Unlocking Spatial Comprehension in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2311.17937v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Mohammad Mahdi Derakhshani, Menglin Xia, Harkirat Behl, Cees G. M. Snoek, Victor Rühle

We propose CompFuser, an image generation pipeline that enhances spatial comprehension and attribute assignment in text-to-image generative models. Our pipeline enables the interpretation of instructions defining spatial relationships between objects in a scene, such as `An image of a gray cat on the left of an orange dog', and generate corresponding images. This is especially important in order to provide more control to the user. CompFuser overcomes the limitation of existing text-to-image diffusion models by decoding the generation of multiple objects into iterative steps: first generating a single object and then editing the image by placing additional objects in their designated positions. To create training data for spatial comprehension and attribute assignment we introduce a synthetic data generation process, that leverages a frozen large language model and a frozen layout-based diffusion model for object placement. We compare our approach to strong baselines and show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art image generation models in spatial comprehension and attribute assignment, despite being 3x to 5x smaller in parameters.

Active Open-Vocabulary Recognition: Let Intelligent Moving Mitigate CLIP Limitations. (arXiv:2311.17938v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Lei Fan, Jianxiong Zhou, Xiaoying Xing, Ying Wu

Active recognition, which allows intelligent agents to explore observations for better recognition performance, serves as a prerequisite for various embodied AI tasks, such as grasping, navigation and room arrangements. Given the evolving environment and the multitude of object classes, it is impractical to include all possible classes during the training stage. In this paper, we aim at advancing active open-vocabulary recognition, empowering embodied agents to actively perceive and classify arbitrary objects. However, directly adopting recent open-vocabulary classification models, like Contrastive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP), poses its unique challenges. Specifically, we observe that CLIP's performance is heavily affected by the viewpoint and occlusions, compromising its reliability in unconstrained embodied perception scenarios. Further, the sequential nature of observations in agent-environment interactions necessitates an effective method for integrating features that maintains discriminative strength for open-vocabulary classification. To address these issues, we introduce a novel agent for active open-vocabulary recognition. The proposed method leverages inter-frame and inter-concept similarities to navigate agent movements and to fuse features, without relying on class-specific knowledge. Compared to baseline CLIP model with 29.6% accuracy on ShapeNet dataset, the proposed agent could achieve 53.3% accuracy for open-vocabulary recognition, without any fine-tuning to the equipped CLIP model. Additional experiments conducted with the Habitat simulator further affirm the efficacy of our method.

Scene Summarization: Clustering Scene Videos into Spatially Diverse Frames. (arXiv:2311.17940v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Chao Chen, Mingzhi Zhu, Ankush Pratap Singh, Yu Yan, Felix Juefei Xu, Chen Feng

We propose scene summarization as a new video-based scene understanding task. It aims to summarize a long video walkthrough of a scene into a small set of frames that are spatially diverse in the scene, which has many impotant applications, such as in surveillance, real estate, and robotics. It stems from video summarization but focuses on long and continuous videos from moving cameras, instead of user-edited fragmented video clips that are more commonly studied in existing video summarization works. Our solution to this task is a two-stage self-supervised pipeline named SceneSum. Its first stage uses clustering to segment the video sequence. Our key idea is to combine visual place recognition (VPR) into this clustering process to promote spatial diversity. Its second stage needs to select a representative keyframe from each cluster as the summary while respecting resource constraints such as memory and disk space limits. Additionally, if the ground truth image trajectory is available, our method can be easily augmented with a supervised loss to enhance the clustering and keyframe selection. Extensive experiments on both real-world and simulated datasets show our method outperforms common video summarization baselines by 50%

Object-based (yet Class-agnostic) Video Domain Adaptation. (arXiv:2311.17942v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Dantong Niu, Amir Bar, Roei Herzig, Trevor Darrell, Anna Rohrbach

Existing video-based action recognition systems typically require dense annotation and struggle in environments when there is significant distribution shift relative to the training data. Current methods for video domain adaptation typically fine-tune the model using fully annotated data on a subset of target domain data or align the representation of the two domains using bootstrapping or adversarial learning. Inspired by the pivotal role of objects in recent supervised object-centric action recognition models, we present Object-based (yet Class-agnostic) Video Domain Adaptation (ODAPT), a simple yet effective framework for adapting the existing action recognition systems to new domains by utilizing a sparse set of frames with class-agnostic object annotations in a target domain. Our model achieves a +6.5 increase when adapting across kitchens in Epic-Kitchens and a +3.1 increase adapting between Epic-Kitchens and the EGTEA dataset. ODAPT is a general framework that can also be combined with previous unsupervised methods, offering a +5.0 boost when combined with the self-supervised multi-modal method MMSADA and a +1.7 boost when added to the adversarial-based method TA$^3$N on Epic-Kitchens.

LALM: Long-Term Action Anticipation with Language Models. (arXiv:2311.17944v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Sanghwan Kim, Daoji Huang, Yongqin Xian, Otmar Hilliges, Luc Van Gool, Xi Wang

Understanding human activity is a crucial yet intricate task in egocentric vision, a field that focuses on capturing visual perspectives from the camera wearer's viewpoint. While traditional methods heavily rely on representation learning trained on extensive video data, there exists a significant limitation: obtaining effective video representations proves challenging due to the inherent complexity and variability in human activities.Furthermore, exclusive dependence on video-based learning may constrain a model's capability to generalize across long-tail classes and out-of-distribution scenarios.

In this study, we introduce a novel approach for long-term action anticipation using language models (LALM), adept at addressing the complex challenges of long-term activity understanding without the need for extensive training. Our method incorporates an action recognition model to track previous action sequences and a vision-language model to articulate relevant environmental details. By leveraging the context provided by these past events, we devise a prompting strategy for action anticipation using large language models (LLMs). Moreover, we implement Maximal Marginal Relevance for example selection to facilitate in-context learning of the LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that LALM surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in the task of long-term action anticipation on the Ego4D benchmark. We further validate LALM on two additional benchmarks, affirming its capacity for generalization across intricate activities with different sets of taxonomies. These are achieved without specific fine-tuning.

Contrastive Vision-Language Alignment Makes Efficient Instruction Learner. (arXiv:2311.17945v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Lizhao Liu, Xinyu Sun, Tianhang Xiang, Zhuangwei Zhuang, Liuren Yin, Mingkui Tan

We study the task of extending the large language model (LLM) into a vision-language instruction-following model. This task is crucial but challenging since the LLM is trained on text modality only, making it hard to effectively digest the visual modality. To address this, existing methods typically train a visual adapter to align the representation between a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT) and the LLM by a generative image captioning loss. However, we find that the generative objective can only produce weak alignment for vision and language, making the aligned vision-language model very hungry for the instruction fine-tuning data. In this paper, we propose CG-VLM that applies both Contrastive and Generative alignment objectives to effectively align the representation of ViT and LLM. Different from image level and sentence level alignment in common contrastive learning settings, CG-VLM aligns the image-patch level features and text-token level embeddings, which, however, is very hard to achieve as no explicit grounding patch-token relation provided in standard image captioning datasets. To address this issue, we propose to maximize the averaged similarity between pooled image-patch features and text-token embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed CG-VLM produces strong vision-language alignment and is an efficient instruction learner. For example, using only 10% instruction tuning data, we reach 95% performance of state-of-the-art method LLaVA [29] on the zero-shot ScienceQA-Image benchmark.

DreamSync: Aligning Text-to-Image Generation with Image Understanding Feedback. (arXiv:2311.17946v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jiao Sun, Deqing Fu, Yushi Hu, Su Wang, Royi Rassin, Da-Cheng Juan, Dana Alon, Charles Herrmann, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Ranjay Krishna, Cyrus Rashtchian

Despite their wide-spread success, Text-to-Image models (T2I) still struggle to produce images that are both aesthetically pleasing and faithful to the user's input text. We introduce DreamSync, a model-agnostic training algorithm by design that improves T2I models to be faithful to the text input. DreamSync builds off a recent insight from TIFA's evaluation framework -- that large vision-language models (VLMs) can effectively identify the fine-grained discrepancies between generated images and the text inputs. DreamSync uses this insight to train T2I models without any labeled data; it improves T2I models using its own generations. First, it prompts the model to generate several candidate images for a given input text. Then, it uses two VLMs to select the best generation: a Visual Question Answering model that measures the alignment of generated images to the text, and another that measures the generation's aesthetic quality. After selection, we use LoRA to iteratively finetune the T2I model to guide its generation towards the selected best generations. DreamSync does not need any additional human annotation. model architecture changes, or reinforcement learning. Despite its simplicity, DreamSync improves both the semantic alignment and aesthetic appeal of two diffusion-based T2I models, evidenced by multiple benchmarks (+1.7% on TIFA, +2.9% on DSG1K, +3.4% on VILA aesthetic) and human evaluation.

Action-slot: Visual Action-centric Representations for Multi-label Atomic Activity Recognition in Traffic Scenes. (arXiv:2311.17948v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Chi-Hsi Kung, Shu-Wei Lu, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Yi-Ting Chen

In this paper, we study multi-label atomic activity recognition. Despite the notable progress in action recognition, it is still challenging to recognize atomic activities due to a deficiency in a holistic understanding of both multiple road users' motions and their contextual information. In this paper, we introduce Action-slot, a slot attention-based approach that learns visual action-centric representations, capturing both motion and contextual information. Our key idea is to design action slots that are capable of paying attention to regions where atomic activities occur, without the need for explicit perception guidance. To further enhance slot attention, we introduce a background slot that competes with action slots, aiding the training process in avoiding unnecessary focus on background regions devoid of activities. Yet, the imbalanced class distribution in the existing dataset hampers the assessment of rare activities. To address the limitation, we collect a synthetic dataset called TACO, which is four times larger than OATS and features a balanced distribution of atomic activities. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct comprehensive experiments and ablation studies against various action recognition baselines. We also show that the performance of multi-label atomic activity recognition on real-world datasets can be improved by pretraining representations on TACO. We will release our source code and dataset. See the videos of visualization on the project page: https://hcis-lab.github.io/Action-slot/

Zero-shot Retrieval: Augmenting Pre-trained Models with Search Engines. (arXiv:2311.17949v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Hamed Damirchi, Cristian Rodríguez-Opazo, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Damien Teney, Javen Qinfeng Shi, Stephen Gould, Anton van den Hengel

Large pre-trained models can dramatically reduce the amount of task-specific data required to solve a problem, but they often fail to capture domain-specific nuances out of the box. The Web likely contains the information necessary to excel on any specific application, but identifying the right data a priori is challenging. This paper shows how to leverage recent advances in NLP and multi-modal learning to augment a pre-trained model with search engine retrieval. We propose to retrieve useful data from the Web at test time based on test cases that the model is uncertain about. Different from existing retrieval-augmented approaches, we then update the model to address this underlying uncertainty. We demonstrate substantial improvements in zero-shot performance, e.g. a remarkable increase of 15 percentage points in accuracy on the Stanford Cars and Flowers datasets. We also present extensive experiments that explore the impact of noisy retrieval and different learning strategies.

Generalized Large-Scale Data Condensation via Various Backbone and Statistical Matching. (arXiv:2311.17950v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Shitong Shao, Zeyuan Yin, Muxin Zhou, Xindong Zhang, Zhiqiang Shen

The lightweight "local-match-global" matching introduced by SRe2L successfully creates a distilled dataset with comprehensive information on the full 224x224 ImageNet-1k. However, this one-sided approach is limited to a particular backbone, layer, and statistics, which limits the improvement of the generalization of a distilled dataset. We suggest that sufficient and various "local-match-global" matching are more precise and effective than a single one and has the ability to create a distilled dataset with richer information and better generalization. We call this perspective "generalized matching" and propose Generalized Various Backbone and Statistical Matching (G-VBSM) in this work, which aims to create a synthetic dataset with densities, ensuring consistency with the complete dataset across various backbones, layers, and statistics. As experimentally demonstrated, G-VBSM is the first algorithm to obtain strong performance across both small-scale and large-scale datasets. Specifically, G-VBSM achieves a performance of 38.7% on CIFAR-100 with 128-width ConvNet, 47.6% on Tiny-ImageNet with ResNet18, and 31.4% on the full 224x224 ImageNet-1k with ResNet18, under images per class (IPC) 10, 50, and 10, respectively. These results surpass all SOTA methods by margins of 3.9%, 6.5%, and 10.1%, respectively.

Synchronizing Vision and Language: Bidirectional Token-Masking AutoEncoder for Referring Image Segmentation. (arXiv:2311.17952v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Minhyeok Lee, Dogyoon Lee, Jungho Lee, Suhwan Cho, Heeseung Choi, Ig-Jae Kim, Sangyoun Lee

Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) aims to segment target objects expressed in natural language within a scene at the pixel level. Various recent RIS models have achieved state-of-the-art performance by generating contextual tokens to model multimodal features from pretrained encoders and effectively fusing them using transformer-based cross-modal attention. While these methods match language features with image features to effectively identify likely target objects, they often struggle to correctly understand contextual information in complex and ambiguous sentences and scenes. To address this issue, we propose a novel bidirectional token-masking autoencoder (BTMAE) inspired by the masked autoencoder (MAE). The proposed model learns the context of image-to-language and language-to-image by reconstructing missing features in both image and language features at the token level. In other words, this approach involves mutually complementing across the features of images and language, with a focus on enabling the network to understand interconnected deep contextual information between the two modalities. This learning method enhances the robustness of RIS performance in complex sentences and scenes. Our BTMAE achieves state-of-the-art performance on three popular datasets, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through various ablation studies.

Rethinking Image Editing Detection in the Era of Generative AI Revolution. (arXiv:2311.17953v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zhihao Sun, Haipeng Fang, Xinying Zhao, Danding Wang, Juan Cao

The accelerated advancement of generative AI significantly enhance the viability and effectiveness of generative regional editing methods. This evolution render the image manipulation more accessible, thereby intensifying the risk of altering the conveyed information within original images and even propagating misinformation. Consequently, there exists a critical demand for robust capable of detecting the edited images. However, the lack of comprehensive dataset containing images edited with abundant and advanced generative regional editing methods poses a substantial obstacle to the advancement of corresponding detection methods.

We endeavor to fill the vacancy by constructing the GRE dataset, a large-scale generative regional editing dataset with the following advantages: 1) Collection of real-world original images, focusing on two frequently edited scenarios. 2) Integration of a logical and simulated editing pipeline, leveraging multiple large models in various modalities. 3) Inclusion of various editing approaches with distinct architectures. 4) Provision of comprehensive analysis tasks. We perform comprehensive experiments with proposed three tasks: edited image classification, edited method attribution and edited region localization, providing analysis of distinct editing methods and evaluation of detection methods in related fields. We expect that the GRE dataset can promote further research and exploration in the field of generative region editing detection.

Transformer-empowered Multi-modal Item Embedding for Enhanced Image Search in E-Commerce. (arXiv:2311.17954v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Chang Liu, Peng Hou, Anxiang Zeng, Han Yu

Over the past decade, significant advances have been made in the field of image search for e-commerce applications. Traditional image-to-image retrieval models, which focus solely on image details such as texture, tend to overlook useful semantic information contained within the images. As a result, the retrieved products might possess similar image details, but fail to fulfil the user's search goals. Moreover, the use of image-to-image retrieval models for products containing multiple images results in significant online product feature storage overhead and complex mapping implementations. In this paper, we report the design and deployment of the proposed Multi-modal Item Embedding Model (MIEM) to address these limitations. It is capable of utilizing both textual information and multiple images about a product to construct meaningful product features. By leveraging semantic information from images, MIEM effectively supplements the image search process, improving the overall accuracy of retrieval results. MIEM has become an integral part of the Shopee image search platform. Since its deployment in March 2023, it has achieved a remarkable 9.90% increase in terms of clicks per user and a 4.23% boost in terms of orders per user for the image search feature on the Shopee e-commerce platform.

PEAN: A Diffusion-based Prior-Enhanced Attention Network for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution. (arXiv:2311.17955v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zuoyan Zhao, Shipeng Zhu, Pengfei Fang, Hui Xue

Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims at simultaneously increasing the resolution and readability of low-resolution scene text images, thus boosting the performance of the downstream recognition task. Two factors in scene text images, semantic information and visual structure, affect the recognition performance significantly. To mitigate the effects from these factors, this paper proposes a Prior-Enhanced Attention Network (PEAN). Specifically, a diffusion-based module is developed to enhance the text prior, hence offering better guidance for the SR network to generate SR images with higher semantic accuracy. Meanwhile, the proposed PEAN leverages an attention-based modulation module to understand scene text images by neatly perceiving the local and global dependence of images, despite the shape of the text. A multi-task learning paradigm is employed to optimize the network, enabling the model to generate legible SR images. As a result, PEAN establishes new SOTA results on the TextZoom benchmark. Experiments are also conducted to analyze the importance of the enhanced text prior as a means of improving the performance of the SR network. Code will be made available at https://github.com/jdfxzzy/PEAN.

