Liqiang Niu


2025

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AVG-LLaVA: An Efficient Large Multimodal Model with Adaptive Visual Granularity
Zhibin Lan | Liqiang Niu | Fandong Meng | Wenbo Li | Jie Zhou | Jinsong Su
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Recently, large multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved significant advancements. When dealing with high-resolution images, dominant LMMs typically divide them into multiple local images and a global image, leading to a large number of visual tokens. In this work, we introduce AVG-LLaVA, an LMM that can adaptively select the appropriate visual granularity based on the input image and instruction. Specifically, we first apply the multiple pooling layers to obtain visual tokens at different granularities. Then we propose a visual granularity router, which includes a Transformer layer, an MLP layer, and a voter layer, used to select the appropriate visual granularity based on the image and instruction. Furthermore, we put forward RGLF, a novel training paradigm that aims at aligning the granularity predicted by the router with the preferences of the LMM, without the need for additional manually annotated data. Extensive experiments and analysis show that AVG-LLaVA achieves superior performance across 11 benchmarks, as well as significantly reduces the number of visual tokens and speeds up inference (e.g., an 85.3% reduction in visual tokens and a 2.53× increase in inference speed on the AI2D benchmark).

2024

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Translatotron-V(ison): An End-to-End Model for In-Image Machine Translation
Zhibin Lan | Liqiang Niu | Fandong Meng | Jie Zhou | Min Zhang | Jinsong Su
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

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UMTIT: Unifying Recognition, Translation, and Generation for Multimodal Text Image Translation
Liqiang Niu | Fandong Meng | Jie Zhou
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Prior research in Image Machine Translation (IMT) has focused on either translating the source image solely into the target language text or exclusively into the target image. As a result, the former approach lacked the capacity to generate target images, while the latter was insufficient in producing target text. In this paper, we present a Unified Multimodal Text Image Translation (UMTIT) model that not only translates text images into the target language but also generates consistent target images. The UMTIT model consists of two image-text modality conversion steps: the first step converts images to text to recognize the source text and generate translations, while the second step transforms text to images to create target images based on the translations. Due to the limited availability of public datasets, we have constructed two multimodal image translation datasets. Experimental results show that our UMTIT model is versatile enough to handle tasks across multiple modalities and outperforms previous methods. Notably, UMTIT surpasses the state-of-the-art TrOCR in text recognition tasks, achieving a lower Character Error Rate (CER); it also outperforms cascading methods in text translation tasks, obtaining a higher BLEU score; and, most importantly, UMTIT can generate high-quality target text images.