MotionPRO: Exploring the Role of Pressure in Human MoCap and Beyond

Existing human Motion Capture (MoCap) methods mostly focus on the visual similarity while neglecting the physical plausibility. As a result, downstream tasks such as driving virtual human in 3D scene or humanoid robots in real world suffer from issues such as timing drift and jitter, spatial problems like sliding and penetration, and poor global trajectory accuracy. In this paper, we revisit human MoCap from the perspective of interaction between human body and physical world by exploring the role of pressure. Firstly, we construct a large-scale human Motion capture dataset with Pressure, RGB and Optical sensors (named MotionPRO), which comprises 70 volunteers performing 400 types of motion, encompassing a total of 12.4M pose frames. Secondly, we examine both the necessity and effectiveness of the pressure signal through two challenging tasks: (1) pose and trajectory estimation based solely on pressure: We propose a network that incorporates a small kernel decoder and a long-short-term attention module, and proof that pressure could provide accurate global trajectory and plausible lower body pose. (2) pose and trajectory estimation by fusing pressure and RGB: We impose constraints on orthographic similarity along the camera axis and whole-body contact along the vertical axis to enhance the cross-attention strategy to fuse pressure and RGB feature maps. Experiments demonstrate that fusing pressure with RGB features not only significantly improves performance in terms of objective metrics, but also plausibly drives virtual humans (SMPL) in 3D scene. Furthermore, we demonstrate that incorporating physical perception enables humanoid robots to perform more precise and stable actions, which is highly beneficial for the development of embodied artificial intelligence. Project page is available at: https://nju-cite-mocaphumanoid.github.io/MotionPRO/

ScholarCopilot: Training Large Language Models for Academic Writing with Accurate Citations

Academic writing requires both coherent text generation and precise citation of relevant literature. Although recent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have significantly improved factual accuracy in general-purpose text generation, their ability to support professional academic writing remains limited. In this work, we introduce ScholarCopilot, a unified framework designed to enhance existing large language models for generating professional academic articles with accurate and contextually relevant citations. ScholarCopilot dynamically determines when to retrieve scholarly references by generating a retrieval token [RET], which is then used to query a citation database. The retrieved references are fed into the model to augment the generation process. We jointly optimize both the generation and citation tasks within a single framework to improve efficiency. Our model is built upon Qwen-2.5-7B and trained on 500K papers from arXiv. It achieves a top-1 retrieval accuracy of 40.1% on our evaluation dataset, outperforming baselines such as E5-Mistral-7B-Instruct (15.0%) and BM25 (9.8%). On a dataset of 1,000 academic writing samples, ScholarCopilot scores 16.2/25 in generation quality -- measured across relevance, coherence, academic rigor, completeness, and innovation -- significantly surpassing all existing models, including much larger ones like the Retrieval-Augmented Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct. Human studies further demonstrate that ScholarCopilot, despite being a 7B model, significantly outperforms ChatGPT, achieving 100% preference in citation quality and over 70% in overall usefulness.

Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks. However, the authenticity of the responses generated by MLLMs is often compromised by object hallucinations. We identify that a key cause of these hallucinations is the model's over-susceptibility to specific image frequency features in detecting objects. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Frequency Perturbations (MFP), a simple, cost-effective, and pluggable method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference, thereby mitigating hallucinations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. Furthermore, as a training-time method, MFP can be combined with inference-time methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the CHAIR benchmark.

Video Repurposing from User Generated Content: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark

The demand for producing short-form videos for sharing on social media platforms has experienced significant growth in recent times. Despite notable advancements in the fields of video summarization and highlight detection, which can create partially usable short films from raw videos, these approaches are often domain-specific and require an in-depth understanding of real-world video content. To tackle this predicament, we propose Repurpose-10K, an extensive dataset comprising over 10,000 videos with more than 120,000 annotated clips aimed at resolving the video long-to-short task. Recognizing the inherent constraints posed by untrained human annotators, which can result in inaccurate annotations for repurposed videos, we propose a two-stage solution to obtain annotations from real-world user-generated content. Furthermore, we offer a baseline model to address this challenging task by integrating audio, visual, and caption aspects through a cross-modal fusion and alignment framework. We aspire for our work to ignite groundbreaking research in the lesser-explored realms of video repurposing. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/yongliang-wu/Repurpose.

VisualLens: Personalization through Visual History

We hypothesize that a user's visual history with images reflecting their daily life, offers valuable insights into their interests and preferences, and can be leveraged for personalization. Among the many challenges to achieve this goal, the foremost is the diversity and noises in the visual history, containing images not necessarily related to a recommendation task, not necessarily reflecting the user's interest, or even not necessarily preference-relevant. Existing recommendation systems either rely on task-specific user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. We propose a novel approach, VisualLens, that extracts, filters, and refines image representations, and leverages these signals for personalization. We created two new benchmarks with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that our method improves over state-of-the-art recommendations by 5-10% on Hit@3, and improves over GPT-4o by 2-5%. Our approach paves the way for personalized recommendations in scenarios where traditional methods fail.