QuadraNet: Improving High-Order Neural Interaction Efficiency with Hardware-Aware Quadratic Neural Networks. (arXiv:2311.17956v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Chenhui Xu, Fuxun Yu, Zirui Xu, Chenchen Liu, Jinjun Xiong, Xiang Chen

Recent progress in computer vision-oriented neural network designs is mostly driven by capturing high-order neural interactions among inputs and features. And there emerged a variety of approaches to accomplish this, such as Transformers and its variants. However, these interactions generate a large amount of intermediate state and/or strong data dependency, leading to considerable memory consumption and computing cost, and therefore compromising the overall runtime performance. To address this challenge, we rethink the high-order interactive neural network design with a quadratic computing approach. Specifically, we propose QuadraNet -- a comprehensive model design methodology from neuron reconstruction to structural block and eventually to the overall neural network implementation. Leveraging quadratic neurons' intrinsic high-order advantages and dedicated computation optimization schemes, QuadraNet could effectively achieve optimal cognition and computation performance. Incorporating state-of-the-art hardware-aware neural architecture search and system integration techniques, QuadraNet could also be well generalized in different hardware constraint settings and deployment scenarios. The experiment shows thatQuadraNet achieves up to 1.5$\times$ throughput, 30% less memory footprint, and similar cognition performance, compared with the state-of-the-art high-order approaches.

HandRefiner: Refining Malformed Hands in Generated Images by Diffusion-based Conditional Inpainting. (arXiv:2311.17957v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Wenquan Lu, Yufei Xu, Jing Zhang, Chaoyue Wang, Dacheng Tao

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating realistic images but suffer from generating accurate human hands, such as incorrect finger counts or irregular shapes. This difficulty arises from the complex task of learning the physical structure and pose of hands from training images, which involves extensive deformations and occlusions. For correct hand generation, our paper introduces a lightweight post-processing solution called $\textbf{HandRefiner}$. HandRefiner employs a conditional inpainting approach to rectify malformed hands while leaving other parts of the image untouched. We leverage the hand mesh reconstruction model that consistently adheres to the correct number of fingers and hand shape, while also being capable of fitting the desired hand pose in the generated image. Given a generated failed image due to malformed hands, we utilize ControlNet modules to re-inject such correct hand information. Additionally, we uncover a phase transition phenomenon within ControlNet as we vary the control strength. It enables us to take advantage of more readily available synthetic data without suffering from the domain gap between realistic and synthetic hands. Experiments demonstrate that HandRefiner can significantly improve the generation quality quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/wenquanlu/HandRefiner .

Guided Prompting in SAM for Weakly Supervised Cell Segmentation in Histopathological Images. (arXiv:2311.17960v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Aayush Kumar Tyagi, Vaibhav Mishra, Prathosh A.P., Mausam

Cell segmentation in histopathological images plays a crucial role in understanding, diagnosing, and treating many diseases. However, data annotation for this is expensive since there can be a large number of cells per image, and expert pathologists are needed for labelling images. Instead, our paper focuses on using weak supervision -- annotation from related tasks -- to induce a segmenter. Recent foundation models, such as Segment Anything (SAM), can use prompts to leverage additional supervision during inference. SAM has performed remarkably well in natural image segmentation tasks; however, its applicability to cell segmentation has not been explored.

In response, we investigate guiding the prompting procedure in SAM for weakly supervised cell segmentation when only bounding box supervision is available. We develop two workflows: (1) an object detector's output as a test-time prompt to SAM (D-SAM), and (2) SAM as pseudo mask generator over training data to train a standalone segmentation model (SAM-S). On finding that both workflows have some complementary strengths, we develop an integer programming-based approach to reconcile the two sets of segmentation masks, achieving yet higher performance. We experiment on three publicly available cell segmentation datasets namely, ConSep, MoNuSeg, and TNBC, and find that all SAM-based solutions hugely outperform existing weakly supervised image segmentation models, obtaining 9-15 pt Dice gains.

ChatIllusion: Efficient-Aligning Interleaved Generation ability with Visual Instruction Model. (arXiv:2311.17963v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Xiaowei Chi, Yijiang Liu, Zhengkai Jiang, Rongyu Zhang, Ziyi Lin, Renrui Zhang, Peng Gao, Chaoyou Fu, Shanghang Zhang, Qifeng Liu, Yike Guo

As the capabilities of Large-Language Models (LLMs) become widely recognized, there is an increasing demand for human-machine chat applications. Human interaction with text often inherently invokes mental imagery, an aspect that existing LLM-based chatbots like GPT-4 do not currently emulate, as they are confined to generating text-only content. To bridge this gap, we introduce ChatIllusion, an advanced Generative multimodal large language model (MLLM) that combines the capabilities of LLM with not only visual comprehension but also creativity. Specifically, ChatIllusion integrates Stable Diffusion XL and Llama, which have been fine-tuned on modest image-caption data, to facilitate multiple rounds of illustrated chats. The central component of ChatIllusion is the "GenAdapter," an efficient approach that equips the multimodal language model with capabilities for visual representation, without necessitating modifications to the foundational model. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our approach, showcasing its ability to produce diverse and superior-quality image outputs Simultaneously, it preserves semantic consistency and control over the dialogue, significantly enhancing the overall user's quality of experience (QoE). The code is available at https://github.com/litwellchi/ChatIllusion.

Discovering Galaxy Features via Dataset Distillation. (arXiv:2311.17967v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Haowen Guan, Xuan Zhao, Zishi Wang, Zhiyang Li, Julia Kempe

In many applications, Neural Nets (NNs) have classification performance on par or even exceeding human capacity. Moreover, it is likely that NNs leverage underlying features that might differ from those humans perceive to classify. Can we "reverse-engineer" pertinent features to enhance our scientific understanding? Here, we apply this idea to the notoriously difficult task of galaxy classification: NNs have reached high performance for this task, but what does a neural net (NN) "see" when it classifies galaxies? Are there morphological features that the human eye might overlook that could help with the task and provide new insights? Can we visualize tracers of early evolution, or additionally incorporated spectral data? We present a novel way to summarize and visualize galaxy morphology through the lens of neural networks, leveraging Dataset Distillation, a recent deep-learning methodology with the primary objective to distill knowledge from a large dataset and condense it into a compact synthetic dataset, such that a model trained on this synthetic dataset achieves performance comparable to a model trained on the full dataset. We curate a class-balanced, medium-size high-confidence version of the Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset, and proceed with dataset distillation from our accurate NN-classifier to create synthesized prototypical images of galaxy morphological features, demonstrating its effectiveness. Of independent interest, we introduce a self-adaptive version of the state-of-the-art Matching Trajectory algorithm to automate the distillation process, and show enhanced performance on computer vision benchmarks.

GeoDream: Disentangling 2D and Geometric Priors for High-Fidelity and Consistent 3D Generation. (arXiv:2311.17971v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Baorui Ma, Haoge Deng, Junsheng Zhou, Yu-Shen Liu, Tiejun Huang, Xinlong Wang

Text-to-3D generation by distilling pretrained large-scale text-to-image diffusion models has shown great promise but still suffers from inconsistent 3D geometric structures (Janus problems) and severe artifacts. The aforementioned problems mainly stem from 2D diffusion models lacking 3D awareness during the lifting. In this work, we present GeoDream, a novel method that incorporates explicit generalized 3D priors with 2D diffusion priors to enhance the capability of obtaining unambiguous 3D consistent geometric structures without sacrificing diversity or fidelity. Specifically, we first utilize a multi-view diffusion model to generate posed images and then construct cost volume from the predicted image, which serves as native 3D geometric priors, ensuring spatial consistency in 3D space. Subsequently, we further propose to harness 3D geometric priors to unlock the great potential of 3D awareness in 2D diffusion priors via a disentangled design. Notably, disentangling 2D and 3D priors allows us to refine 3D geometric priors further. We justify that the refined 3D geometric priors aid in the 3D-aware capability of 2D diffusion priors, which in turn provides superior guidance for the refinement of 3D geometric priors. Our numerical and visual comparisons demonstrate that GeoDream generates more 3D consistent textured meshes with high-resolution realistic renderings (i.e., 1024 $\times$ 1024) and adheres more closely to semantic coherence.

GeoDeformer: Geometric Deformable Transformer for Action Recognition. (arXiv:2311.17975v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jinhui Ye, Jiaming Zhou, Hui Xiong, Junwei Liang

Vision transformers have recently emerged as an effective alternative to convolutional networks for action recognition. However, vision transformers still struggle with geometric variations prevalent in video data. This paper proposes a novel approach, GeoDeformer, designed to capture the variations inherent in action video by integrating geometric comprehension directly into the ViT architecture. Specifically, at the core of GeoDeformer is the Geometric Deformation Predictor, a module designed to identify and quantify potential spatial and temporal geometric deformations within the given video. Spatial deformations adjust the geometry within individual frames, while temporal deformations capture the cross-frame geometric dynamics, reflecting motion and temporal progression. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we incorporate it into the established MViTv2 framework, replacing the standard self-attention blocks with GeoDeformer blocks. Our experiments at UCF101, HMDB51, and Mini-K200 achieve significant increases in both Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art results with only a marginal increase in computational cost. Additionally, visualizations affirm that GeoDeformer effectively manifests explicit geometric deformations and minimizes geometric variations. Codes and checkpoints will be released.

GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces. (arXiv:2311.17977v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yingwenqi Jiang, Jiadong Tu, Yuan Liu, Xifeng Gao, Xiaoxiao Long, Wenping Wang, Yuexin Ma

The advent of neural 3D Gaussians has recently brought about a revolution in the field of neural rendering, facilitating the generation of high-quality renderings at real-time speeds. However, the explicit and discrete representation encounters challenges when applied to scenes featuring reflective surfaces. In this paper, we present GaussianShader, a novel method that applies a simplified shading function on 3D Gaussians to enhance the neural rendering in scenes with reflective surfaces while preserving the training and rendering efficiency. The main challenge in applying the shading function lies in the accurate normal estimation on discrete 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we proposed a novel normal estimation framework based on the shortest axis directions of 3D Gaussians with a delicately designed loss to make the consistency between the normals and the geometries of Gaussian spheres. Experiments show that GaussianShader strikes a commendable balance between efficiency and visual quality. Our method surpasses Gaussian Splatting in PSNR on specular object datasets, exhibiting an improvement of 1.57dB. When compared to prior works handling reflective surfaces, such as Ref-NeRF, our optimization time is significantly accelerated (23h vs. 0.58h). Please click on our project website to see more results.

AutArch: An AI-assisted workflow for object detection and automated recording in archaeological catalogues. (arXiv:2311.17978v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Kevin Klein, Alyssa Wohde, Alexander V. Gorelik, Volker Heyd, Yoan Diekmann, Maxime Brami

Compiling large datasets from published resources, such as archaeological find catalogues presents fundamental challenges: identifying relevant content and manually recording it is a time-consuming, repetitive and error-prone task. For the data to be useful, it must be of comparable quality and adhere to the same recording standards, which is hardly ever the case in archaeology. Here, we present a new data collection method exploiting recent advances in Artificial Intelligence. Our software uses an object detection neural network combined with further classification networks to speed up, automate, and standardise data collection from legacy resources, such as archaeological drawings and photographs in large unsorted PDF files. The AI-assisted workflow detects common objects found in archaeological catalogues, such as graves, skeletons, ceramics, ornaments, stone tools and maps, and spatially relates and analyses these objects on the page to extract real-life attributes, such as the size and orientation of a grave based on the north arrow and the scale. A graphical interface allows for and assists with manual validation. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach by collecting a range of shapes and numerical attributes from richly-illustrated archaeological catalogues, and benchmark it in a real-world experiment with ten users. Moreover, we record geometric whole-outlines through contour detection, an alternative to landmark-based geometric morphometrics not achievable by hand.

VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models. (arXiv:2311.17982v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Ziqi Huang, Yinan He, Jiashuo Yu, Fan Zhang, Chenyang Si, Yuming Jiang, Yuanhan Zhang, Tianxing Wu, Qingyang Jin, Nattapol Chanpaisit, Yaohui Wang, Xinyuan Chen, Limin Wang, Dahua Lin, Yu Qiao, Ziwei Liu

Video generation has witnessed significant advancements, yet evaluating these models remains a challenge. A comprehensive evaluation benchmark for video generation is indispensable for two reasons: 1) Existing metrics do not fully align with human perceptions; 2) An ideal evaluation system should provide insights to inform future developments of video generation. To this end, we present VBench, a comprehensive benchmark suite that dissects "video generation quality" into specific, hierarchical, and disentangled dimensions, each with tailored prompts and evaluation methods. VBench has three appealing properties: 1) Comprehensive Dimensions: VBench comprises 16 dimensions in video generation (e.g., subject identity inconsistency, motion smoothness, temporal flickering, and spatial relationship, etc). The evaluation metrics with fine-grained levels reveal individual models' strengths and weaknesses. 2) Human Alignment: We also provide a dataset of human preference annotations to validate our benchmarks' alignment with human perception, for each evaluation dimension respectively. 3) Valuable Insights: We look into current models' ability across various evaluation dimensions, and various content types. We also investigate the gaps between video and image generation models. We will open-source VBench, including all prompts, evaluation methods, generated videos, and human preference annotations, and also include more video generation models in VBench to drive forward the field of video generation.

Improving Faithfulness for Vision Transformers. (arXiv:2311.17983v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Lijie Hu, Yixin Liu, Ninghao Liu, Mengdi Huai, Lichao Sun, Di Wang

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for various vision tasks. One reason behind the success lies in their ability to provide plausible innate explanations for the behavior of neural architectures. However, ViTs suffer from issues with explanation faithfulness, as their focal points are fragile to adversarial attacks and can be easily changed with even slight perturbations on the input image. In this paper, we propose a rigorous approach to mitigate these issues by introducing Faithful ViTs (FViTs). Briefly speaking, an FViT should have the following two properties: (1) The top-$k$ indices of its self-attention vector should remain mostly unchanged under input perturbation, indicating stable explanations; (2) The prediction distribution should be robust to perturbations. To achieve this, we propose a new method called Denoised Diffusion Smoothing (DDS), which adopts randomized smoothing and diffusion-based denoising. We theoretically prove that processing ViTs directly with DDS can turn them into FViTs. We also show that Gaussian noise is nearly optimal for both $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$-norm cases. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments and evaluations. Specifically, we compare our FViTs with other baselines through visual interpretation and robustness accuracy under adversarial attacks. Results show that FViTs are more robust against adversarial attacks while maintaining the explainability of attention, indicating higher faithfulness.

4D-fy: Text-to-4D Generation Using Hybrid Score Distillation Sampling. (arXiv:2311.17984v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Sherwin Bahmani, Ivan Skorokhodov, Victor Rong, Gordon Wetzstein, Leonidas Guibas, Peter Wonka, Sergey Tulyakov, Jeong Joon Park, Andrea Tagliasacchi, David B. Lindell

Recent breakthroughs in text-to-4D generation rely on pre-trained text-to-image and text-to-video models to generate dynamic 3D scenes. However, current text-to-4D methods face a three-way tradeoff between the quality of scene appearance, 3D structure, and motion. For example, text-to-image models and their 3D-aware variants are trained on internet-scale image datasets and can be used to produce scenes with realistic appearance and 3D structure -- but no motion. Text-to-video models are trained on relatively smaller video datasets and can produce scenes with motion, but poorer appearance and 3D structure. While these models have complementary strengths, they also have opposing weaknesses, making it difficult to combine them in a way that alleviates this three-way tradeoff. Here, we introduce hybrid score distillation sampling, an alternating optimization procedure that blends supervision signals from multiple pre-trained diffusion models and incorporates benefits of each for high-fidelity text-to-4D generation. Using hybrid SDS, we demonstrate synthesis of 4D scenes with compelling appearance, 3D structure, and motion.

Echoes in the Noise: Posterior Samples of Faint Galaxy Surface Brightness Profiles with Score-Based Likelihoods and Priors. (arXiv:2311.18002v1 [astro-ph.IM])

Authors: Alexandre Adam, Connor Stone, Connor Bottrell, Ronan Legin, Yashar Hezaveh, Laurence Perreault-Levasseur

Examining the detailed structure of galaxy populations provides valuable insights into their formation and evolution mechanisms. Significant barriers to such analysis are the non-trivial noise properties of real astronomical images and the point spread function (PSF) which blurs structure. Here we present a framework which combines recent advances in score-based likelihood characterization and diffusion model priors to perform a Bayesian analysis of image deconvolution. The method, when applied to minimally processed \emph{Hubble Space Telescope} (\emph{HST}) data, recovers structures which have otherwise only become visible in next-generation \emph{James Webb Space Telescope} (\emph{JWST}) imaging.

