Portrait of Yang Wang

Yang Wang

Associate Academic Member
Associate Professor, Concordia University, Computer science and software engineering
Research Topics
Applied Machine Learning
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Website
Google Scholar

Current Students

Li Gu
PhD - Concordia University
Wenhao Gu
PhD - Concordia University
Linlian Jiang
PhD - Concordia University
Website
Jacob Kingi
PhD - Concordia University
Sadman Pinon
PhD - Concordia University
Website
Github
Wang Ziqiang
PhD - Concordia University
Github
Google Scholar

Publications

PointMAC: Meta-Learned Adaptation for Robust Test-Time Point Cloud Completion
Linlian Jiang
Rui Ma
Li Gu
Ziqiang Wang
Xinxin Zuo
Yang Wang
Point cloud completion is essential for robust 3D perception in safety-critical applications such as robotics and augmented reality. However… (see more), existing models perform static inference and rely heavily on inductive biases learned during training, limiting their ability to adapt to novel structural patterns and sensor-induced distortions at test time. To address this limitation, we propose PointMAC, a meta-learned framework for robust test-time adaptation in point cloud completion. It enables sample-specific refinement without requiring additional supervision. Our method optimizes the completion model under two self-supervised auxiliary objectives that simulate structural and sensor-level incompleteness. A meta-auxiliary learning strategy based on Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) ensures that adaptation driven by auxiliary objectives is consistently aligned with the primary completion task. During inference, we adapt the shared encoder on-the-fly by optimizing auxiliary losses, with the decoder kept fixed. To further stabilize adaptation, we introduce Adaptive
2025-12-02
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (Accept (poster))
doi.org
openreview.net
MetaWriter: Personalized Handwritten Text Recognition Using Meta-Learned Prompt Tuning
Wenhao Gu
Li Gu
Ching Yee Suen
Yang Wang
Recent advancements in handwritten text recognition (HTR) have enabled the effective conversion of handwritten text to digital formats. Howe… (see more)ver, achieving robust recognition across diverse writing styles remains challenging. Traditional HTR methods lack writer-specific personalization at test time due to limitations in model architecture and training strategies. Existing attempts to bridge this gap, through gradient-based meta-learning, still require labeled examples and suffer from parameter-inefficient fine-tuning, leading to substantial computational and memory overhead. To overcome these challenges, we propose an efficient framework that formulates personalization as prompt tuning, incorporating an auxiliary image reconstruction task with a self-supervised loss to guide prompt adaptation with unlabeled test-time examples. To ensure self-supervised loss effectively minimizes text recognition error, we leverage meta-learning to learn the optimal initialization of the prompts. As a result, our method allows the model to efficiently capture unique writing styles by updating less than 1% of its parameters and eliminating the need for time-intensive annotation processes. We validate our approach on the RIMES and IAM Handwriting Database benchmarks, where it consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods while using 20x fewer parameters. We believe this represents a significant advancement in personalized handwritten text recognition, paving the way for more reliable and practical deployment in resource-constrained scenarios.
2025-06-12
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Accept)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Learning to Adapt Frozen CLIP for Few-Shot Test-Time Domain Adaptation
Zhixiang Chi
Li Gu
Huan Liu
Ziqiang Wang
Yanan Wu
Yang Wang
Konstantinos N Plataniotis
Few-shot Test-Time Domain Adaptation focuses on adapting a model at test time to a specific domain using only a few unlabeled examples, addr… (see more)essing domain shift. Prior methods leverage CLIP's strong out-of-distribution (OOD) abilities by generating domain-specific prompts to guide its generalized, frozen features. However, since downstream datasets are not explicitly seen by CLIP, solely depending on the feature space knowledge is constrained by CLIP's prior knowledge. Notably, when using a less robust backbone like ViT-B/16, performance significantly drops on challenging real-world benchmarks. Departing from the state-of-the-art of inheriting the intrinsic OOD capability of CLIP, this work introduces learning directly on the input space to complement the dataset-specific knowledge for frozen CLIP. Specifically, an independent side branch is attached in parallel with CLIP and enforced to learn exclusive knowledge via revert attention. To better capture the dataset-specific label semantics for downstream adaptation, we propose to enhance the inter-dispersion among text features via greedy text ensemble and refinement. The text and visual features are then progressively fused in a domain-aware manner by a generated domain prompt to adapt toward a specific domain. Extensive experiments show our method's superiority on 5 large-scale benchmarks (WILDS and DomainNet), notably improving over smaller networks like ViT-B/16 with gains of \textbf{+5.1} in F1 for iWildCam and \textbf{+3.1\%} in WC Acc for FMoW.
2025-04-22
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
doi.org
openreview.net