Showing 1–11 of 11 results for author: Li, J C L

VP-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Visual Prompting in Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors: Mingjie Xu, Jinpeng Chen, Yuzhi Zhao, Jason Chun Lok Li, Yue Qiu, Zekang Du, Mengyang Wu, Pingping Zhang, Kun Li, Hongzheng Yang, Wenao Ma, Jiaheng Wei, Qinbin Li, Kangcheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled a wide range of advanced vision-language applications, including fine-grained object recognition and contextual understanding. When querying specific regions or objects in an image, human users naturally use "visual prompts" (VPs), such as bounding boxes, to provide reference. However, no existing benchmark systematically evaluates the ability… ▽ More Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled a wide range of advanced vision-language applications, including fine-grained object recognition and contextual understanding. When querying specific regions or objects in an image, human users naturally use "visual prompts" (VPs), such as bounding boxes, to provide reference. However, no existing benchmark systematically evaluates the ability of MLLMs to interpret such VPs. This gap leaves it unclear whether current MLLMs can effectively recognize VPs, an intuitive prompting method for humans, and use them to solve problems. To address this limitation, we introduce VP-Bench, a benchmark for assessing MLLMs' capability in VP perception and utilization. VP-Bench employs a two-stage evaluation framework: Stage 1 examines models' ability to perceive VPs in natural scenes, using 30k visualized prompts spanning eight shapes and 355 attribute combinations. Stage 2 investigates the impact of VPs on downstream tasks, measuring their effectiveness in real-world problem-solving scenarios. Using VP-Bench, we evaluate 28 MLLMs, including proprietary systems (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-source models (e.g., InternVL3 and Qwen2.5-VL), and provide a comprehensive analysis of factors that affect VP understanding, such as variations in VP attributes, question arrangement, and model scale. VP-Bench establishes a new reference framework for studying how MLLMs comprehend and resolve grounded referring questions. △ Less

Submitted 14 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Comments: This is the extended version of the paper accepted at AAAI 2026, which includes all technical appendices and additional experimental details

From Exploration to Exploitation: A Two-Stage Entropy RLVR Approach for Noise-Tolerant MLLM Training

Authors: Donglai Xu, Hongzheng Yang, Yuzhi Zhao, Pingping Zhang, Jinpeng Chen, Wenao Ma, Zhijian Hou, Mengyang Wu, Xiaolei Li, Senkang Hu, Ziyi Guan, Jason Chun Lok Li, Lai Man Po

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is highly dependent on high-quality labeled data, which is often scarce and prone to substantial annotation noise in real-world scenarios. Existing unsupervised RLVR methods, including pure entropy minimization, can overfit to incorrect labels and limit the crucial reward ranking signal for Group-Rel… ▽ More Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is highly dependent on high-quality labeled data, which is often scarce and prone to substantial annotation noise in real-world scenarios. Existing unsupervised RLVR methods, including pure entropy minimization, can overfit to incorrect labels and limit the crucial reward ranking signal for Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). To address these challenges and enhance noise tolerance, we propose a novel two-stage, token-level entropy optimization method for RLVR. This approach dynamically guides the model from exploration to exploitation during training. In the initial exploration phase, token-level entropy maximization promotes diverse and stochastic output generation, serving as a strong regularizer that prevents premature convergence to noisy labels and ensures sufficient intra-group variation, which enables more reliable reward gradient estimation in GRPO. As training progresses, the method transitions into the exploitation phase, where token-level entropy minimization encourages the model to produce confident and deterministic outputs, thereby consolidating acquired knowledge and refining prediction accuracy. Empirically, across three MLLM backbones - Qwen2-VL-2B, Qwen2-VL-7B, and Qwen2.5-VL-3B - spanning diverse noise settings and multiple tasks, our phased strategy consistently outperforms prior approaches by unifying and enhancing external, internal, and entropy-based methods, delivering robust and superior performance across the board. △ Less

Submitted 10 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

KG-RAG: Enhancing GUI Agent Decision-Making via Knowledge Graph-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Authors: Ziyi Guan, Jason Chun Lok Li, Zhijian Hou, Pingping Zhang, Donglai Xu, Yuzhi Zhao, Mengyang Wu, Jinpeng Chen, Thanh-Toan Nguyen, Pengfei Xian, Wenao Ma, Shengchao Qin, Graziano Chesi, Ngai Wong