Bayesian Imaging for Radio Interferometry with Score-Based Priors. (arXiv:2311.18012v1 [astro-ph.IM])

Authors: Noe Dia, M. J. Yantovski-Barth, Alexandre Adam, Micah Bowles, Pablo Lemos, Anna M. M. Scaife, Yashar Hezaveh, Laurence Perreault-Levasseur

The inverse imaging task in radio interferometry is a key limiting factor to retrieving Bayesian uncertainties in radio astronomy in a computationally effective manner. We use a score-based prior derived from optical images of galaxies to recover images of protoplanetary disks from the DSHARP survey. We demonstrate that our method produces plausible posterior samples despite the misspecified galaxy prior. We show that our approach produces results which are competitive with existing radio interferometry imaging algorithms.

Understanding and Improving In-Context Learning on Vision-language Models. (arXiv:2311.18021v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Shuo Chen, Zhen Han, Bailan He, Mark Buckley, Philip Torr, Volker Tresp, Jindong Gu

Recently, in-context learning (ICL) on large language models (LLMs) has received great attention, and this technique can also be applied to vision-language models (VLMs) built upon LLMs. These VLMs can respond to queries by conditioning responses on a series of multimodal demonstrations, which comprise images, queries, and answers. Though ICL has been extensively studied on LLMs, its research on VLMs remains limited. The inclusion of additional visual information in the demonstrations motivates the following research questions: which of the two modalities in the demonstration is more significant? How can we select effective multimodal demonstrations to enhance ICL performance? This study investigates the significance of both visual and language information. Our findings indicate that ICL in VLMs is predominantly driven by the textual information in the demonstrations whereas the visual information in the demonstrations barely affects the ICL performance. Subsequently, we provide an understanding of the findings by analyzing the model information flow and comparing model inner states given different ICL settings. Motivated by our analysis, we propose a simple yet effective approach, termed Mixed Modality In-Context Example Selection (MMICES), which considers both visual and language modalities when selecting demonstrations and shows better ICL performance. Extensive experiments are conducted to support our findings, understanding, and improvement of the ICL performance of VLMs.

GELDA: A generative language annotation framework to reveal visual biases in datasets. (arXiv:2311.18064v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Krish Kabra, Kathleen M. Lewis, Guha Balakrishnan

Bias analysis is a crucial step in the process of creating fair datasets for training and evaluating computer vision models. The bottleneck in dataset analysis is annotation, which typically requires: (1) specifying a list of attributes relevant to the dataset domain, and (2) classifying each image-attribute pair. While the second step has made rapid progress in automation, the first has remained human-centered, requiring an experimenter to compile lists of in-domain attributes. However, an experimenter may have limited foresight leading to annotation "blind spots," which in turn can lead to flawed downstream dataset analyses. To combat this, we propose GELDA, a nearly automatic framework that leverages large generative language models (LLMs) to propose and label various attributes for a domain. GELDA takes a user-defined domain caption (e.g., "a photo of a bird," "a photo of a living room") and uses an LLM to hierarchically generate attributes. In addition, GELDA uses the LLM to decide which of a set of vision-language models (VLMs) to use to classify each attribute in images. Results on real datasets show that GELDA can generate accurate and diverse visual attribute suggestions, and uncover biases such as confounding between class labels and background features. Results on synthetic datasets demonstrate that GELDA can be used to evaluate the biases of text-to-image diffusion models and generative adversarial networks. Overall, we show that while GELDA is not accurate enough to replace human annotators, it can serve as a complementary tool to help humans analyze datasets in a cheap, low-effort, and flexible manner.

ALSTER: A Local Spatio-Temporal Expert for Online 3D Semantic Reconstruction. (arXiv:2311.18068v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Silvan Weder, Francis Engelmann, Johannes L. Schönberger, Akihito Seki, Marc Pollefeys, Martin R. Oswald

We propose an online 3D semantic segmentation method that incrementally reconstructs a 3D semantic map from a stream of RGB-D frames. Unlike offline methods, ours is directly applicable to scenarios with real-time constraints, such as robotics or mixed reality. To overcome the inherent challenges of online methods, we make two main contributions. First, to effectively extract information from the input RGB-D video stream, we jointly estimate geometry and semantic labels per frame in 3D. A key focus of our approach is to reason about semantic entities both in the 2D input and the local 3D domain to leverage differences in spatial context and network architectures. Our method predicts 2D features using an off-the-shelf segmentation network. The extracted 2D features are refined by a lightweight 3D network to enable reasoning about the local 3D structure. Second, to efficiently deal with an infinite stream of input RGB-D frames, a subsequent network serves as a temporal expert predicting the incremental scene updates by leveraging 2D, 3D, and past information in a learned manner. These updates are then integrated into a global scene representation. Using these main contributions, our method can enable scenarios with real-time constraints and can scale to arbitrary scene sizes by processing and updating the scene only in a local region defined by the new measurement. Our experiments demonstrate improved results compared to existing online methods that purely operate in local regions and show that complementary sources of information can boost the performance. We provide a thorough ablation study on the benefits of different architectural as well as algorithmic design decisions. Our method yields competitive results on the popular ScanNet benchmark and SceneNN dataset.

Turn Down the Noise: Leveraging Diffusion Models for Test-time Adaptation via Pseudo-label Ensembling. (arXiv:2311.18071v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Mrigank Raman, Rohan Shah, Akash Kannan, Pranit Chawla

The goal of test-time adaptation is to adapt a source-pretrained model to a continuously changing target domain without relying on any source data. Typically, this is either done by updating the parameters of the model (model adaptation) using inputs from the target domain or by modifying the inputs themselves (input adaptation). However, methods that modify the model suffer from the issue of compounding noisy updates whereas methods that modify the input need to adapt to every new data point from scratch while also struggling with certain domain shifts. We introduce an approach that leverages a pre-trained diffusion model to project the target domain images closer to the source domain and iteratively updates the model via pseudo-label ensembling. Our method combines the advantages of model and input adaptations while mitigating their shortcomings. Our experiments on CIFAR-10C demonstrate the superiority of our approach, outperforming the strongest baseline by an average of 1.7% across 15 diverse corruptions and surpassing the strongest input adaptation baseline by an average of 18%.

LiDAR-based Outdoor Crowd Management for Smart Campus on the Edge. (arXiv:2311.18077v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yitao Chen, Krishna Gundu, Zohair Zaidi, Ming Zhao

Crowd management is crucial for a smart campus. Popular methods are camera-based. However, conventional camera-based approaches may leak users' personally identifiable features, jeopardizing user's privacy, which limits its application. In this work, we investigate using affordable light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology to perform outdoor crowd management leveraging edge computing. Specifically, we aim to count the number of people on a walkway of a university campus. Besides privacy protection, LiDAR sensors are superior to cameras since their performance will not be compromised when the campus is not well-illuminated. We deploy LiDAR sensors on light poles to collect data from the crowd on the campus and leverage edge accelerators to process data locally. We proposed two different methodologies in this work: 1) a non-convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach, using clustering and autoencoder, and 2) a CNN-based approach that first projects point clouds to 2D planes and then processes the projection with conventional CNNs. Our first approach relies on careful feature engineering, whereas our second approach does not require such effort. However, the CNN-based approach requires more computational power than our non-CNN-based approach. We evaluate both approaches comprehensively with our hand-labeled real-life data collected from campus. Our evaluation results show that the first method achieves an accuracy of 85.4%, whereas the second method achieves 95.8%. Our CNN-based method outperforms existing solutions significantly. We also deploy our two models on an edge accelerator, TPU, to measure the speedup, leveraging this specialized accelerator.

Zooming Out on Zooming In: Advancing Super-Resolution for Remote Sensing. (arXiv:2311.18082v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Piper Wolters, Favyen Bastani, Aniruddha Kembhavi

Super-Resolution for remote sensing has the potential for huge impact on planet monitoring by producing accurate and realistic high resolution imagery on a frequent basis and a global scale. Despite a lot of attention, several inconsistencies and challenges have prevented it from being deployed in practice. These include the lack of effective metrics, fragmented and relatively small-scale datasets for training, insufficient comparisons across a suite of methods, and unclear evidence for the use of super-resolution outputs for machine consumption. This work presents a new metric for super-resolution, CLIPScore, that corresponds far better with human judgments than previous metrics on an extensive study. We use CLIPScore to evaluate four standard methods on a new large-scale dataset, S2-NAIP, and three existing benchmark datasets, and find that generative adversarial networks easily outperform more traditional L2 loss-based models and are more semantically accurate than modern diffusion models. We also find that using CLIPScore as an auxiliary loss can speed up the training of GANs by 18x and lead to improved outputs, resulting in an effective model in diverse geographies across the world which we will release publicly. The dataset, pre-trained model weights, and code are available at https://github.com/allenai/satlas-super-resolution/.

Meta Co-Training: Two Views are Better than One. (arXiv:2311.18083v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jay C. Rothenberger, Dimitrios I. Diochnos

In many practical computer vision scenarios unlabeled data is plentiful, but labels are scarce and difficult to obtain. As a result, semi-supervised learning which leverages unlabeled data to boost the performance of supervised classifiers have received significant attention in recent literature. One major class of semi-supervised algorithms is co-training. In co-training two different models leverage different independent and sufficient "views" of the data to jointly make better predictions. During co-training each model creates pseudo labels on unlabeled points which are used to improve the other model. We show that in the common case when independent views are not available we can construct such views inexpensively using pre-trained models. Co-training on the constructed views yields a performance improvement over any of the individual views we construct and performance comparable with recent approaches in semi-supervised learning, but has some undesirable properties. To alleviate the issues present with co-training we present Meta Co-Training which is an extension of the successful Meta Pseudo Labels approach to multiple views. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet-10% with very few training resources, as well as outperforming prior semi-supervised work on several other fine-grained image classification datasets.

PatchBMI-Net: Lightweight Facial Patch-based Ensemble for BMI Prediction. (arXiv:2311.18102v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Parshuram N. Aarotale, Twyla Hill, Ajita Rattani

Due to an alarming trend related to obesity affecting 93.3 million adults in the United States alone, body mass index (BMI) and body weight have drawn significant interest in various health monitoring applications. Consequently, several studies have proposed self-diagnostic facial image-based BMI prediction methods for healthy weight monitoring. These methods have mostly used convolutional neural network (CNN) based regression baselines, such as VGG19, ResNet50, and Efficient-NetB0, for BMI prediction from facial images. However, the high computational requirement of these heavy-weight CNN models limits their deployment to resource-constrained mobile devices, thus deterring weight monitoring using smartphones. This paper aims to develop a lightweight facial patch-based ensemble (PatchBMI-Net) for BMI prediction to facilitate the deployment and weight monitoring using smartphones. Extensive experiments on BMI-annotated facial image datasets suggest that our proposed PatchBMI-Net model can obtain Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in the range [3.58, 6.51] with a size of about 3.3 million parameters. On cross-comparison with heavyweight models, such as ResNet-50 and Xception, trained for BMI prediction from facial images, our proposed PatchBMI-Net obtains equivalent MAE along with the model size reduction of about 5.4x and the average inference time reduction of about 3x when deployed on Apple-14 smartphone. Thus, demonstrating performance efficiency as well as low latency for on-device deployment and weight monitoring using smartphone applications.

Corner-to-Center Long-range Context Model for Efficient Learned Image Compression. (arXiv:2311.18103v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Yang Sui, Ding Ding, Xiang Pan, Xiaozhong Xu, Shan Liu, Bo Yuan, Zhenzhong Chen

In the framework of learned image compression, the context model plays a pivotal role in capturing the dependencies among latent representations. To reduce the decoding time resulting from the serial autoregressive context model, the parallel context model has been proposed as an alternative that necessitates only two passes during the decoding phase, thus facilitating efficient image compression in real-world scenarios. However, performance degradation occurs due to its incomplete casual context. To tackle this issue, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the performance degradation observed in existing parallel context models, focusing on two aspects: the Quantity and Quality of information utilized for context prediction and decoding. Based on such analysis, we propose the \textbf{Corner-to-Center transformer-based Context Model (C$^3$M)} designed to enhance context and latent predictions and improve rate-distortion performance. Specifically, we leverage the logarithmic-based prediction order to predict more context features from corner to center progressively. In addition, to enlarge the receptive field in the analysis and synthesis transformation, we use the Long-range Crossing Attention Module (LCAM) in the encoder/decoder to capture the long-range semantic information by assigning the different window shapes in different channels. Extensive experimental evaluations show that the proposed method is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art parallel methods. Finally, according to the subjective analysis, we suggest that improving the detailed representation in transformer-based image compression is a promising direction to be explored.

A Stochastic-Geometrical Framework for Object Pose Estimation based on Mixture Models Avoiding the Correspondence Problem. (arXiv:2311.18107v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Wolfgang Hoegele

Background: Pose estimation of rigid objects is a practical challenge in optical metrology and computer vision. In this paper a novel stochastic-geometrical modeling framework for object pose estimation is presented based on observing multiple feature points. Methods: This stochastic-geometrical framework utilizes mixture models for the feature point densities in object space as well as for interpreting real measurements. Direct advantages of this approach are the avoidance to resolve individual feature correspondences and to incorporate correct stochastic dependencies in multi-view applications. First, the general modeling framework is presented, second, a general algorithm for pose estimation is derived, and third, two example models for a camera setup as well as a lateration setup are presented. Results: The numerical experiments show the effectiveness of this modeling and general algorithm by investigating four simulation scenarios for three different observation systems, including the dependence on measurement resolution, object deformations as well as strong measurement noise. It can be concluded that the probabilistic modeling of pose estimation based on mixture models can lead to accurate and robust pose estimations.

Back to 3D: Few-Shot 3D Keypoint Detection with Back-Projected 2D Features. (arXiv:2311.18113v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Thomas Wimmer, Peter Wonka, Maks Ovsjanikov

With the immense growth of dataset sizes and computing resources in recent years, so-called foundation models have become popular in NLP and vision tasks. In this work, we propose to explore foundation models for the task of keypoint detection on 3D shapes. A unique characteristic of keypoint detection is that it requires semantic and geometric awareness while demanding high localization accuracy. To address this problem, we propose, first, to back-project features from large pre-trained 2D vision models onto 3D shapes and employ them for this task. We show that we obtain robust 3D features that contain rich semantic information and analyze multiple candidate features stemming from different 2D foundation models. Second, we employ a keypoint candidate optimization module which aims to match the average observed distribution of keypoints on the shape and is guided by the back-projected features. The resulting approach achieves a new state of the art for few-shot keypoint detection on the KeyPointNet dataset, almost doubling the performance of the previous best methods.

The Trifecta: Three simple techniques for training deeper Forward-Forward networks. (arXiv:2311.18130v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Thomas Dooms, Ing Jyh Tsang, Jose Oramas

Modern machine learning models are able to outperform humans on a variety of non-trivial tasks. However, as the complexity of the models increases, they consume significant amounts of power and still struggle to generalize effectively to unseen data. Local learning, which focuses on updating subsets of a model's parameters at a time, has emerged as a promising technique to address these issues. Recently, a novel local learning algorithm, called Forward-Forward, has received widespread attention due to its innovative approach to learning. Unfortunately, its application has been limited to smaller datasets due to scalability issues. To this end, we propose The Trifecta, a collection of three simple techniques that synergize exceptionally well and drastically improve the Forward-Forward algorithm on deeper networks. Our experiments demonstrate that our models are on par with similarly structured, backpropagation-based models in both training speed and test accuracy on simple datasets. This is achieved by the ability to learn representations that are informative locally, on a layer-by-layer basis, and retain their informativeness when propagated to deeper layers in the architecture. This leads to around 84\% accuracy on CIFAR-10, a notable improvement (25\%) over the original FF algorithm. These results highlight the potential of Forward-Forward as a genuine competitor to backpropagation and as a promising research avenue.

STF: Spatial Temporal Fusion for Trajectory Prediction. (arXiv:2311.18149v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Pengqian Han, Partha Roop, Jiamou Liu, Tianzhe Bao, Yifei Wang

Trajectory prediction is a challenging task that aims to predict the future trajectory of vehicles or pedestrians over a short time horizon based on their historical positions. The main reason is that the trajectory is a kind of complex data, including spatial and temporal information, which is crucial for accurate prediction. Intuitively, the more information the model can capture, the more precise the future trajectory can be predicted. However, previous works based on deep learning methods processed spatial and temporal information separately, leading to inadequate spatial information capture, which means they failed to capture the complete spatial information. Therefore, it is of significance to capture information more fully and effectively on vehicle interactions. In this study, we introduced an integrated 3D graph that incorporates both spatial and temporal edges. Based on this, we proposed the integrated 3D graph, which considers the cross-time interaction information. In specific, we design a Spatial-Temporal Fusion (STF) model including Multi-layer perceptions (MLP) and Graph Attention (GAT) to capture the spatial and temporal information historical trajectories simultaneously on the 3D graph. Our experiment on the ApolloScape Trajectory Datasets shows that the proposed STF outperforms several baseline methods, especially on the long-time-horizon trajectory prediction.

