Cairong Zhao

Dr. Cairong Zhao

College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

10Years (2017-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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23 January 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Cairong ZhaoCairong Zhao
Cairong Zhao
CWChutian Wang
Chutian Wang
GHGuosheng Hu
Guosheng Hu
HCHaonan Chen
Haonan Chen
CLChun Liu
Chun Liu
JTJinhui Tang
Jinhui Tang
With the rapid development of Deepfake synthesis technology, our information security and personal privacy have been severely threatened in recent years. To achieve a robust Deepfake detection, researchers attempt to exploit the joint spatial-temporal information in the videos, like using recurrent networks and 3D convolutional networks. However, these spatial-temporal models remain room to improve. Another general challenge for spatial-temporal models is that people do not clearly understand what these spatial-temporal models really learn. To address these two challenges, in this paper, we propose an Interpretable Spatial-Temporal Video Transformer (ISTVT), which consists of a novel decomposed spatial-temporal self-attention and a self-subtract mechanism to capture spatial artifacts and temporal inconsistency for robust Deepfake detection. Thanks to this decomposition, we propose to interpret ISTVT by visualizing the discriminative regions for both spatial and temporal dimensions via the relevance (the pixel-wise importance on the input) propagation algorithm. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale datasets, including FaceForensics++, FaceShifter, DeeperForensics, Celeb-DF, and DFDC datasets. Our strong performance of intra-dataset and cross-dataset Deepfake detection demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method, and our visualization-based interpretability offers people insights into our model.

28 February 2022 in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Cairong ZhaoCairong Zhao
Cairong Zhao
LZLiang Zhu
Liang Zhu
SDShuguang Dou
Shuguang Dou
WDWeihong Deng
Weihong Deng
LWLiang Wang
Liang Wang
One of the key challenges to the X-ray security check is to detect the overlapped items in backpacks or suitcases in the X-ray images. Most existing methods improve the robustness of models to the object overlapping problem by enhancing the underlying visual information such as colors and edges. However, this strategy ignores the situations that the objects have similar visual clues as to the background, and objects overlapping each other. Since the two cases rarely appear in existing datasets, we contribute a novel dataset – Cutters and Liquid Containers X-ray Dataset (CLCXray) to complete the related research. Furthermore, we propose a novel Label-aware Mechanism (LA) to tackle the object overlapping problem. Particularly, LA establishes the associations between feature channels and different labels and adjusts the features according to the assigned labels (or pseudo labels) to help improve the prediction results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the LA is accurate and robust to detect overlapped objects, and also validate the effectiveness and the good generalization of the LA for arbitrary state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, experimental results show that the network constructed by the LA is superior to the SOTA models on OPIXray and CLCXray, especially solving the challenges of the subset of the highly overlapped objects.

6 April 2021 in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Cairong ZhaoCairong Zhao
Cairong Zhao
XLXinbi Lv
Xinbi Lv
SDShuguang Dou
Shuguang Dou
SZShanshan Zhang
Shanshan Zhang
JWJun Wu
Jun Wu
LWLiang Wang
Liang Wang
Person re-identification (re-id) suffers from the significant challenge of occlusion, where an image contains occlusions and less discriminative pedestrian information. However, certain work consistently attempts to design complex modules to capture implicit information (including human pose landmarks, mask maps, and spatial information). The network, consequently, focuses on discriminative features learning on human non-occluded body regions and realizes effective matching under spatial misalignment. Few studies have focused on data augmentation, given that existing single-based data augmentation methods bring limited performance improvement. To address the occlusion problem, we propose a novel Incremental Generative Occlusion Adversarial Suppression (IGOAS) network. It consists of 1) an incremental generative occlusion block, generating easy-to-hard occlusion data, that makes the network more robust to occlusion by gradually learning harder occlusion instead of hardest occlusion directly. And 2) a global-adversarial suppression (G&A) framework with a global branch and an adversarial suppression branch. The global branch extracts steady global features of the images. The adversarial suppression branch, embedded with two occlusion suppression module, minimizes the generated occlusion’s response and strengthens attentive feature representation on human non-occluded body regions. Finally, we get a more discriminative pedestrian feature descriptor by concatenating two branches’ features, which is robust to the occlusion problem. The experiments on the occluded dataset show the competitive performance of IGOAS. On Occluded-DukeMTMC, it achieves 60.1% Rank-1 accuracy and 49.4% mAP.