APDDv2: Aesthetics of Paintings and Drawings Dataset with Artist Labeled Scores and Comments

Datasets play a pivotal role in training visual models, facilitating the development of abstract understandings of visual features through diverse image samples and multidimensional attributes. However, in the realm of aesthetic evaluation of artistic images, datasets remain relatively scarce. Existing painting datasets are often characterized by limited scoring dimensions and insufficient annotations, thereby constraining the advancement and application of automatic aesthetic evaluation methods in the domain of painting. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Aesthetics Paintings and Drawings Dataset (APDD), the first comprehensive collection of paintings encompassing 24 distinct artistic categories and 10 aesthetic attributes. Building upon the initial release of APDDv1, our ongoing research has identified opportunities for enhancement in data scale and annotation precision. Consequently, APDDv2 boasts an expanded image corpus and improved annotation quality, featuring detailed language comments to better cater to the needs of both researchers and practitioners seeking high-quality painting datasets. Furthermore, we present an updated version of the Art Assessment Network for Specific Painting Styles, denoted as ArtCLIP. Experimental validation demonstrates the superior performance of this revised model in the realm of aesthetic evaluation, surpassing its predecessor in accuracy and efficacy. The dataset and model are available at https://github.com/BestiVictory/APDDv2.git.

DPI-TTS: Directional Patch Interaction for Fast-Converging and Style Temporal Modeling in Text-to-Speech

In recent years, speech diffusion models have advanced rapidly. Alongside the widely used U-Net architecture, transformer-based models such as the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) have also gained attention. However, current DiT speech models treat Mel spectrograms as general images, which overlooks the specific acoustic properties of speech. To address these limitations, we propose a method called Directional Patch Interaction for Text-to-Speech (DPI-TTS), which builds on DiT and achieves fast training without compromising accuracy. Notably, DPI-TTS employs a low-to-high frequency, frame-by-frame progressive inference approach that aligns more closely with acoustic properties, enhancing the naturalness of the generated speech. Additionally, we introduce a fine-grained style temporal modeling method that further improves speaker style similarity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method increases the training speed by nearly 2 times and significantly outperforms the baseline models.

Mixture of Experts Fusion for Fake Audio Detection Using Frozen wav2vec 2.0

Speech synthesis technology has posed a serious threat to speaker verification systems. Currently, the most effective fake audio detection methods utilize pretrained models, and integrating features from various layers of pretrained model further enhances detection performance. However, most of the previously proposed fusion methods require fine-tuning the pretrained models, resulting in excessively long training times and hindering model iteration when facing new speech synthesis technology. To address this issue, this paper proposes a feature fusion method based on the Mixture of Experts, which extracts and integrates features relevant to fake audio detection from layer features, guided by a gating network based on the last layer feature, while freezing the pretrained model. Experiments conducted on the ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof2021 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance compared to those requiring fine-tuning.

A Controlled Study on Long Context Extension and Generalization in LLMs

Broad textual understanding and in-context learning require language models that utilize full document contexts. Due to the implementation challenges associated with directly training long-context models, many methods have been proposed for extending models to handle long contexts. However, owing to differences in data and model classes, it has been challenging to compare these approaches, leading to uncertainty as to how to evaluate long-context performance and whether it differs from standard evaluation. We implement a controlled protocol for extension methods with a standardized evaluation, utilizing consistent base models and extension data. Our study yields several insights into long-context behavior. First, we reaffirm the critical role of perplexity as a general-purpose performance indicator even in longer-context tasks. Second, we find that current approximate attention methods systematically underperform across long-context tasks. Finally, we confirm that exact fine-tuning based methods are generally effective within the range of their extension, whereas extrapolation remains challenging. All codebases, models, and checkpoints will be made available open-source, promoting transparency and facilitating further research in this critical area of AI development.

Smart Multi-Modal Search: Contextual Sparse and Dense Embedding Integration in Adobe Express

As user content and queries become increasingly multi-modal, the need for effective multi-modal search systems has grown. Traditional search systems often rely on textual and metadata annotations for indexed images, while multi-modal embeddings like CLIP enable direct search using text and image embeddings. However, embedding-based approaches face challenges in integrating contextual features such as user locale and recency. Building a scalable multi-modal search system requires fine-tuning several components. This paper presents a multi-modal search architecture and a series of AB tests that optimize embeddings and multi-modal technologies in Adobe Express template search. We address considerations such as embedding model selection, the roles of embeddings in matching and ranking, and the balance between dense and sparse embeddings. Our iterative approach demonstrates how utilizing sparse, dense, and contextual features enhances short and long query search, significantly reduces null rates (over 70\%), and increases click-through rates (CTR). Our findings provide insights into developing robust multi-modal search systems, thereby enhancing relevance for complex queries.