HiPA: Enabling One-Step Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via High-Frequency-Promoting Adaptation. (arXiv:2311.18158v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yifan Zhang, Bryan Hooi

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation, but their real-world applications are hampered by the extensive time needed for hundreds of diffusion steps. Although progressive distillation has been proposed to speed up diffusion sampling to 2-8 steps, it still falls short in one-step generation, and necessitates training multiple student models, which is highly parameter-extensive and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations, we introduce High-frequency-Promoting Adaptation (HiPA), a parameter-efficient approach to enable one-step text-to-image diffusion. Grounded in the insight that high-frequency information is essential but highly lacking in one-step diffusion, HiPA focuses on training one-step, low-rank adaptors to specifically enhance the under-represented high-frequency abilities of advanced diffusion models. The learned adaptors empower these diffusion models to generate high-quality images in just a single step. Compared with progressive distillation, HiPA achieves much better performance in one-step text-to-image generation (37.3 $\rightarrow$ 23.8 in FID-5k on MS-COCO 2017) and 28.6x training speed-up (108.8 $\rightarrow$ 3.8 A100 GPU days), requiring only 0.04% training parameters (7,740 million $\rightarrow$ 3.3 million). We also demonstrate HiPA's effectiveness in text-guided image editing, inpainting and super-resolution tasks, where our adapted models consistently deliver high-quality outputs in just one diffusion step. The source code will be released.

Compact3D: Compressing Gaussian Splat Radiance Field Models with Vector Quantization. (arXiv:2311.18159v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: KL Navaneet, Kossar Pourahmadi Meibodi, Soroush Abbasi Koohpayegani, Hamed Pirsiavash

3D Gaussian Splatting is a new method for modeling and rendering 3D radiance fields that achieves much faster learning and rendering time compared to SOTA NeRF methods. However, it comes with a drawback in the much larger storage demand compared to NeRF methods since it needs to store the parameters for several 3D Gaussians. We notice that many Gaussians may share similar parameters, so we introduce a simple vector quantization method based on \kmeans algorithm to quantize the Gaussian parameters. Then, we store the small codebook along with the index of the code for each Gaussian. Moreover, we compress the indices further by sorting them and using a method similar to run-length encoding. We do extensive experiments on standard benchmarks as well as a new benchmark which is an order of magnitude larger than the standard benchmarks. We show that our simple yet effective method can reduce the storage cost for the original 3D Gaussian Splatting method by a factor of almost $20\times$ with a very small drop in the quality of rendered images.

A-Scan2BIM: Assistive Scan to Building Information Modeling. (arXiv:2311.18166v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Weilian Song, Jieliang Luo, Dale Zhao, Yan Fu, Chin-Yi Cheng, Yasutaka Furukawa

This paper proposes an assistive system for architects that converts a large-scale point cloud into a standardized digital representation of a building for Building Information Modeling (BIM) applications. The process is known as Scan-to-BIM, which requires many hours of manual work even for a single building floor by a professional architect. Given its challenging nature, the paper focuses on helping architects on the Scan-to-BIM process, instead of replacing them. Concretely, we propose an assistive Scan-to-BIM system that takes the raw sensor data and edit history (including the current BIM model), then auto-regressively predicts a sequence of model editing operations as APIs of a professional BIM software (i.e., Autodesk Revit). The paper also presents the first building-scale Scan2BIM dataset that contains a sequence of model editing operations as the APIs of Autodesk Revit. The dataset contains 89 hours of Scan2BIM modeling processes by professional architects over 16 scenes, spanning over 35,000 m^2. We report our system's reconstruction quality with standard metrics, and we introduce a novel metric that measures how natural the order of reconstructed operations is. A simple modification to the reconstruction module helps improve performance, and our method is far superior to two other baselines in the order metric. We will release data, code, and models at a-scan2bim.github.io.

Probabilistic Speech-Driven 3D Facial Motion Synthesis: New Benchmarks, Methods, and Applications. (arXiv:2311.18168v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Karren D. Yang, Anurag Ranjan, Jen-Hao Rick Chang, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Oncel Tuzel

We consider the task of animating 3D facial geometry from speech signal. Existing works are primarily deterministic, focusing on learning a one-to-one mapping from speech signal to 3D face meshes on small datasets with limited speakers. While these models can achieve high-quality lip articulation for speakers in the training set, they are unable to capture the full and diverse distribution of 3D facial motions that accompany speech in the real world. Importantly, the relationship between speech and facial motion is one-to-many, containing both inter-speaker and intra-speaker variations and necessitating a probabilistic approach. In this paper, we identify and address key challenges that have so far limited the development of probabilistic models: lack of datasets and metrics that are suitable for training and evaluating them, as well as the difficulty of designing a model that generates diverse results while remaining faithful to a strong conditioning signal as speech. We first propose large-scale benchmark datasets and metrics suitable for probabilistic modeling. Then, we demonstrate a probabilistic model that achieves both diversity and fidelity to speech, outperforming other methods across the proposed benchmarks. Finally, we showcase useful applications of probabilistic models trained on these large-scale datasets: we can generate diverse speech-driven 3D facial motion that matches unseen speaker styles extracted from reference clips; and our synthetic meshes can be used to improve the performance of downstream audio-visual models.

Few-shot Image Generation via Style Adaptation and Content Preservation. (arXiv:2311.18169v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Xiaosheng He, Fan Yang, Fayao Liu, Guosheng Lin

Training a generative model with limited data (e.g., 10) is a very challenging task. Many works propose to fine-tune a pre-trained GAN model. However, this can easily result in overfitting. In other words, they manage to adapt the style but fail to preserve the content, where \textit{style} denotes the specific properties that defines a domain while \textit{content} denotes the domain-irrelevant information that represents diversity. Recent works try to maintain a pre-defined correspondence to preserve the content, however, the diversity is still not enough and it may affect style adaptation. In this work, we propose a paired image reconstruction approach for content preservation. We propose to introduce an image translation module to GAN transferring, where the module teaches the generator to separate style and content, and the generator provides training data to the translation module in return. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in few shot setting.

Quantification of cardiac capillarization in single-immunostained myocardial slices using weakly supervised instance segmentation. (arXiv:2311.18173v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Zhao Zhang, Xiwen Chen, William Richardson, Bruce Z. Gao, Abolfazl Razi, Tong Ye

Decreased myocardial capillary density has been reported as an important histopathological feature associated with various heart disorders. Quantitative assessment of cardiac capillarization typically involves double immunostaining of cardiomyocytes (CMs) and capillaries in myocardial slices. In contrast, single immunostaining of basement membrane components is a straightforward approach to simultaneously label CMs and capillaries, presenting fewer challenges in background staining. However, subsequent image analysis always requires manual work in identifying and segmenting CMs and capillaries. Here, we developed an image analysis tool, AutoQC, to automatically identify and segment CMs and capillaries in immunofluorescence images of collagen type IV, a predominant basement membrane protein within the myocardium. In addition, commonly used capillarization-related measurements can be derived from segmentation masks. AutoQC features a weakly supervised instance segmentation algorithm by leveraging the power of a pre-trained segmentation model via prompt engineering. AutoQC outperformed YOLOv8-Seg, a state-of-the-art instance segmentation model, in both instance segmentation and capillarization assessment. Furthermore, the training of AutoQC required only a small dataset with bounding box annotations instead of pixel-wise annotations, leading to a reduced workload during network training. AutoQC provides an automated solution for quantifying cardiac capillarization in basement-membrane-immunostained myocardial slices, eliminating the need for manual image analysis once it is trained.

Persistent Test-time Adaptation in Episodic Testing Scenarios. (arXiv:2311.18193v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Trung-Hieu Hoang, Duc Minh Vo, Minh N. Do

Current test-time adaptation (TTA) approaches aim to adapt to environments that change continuously. Yet, when the environments not only change but also recur in a correlated manner over time, such as in the case of day-night surveillance cameras, it is unclear whether the adaptability of these methods is sustained after a long run. This study aims to examine the error accumulation of TTA models when they are repeatedly exposed to previous testing environments, proposing a novel testing setting called episodic TTA. To study this phenomenon, we design a simulation of TTA process on a simple yet representative $\epsilon$-perturbed Gaussian Mixture Model Classifier and derive the theoretical findings revealing the dataset- and algorithm-dependent factors that contribute to the gradual degeneration of TTA methods through time. Our investigation has led us to propose a method, named persistent TTA (PeTTA). PeTTA senses the model divergence towards a collapsing and adjusts the adaptation strategy of TTA, striking a balance between two primary objectives: adaptation and preventing model collapse. The stability of PeTTA in the face of episodic TTA scenarios has been demonstrated through a set of comprehensive experiments on various benchmarks.

S-T CRF: Spatial-Temporal Conditional Random Field for Human Trajectory Prediction. (arXiv:2311.18198v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Pengqian Han, Jiamou Liu, Jialing He, Zeyu Zhang, Song Yang, Yanni Tang, Partha Roop

Trajectory prediction is of significant importance in computer vision. Accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction benefits autonomous vehicles and robots in planning their motion. Pedestrians' trajectories are greatly influenced by their intentions. Prior studies having introduced various deep learning methods only pay attention to the spatial and temporal information of trajectory, overlooking the explicit intention information. In this study, we introduce a novel model, termed the \textbf{S-T CRF}: \textbf{S}patial-\textbf{T}emporal \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{R}andom \textbf{F}ield, which judiciously incorporates intention information besides spatial and temporal information of trajectory. This model uses a Conditional Random Field (CRF) to generate a representation of future intentions, greatly improving the prediction of subsequent trajectories when combined with spatial-temporal representation. Furthermore, the study innovatively devises a space CRF loss and a time CRF loss, meticulously designed to enhance interaction constraints and temporal dynamics, respectively. Extensive experimental evaluations on dataset ETH/UCY and SDD demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses existing baseline approaches.

Hy-Tracker: A Novel Framework for Enhancing Efficiency and Accuracy of Object Tracking in Hyperspectral Videos. (arXiv:2311.18199v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Mohammad Aminul Islam, Wangzhi Xing, Jun Zhou, Yongsheng Gao, Kuldip K. Paliwal

Hyperspectral object tracking has recently emerged as a topic of great interest in the remote sensing community. The hyperspectral image, with its many bands, provides a rich source of material information of an object that can be effectively used for object tracking. While most hyperspectral trackers are based on detection-based techniques, no one has yet attempted to employ YOLO for detecting and tracking the object. This is due to the presence of multiple spectral bands, the scarcity of annotated hyperspectral videos, and YOLO's performance limitation in managing occlusions, and distinguishing object in cluttered backgrounds. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel framework called Hy-Tracker, which aims to bridge the gap between hyperspectral data and state-of-the-art object detection methods to leverage the strengths of YOLOv7 for object tracking in hyperspectral videos. Hy-Tracker not only introduces YOLOv7 but also innovatively incorporates a refined tracking module on top of YOLOv7. The tracker refines the initial detections produced by YOLOv7, leading to improved object-tracking performance. Furthermore, we incorporate Kalman-Filter into the tracker, which addresses the challenges posed by scale variation and occlusion. The experimental results on hyperspectral benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Hy-Tracker in accurately tracking objects across frames.

SMaRt: Improving GANs with Score Matching Regularity. (arXiv:2311.18208v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Mengfei Xia, Yujun Shen, Ceyuan Yang, Ran Yi, Wenping Wang, Yong-jin Liu

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) usually struggle in learning from highly diverse data, whose underlying manifold is complex. In this work, we revisit the mathematical foundations of GANs, and theoretically reveal that the native adversarial loss for GAN training is insufficient to fix the problem of subsets with positive Lebesgue measure of the generated data manifold lying out of the real data manifold. Instead, we find that score matching serves as a valid solution to this issue thanks to its capability of persistently pushing the generated data points towards the real data manifold. We thereby propose to improve the optimization of GANs with score matching regularity (SMaRt). Regarding the empirical evidences, we first design a toy example to show that training GANs by the aid of a ground-truth score function can help reproduce the real data distribution more accurately, and then confirm that our approach can consistently boost the synthesis performance of various state-of-the-art GANs on real-world datasets with pre-trained diffusion models acting as the approximate score function. For instance, when training Aurora on the ImageNet 64x64 dataset, we manage to improve FID from 8.87 to 7.11, on par with the performance of one-step consistency model. The source code will be made public.

Perception of Misalignment States for Sky Survey Telescopes with the Digital Twin and the Deep Neural Networks. (arXiv:2311.18214v1 [astro-ph.IM])

Authors: Miao Zhang, Peng Jia, Zhengyang Li, Wennan Xiang, Jiameng Lv, Rui Sun

Sky survey telescopes play a critical role in modern astronomy, but misalignment of their optical elements can introduce significant variations in point spread functions, leading to reduced data quality. To address this, we need a method to obtain misalignment states, aiding in the reconstruction of accurate point spread functions for data processing methods or facilitating adjustments of optical components for improved image quality. Since sky survey telescopes consist of many optical elements, they result in a vast array of potential misalignment states, some of which are intricately coupled, posing detection challenges. However, by continuously adjusting the misalignment states of optical elements, we can disentangle coupled states. Based on this principle, we propose a deep neural network to extract misalignment states from continuously varying point spread functions in different field of views. To ensure sufficient and diverse training data, we recommend employing a digital twin to obtain data for neural network training. Additionally, we introduce the state graph to store misalignment data and explore complex relationships between misalignment states and corresponding point spread functions, guiding the generation of training data from experiments. Once trained, the neural network estimates misalignment states from observation data, regardless of the impacts caused by atmospheric turbulence, noise, and limited spatial sampling rates in the detector. The method proposed in this paper could be used to provide prior information for the active optics system and the optical system alignment.

FS-BAND: A Frequency-Sensitive Banding Detector. (arXiv:2311.18216v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zijian Chen, Wei Sun, Zicheng Zhang, Ru Huang, Fangfang Lu, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai, Wenjun Zhang

Banding artifact, as known as staircase-like contour, is a common quality annoyance that happens in compression, transmission, etc. scenarios, which largely affects the user's quality of experience (QoE). The banding distortion typically appears as relatively small pixel-wise variations in smooth backgrounds, which is difficult to analyze in the spatial domain but easily reflected in the frequency domain. In this paper, we thereby study the banding artifact from the frequency aspect and propose a no-reference banding detection model to capture and evaluate banding artifacts, called the Frequency-Sensitive BANding Detector (FS-BAND). The proposed detector is able to generate a pixel-wise banding map with a perception correlated quality score. Experimental results show that the proposed FS-BAND method outperforms state-of-the-art image quality assessment (IQA) approaches with higher accuracy in banding classification task.

TCP:Textual-based Class-aware Prompt tuning for Visual-Language Model. (arXiv:2311.18231v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Hantao Yao, Rui Zhang, Changsheng Xu

Prompt tuning represents a valuable technique for adapting pre-trained visual-language models (VLM) to various downstream tasks. Recent advancements in CoOp-based methods propose a set of learnable domain-shared or image-conditional textual tokens to facilitate the generation of task-specific textual classifiers. However, those textual tokens have a limited generalization ability regarding unseen domains, as they cannot dynamically adjust to the distribution of testing classes. To tackle this issue, we present a novel Textual-based Class-aware Prompt tuning(TCP) that explicitly incorporates prior knowledge about classes to enhance their discriminability. The critical concept of TCP involves leveraging Textual Knowledge Embedding (TKE) to map the high generalizability of class-level textual knowledge into class-aware textual tokens. By seamlessly integrating these class-aware prompts into the Text Encoder, a dynamic class-aware classifier is generated to enhance discriminability for unseen domains. During inference, TKE dynamically generates class-aware prompts related to the unseen classes. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that TKE serves as a plug-and-play module effortlessly combinable with existing methods. Furthermore, TCP consistently achieves superior performance while demanding less training time.

Label-efficient Training of Small Task-specific Models by Leveraging Vision Foundation Models. (arXiv:2311.18237v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Raviteja Vemulapalli, Hadi Pouransari, Fartash Faghri, Sachin Mehta, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Mohammad Rastegari, Oncel Tuzel

Large Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) pretrained on massive datasets exhibit impressive performance on various downstream tasks, especially with limited labeled target data. However, due to their high memory and compute requirements, these models cannot be deployed in resource constrained settings. This raises an important question: How can we utilize the knowledge from a large VFM to train a small task-specific model for a new target task with limited labeled training data? In this work, we answer this question by proposing a simple and highly effective task-oriented knowledge transfer approach to leverage pretrained VFMs for effective training of small task-specific models. Our experimental results on four target tasks under limited labeled data settings show that the proposed knowledge transfer approach outperforms task-agnostic VFM distillation, web-scale CLIP pretraining and supervised ImageNet pretraining by 1-10.5%, 2-22% and 2-14%, respectively. We also show that the dataset used for transferring knowledge has a significant effect on the final target task performance, and propose an image retrieval-based approach for curating effective transfer sets.