Abstract: Despite recent progress, Graphic User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with complex mobile tasks due to limited app-specific knowledge. While UI Transition Graphs (UTGs) offer structured navigation representations, they are underutilized due to poor extraction and inefficient integration. We introduce KG-RAG, a Knowledge Graph-driven Retrieval-Augmented Gener… ▽ More Despite recent progress, Graphic User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with complex mobile tasks due to limited app-specific knowledge. While UI Transition Graphs (UTGs) offer structured navigation representations, they are underutilized due to poor extraction and inefficient integration. We introduce KG-RAG, a Knowledge Graph-driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework that transforms fragmented UTGs into structured vector databases for efficient real-time retrieval. By leveraging an intent-guided LLM search method, KG-RAG generates actionable navigation paths, enhancing agent decision-making. Experiments across diverse mobile apps show that KG-RAG outperforms existing methods, achieving a 75.8% success rate (8.9% improvement over AutoDroid), 84.6% decision accuracy (8.1% improvement), and reducing average task steps from 4.5 to 4.1. Additionally, we present KG-Android-Bench and KG-Harmony-Bench, two benchmarks tailored to the Chinese mobile ecosystem for future research. Finally, KG-RAG transfers to web/desktop (+40% SR on Weibo-web; +20% on QQ Music-desktop), and a UTG cost ablation shows accuracy saturates at ~4h per complex app, enabling practical deployment trade-offs. △ Less

Submitted 30 August, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

Comments: Accepted by the EMNLP 2025

LLaVA-SpaceSGG: Visual Instruct Tuning for Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation with Enhanced Spatial Relations

Authors: Mingjie Xu, Mengyang Wu, Yuzhi Zhao, Jason Chun Lok Li, Weifeng Ou

Abstract: Scene Graph Generation (SGG) converts visual scenes into structured graph representations, providing deeper scene understanding for complex vision tasks. However, existing SGG models often overlook essential spatial relationships and struggle with generalization in open-vocabulary contexts. To address these limitations, we propose LLaVA-SpaceSGG, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) designed f… ▽ More Scene Graph Generation (SGG) converts visual scenes into structured graph representations, providing deeper scene understanding for complex vision tasks. However, existing SGG models often overlook essential spatial relationships and struggle with generalization in open-vocabulary contexts. To address these limitations, we propose LLaVA-SpaceSGG, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) designed for open-vocabulary SGG with enhanced spatial relation modeling. To train it, we collect the SGG instruction-tuning dataset, named SpaceSGG. This dataset is constructed by combining publicly available datasets and synthesizing data using open-source models within our data construction pipeline. It combines object locations, object relations, and depth information, resulting in three data formats: spatial SGG description, question-answering, and conversation. To enhance the transfer of MLLMs' inherent capabilities to the SGG task, we introduce a two-stage training paradigm. Experiments show that LLaVA-SpaceSGG outperforms other open-vocabulary SGG methods, boosting recall by 8.6% and mean recall by 28.4% compared to the baseline. Our codebase, dataset, and trained models are publicly accessible on GitHub at the following URL: https://github.com/Endlinc/LLaVA-SpaceSGG. △ Less

Submitted 9 December, 2024; originally announced December 2024.

Comments: Accepted by the WACV 2025, including supplementary material

ASMR: Activation-sharing Multi-resolution Coordinate Networks For Efficient Inference

Authors: Jason Chun Lok Li, Steven Tin Sui Luo, Le Xu, Ngai Wong

Abstract: Coordinate network or implicit neural representation (INR) is a fast-emerging method for encoding natural signals (such as images and videos) with the benefits of a compact neural representation. While numerous methods have been proposed to increase the encoding capabilities of an INR, an often overlooked aspect is the inference efficiency, usually measured in multiply-accumulate (MAC) count. This… ▽ More Coordinate network or implicit neural representation (INR) is a fast-emerging method for encoding natural signals (such as images and videos) with the benefits of a compact neural representation. While numerous methods have been proposed to increase the encoding capabilities of an INR, an often overlooked aspect is the inference efficiency, usually measured in multiply-accumulate (MAC) count. This is particularly critical in use cases where inference throughput is greatly limited by hardware constraints. To this end, we propose the Activation-Sharing Multi-Resolution (ASMR) coordinate network that combines multi-resolution coordinate decomposition with hierarchical modulations. Specifically, an ASMR model enables the sharing of activations across grids of the data. This largely decouples its inference cost from its depth which is directly correlated to its reconstruction capability, and renders a near O(1) inference complexity irrespective of the number of layers. Experiments show that ASMR can reduce the MAC of a vanilla SIREN model by up to 500x while achieving an even higher reconstruction quality than its SIREN baseline. △ Less

Submitted 20 May, 2024; originally announced May 2024.

