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Wenyan Li

9 accepted papers

2026

ExpAlign: Expectation-Guided Vision–Language Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Grounding

ICML 2026poster

Open-vocabulary grounding requires accurate vision-language alignment under weak supervision, yet existing methods either rely on global sentence embeddings that lack fine-grained expressiveness or introduce token-level alignment with explicit supervision or heavy cross-attention designs. We propose…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RAVENEA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Visual Culture Understanding

ICLR 2026poster

As vision-language models (VLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for accurate visual culture understanding is becoming critical. Yet, these models frequently fall short in interpreting cultural nuances effectively. Prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval-a…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Hanfu-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark on Cross-Temporal Cultural Understanding and Transcreation

EMNLP 2025

Culture is a rich and dynamic domain that evolves across both geography and time. However, existing studies on cultural understanding with vision-language models (VLMs) primarily emphasize geographic diversity, often overlooking the critical temporal dimensions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Hanf

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Lost in Embeddings: Information Loss in Vision–Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Vision–language models (VLMs) often process visual inputs through a pretrained vision encoder, followed by a projection into the language model’s embedding space via a connector component. While crucial for modality fusion, the potential information loss induced by this projection step and its direc

2024

FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture

EMNLP 2024main

Food is a rich and varied dimension of cultural heritage, crucial to both individuals and social groups. To bridge the gap in the literature on the often-overlooked regional diversity in this domain, we introduce FoodieQA, a manually curated, fine-grained image-text dataset capturing the intricate f…

2024

Understanding Retrieval Robustness for Retrieval-augmented Image Captioning

ACL 2024long

Recent advances in retrieval-augmented models for image captioning highlight the benefit of retrieving related captions for efficient, lightweight models with strong domain-transfer capabilities. While these models demonstrate the success of retrieval augmentation, retrieval models are still far fro…

2024

Words Worth a Thousand Pictures: Measuring and Understanding Perceptual Variability in Text-to-Image Generation

EMNLP 2024main

Diffusion models are the state of the art in text-to-image generation, but their perceptual variability remains understudied. In this paper, we examine how prompts affect image variability in black-box diffusion-based models. We propose W1KP, a human-calibrated measure of variability in a set of ima…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

Temporal Early Exiting for Streaming Speech Commands Recognition

ICASSP 2022accepted

Limited-vocabulary speech commands recognition is the task of classifying a short utterance as one of several speech commands, for which neural networks obtain state-of-the-art results. In particular, recurrent neural networks represent a common approach for streaming commands recognition systems. I…

Cited by 0SourceScholar