LLVMs4Protest: Harnessing the Power of Large Language and Vision Models for Deciphering Protests in the News. (arXiv:2311.18241v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yongjun Zhang

Large language and vision models have transformed how social movements scholars identify protest and extract key protest attributes from multi-modal data such as texts, images, and videos. This article documents how we fine-tuned two large pretrained transformer models, including longformer and swin-transformer v2, to infer potential protests in news articles using textual and imagery data. First, the longformer model was fine-tuned using the Dynamic of Collective Action (DoCA) Corpus. We matched the New York Times articles with the DoCA database to obtain a training dataset for downstream tasks. Second, the swin-transformer v2 models was trained on UCLA-protest imagery data. UCLA-protest project contains labeled imagery data with information such as protest, violence, and sign. Both fine-tuned models will be available via \url{https://github.com/Joshzyj/llvms4protest}. We release this short technical report for social movement scholars who are interested in using LLVMs to infer protests in textual and imagery data.

DKiS: Decay weight invertible image steganography with private key. (arXiv:2311.18243v1 [cs.MM])

Authors: Hang Yang, Yitian Xu, Xuhua Liu

Image steganography, the practice of concealing information within another image, traditionally faces security challenges when its methods become publicly known. To counteract this, we introduce a novel private key-based image steganography technique. This approach ensures the security of hidden information, requiring a corresponding private key for access, irrespective of the public knowledge of the steganography method. We present experimental evidence demonstrating our method's effectiveness, showcasing its real-world applicability. Additionally, we identified a critical challenge in the invertible image steganography process: the transfer of non-essential, or `garbage', information from the secret to the host pipeline. To address this, we introduced the decay weight to control the information transfer, filtering out irrelevant data and enhancing the performance of image steganography. Our code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/yanghangAI/DKiS, and a practical demonstration is available at this http URL

Automatic Detection of Alzheimer's Disease with Multi-Modal Fusion of Clinical MRI Scans. (arXiv:2311.18245v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Long Chen, Liben Chen, Binfeng Xu, Wenxin Zhang, Narges Razavian

The aging population of the U.S. drives the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease. Brookmeyer et al. forecasts approximately 15 million Americans will have either clinical AD or mild cognitive impairment by 2060. In response to this urgent call, methods for early detection of Alzheimer's disease have been developed for prevention and pre-treatment. Notably, literature on the application of deep learning in the automatic detection of the disease has been proliferating. This study builds upon previous literature and maintains a focus on leveraging multi-modal information to enhance automatic detection. We aim to predict the stage of the disease - Cognitively Normal (CN), Mildly Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's Disease (AD), based on two different types of brain MRI scans. We design an AlexNet-based deep learning model that learns the synergy of complementary information from both T1 and FLAIR MRI scans.

Sketch Input Method Editor: A Comprehensive Dataset and Methodology for Systematic Input Recognition. (arXiv:2311.18254v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Guangming Zhu, Siyuan Wang, Qing Cheng, Kelong Wu, Hao Li, Liang Zhang

With the recent surge in the use of touchscreen devices, free-hand sketching has emerged as a promising modality for human-computer interaction. While previous research has focused on tasks such as recognition, retrieval, and generation of familiar everyday objects, this study aims to create a Sketch Input Method Editor (SketchIME) specifically designed for a professional C4I system. Within this system, sketches are utilized as low-fidelity prototypes for recommending standardized symbols in the creation of comprehensive situation maps. This paper also presents a systematic dataset comprising 374 specialized sketch types, and proposes a simultaneous recognition and segmentation architecture with multilevel supervision between recognition and segmentation to improve performance and enhance interpretability. By incorporating few-shot domain adaptation and class-incremental learning, the network's ability to adapt to new users and extend to new task-specific classes is significantly enhanced. Results from experiments conducted on both the proposed dataset and the SPG dataset illustrate the superior performance of the proposed architecture. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Anony517/SketchIME.

Diffusion Models Without Attention. (arXiv:2311.18257v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jing Nathan Yan, Jiatao Gu, Alexander M. Rush

In recent advancements in high-fidelity image generation, Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have emerged as a key player. However, their application at high resolutions presents significant computational challenges. Current methods, such as patchifying, expedite processes in UNet and Transformer architectures but at the expense of representational capacity. Addressing this, we introduce the Diffusion State Space Model (DiffuSSM), an architecture that supplants attention mechanisms with a more scalable state space model backbone. This approach effectively handles higher resolutions without resorting to global compression, thus preserving detailed image representation throughout the diffusion process. Our focus on FLOP-efficient architectures in diffusion training marks a significant step forward. Comprehensive evaluations on both ImageNet and LSUN datasets at two resolutions demonstrate that DiffuSSMs are on par or even outperform existing diffusion models with attention modules in FID and Inception Score metrics while significantly reducing total FLOP usage.

Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives. (arXiv:2311.18259v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Kristen Grauman, Andrew Westbury, Lorenzo Torresani, Kris Kitani, Jitendra Malik, Triantafyllos Afouras, Kumar Ashutosh, Vijay Baiyya, Siddhant Bansal, Bikram Boote, Eugene Byrne, Zach Chavis, Joya Chen, Feng Cheng, Fu-Jen Chu, Sean Crane, Avijit Dasgupta, Jing Dong, Maria Escobar, Cristhian Forigua, Abrham Gebreselasie, Sanjay Haresh, Jing Huang, Md Mohaiminul Islam, Suyog Jain, Rawal Khirodkar, Devansh Kukreja, Kevin J Liang, Jia-Wei Liu, Sagnik Majumder, Yongsen Mao, Miguel Martin, Effrosyni Mavroudi, Tushar Nagarajan, Francesco Ragusa, Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan, Luigi Seminara, Arjun Somayazulu, Yale Song, Shan Su, Zihui Xue, Edward Zhang, Jinxu Zhang, Angela Castillo, Changan Chen, Xinzhu Fu, Ryosuke Furuta, Cristina Gonzalez, Prince Gupta, Jiabo Hu, Yifei Huang, Yiming Huang, Weslie Khoo, et al. (48 additional authors not shown)

We present Ego-Exo4D, a diverse, large-scale multimodal multiview video dataset and benchmark challenge. Ego-Exo4D centers around simultaneously-captured egocentric and exocentric video of skilled human activities (e.g., sports, music, dance, bike repair). More than 800 participants from 13 cities worldwide performed these activities in 131 different natural scene contexts, yielding long-form captures from 1 to 42 minutes each and 1,422 hours of video combined. The multimodal nature of the dataset is unprecedented: the video is accompanied by multichannel audio, eye gaze, 3D point clouds, camera poses, IMU, and multiple paired language descriptions -- including a novel "expert commentary" done by coaches and teachers and tailored to the skilled-activity domain. To push the frontier of first-person video understanding of skilled human activity, we also present a suite of benchmark tasks and their annotations, including fine-grained activity understanding, proficiency estimation, cross-view translation, and 3D hand/body pose. All resources will be open sourced to fuel new research in the community.

Consensus, dissensus and synergy between clinicians and specialist foundation models in radiology report generation. (arXiv:2311.18260v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Ryutaro Tanno, David G.T. Barrett, Andrew Sellergren, Sumedh Ghaisas, Sumanth Dathathri, Abigail See, Johannes Welbl, Karan Singhal, Shekoofeh Azizi, Tao Tu, Mike Schaekermann, Rhys May, Roy Lee, SiWai Man, Zahra Ahmed, Sara Mahdavi, Danielle Belgrave, Vivek Natarajan, Shravya Shetty, Pushmeet Kohli, Po-Sen Huang, Alan Karthikesalingam, Ira Ktena

Radiology reports are an instrumental part of modern medicine, informing key clinical decisions such as diagnosis and treatment. The worldwide shortage of radiologists, however, restricts access to expert care and imposes heavy workloads, contributing to avoidable errors and delays in report delivery. While recent progress in automated report generation with vision-language models offer clear potential in ameliorating the situation, the path to real-world adoption has been stymied by the challenge of evaluating the clinical quality of AI-generated reports. In this study, we build a state-of-the-art report generation system for chest radiographs, Flamingo-CXR, by fine-tuning a well-known vision-language foundation model on radiology data. To evaluate the quality of the AI-generated reports, a group of 16 certified radiologists provide detailed evaluations of AI-generated and human written reports for chest X-rays from an intensive care setting in the United States and an inpatient setting in India. At least one radiologist (out of two per case) preferred the AI report to the ground truth report in over 60$\%$ of cases for both datasets. Amongst the subset of AI-generated reports that contain errors, the most frequently cited reasons were related to the location and finding, whereas for human written reports, most mistakes were related to severity and finding. This disparity suggested potential complementarity between our AI system and human experts, prompting us to develop an assistive scenario in which Flamingo-CXR generates a first-draft report, which is subsequently revised by a clinician. This is the first demonstration of clinician-AI collaboration for report writing, and the resultant reports are assessed to be equivalent or preferred by at least one radiologist to reports written by experts alone in 80$\%$ of in-patient cases and 66$\%$ of intensive care cases.

MCI Detection using fMRI time series embeddings of Recurrence plots. (arXiv:2311.18265v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Ninad Aithal, Chakka Sai Pradeep, Neelam Sinha

The human brain can be conceptualized as a dynamical system. Utilizing resting state fMRI time series imaging, we can study the underlying dynamics at ear-marked Regions of Interest (ROIs) to understand structure or lack thereof. This differential behavior could be key to understanding the neurodegeneration and also to classify between healthy and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) subjects. In this study, we consider 6 brain networks spanning over 160 ROIs derived from Dosenbach template, where each network consists of 25-30 ROIs. Recurrence plot, extensively used to understand evolution of time series, is employed. Representative time series at each ROI is converted to its corresponding recurrence plot visualization, which is subsequently condensed to low-dimensional feature embeddings through Autoencoders. The performance of the proposed method is shown on fMRI volumes of 100 subjects (balanced data), taken from publicly available ADNI dataset. Results obtained show peak classification accuracy of 93% among the 6 brain networks, mean accuracy of 89.3% thereby illustrating promise in the proposed approach.

Prompt-Based Exemplar Super-Compression and Regeneration for Class-Incremental Learning. (arXiv:2311.18266v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Ruxiao Duan, Yaoyao Liu, Jieneng Chen, Adam Kortylewski, Alan Yuille

Replay-based methods in class-incremental learning (CIL) have attained remarkable success, as replaying the exemplars of old classes can significantly mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Despite their effectiveness, the inherent memory restrictions of CIL result in saving a limited number of exemplars with poor diversity, leading to data imbalance and overfitting issues. In this paper, we introduce a novel exemplar super-compression and regeneration method, ESCORT, which substantially increases the quantity and enhances the diversity of exemplars. Rather than storing past images, we compress images into visual and textual prompts, e.g., edge maps and class tags, and save the prompts instead, reducing the memory usage of each exemplar to 1/24 of the original size. In subsequent learning phases, diverse high-resolution exemplars are generated from the prompts by a pre-trained diffusion model, e.g., ControlNet. To minimize the domain gap between generated exemplars and real images, we propose partial compression and diffusion-based data augmentation, allowing us to utilize an off-the-shelf diffusion model without fine-tuning it on the target dataset. Therefore, the same diffusion model can be downloaded whenever it is needed, incurring no memory consumption. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves model performance across multiple CIL benchmarks, e.g., 5.0 percentage points higher than the previous state-of-the-art on 10-phase Caltech-256 dataset.

Beyond Entropy: Style Transfer Guided Single Image Continual Test-Time Adaptation. (arXiv:2311.18270v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Younggeol Cho, Youngrae Kim, Dongman Lee

Continual test-time adaptation (cTTA) methods are designed to facilitate the continual adaptation of models to dynamically changing real-world environments where computational resources are limited. Due to this inherent limitation, existing approaches fail to simultaneously achieve accuracy and efficiency. In detail, when using a single image, the instability caused by batch normalization layers and entropy loss significantly destabilizes many existing methods in real-world cTTA scenarios. To overcome these challenges, we present BESTTA, a novel single image continual test-time adaptation method guided by style transfer, which enables stable and efficient adaptation to the target environment by transferring the style of the input image to the source style. To implement the proposed method, we devise BeIN, a simple yet powerful normalization method, along with the style-guided losses. We demonstrate that BESTTA effectively adapts to the continually changing target environment, leveraging only a single image on both semantic segmentation and image classification tasks. Remarkably, despite training only two parameters in a BeIN layer consuming the least memory, BESTTA outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance.

HKUST at SemEval-2023 Task 1: Visual Word Sense Disambiguation with Context Augmentation and Visual Assistance. (arXiv:2311.18273v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zhuohao Yin, Xin Huang

Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (VWSD) is a multi-modal task that aims to select, among a batch of candidate images, the one that best entails the target word's meaning within a limited context. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal retrieval framework that maximally leverages pretrained Vision-Language models, as well as open knowledge bases and datasets. Our system consists of the following key components: (1) Gloss matching: a pretrained bi-encoder model is used to match contexts with proper senses of the target words; (2) Prompting: matched glosses and other textual information, such as synonyms, are incorporated using a prompting template; (3) Image retrieval: semantically matching images are retrieved from large open datasets using prompts as queries; (4) Modality fusion: contextual information from different modalities are fused and used for prediction. Although our system does not produce the most competitive results at SemEval-2023 Task 1, we are still able to beat nearly half of the teams. More importantly, our experiments reveal acute insights for the field of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and multi-modal learning. Our code is available on GitHub.

Utilizing Radiomic Feature Analysis For Automated MRI Keypoint Detection: Enhancing Graph Applications. (arXiv:2311.18281v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Sahar Almahfouz Nasser, Shashwat Pathak, Keshav Singhal, Mohit Meena, Nihar Gupte, Ananya Chinmaya, Prateek Garg, Amit Sethi

Graph neural networks (GNNs) present a promising alternative to CNNs and transformers in certain image processing applications due to their parameter-efficiency in modeling spatial relationships. Currently, a major area of research involves the converting non-graph input data for GNN-based models, notably in scenarios where the data originates from images. One approach involves converting images into nodes by identifying significant keypoints within them. Super-Retina, a semi-supervised technique, has been utilized for detecting keypoints in retinal images. However, its limitations lie in the dependency on a small initial set of ground truth keypoints, which is progressively expanded to detect more keypoints. Having encountered difficulties in detecting consistent initial keypoints in brain images using SIFT and LoFTR, we proposed a new approach: radiomic feature-based keypoint detection. Demonstrating the anatomical significance of the detected keypoints was achieved by showcasing their efficacy in improving registration processes guided by these keypoints. Subsequently, these keypoints were employed as the ground truth for the keypoint detection method (LK-SuperRetina). Furthermore, the study showcases the application of GNNs in image matching, highlighting their superior performance in terms of both the number of good matches and confidence scores. This research sets the stage for expanding GNN applications into various other applications, including but not limited to image classification, segmentation, and registration.

SimulFlow: Simultaneously Extracting Feature and Identifying Target for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation. (arXiv:2311.18286v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Lingyi Hong, Wei Zhang, Shuyong Gao, Hong Lu, WenQiang Zhang

Unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS) aims at detecting the primary objects in a given video sequence without any human interposing. Most existing methods rely on two-stream architectures that separately encode the appearance and motion information before fusing them to identify the target and generate object masks. However, this pipeline is computationally expensive and can lead to suboptimal performance due to the difficulty of fusing the two modalities properly. In this paper, we propose a novel UVOS model called SimulFlow that simultaneously performs feature extraction and target identification, enabling efficient and effective unsupervised video object segmentation. Concretely, we design a novel SimulFlow Attention mechanism to bridege the image and motion by utilizing the flexibility of attention operation, where coarse masks predicted from fused feature at each stage are used to constrain the attention operation within the mask area and exclude the impact of noise. Because of the bidirectional information flow between visual and optical flow features in SimulFlow Attention, no extra hand-designed fusing module is required and we only adopt a light decoder to obtain the final prediction. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results. Our proposed approach not only outperforms existing methods but also addresses the computational complexity and fusion difficulties caused by two-stream architectures. Our models achieve 87.4% J & F on DAVIS-16 with the highest speed (63.7 FPS on a 3090) and the lowest parameters (13.7 M). Our SimulFlow also obtains competitive results on video salient object detection datasets.