Comments: ICLR 2024 (v3: 21 pages, 11 figures, Project Page: https://github.com/stevolopolis/asmr.git)

Nonparametric Teaching of Implicit Neural Representations

Authors: Chen Zhang, Steven Tin Sui Luo, Jason Chun Lok Li, Yik-Chung Wu, Ngai Wong

Abstract: We investigate the learning of implicit neural representation (INR) using an overparameterized multilayer perceptron (MLP) via a novel nonparametric teaching perspective. The latter offers an efficient example selection framework for teaching nonparametrically defined (viz. non-closed-form) target functions, such as image functions defined by 2D grids of pixels. To address the costly training of I… ▽ More We investigate the learning of implicit neural representation (INR) using an overparameterized multilayer perceptron (MLP) via a novel nonparametric teaching perspective. The latter offers an efficient example selection framework for teaching nonparametrically defined (viz. non-closed-form) target functions, such as image functions defined by 2D grids of pixels. To address the costly training of INRs, we propose a paradigm called Implicit Neural Teaching (INT) that treats INR learning as a nonparametric teaching problem, where the given signal being fitted serves as the target function. The teacher then selects signal fragments for iterative training of the MLP to achieve fast convergence. By establishing a connection between MLP evolution through parameter-based gradient descent and that of function evolution through functional gradient descent in nonparametric teaching, we show for the first time that teaching an overparameterized MLP is consistent with teaching a nonparametric learner. This new discovery readily permits a convenient drop-in of nonparametric teaching algorithms to broadly enhance INR training efficiency, demonstrating 30%+ training time savings across various input modalities. △ Less

Submitted 17 May, 2024; originally announced May 2024.

Comments: ICML 2024 (24 pages, 13 figures)

Learning Spatially Collaged Fourier Bases for Implicit Neural Representation

Authors: Jason Chun Lok Li, Chang Liu, Binxiao Huang, Ngai Wong

Abstract: Existing approaches to Implicit Neural Representation (INR) can be interpreted as a global scene representation via a linear combination of Fourier bases of different frequencies. However, such universal basis functions can limit the representation capability in local regions where a specific component is unnecessary, resulting in unpleasant artifacts. To this end, we introduce a learnable spatial… ▽ More Existing approaches to Implicit Neural Representation (INR) can be interpreted as a global scene representation via a linear combination of Fourier bases of different frequencies. However, such universal basis functions can limit the representation capability in local regions where a specific component is unnecessary, resulting in unpleasant artifacts. To this end, we introduce a learnable spatial mask that effectively dispatches distinct Fourier bases into respective regions. This translates into collaging Fourier patches, thus enabling an accurate representation of complex signals. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior reconstruction quality of the proposed approach over existing baselines across various INR tasks, including image fitting, video representation, and 3D shape representation. Our method outperforms all other baselines, improving the image fitting PSNR by over 3dB and 3D reconstruction to 98.81 IoU and 0.0011 Chamfer Distance. △ Less

Submitted 28 December, 2023; originally announced December 2023.

Comments: 11 pages, 13 figures, Accepted at the 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24)

A Unifying Tensor View for Lightweight CNNs

Authors: Jason Chun Lok Li, Rui Lin, Jiajun Zhou, Edmund Yin Mun Lam, Ngai Wong

Abstract: Despite the decomposition of convolutional kernels for lightweight CNNs being well studied, existing works that rely on tensor network diagrams or hyperdimensional abstraction lack geometry intuition. This work devises a new perspective by linking a 3D-reshaped kernel tensor to its various slice-wise and rank-1 decompositions, permitting a straightforward connection between various tensor approxim… ▽ More Despite the decomposition of convolutional kernels for lightweight CNNs being well studied, existing works that rely on tensor network diagrams or hyperdimensional abstraction lack geometry intuition. This work devises a new perspective by linking a 3D-reshaped kernel tensor to its various slice-wise and rank-1 decompositions, permitting a straightforward connection between various tensor approximations and efficient CNN modules. Specifically, it is discovered that a pointwise-depthwise-pointwise (PDP) configuration constitutes a viable construct for lightweight CNNs. Moreover, a novel link to the latest ShiftNet is established, inspiring a first-ever shift layer pruning that achieves nearly 50% compression with < 1% drop in accuracy for ShiftResNet. △ Less

Submitted 15 December, 2023; originally announced December 2023.

