as feature extractor, that performs consistently well across a variety of downstream tasks including FAR (1.13% gain over supervised benchmark), FER (2.64% gain over unsupervised benchmark), DFD (1.86% gain over unsupervised benchmark), LS (29.36% gain for Frechet Inception Distance), and even in low data regime. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/MARLIN. Zhixi Cai, Shreya Ghosh 0001, Kalin Stefanov, Abhinav Dhall, Jianfei Cai 0001, Seyed Hamid Rezatofighi, Gholamreza Haffari, Munawar Hayat |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2023 | Glitch in the matrix: A large scale benchmark for content driven audio-visual forgery detection and localizationabstractMost deepfake detection methods focus on detecting spatial and/or spatio-temporal changes in facial attributes and are centered around the binary classification task of detecting whether a video is real or fake. This is because available benchmark datasets contain mostly visual-only modifications present in the entirety of the video. However, a sophisticated deepfake may include small segments of audio or audio-visual manipulations that can completely change the meaning of the video content. To addresses this gap, we propose and benchmark a new dataset, Localized Audio Visual DeepFake (LAV-DF), consisting of strategic content-driven audio, visual and audio-visual manipulations. The proposed baseline method, Boundary Aware Temporal Forgery Detection (BA-TFD), is a 3D Convolutional Neural Network-based architecture which effectively captures multimodal manipulations. We further improve (i.e. BA-TFD+) the baseline method by replacing the backbone with a Multiscale Vision Transformer and guide the training process with contrastive, frame classification, boundary matching and multimodal boundary matching loss functions. The quantitative analysis demonstrates the superiority of BA-TFD+ on temporal forgery localization and deepfake detection tasks using several benchmark datasets including our newly proposed dataset. The dataset, models and code are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/LAV-DF. Zhixi Cai, Shreya Ghosh 0001, Abhinav Dhall, Tom Gedeon, Kalin Stefanov, Munawar Hayat |
Comput. Vis. Image Underst. | 1 |