Dispersed Structured Light for Hyperspectral 3D Imaging. (arXiv:2311.18287v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Suhyun Shin, Seokjun Choi, Felix Heide, Seung-Hwan Baek

Hyperspectral 3D imaging aims to acquire both depth and spectral information of a scene. However, existing methods are either prohibitively expensive and bulky or compromise on spectral and depth accuracy. In this work, we present Dispersed Structured Light (DSL), a cost-effective and compact method for accurate hyperspectral 3D imaging. DSL modifies a traditional projector-camera system by placing a sub-millimeter thick diffraction grating film front of the projector. The grating disperses structured light based on light wavelength. To utilize the dispersed structured light, we devise a model for dispersive projection image formation and a per-pixel hyperspectral 3D reconstruction method. We validate DSL by instantiating a compact experimental prototype. DSL achieves spectral accuracy of 18.8nm full-width half-maximum (FWHM) and depth error of 1mm. We demonstrate that DSL outperforms prior work on practical hyperspectral 3D imaging. DSL promises accurate and practical hyperspectral 3D imaging for diverse application domains, including computer vision and graphics, cultural heritage, geology, and biology.

CosAvatar: Consistent and Animatable Portrait Video Tuning with Text Prompt. (arXiv:2311.18288v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Haiyao Xiao, Chenglai Zhong, Xuan Gao, Yudong Guo, Juyong Zhang

Recently, text-guided digital portrait editing has attracted more and more attentions. However, existing methods still struggle to maintain consistency across time, expression, and view or require specific data prerequisites. To solve these challenging problems, we propose CosAvatar, a high-quality and user-friendly framework for portrait tuning. With only monocular video and text instructions as input, we can produce animatable portraits with both temporal and 3D consistency. Different from methods that directly edit in the 2D domain, we employ a dynamic NeRF-based 3D portrait representation to model both the head and torso. We alternate between editing the video frames' dataset and updating the underlying 3D portrait until the edited frames reach 3D consistency. Additionally, we integrate the semantic portrait priors to enhance the edited results, allowing precise modifications in specified semantic areas. Extensive results demonstrate that our proposed method can not only accurately edit portrait styles or local attributes based on text instructions but also support expressive animation driven by a source video.

TLDR: Text Based Last-layer Retraining for Debiasing Image Classifiers. (arXiv:2311.18291v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Juhyeon Park, Seokhyeon Jeong, Taesup Moon

A classifier may depend on incidental features stemming from a strong correlation between the feature and the classification target in the training dataset. Recently, Last Layer Retraining (LLR) with group-balanced datasets is known to be efficient in mitigating the spurious correlation of classifiers. However, the acquisition of group-balanced datasets is costly, which hinders the applicability of the LLR method. In this work, we propose to perform LLR based on text datasets built with large language models for a general image classifier. We demonstrate that text can be a proxy for its corresponding image beyond the image-text joint embedding space, such as CLIP. Based on this, we use generated texts to train the final layer in the embedding space of the arbitrary image classifier. In addition, we propose a method of filtering the generated words to get rid of noisy, imprecise words, which reduces the effort of inspecting each word. We dub these procedures as TLDR (\textbf{T}ext-based \textbf{L}ast layer retraining for \textbf{D}ebiasing image classifie\textbf{R}s) and show our method achieves the performance that is comparable to those of the LLR methods that also utilize group-balanced image dataset for retraining. Furthermore, TLDR outperforms other baselines that involve training the last linear layer without a group annotated dataset.

Perceptual Group Tokenizer: Building Perception with Iterative Grouping. (arXiv:2311.18296v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zhiwei Deng, Ting Chen, Yang Li

Human visual recognition system shows astonishing capability of compressing visual information into a set of tokens containing rich representations without label supervision. One critical driving principle behind it is perceptual grouping. Despite being widely used in computer vision in the early 2010s, it remains a mystery whether perceptual grouping can be leveraged to derive a neural visual recognition backbone that generates as powerful representations. In this paper, we propose the Perceptual Group Tokenizer, a model that entirely relies on grouping operations to extract visual features and perform self-supervised representation learning, where a series of grouping operations are used to iteratively hypothesize the context for pixels or superpixels to refine feature representations. We show that the proposed model can achieve competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art vision architectures, and inherits desirable properties including adaptive computation without re-training, and interpretability. Specifically, Perceptual Group Tokenizer achieves 80.3% on ImageNet-1K self-supervised learning benchmark with linear probe evaluation, marking a new progress under this paradigm.

TrustMark: Universal Watermarking for Arbitrary Resolution Images. (arXiv:2311.18297v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Tu Bui, Shruti Agarwal, John Collomosse

Imperceptible digital watermarking is important in copyright protection, misinformation prevention, and responsible generative AI. We propose TrustMark - a GAN-based watermarking method with novel design in architecture and spatio-spectra losses to balance the trade-off between watermarked image quality with the watermark recovery accuracy. Our model is trained with robustness in mind, withstanding various in- and out-place perturbations on the encoded image. Additionally, we introduce TrustMark-RM - a watermark remover method useful for re-watermarking. Our methods achieve state-of-art performance on 3 benchmarks comprising arbitrary resolution images.

Reconstructing the normal and shape at specularities in endoscopy. (arXiv:2311.18299v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Karim Makki, Adrien Bartoli

Specularities are numerous in endoscopic images. They occur as many white small elliptic spots, which are generally ruled out as nuisance in image analysis and computer vision methods. Instead, we propose to use specularities as cues for 3D perception. Specifically, we propose a new method to reconstruct, at each specularity, the observed tissue's normal direction (i.e., its orientation) and shape (i.e., its curvature) from a single image. We show results on simulated and real interventional images.

OmniMotionGPT: Animal Motion Generation with Limited Data. (arXiv:2311.18303v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zhangsihao Yang, Mingyuan Zhou, Mengyi Shan, Bingbing Wen, Ziwei Xuan, Mitch Hill, Junjie Bai, Guo-Jun Qi, Yalin Wang

Our paper aims to generate diverse and realistic animal motion sequences from textual descriptions, without a large-scale animal text-motion dataset. While the task of text-driven human motion synthesis is already extensively studied and benchmarked, it remains challenging to transfer this success to other skeleton structures with limited data. In this work, we design a model architecture that imitates Generative Pretraining Transformer (GPT), utilizing prior knowledge learned from human data to the animal domain. We jointly train motion autoencoders for both animal and human motions and at the same time optimize through the similarity scores among human motion encoding, animal motion encoding, and text CLIP embedding. Presenting the first solution to this problem, we are able to generate animal motions with high diversity and fidelity, quantitatively and qualitatively outperforming the results of training human motion generation baselines on animal data. Additionally, we introduce AnimalML3D, the first text-animal motion dataset with 1240 animation sequences spanning 36 different animal identities. We hope this dataset would mediate the data scarcity problem in text-driven animal motion generation, providing a new playground for the research community.

Categorical Traffic Transformer: Interpretable and Diverse Behavior Prediction with Tokenized Latent. (arXiv:2311.18307v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Yuxiao Chen, Sander Tonkens, Marco Pavone

Adept traffic models are critical to both planning and closed-loop simulation for autonomous vehicles (AV), and key design objectives include accuracy, diverse multimodal behaviors, interpretability, and downstream compatibility. Recently, with the advent of large language models (LLMs), an additional desirable feature for traffic models is LLM compatibility. We present Categorical Traffic Transformer (CTT), a traffic model that outputs both continuous trajectory predictions and tokenized categorical predictions (lane modes, homotopies, etc.). The most outstanding feature of CTT is its fully interpretable latent space, which enables direct supervision of the latent variable from the ground truth during training and avoids mode collapse completely. As a result, CTT can generate diverse behaviors conditioned on different latent modes with semantic meanings while beating SOTA on prediction accuracy. In addition, CTT's ability to input and output tokens enables integration with LLMs for common-sense reasoning and zero-shot generalization.

Anisotropic Neural Representation Learning for High-Quality Neural Rendering. (arXiv:2311.18311v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Y.Wang, J. Xu, Y. Zeng, Y. Gong

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have achieved impressive view synthesis results by learning an implicit volumetric representation from multi-view images. To project the implicit representation into an image, NeRF employs volume rendering that approximates the continuous integrals of rays as an accumulation of the colors and densities of the sampled points. Although this approximation enables efficient rendering, it ignores the direction information in point intervals, resulting in ambiguous features and limited reconstruction quality. In this paper, we propose an anisotropic neural representation learning method that utilizes learnable view-dependent features to improve scene representation and reconstruction. We model the volumetric function as spherical harmonic (SH)-guided anisotropic features, parameterized by multilayer perceptrons, facilitating ambiguity elimination while preserving the rendering efficiency. To achieve robust scene reconstruction without anisotropy overfitting, we regularize the energy of the anisotropic features during training. Our method is flexiable and can be plugged into NeRF-based frameworks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed representation can boost the rendering quality of various NeRFs and achieve state-of-the-art rendering performance on both synthetic and real-world scenes.

Advances in 3D Neural Stylization: A Survey. (arXiv:2311.18328v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yingshu Chen, Guocheng Shao, Ka Chun Shum, Binh-Son Hua, Sai-Kit Yeung

Modern artificial intelligence provides a novel way of producing digital art in styles. The expressive power of neural networks enables the realm of visual style transfer methods, which can be used to edit images, videos, and 3D data to make them more artistic and diverse. This paper reports on recent advances in neural stylization for 3D data. We provide a taxonomy for neural stylization by considering several important design choices, including scene representation, guidance data, optimization strategies, and output styles. Building on such taxonomy, our survey first revisits the background of neural stylization on 2D images, and then provides in-depth discussions on recent neural stylization methods for 3D data, where we also provide a mini-benchmark on artistic stylization methods. Based on the insights gained from the survey, we then discuss open challenges, future research, and potential applications and impacts of neural stylization.

MRFP: Learning Generalizable Semantic Segmentation from Sim-2-Real with Multi-Resolution Feature Perturbation. (arXiv:2311.18331v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Sumanth Udupa, Prajwal Gurunath, Aniruddh Sikdar, Suresh Sundaram

Deep neural networks have shown exemplary performance on semantic scene understanding tasks on source domains, but due to the absence of style diversity during training, enhancing performance on unseen target domains using only single source domain data remains a challenging task. Generation of simulated data is a feasible alternative to retrieving large style-diverse real-world datasets as it is a cumbersome and budget-intensive process. However, the large domain-specific inconsistencies between simulated and real-world data pose a significant generalization challenge in semantic segmentation. In this work, to alleviate this problem, we propose a novel MultiResolution Feature Perturbation (MRFP) technique to randomize domain-specific fine-grained features and perturb style of coarse features. Our experimental results on various urban-scene segmentation datasets clearly indicate that, along with the perturbation of style-information, perturbation of fine-feature components is paramount to learn domain invariant robust feature maps for semantic segmentation models. MRFP is a simple and computationally efficient, transferable module with no additional learnable parameters or objective functions, that helps state-of-the-art deep neural networks to learn robust domain invariant features for simulation-to-real semantic segmentation.

Multilevel Saliency-Guided Self-Supervised Learning for Image Anomaly Detection. (arXiv:2311.18332v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jianjian Qin, Chunzhi Gu, Jun Yu, Chao Zhang

Anomaly detection (AD) is a fundamental task in computer vision. It aims to identify incorrect image data patterns which deviate from the normal ones. Conventional methods generally address AD by preparing augmented negative samples to enforce self-supervised learning. However, these techniques typically do not consider semantics during augmentation, leading to the generation of unrealistic or invalid negative samples. Consequently, the feature extraction network can be hindered from embedding critical features. In this study, inspired by visual attention learning approaches, we propose CutSwap, which leverages saliency guidance to incorporate semantic cues for augmentation. Specifically, we first employ LayerCAM to extract multilevel image features as saliency maps and then perform clustering to obtain multiple centroids. To fully exploit saliency guidance, on each map, we select a pixel pair from the cluster with the highest centroid saliency to form a patch pair. Such a patch pair includes highly similar context information with dense semantic correlations. The resulting negative sample is created by swapping the locations of the patch pair. Compared to prior augmentation methods, CutSwap generates more subtle yet realistic negative samples to facilitate quality feature learning. Extensive experimental and ablative evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art AD performance on two mainstream AD benchmark datasets.

DSeg: Direct Line Segments Detection. (arXiv:2311.18344v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Berger Cyrille, Lacroix Simon

This paper presents a model-driven approach to detect image line segments. The approach incrementally detects segments on the gradient image using a linear Kalman filter that estimates the supporting line parameters and their associated variances. The algorithm is fast and robust with respect to image noise and illumination variations, it allows the detection of longer line segments than data-driven approaches, and does not require any tedious parameters tuning. An extension of the algorithm that exploits a pyramidal approach to enhance the quality of results is proposed. Results with varying scene illumination and comparisons to classic existing approaches are presented.

TIDE: Test Time Few Shot Object Detection. (arXiv:2311.18358v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Weikai Li, Hongfeng Wei, Yanlai Wu, Jie Yang, Yudi Ruan, Yuan Li, Ying Tang

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to extract semantic knowledge from limited object instances of novel categories within a target domain. Recent advances in FSOD focus on fine-tuning the base model based on a few objects via meta-learning or data augmentation. Despite their success, the majority of them are grounded with parametric readjustment to generalize on novel objects, which face considerable challenges in Industry 5.0, such as (i) a certain amount of fine-tuning time is required, and (ii) the parameters of the constructed model being unavailable due to the privilege protection, making the fine-tuning fail. Such constraints naturally limit its application in scenarios with real-time configuration requirements or within black-box settings. To tackle the challenges mentioned above, we formalize a novel FSOD task, referred to as Test TIme Few Shot DEtection (TIDE), where the model is un-tuned in the configuration procedure. To that end, we introduce an asymmetric architecture for learning a support-instance-guided dynamic category classifier. Further, a cross-attention module and a multi-scale resizer are provided to enhance the model performance. Experimental results on multiple few-shot object detection platforms reveal that the proposed TIDE significantly outperforms existing contemporary methods. The implementation codes are available at https://github.com/deku-0621/TIDE

Automating lookahead planning using site appearance and space utilization. (arXiv:2311.18361v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Eyob Mengiste, Borja Garcia de Soto, Timo Hartmann

This study proposes a method to automate the development of lookahead planning. The proposed method uses construction material conditions (i.e., appearances) and site space utilization to predict task completion rates. A Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model was trained using a segment of a construction project timeline to estimate completion rates of tasks and propose data-aware lookahead plans. The proposed method was evaluated in a sample construction project involving finishing works such as plastering, painting, and installing electrical fixtures. The results show that the proposed method can assist with developing automated lookahead plans. In doing so, this study links construction planning with actual events at the construction site. It extends the traditional scheduling techniques and integrates a broader spectrum of site spatial constraints into lookahead planning.

Each Test Image Deserves A Specific Prompt: Continual Test-Time Adaptation for 2D Medical Image Segmentation. (arXiv:2311.18363v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Ziyang Chen, Yiwen Ye, Mengkang Lu, Yongsheng Pan, Yong Xia

Distribution shift widely exists in medical images acquired from different medical centres and poses a significant obstacle to deploying the pre-trained semantic segmentation model in real-world applications. Test-time adaptation has proven its effectiveness in tackling the cross-domain distribution shift during inference. However, most existing methods achieve adaptation by updating the pre-trained models, rendering them susceptible to error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting when encountering a series of distribution shifts (i.e., under the continual test-time adaptation setup). To overcome these challenges caused by updating the models, in this paper, we freeze the pre-trained model and propose the Visual Prompt-based Test-Time Adaptation (VPTTA) method to train a specific prompt for each test image to align the statistics in the batch normalization layers. Specifically, we present the low-frequency prompt, which is lightweight with only a few parameters and can be effectively trained in a single iteration. To enhance prompt initialization, we equip VPTTA with a memory bank to benefit the current prompt from previous ones. Additionally, we design a warm-up mechanism, which mixes source and target statistics to construct warm-up statistics, thereby facilitating the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our VPTTA over other state-of-the-art methods on two medical image segmentation benchmark tasks. The code and weights of pre-trained source models are available at https://github.com/Chen-Ziyang/VPTTA.

A Survey on Deep Learning for Polyp Segmentation: Techniques, Challenges and Future Trends. (arXiv:2311.18373v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jiaxin Mei, Tao Zhou, Kaiwen Huang, Yizhe Zhang, Yi Zhou, Ye Wu, Huazhu Fu

Early detection and assessment of polyps play a crucial role in the prevention and treatment of colorectal cancer (CRC). Polyp segmentation provides an effective solution to assist clinicians in accurately locating and segmenting polyp regions. In the past, people often relied on manually extracted lower-level features such as color, texture, and shape, which often had issues capturing global context and lacked robustness to complex scenarios. With the advent of deep learning, more and more outstanding medical image segmentation algorithms based on deep learning networks have emerged, making significant progress in this field. This paper provides a comprehensive review of polyp segmentation algorithms. We first review some traditional algorithms based on manually extracted features and deep segmentation algorithms, then detail benchmark datasets related to the topic. Specifically, we carry out a comprehensive evaluation of recent deep learning models and results based on polyp sizes, considering the pain points of research topics and differences in network structures. Finally, we discuss the challenges of polyp segmentation and future trends in this field. The models, benchmark datasets, and source code links we collected are all published at https://github.com/taozh2017/Awesome-Polyp-Segmentation.