6 February 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Cairong ZhaoCairong Zhao
Cairong Zhao
XLXinbi Lv
Xinbi Lv
ZZZhang Zhang
Zhang Zhang
WZWangmeng Zuo
Wangmeng Zuo
JWJun Wu
Jun Wu
DMDuoqian Miao
Duoqian Miao

9 February 2024 in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Cairong ZhaoCairong Zhao
Cairong Zhao
YWYubin Wang
Yubin Wang
XJXinyang Jiang
Xinyang Jiang
YSYifei Shen
Yifei Shen
KSKaitao Song
Kaitao Song
DMDuoqian Miao
Duoqian Miao
Prompt learning stands out as one of the most efficient approaches for adapting powerful vision-language foundational models like CLIP to downstream datasets by tuning learnable prompt vectors with very few samples. However, despite its success in achieving remarkable performance on in-domain data, prompt learning still faces the significant challenge of effectively generalizing to novel classes and domains. Some existing methods address this concern by dynamically generating distinct prompts for different domains. Yet, they overlook the inherent potential of prompts to generalize across unseen domains. To address these limitations, our study introduces an innovative prompt learning paradigm, called MetaPrompt, aiming to directly learn domain invariant prompt in few-shot scenarios. To facilitate learning prompts for image and text inputs independently, we present a dual-modality prompt tuning network comprising two pairs of coupled encoders. Our study centers on an alternate episodic training algorithm to enrich the generalization capacity of the learned prompts. In contrast to traditional episodic training algorithms, our approach incorporates both in-domain updates and domain-split updates in a batch-wise manner. For in-domain updates, we introduce a novel asymmetric contrastive learning paradigm, where representations from the pre-trained encoder assume supervision to regularize prompts from the prompted encoder. To enhance performance on out-of-domain distribution, we propose a domain-split optimization on visual prompts for cross-domain tasks or textual prompts for cross-class tasks during domain-split updates. Extensive experiments across 11 datasets for base-to-new generalization and 4 datasets for domain generalization exhibit favorable performance. Compared with the state-of-the-art method, MetaPrompt achieves an absolute gain of 1.02% on the overall harmonic mean in base-to-new generalization and consistently demonstrates superiority over all benchmarks in domain generalization.

16 September 2025 in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
JGJunyao Gao
Junyao Gao
YSYanan Sun
Yanan Sun
YLYanchen Liu
Yanchen Liu
YTYinhao Tang
Yinhao Tang
YZYanhong Zeng
Yanhong Zeng
Cairong ZhaoCairong Zhao
Cairong Zhao
Image Style Transfer aims to replicate the style of a reference image based on the content from a text description or another image. With the significant advancements in image generation through diffusion models, recent studies have attempted to either fine-tuning embeddings to learn the single style or utilizing the pre-trained CLIP image encoder to extract style representations. However, style-tuning requires substantial computational resources and the pre-trained CLIP image encoder is trained for semantic understanding rather than for style representation. To address these challenges, we introduce a style-aware encoder and a well-organized style dataset called StyleGallery to learn a good style representation that is crucial and sufficient for generalized style transfer without test-time tuning. With dedicated design for style learning, this style-aware encoder is trained to extract expressive style representation from multi-level patches with decoupling training strategy, and StyleGallery enables the generalization ability. Moreover, we employ a content extraction and content-fusion encoder to enhance image-driven style transfer. We highlight that, our approach, named StyleShot, is simple yet effective in mimicking various desired styles, i.e., 3D, flat, abstract or even fine-grained styles, without test-time tuning. Rigorous experiments validate that, StyleShot achieves superior performance across a wide range of styles compared to existing state-of-the-art text- and image-driven methods.