Comments: 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted in 2023 IEEE 15th International Conference on ASIC (ASICON 2023)

Hundred-Kilobyte Lookup Tables for Efficient Single-Image Super-Resolution

Authors: Binxiao Huang, Jason Chun Lok Li, Jie Ran, Boyu Li, Jiajun Zhou, Dahai Yu, Ngai Wong

Abstract: Conventional super-resolution (SR) schemes make heavy use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which involve intensive multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations, and require specialized hardware such as graphics processing units. This contradicts the regime of edge AI that often runs on devices strained by power, computing, and storage resources. Such a challenge has motivated a series of lookup ta… ▽ More Conventional super-resolution (SR) schemes make heavy use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which involve intensive multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations, and require specialized hardware such as graphics processing units. This contradicts the regime of edge AI that often runs on devices strained by power, computing, and storage resources. Such a challenge has motivated a series of lookup table (LUT)-based SR schemes that employ simple LUT readout and largely elude CNN computation. Nonetheless, the multi-megabyte LUTs in existing methods still prohibit on-chip storage and necessitate off-chip memory transport. This work tackles this storage hurdle and innovates hundred-kilobyte LUT (HKLUT) models amenable to on-chip cache. Utilizing an asymmetric two-branch multistage network coupled with a suite of specialized kernel patterns, HKLUT demonstrates an uncompromising performance and superior hardware efficiency over existing LUT schemes. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/jasonli0707/hklut. △ Less

Submitted 8 May, 2024; v1 submitted 10 December, 2023; originally announced December 2023.

Lite it fly: An All-Deformable-Butterfly Network

Authors: Rui Lin, Jason Chun Lok Li, Jiajun Zhou, Binxiao Huang, Jie Ran, Ngai Wong

Abstract: Most deep neural networks (DNNs) consist fundamentally of convolutional and/or fully connected layers, wherein the linear transform can be cast as the product between a filter matrix and a data matrix obtained by arranging feature tensors into columns. The lately proposed deformable butterfly (DeBut) decomposes the filter matrix into generalized, butterflylike factors, thus achieving network compr… ▽ More Most deep neural networks (DNNs) consist fundamentally of convolutional and/or fully connected layers, wherein the linear transform can be cast as the product between a filter matrix and a data matrix obtained by arranging feature tensors into columns. The lately proposed deformable butterfly (DeBut) decomposes the filter matrix into generalized, butterflylike factors, thus achieving network compression orthogonal to the traditional ways of pruning or low-rank decomposition. This work reveals an intimate link between DeBut and a systematic hierarchy of depthwise and pointwise convolutions, which explains the empirically good performance of DeBut layers. By developing an automated DeBut chain generator, we show for the first time the viability of homogenizing a DNN into all DeBut layers, thus achieving an extreme sparsity and compression. Various examples and hardware benchmarks verify the advantages of All-DeBut networks. In particular, we show it is possible to compress a PointNet to < 5% parameters with < 5% accuracy drop, a record not achievable by other compression schemes. △ Less

Submitted 14 November, 2023; originally announced November 2023.

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted as a brief paper in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)

PECAN: A Product-Quantized Content Addressable Memory Network

Authors: Jie Ran, Rui Lin, Jason Chun Lok Li, Jiajun Zhou, Ngai Wong

Abstract: A novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture is proposed wherein the filtering and linear transform are realized solely with product quantization (PQ). This results in a natural implementation via content addressable memory (CAM), which transcends regular DNN layer operations and requires only simple table lookup. Two schemes are developed for the end-to-end PQ prototype training, namely, throug… ▽ More A novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture is proposed wherein the filtering and linear transform are realized solely with product quantization (PQ). This results in a natural implementation via content addressable memory (CAM), which transcends regular DNN layer operations and requires only simple table lookup. Two schemes are developed for the end-to-end PQ prototype training, namely, through angle- and distance-based similarities, which differ in their multiplicative and additive natures with different complexity-accuracy tradeoffs. Even more, the distance-based scheme constitutes a truly multiplier-free DNN solution. Experiments confirm the feasibility of such Product-Quantized Content Addressable Memory Network (PECAN), which has strong implication on hardware-efficient deployments especially for in-memory computing. △ Less

Submitted 13 August, 2022; originally announced August 2022.