On Exact Inversion of DPM-Solvers. (arXiv:2311.18387v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Seongmin Hong, Kyeonghyun Lee, Suh Yoon Jeon, Hyewon Bae, Se Young Chun

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) are a key component in modern generative models. DPM-solvers have achieved reduced latency and enhanced quality significantly, but have posed challenges to find the exact inverse (i.e., finding the initial noise from the given image). Here we investigate the exact inversions for DPM-solvers and propose algorithms to perform them when samples are generated by the first-order as well as higher-order DPM-solvers. For each explicit denoising step in DPM-solvers, we formulated the inversions using implicit methods such as gradient descent or forward step method to ensure the robustness to large classifier-free guidance unlike the prior approach using fixed-point iteration. Experimental results demonstrated that our proposed exact inversion methods significantly reduced the error of both image and noise reconstructions, greatly enhanced the ability to distinguish invisible watermarks and well prevented unintended background changes consistently during image editing. Project page: \url{https://smhongok.github.io/inv-dpm.html}.

RainAI -- Precipitation Nowcasting from Satellite Data. (arXiv:2311.18398v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Rafael Pablos Sarabia, Joachim Nyborg, Morten Birk, Ira Assent

This paper presents a solution to the Weather4Cast 2023 competition, where the goal is to forecast high-resolution precipitation with an 8-hour lead time using lower-resolution satellite radiance images. We propose a simple, yet effective method for spatiotemporal feature learning using a 2D U-Net model, that outperforms the official 3D U-Net baseline in both performance and efficiency. We place emphasis on refining the dataset, through importance sampling and dataset preparation, and show that such techniques have a significant impact on performance. We further study an alternative cross-entropy loss function that improves performance over the standard mean squared error loss, while also enabling models to produce probabilistic outputs. Additional techniques are explored regarding the generation of predictions at different lead times, specifically through Conditioning Lead Time. Lastly, to generate high-resolution forecasts, we evaluate standard and learned upsampling methods. The code and trained parameters are available at https://github.com/rafapablos/w4c23-rainai.

MV-CLIP: Multi-View CLIP for Zero-shot 3D Shape Recognition. (arXiv:2311.18402v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Dan Song, Xinwei Fu, Weizhi Nie, Wenhui Li, Anan Liu

Large-scale pre-trained models have demonstrated impressive performance in vision and language tasks within open-world scenarios. Due to the lack of comparable pre-trained models for 3D shapes, recent methods utilize language-image pre-training to realize zero-shot 3D shape recognition. However, due to the modality gap, pretrained language-image models are not confident enough in the generalization to 3D shape recognition. Consequently, this paper aims to improve the confidence with view selection and hierarchical prompts. Leveraging the CLIP model as an example, we employ view selection on the vision side by identifying views with high prediction confidence from multiple rendered views of a 3D shape. On the textual side, the strategy of hierarchical prompts is proposed for the first time. The first layer prompts several classification candidates with traditional class-level descriptions, while the second layer refines the prediction based on function-level descriptions or further distinctions between the candidates. Remarkably, without the need for additional training, our proposed method achieves impressive zero-shot 3D classification accuracies of 84.44\%, 91.51\%, and 66.17\% on ModelNet40, ModelNet10, and ShapeNet Core55, respectively. Furthermore, we will make the code publicly available to facilitate reproducibility and further research in this area.

Corrupting Convolution-based Unlearnable Datasets with Pixel-based Image Transformations. (arXiv:2311.18403v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Xianlong Wang, Shengshan Hu, Minghui Li, Zhifei Yu, Ziqi Zhou, Leo Yu Zhang, Hai Jin

Unlearnable datasets lead to a drastic drop in the generalization performance of models trained on them by introducing elaborate and imperceptible perturbations into clean training sets. Many existing defenses, e.g., JPEG compression and adversarial training, effectively counter UDs based on norm-constrained additive noise. However, a fire-new type of convolution-based UDs have been proposed and render existing defenses all ineffective, presenting a greater challenge to defenders. To address this, we express the convolution-based unlearnable sample as the result of multiplying a matrix by a clean sample in a simplified scenario, and formalize the intra-class matrix inconsistency as $\Theta_{imi}$, inter-class matrix consistency as $\Theta_{imc}$ to investigate the working mechanism of the convolution-based UDs. We conjecture that increasing both of these metrics will mitigate the unlearnability effect. Through validation experiments that commendably support our hypothesis, we further design a random matrix to boost both $\Theta_{imi}$ and $\Theta_{imc}$, achieving a notable degree of defense effect. Hence, by building upon and extending these facts, we first propose a brand-new image COrruption that employs randomly multiplicative transformation via INterpolation operation to successfully defend against convolution-based UDs. Our approach leverages global pixel random interpolations, effectively suppressing the impact of multiplicative noise in convolution-based UDs. Additionally, we have also designed two new forms of convolution-based UDs, and find that our defense is the most effective against them.

CAT-DM: Controllable Accelerated Virtual Try-on with Diffusion Model. (arXiv:2311.18405v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jianhao Zeng, Dan Song, Weizhi Nie, Hongshuo Tian, Tongtong Wang, Anan Liu

Image-based virtual try-on enables users to virtually try on different garments by altering original clothes in their photographs. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) dominate the research field in image-based virtual try-on, but have not resolved problems such as unnatural deformation of garments and the blurry generation quality. Recently, diffusion models have emerged with surprising performance across various image generation tasks. While the generative quality of diffusion models is impressive, achieving controllability poses a significant challenge when applying it to virtual try-on tasks and multiple denoising iterations limit its potential for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose Controllable Accelerated virtual Try-on with Diffusion Model called CAT-DM. To enhance the controllability, a basic diffusion-based virtual try-on network is designed, which utilizes ControlNet to introduce additional control conditions and improves the feature extraction of garment images. In terms of acceleration, CAT-DM initiates a reverse denoising process with an implicit distribution generated by a pre-trained GAN-based model. Compared with previous try-on methods based on diffusion models, CAT-DM not only retains the pattern and texture details of the in-shop garment but also reduces the sampling steps without compromising generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of CAT-DM against both GAN-based and diffusion-based methods in producing more realistic images and accurately reproducing garment patterns. Our code and models will be publicly released.

TeG-DG: Textually Guided Domain Generalization for Face Anti-Spoofing. (arXiv:2311.18420v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Lianrui Mu, Jianhong Bai, Xiaoxuan He, Jiangnan Ye, Xiaoyu Liang, Yuchen Yang, Jiedong Zhuang, Haoji Hu

Enhancing the domain generalization performance of Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) techniques has emerged as a research focus. Existing methods are dedicated to extracting domain-invariant features from various training domains. Despite the promising performance, the extracted features inevitably contain residual style feature bias (e.g., illumination, capture device), resulting in inferior generalization performance. In this paper, we propose an alternative and effective solution, the Textually Guided Domain Generalization (TeG-DG) framework, which can effectively leverage text information for cross-domain alignment. Our core insight is that text, as a more abstract and universal form of expression, can capture the commonalities and essential characteristics across various attacks, bridging the gap between different image domains. Contrary to existing vision-language models, the proposed framework is elaborately designed to enhance the domain generalization ability of the FAS task. Concretely, we first design a Hierarchical Attention Fusion (HAF) module to enable adaptive aggregation of visual features at different levels; Then, a Textual-Enhanced Visual Discriminator (TEVD) is proposed for not only better alignment between the two modalities but also to regularize the classifier with unbiased text features. TeG-DG significantly outperforms previous approaches, especially in situations with extremely limited source domain data (~14% and ~12% improvements on HTER and AUC respectively), showcasing impressive few-shot performance.

E2PNet: Event to Point Cloud Registration with Spatio-Temporal Representation Learning. (arXiv:2311.18433v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Xiuhong Lin, Changjie Qiu, Zhipeng Cai, Siqi Shen, Yu Zang, Weiquan Liu, Xuesheng Bian, Matthias Müller, Cheng Wang

Event cameras have emerged as a promising vision sensor in recent years due to their unparalleled temporal resolution and dynamic range. While registration of 2D RGB images to 3D point clouds is a long-standing problem in computer vision, no prior work studies 2D-3D registration for event cameras. To this end, we propose E2PNet, the first learning-based method for event-to-point cloud registration. The core of E2PNet is a novel feature representation network called Event-Points-to-Tensor (EP2T), which encodes event data into a 2D grid-shaped feature tensor. This grid-shaped feature enables matured RGB-based frameworks to be easily used for event-to-point cloud registration, without changing hyper-parameters and the training procedure. EP2T treats the event input as spatio-temporal point clouds. Unlike standard 3D learning architectures that treat all dimensions of point clouds equally, the novel sampling and information aggregation modules in EP2T are designed to handle the inhomogeneity of the spatial and temporal dimensions. Experiments on the MVSEC and VECtor datasets demonstrate the superiority of E2PNet over hand-crafted and other learning-based methods. Compared to RGB-based registration, E2PNet is more robust to extreme illumination or fast motion due to the use of event data. Beyond 2D-3D registration, we also show the potential of EP2T for other vision tasks such as flow estimation, event-to-image reconstruction and object recognition. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/Xmu-qcj/E2PNet.

Layered Rendering Diffusion Model for Zero-Shot Guided Image Synthesis. (arXiv:2311.18435v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zipeng Qi, Guoxi Huang, Zebin Huang, Qin Guo, Jinwen Chen, Junyu Han, Jian Wang, Gang Zhang, Lufei Liu, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang

This paper introduces innovative solutions to enhance spatial controllability in diffusion models reliant on text queries. We present two key innovations: Vision Guidance and the Layered Rendering Diffusion (LRDiff) framework. Vision Guidance, a spatial layout condition, acts as a clue in the perturbed distribution, greatly narrowing down the search space, to focus on the image sampling process adhering to the spatial layout condition. The LRDiff framework constructs an image-rendering process with multiple layers, each of which applies the vision guidance to instructively estimate the denoising direction for a single object. Such a layered rendering strategy effectively prevents issues like unintended conceptual blending or mismatches, while allowing for more coherent and contextually accurate image synthesis. The proposed method provides a more efficient and accurate means of synthesising images that align with specific spatial and contextual requirements. We demonstrate through our experiments that our method provides better results than existing techniques both quantitatively and qualitatively. We apply our method to three practical applications: bounding box-to-image, semantic mask-to-image and image editing.

VTimeLLM: Empower LLM to Grasp Video Moments. (arXiv:2311.18445v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Bin Huang, Xin Wang, Hong Chen, Zihan Song, Wenwu Zhu

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable text understanding capabilities, which have been extended as Video LLMs to handle video data for comprehending visual details. However, existing Video LLMs can only provide a coarse description of the entire video, failing to capture the precise start and end time boundary of specific events. In this paper, we solve this issue via proposing VTimeLLM, a novel Video LLM designed for fine-grained video moment understanding and reasoning with respect to time boundary. Specifically, our VTimeLLM adopts a boundary-aware three-stage training strategy, which respectively utilizes image-text pairs for feature alignment, multiple-event videos to increase temporal-boundary awareness, and high-quality video-instruction tuning to further improve temporal understanding ability as well as align with human intents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that in fine-grained time-related comprehension tasks for videos such as Temporal Video Grounding and Dense Video Captioning, VTimeLLM significantly outperforms existing Video LLMs. Besides, benefits from the fine-grained temporal understanding of the videos further enable VTimeLLM to beat existing Video LLMs in video dialogue benchmark, showing its superior cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities.

HOLD: Category-agnostic 3D Reconstruction of Interacting Hands and Objects from Video. (arXiv:2311.18448v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zicong Fan, Maria Parelli, Maria Eleni Kadoglou, Muhammed Kocabas, Xu Chen, Michael J. Black, Otmar Hilliges

Since humans interact with diverse objects every day, the holistic 3D capture of these interactions is important to understand and model human behaviour. However, most existing methods for hand-object reconstruction from RGB either assume pre-scanned object templates or heavily rely on limited 3D hand-object data, restricting their ability to scale and generalize to more unconstrained interaction settings. To this end, we introduce HOLD -- the first category-agnostic method that reconstructs an articulated hand and object jointly from a monocular interaction video. We develop a compositional articulated implicit model that can reconstruct disentangled 3D hand and object from 2D images. We also further incorporate hand-object constraints to improve hand-object poses and consequently the reconstruction quality. Our method does not rely on 3D hand-object annotations while outperforming fully-supervised baselines in both in-the-lab and challenging in-the-wild settings. Moreover, we qualitatively show its robustness in reconstructing from in-the-wild videos. Code: https://github.com/zc-alexfan/hold

ESG Accountability Made Easy: DocQA at Your Service. (arXiv:2311.18481v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Lokesh Mishra, Cesar Berrospi, Kasper Dinkla, Diego Antognini, Francesco Fusco, Benedikt Bothur, Maksym Lysak, Nikolaos Livathinos, Ahmed Nassar, Panagiotis Vagenas, Lucas Morin, Christoph Auer, Michele Dolfi, Peter Staar

We present Deep Search DocQA. This application enables information extraction from documents via a question-answering conversational assistant. The system integrates several technologies from different AI disciplines consisting of document conversion to machine-readable format (via computer vision), finding relevant data (via natural language processing), and formulating an eloquent response (via large language models). Users can explore over 10,000 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure reports from over 2000 corporations. The Deep Search platform can be accessed at: https://ds4sd.github.io.

Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding. (arXiv:2311.18482v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jin-Chuan Shi, Miao Wang, Hao-Bin Duan, Shao-Hua Guan

Open-vocabulary querying in 3D space is challenging but essential for scene understanding tasks such as object localization and segmentation. Language-embedded scene representations have made progress by incorporating language features into 3D spaces. However, their efficacy heavily depends on neural networks that are resource-intensive in training and rendering. Although recent 3D Gaussians offer efficient and high-quality novel view synthesis, directly embedding language features in them leads to prohibitive memory usage and decreased performance. In this work, we introduce Language Embedded 3D Gaussians, a novel scene representation for open-vocabulary query tasks. Instead of embedding high-dimensional raw semantic features on 3D Gaussians, we propose a dedicated quantization scheme that drastically alleviates the memory requirement, and a novel embedding procedure that achieves smoother yet high accuracy query, countering the multi-view feature inconsistencies and the high-frequency inductive bias in point-based representations. Our comprehensive experiments show that our representation achieves the best visual quality and language querying accuracy across current language-embedded representations, while maintaining real-time rendering frame rates on a single desktop GPU.

ZeST-NeRF: Using temporal aggregation for Zero-Shot Temporal NeRFs. (arXiv:2311.18491v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Violeta Menéndez González, Andrew Gilbert, Graeme Phillipson, Stephen Jolly, Simon Hadfield

In the field of media production, video editing techniques play a pivotal role. Recent approaches have had great success at performing novel view image synthesis of static scenes. But adding temporal information adds an extra layer of complexity. Previous models have focused on implicitly representing static and dynamic scenes using NeRF. These models achieve impressive results but are costly at training and inference time. They overfit an MLP to describe the scene implicitly as a function of position. This paper proposes ZeST-NeRF, a new approach that can produce temporal NeRFs for new scenes without retraining. We can accurately reconstruct novel views using multi-view synthesis techniques and scene flow-field estimation, trained only with unrelated scenes. We demonstrate how existing state-of-the-art approaches from a range of fields cannot adequately solve this new task and demonstrate the efficacy of our solution. The resulting network improves quantitatively by 15% and produces significantly better visual results.

PRS: Sharp Feature Priors for Resolution-Free Surface Remeshing. (arXiv:2311.18494v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Natalia Soboleva, Olga Gorbunova, Maria Ivanova, Evgeny Burnaev, Matthias Nießner, Denis Zorin, Alexey Artemov

Surface reconstruction with preservation of geometric features is a challenging computer vision task. Despite significant progress in implicit shape reconstruction, state-of-the-art mesh extraction methods often produce aliased, perceptually distorted surfaces and lack scalability to high-resolution 3D shapes. We present a data-driven approach for automatic feature detection and remeshing that requires only a coarse, aliased mesh as input and scales to arbitrary resolution reconstructions. We define and learn a collection of surface-based fields to (1) capture sharp geometric features in the shape with an implicit vertexwise model and (2) approximate improvements in normals alignment obtained by applying edge-flips with an edgewise model. To support scaling to arbitrary complexity shapes, we learn our fields using local triangulated patches, fusing estimates on complete surface meshes. Our feature remeshing algorithm integrates the learned fields as sharp feature priors and optimizes vertex placement and mesh connectivity for maximum expected surface improvement. On a challenging collection of high-resolution shape reconstructions in the ABC dataset, our algorithm improves over state-of-the-art by 26% normals F-score and 42% perceptual $\text{RMSE}_{\text{v}}$.

