Mushui Liu

📝 Selected Publications

Full publication list can be found on Google Scholar.
^*equal contribution; ^#corresponding author.

2024

1. 

   Mars: Mixture of Auto-Regressive Models for Fine-grained Text-to-Image Synthesis

   Wanggui He^*, Siming Fu^*, Mushui Liu^*, Xierui Wang, Wenyi Xiao, Fangxun Shu, Yi Wang, Lei Zhang, Zhelun Yu, Haoyuan Li, Ziwei Huang, LeiLei Gan, Hao Jiang

   In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2025

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   Auto-regressive models have made significant progress in the realm of text-to-image synthesis, yet devising an appropriate model architecture and training strategy to achieve a satisfactory level remains an important avenue of exploration. In this work, we introduce MARS, a novel framework for T2I generation that incorporates a specially designed Semantic Vision-Language Integration Expert (SemVIE). This innovative component integrates pre-trained LLMs by independently processing linguistic and visual information—freezing the textual component while fine-tuning the visual component. This methodology preserves the NLP capabilities of LLMs while imbuing them with exceptional visual understanding. Building upon the powerful base of the pre-trained Qwen-7B, MARS stands out with its bilingual generative capabilities corresponding to both English and Chinese language prompts and the capacity for joint image and text generation. The flexibility of this framework lends itself to migration towards \textbf{any-to-any} task adaptability. Furthermore, MARS employs a multi-stage training strategy that first establishes robust image-text alignment through complementary bidirectional tasks and subsequently concentrates on refining the T2I generation process, significantly augmenting text-image synchrony and the granularity of image details. Notably, MARS requires only 9% of the GPU days needed by SD1.5, yet it achieves remarkable results across a variety of benchmarks, illustrating the training efficiency and the potential for swift deployment in various applications.

2. 

   LLM4GEN: Leveraging Semantic Representation of LLMs for Text-to-Image Generation

   Mushui Liu^*, Yuhang Ma^*, Zhen Yang, Jun Dan, Yunlong Yu, Zeng Zhao, Bai Liu, Changjie Fan, Zhipeng Hu

   In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2025

   Abs PDF

   Diffusion models have exhibited substantial success in text-to-image generation. However, they often encounter challenges when dealing with complex and dense prompts involving multiple objects, attribute binding, and long descriptions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called LLM4GEN, which enhances the semantic understanding of text-to-image diffusion models by leveraging the representation of Large Language Models (LLMs). It can be seamlessly incorporated into various diffusion models as a plug-and-play component. A specially designed Cross-Adapter Module (CAM) integrates the original text features of text-to-image models with LLM features, thereby enhancing text-to-image generation. Additionally, to facilitate and correct entity-attribute relationships in text prompts, we develop an entity-guided regularization loss to further improve generation performance. We also introduce DensePrompts, which contains 7,000 dense prompts to provide a comprehensive evaluation for the text-to-image generation task. Experiments indicate that LLM4GEN significantly improves the semantic alignment of SD1.5 and SDXL, demonstrating increases of 9.69% and 12.90% in color on T2I-CompBench, respectively. Moreover, it surpasses existing models in terms of sample quality, image-text alignment, and human evaluation.

3. 

   Envisioning Class Entity Reasoning by Large Language Models for Few-shot Learning

   Mushui Liu, Fangtai Wu, Bozheng Li, Ziqian Lu, Yunlong Yu, Xi Li

   In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2025

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   Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to recognize new concepts using a limited number of visual samples. Existing approaches attempt to incorporate semantic information into the limited visual data for category understanding. However, these methods often enrich class-level feature representations with abstract category names, failing to capture the nuanced features essential for effective generalization. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for FSL, which incorporates both the abstract class semantics and the concrete class entities extracted from Large Language Models (LLMs), to enhance the representation of the class prototypes. Specifically, our framework composes a Semantic-guided Visual Pattern Extraction (SVPE) module and a Prototype-Calibration (PC) module, where the SVPE meticulously extracts semanticaware visual patterns across diverse scales, while the PC module seamlessly integrates these patterns to refine the visual prototype, enhancing its representativeness. Extensive experiments on four few-shot classification benchmarks and the BSCD-FSL cross-domain benchmarks showcase remarkable advancements over the current state-of-the-art methods. Notably, for the challenging one-shot setting, our approach, utilizing the ResNet-12 backbone, achieves an impressive average improvement of 1.95% over the second-best competitor.

4. 

   Frame Order Matters: A Temporal Sequence-Aware Model for Few-Shot Action Recognition

   Bozheng Li^*, Mushui Liu^*, Gaoang Wang, Yunlong Yu

   In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2025

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   In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Sequence-Aware Model (TSAM) for few-shot action recognition (FSAR), which incorporates a sequential perceiver adapter into the pre-training framework, to integrate both the spatial information and the sequential temporal dynamics into the feature embeddings. Different from the existing fine-tuning approaches that capture temporal information by exploring the relationships among all the frames, our perceiver-based adapter recurrently captures the sequential dynamics alongside the timeline, which could perceive the order change. To obtain the discriminative representations for each class, we extend a textual corpus for each class derived from the large language models (LLMs) and enrich the visual prototypes by integrating the contextual semantic information. Besides, We introduce an unbalanced optimal transport strategy for feature matching that mitigates the impact of class-unrelated features, thereby facilitating more effective decision-making. Experimental results on five FSAR datasets demonstrate that our method set a new benchmark, beating the second-best competitors with large margins.

5. 

   OmniCLIP: Adapting CLIP for Video Recognition with Spatial-Temporal Omni-Scale Feature Learning

   Mushui Liu, Bozheng Li, Yunlong Yu

   In European Conference on Artifical Intelligence (ECAI) 2024

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   Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) e.g. CLIP have made great progress in video recognition. Despite the improvement brought by the strong visual backbone in extracting spatial features, CLIP still falls short in capturing and integrating spatial-temporal features which is essential for video recognition. In this paper, we propose OmniCLIP, a framework that adapts CLIP for video recognition by focusing on learning comprehensive features encompassing spatial, temporal, and dynamic spatial-temporal scales, which we refer to as omni-scale features. This is achieved through the design of spatial-temporal blocks that include parallel temporal adapters (PTA), enabling efficient temporal modeling. Additionally, we introduce a self-prompt generator (SPG) module to capture dynamic object spatial features. The synergy between PTA and SPG allows OmniCLIP to discern varying spatial information across frames and assess object scales over time. We have conducted extensive experiments in supervised video recognition, few-shot video recognition, and zero-shot recognition tasks. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially with OmniCLIP achieving a top-1 accuracy of 74.30% on HMDB51 in a 16-shot setting, surpassing the recent MotionPrompt approach even with full training data.