Improving Adversarial Transferability via Model Alignment. (arXiv:2311.18495v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Avery Ma, Amir-massoud Farahmand, Yangchen Pan, Philip Torr, Jindong Gu

Neural networks are susceptible to adversarial perturbations that are transferable across different models. In this paper, we introduce a novel model alignment technique aimed at improving a given source model's ability in generating transferable adversarial perturbations. During the alignment process, the parameters of the source model are fine-tuned to minimize an alignment loss. This loss measures the divergence in the predictions between the source model and another, independently trained model, referred to as the witness model. To understand the effect of model alignment, we conduct a geometric anlaysis of the resulting changes in the loss landscape. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset, using a variety of model architectures, demonstrate that perturbations generated from aligned source models exhibit significantly higher transferability than those from the original source model.

Accurate Segmentation of Optic Disc And Cup from Multiple Pseudo-labels by Noise-Aware Learning. (arXiv:2311.18496v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Tengjin Weng, Yang Shen, Zhidong Zhao, Zhiming Cheng, Shuai Wang

Optic disc and cup segmentation play a crucial role in automating the screening and diagnosis of optic glaucoma. While data-driven convolutional neural networks (CNNs) show promise in this area, the inherent ambiguity of segmenting object and background boundaries in the task of optic disc and cup segmentation leads to noisy annotations that impact model performance. To address this, we propose an innovative label-denoising method of Multiple Pseudo-labels Noise-aware Network (MPNN) for accurate optic disc and cup segmentation. Specifically, the Multiple Pseudo-labels Generation and Guided Denoising (MPGGD) module generates pseudo-labels by multiple different initialization networks trained on true labels, and the pixel-level consensus information extracted from these pseudo-labels guides to differentiate clean pixels from noisy pixels. The training framework of the MPNN is constructed by a teacher-student architecture to learn segmentation from clean pixels and noisy pixels. Particularly, such a framework adeptly leverages (i) reliable and fundamental insights from clean pixels and (ii) the supplementary knowledge within noisy pixels via multiple perturbation-based unsupervised consistency. Compared to other label-denoising methods, comprehensive experimental results on the RIGA dataset demonstrate our method's excellent performance and significant denoising ability.

DifAugGAN: A Practical Diffusion-style Data Augmentation for GAN-based Single Image Super-resolution. (arXiv:2311.18508v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Axi Niu, Kang Zhang, Joshua Tian Jin Tee, Trung X. Pham, Jinqiu Sun, Chang D. Yoo, In So Kweon, Yanning Zhang

It is well known the adversarial optimization of GAN-based image super-resolution (SR) methods makes the preceding SR model generate unpleasant and undesirable artifacts, leading to large distortion. We attribute the cause of such distortions to the poor calibration of the discriminator, which hampers its ability to provide meaningful feedback to the generator for learning high-quality images. To address this problem, we propose a simple but non-travel diffusion-style data augmentation scheme for current GAN-based SR methods, known as DifAugGAN. It involves adapting the diffusion process in generative diffusion models for improving the calibration of the discriminator during training motivated by the successes of data augmentation schemes in the field to achieve good calibration. Our DifAugGAN can be a Plug-and-Play strategy for current GAN-based SISR methods to improve the calibration of the discriminator and thus improve SR performance. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of DifAugGAN over state-of-the-art GAN-based SISR methods across both synthetic and real-world datasets, showcasing notable advancements in both qualitative and quantitative results.

Revisiting Proposal-based Object Detection. (arXiv:2311.18512v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Aritra Bhowmik, Martin R. Oswald, Pascal Mettes, Cees G. M. Snoek

This paper revisits the pipeline for detecting objects in images with proposals. For any object detector, the obtained box proposals or queries need to be classified and regressed towards ground truth boxes. The common solution for the final predictions is to directly maximize the overlap between each proposal and the ground truth box, followed by a winner-takes-all ranking or non-maximum suppression. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective alternative. For proposal regression, we solve a simpler problem where we regress to the area of intersection between proposal and ground truth. In this way, each proposal only specifies which part contains the object, avoiding a blind inpainting problem where proposals need to be regressed beyond their visual scope. In turn, we replace the winner-takes-all strategy and obtain the final prediction by taking the union over the regressed intersections of a proposal group surrounding an object. Our revisited approach comes with minimal changes to the detection pipeline and can be plugged into any existing method. We show that our approach directly improves canonical object detection and instance segmentation architectures, highlighting the utility of intersection-based regression and grouping.

Color-Emotion Associations in Art: Fuzzy Approach. (arXiv:2311.18518v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Pakizar Shamoi, Muragul Muratbekova

Art objects can evoke certain emotions. Color is a fundamental element of visual art and plays a significant role in how art is perceived. This paper introduces a novel approach to classifying emotions in art using Fuzzy Sets. We employ a fuzzy approach because it aligns well with human judgments' imprecise and subjective nature. Extensive fuzzy colors (n=120) and a broad emotional spectrum (n=10) allow for a more human-consistent and context-aware exploration of emotions inherent in paintings. First, we introduce the fuzzy color representation model. Then, at the fuzzification stage, we process the Wiki Art Dataset of paintings tagged with emotions, extracting fuzzy dominant colors linked to specific emotions. This results in fuzzy color distributions for ten emotions. Finally, we convert them back to a crisp domain, obtaining a knowledge base of color-emotion associations in primary colors. Our findings reveal strong associations between specific emotions and colors; for instance, gratitude strongly correlates with green, brown, and orange. Other noteworthy associations include brown and anger, orange with shame, yellow with happiness, and gray with fear. Using these associations and Jaccard similarity, we can find the emotions in the arbitrary untagged image. We conducted a 2AFC experiment involving human subjects to evaluate the proposed method. The average hit rate of 0.77 indicates a significant correlation between the method's predictions and human perception. The proposed method is simple to adapt to art painting retrieval systems. The study contributes to the theoretical understanding of color-emotion associations in art, offering valuable insights for various practical applications besides art, like marketing, design, and psychology.

Dataset Distillation via the Wasserstein Metric. (arXiv:2311.18531v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Haoyang Liu, Tiancheng Xing, Luwei Li, Vibhu Dalal, Jingrui He, Haohan Wang

Dataset distillation (DD) offers a compelling approach in computer vision, with the goal of condensing extensive datasets into smaller synthetic versions without sacrificing much of the model performance. In this paper, we continue to study the methods for DD, by addressing its conceptually core objective: how to capture the essential representation of extensive datasets in smaller, synthetic forms.

We propose a novel approach utilizing the Wasserstein distance, a metric rooted in optimal transport theory, to enhance distribution matching in DD. Our method leverages the Wasserstein barycenter, offering a geometrically meaningful way to quantify distribution differences and effectively capture the centroid of a set of distributions. Our approach retains the computational benefits of distribution matching-based methods while achieving new state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks.

To provide useful prior for learning the images, we embed the synthetic data into the feature space of pretrained classification models to conduct distribution matching. Extensive testing on various high-resolution datasets confirms the effectiveness and adaptability of our method, indicating the promising yet unexplored capabilities of Wasserstein metrics in dataset distillation.

MaXTron: Mask Transformer with Trajectory Attention for Video Panoptic Segmentation. (arXiv:2311.18537v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Ju He, Qihang Yu, Inkyu Shin, Xueqing Deng, Xiaohui Shen, Alan Yuille, Liang-Chieh Chen

Video panoptic segmentation requires consistently segmenting (for both `thing' and `stuff' classes) and tracking objects in a video over time. In this work, we present MaXTron, a general framework that exploits Mask XFormer with Trajectory Attention to tackle the task. MaXTron enriches an off-the-shelf mask transformer by leveraging trajectory attention. The deployed mask transformer takes as input a short clip consisting of only a few frames and predicts the clip-level segmentation. To enhance the temporal consistency, MaXTron employs within-clip and cross-clip tracking modules, efficiently utilizing trajectory attention. Originally designed for video classification, trajectory attention learns to model the temporal correspondences between neighboring frames and aggregates information along the estimated motion paths. However, it is nontrivial to directly extend trajectory attention to the per-pixel dense prediction tasks due to its quadratic dependency on input size. To alleviate the issue, we propose to adapt the trajectory attention for both the dense pixel features and object queries, aiming to improve the short-term and long-term tracking results, respectively. Particularly, in our within-clip tracking module, we propose axial-trajectory attention that effectively computes the trajectory attention for tracking dense pixels sequentially along the height- and width-axes. The axial decomposition significantly reduces the computational complexity for dense pixel features. In our cross-clip tracking module, since the object queries in mask transformer are learned to encode the object information, we are able to capture the long-term temporal connections by applying trajectory attention to object queries, which learns to track each object across different clips. Without bells and whistles, MaXTron demonstrates state-of-the-art performances on video segmentation benchmarks.

Match me if you can: Semantic Correspondence Learning with Unpaired Images. (arXiv:2311.18540v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jiwon Kim, Byeongho Heo, Sangdoo Yun, Seungryong Kim, Dongyoon Han

Recent approaches for semantic correspondence have focused on obtaining high-quality correspondences using a complicated network, refining the ambiguous or noisy matching points. Despite their performance improvements, they remain constrained by the limited training pairs due to costly point-level annotations. This paper proposes a simple yet effective method that performs training with unlabeled pairs to complement both limited image pairs and sparse point pairs, requiring neither extra labeled keypoints nor trainable modules. We fundamentally extend the data quantity and variety by augmenting new unannotated pairs not primitively provided as training pairs in benchmarks. Using a simple teacher-student framework, we offer reliable pseudo correspondences to the student network via machine supervision. Finally, the performance of our network is steadily improved by the proposed iterative training, putting back the student as a teacher to generate refined labels and train a new student repeatedly. Our models outperform the milestone baselines, including state-of-the-art methods on semantic correspondence benchmarks.

Heterogeneous Graph-based Trajectory Prediction using Local Map Context and Social Interactions. (arXiv:2311.18553v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Daniel Grimm, Maximilian Zipfl, Felix Hertlein, Alexander Naumann, Jürgen Lüttin, Steffen Thoma, Stefan Schmid, Lavdim Halilaj, Achim Rettinger, J. Marius Zöllner

Precisely predicting the future trajectories of surrounding traffic participants is a crucial but challenging problem in autonomous driving, due to complex interactions between traffic agents, map context and traffic rules. Vector-based approaches have recently shown to achieve among the best performances on trajectory prediction benchmarks. These methods model simple interactions between traffic agents but don't distinguish between relation-type and attributes like their distance along the road. Furthermore, they represent lanes only by sequences of vectors representing center lines and ignore context information like lane dividers and other road elements. We present a novel approach for vector-based trajectory prediction that addresses these shortcomings by leveraging three crucial sources of information: First, we model interactions between traffic agents by a semantic scene graph, that accounts for the nature and important features of their relation. Second, we extract agent-centric image-based map features to model the local map context. Finally, we generate anchor paths to enforce the policy in multi-modal prediction to permitted trajectories only. Each of these three enhancements shows advantages over the baseline model HoliGraph.

FediOS: Decoupling Orthogonal Subspaces for Personalization in Feature-skew Federated Learning. (arXiv:2311.18559v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Lingzhi Gao, Zexi Li, Yang Lu, Chao Wu

Personalized federated learning (pFL) enables collaborative training among multiple clients to enhance the capability of customized local models. In pFL, clients may have heterogeneous (also known as non-IID) data, which poses a key challenge in how to decouple the data knowledge into generic knowledge for global sharing and personalized knowledge for preserving local personalization. A typical way of pFL focuses on label distribution skew, and they adopt a decoupling scheme where the model is split into a common feature extractor and two prediction heads (generic and personalized). However, such a decoupling scheme cannot solve the essential problem of feature skew heterogeneity, because a common feature extractor cannot decouple the generic and personalized features. Therefore, in this paper, we rethink the architecture decoupling design for feature-skew pFL and propose an effective pFL method called FediOS. In FediOS, we reformulate the decoupling into two feature extractors (generic and personalized) and one shared prediction head. Orthogonal projections are used for clients to map the generic features into one common subspace and scatter the personalized features into different subspaces to achieve decoupling for them. In addition, a shared prediction head is trained to balance the importance of generic and personalized features during inference. Extensive experiments on four vision datasets demonstrate our method reaches state-of-the-art pFL performances under feature skew heterogeneity.

Periodic Vibration Gaussian: Dynamic Urban Scene Reconstruction and Real-time Rendering. (arXiv:2311.18561v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yurui Chen, Chun Gu, Junzhe Jiang, Xiatian Zhu, Li Zhang

Modeling dynamic, large-scale urban scenes is challenging due to their highly intricate geometric structures and unconstrained dynamics in both space and time. Prior methods often employ high-level architectural priors, separating static and dynamic elements, resulting in suboptimal capture of their synergistic interactions. To address this challenge, we present a unified representation model, called Periodic Vibration Gaussian (PVG). PVG builds upon the efficient 3D Gaussian splatting technique, originally designed for static scene representation, by introducing periodic vibration-based temporal dynamics. This innovation enables PVG to elegantly and uniformly represent the characteristics of various objects and elements in dynamic urban scenes. To enhance temporally coherent representation learning with sparse training data, we introduce a novel flow-based temporal smoothing mechanism and a position-aware adaptive control strategy. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and KITTI benchmarks demonstrate that PVG surpasses state-of-the-art alternatives in both reconstruction and novel view synthesis for both dynamic and static scenes. Notably, PVG achieves this without relying on manually labeled object bounding boxes or expensive optical flow estimation. Moreover, PVG exhibits 50/6000-fold acceleration in training/rendering over the best alternative.

Seam-guided local alignment and stitching for large parallax images. (arXiv:2311.18564v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Tianli Liao, Chenyang Zhao, Lei Li, Heling Cao

Seam-cutting methods have been proven effective in the composition step of image stitching, especially for images with parallax. However, the effectiveness of seam-cutting usually depends on that images can be roughly aligned such that there exists a local region where a plausible seam can be found. For images with large parallax, current alignment methods often fall short of expectations. In this paper, we propose a local alignment and stitching method guided by seam quality evaluation. First, we use existing image alignment and seam-cutting methods to calculate an initial seam and evaluate the quality of pixels along the seam. Then, for pixels with low qualities, we separate their enclosing patches in the aligned images and locally align them by extracting modified dense correspondences via SIFT flow. Finally, we composite the aligned patches via seam-cutting and merge them into the original aligned result to generate the final mosaic. Experiments show that compared with the state-of-the-art seam-cutting methods, our result is more plausible and with fewer artifacts. The code will be available at https://github.com/tlliao/Seam-guided-local-alignment.

Overcoming Label Noise for Source-free Unsupervised Video Domain Adaptation. (arXiv:2311.18572v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Avijit Dasgupta, C. V. Jawahar, Karteek Alahari

Despite the progress seen in classification methods, current approaches for handling videos with distribution shifts in source and target domains remain source-dependent as they require access to the source data during the adaptation stage. In this paper, we present a self-training based source-free video domain adaptation approach to address this challenge by bridging the gap between the source and the target domains. We use the source pre-trained model to generate pseudo-labels for the target domain samples, which are inevitably noisy. Thus, we treat the problem of source-free video domain adaptation as learning from noisy labels and argue that the samples with correct pseudo-labels can help us in adaptation. To this end, we leverage the cross-entropy loss as an indicator of the correctness of the pseudo-labels and use the resulting small-loss samples from the target domain for fine-tuning the model. We further enhance the adaptation performance by implementing a teacher-student framework, in which the teacher, which is updated gradually, produces reliable pseudo-labels. Meanwhile, the student undergoes fine-tuning on the target domain videos using these generated pseudo-labels to improve its performance. Extensive experimental evaluations show that our methods, termed as CleanAdapt, CleanAdapt + TS, achieve state-of-the-art results, outperforming the existing approaches on various open datasets. Our source code is publicly available at https://avijit9.github.io/CleanAdapt.

Fingerprint Matching with Localized Deep Representation. (arXiv:2311.18576v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yongjie Duan, Zhiyu Pan, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou

Compared to minutia-based fingerprint representations, fixed-length representations are attractive due to simple and efficient matching. However, fixed-length fingerprint representations are limited in accuracy when matching fingerprints with different visible areas, which can occur due to different finger poses or acquisition methods. To address this issue, we propose a localized deep representation of fingerprint, named LDRF. By focusing on the discriminative characteristics within local regions, LDRF provides a more robust and accurate fixed-length representation for fingerprints with variable visible areas. LDRF can be adapted to retain information within any valid area, making it highly flexible. The matching scores produced by LDRF also exhibit intuitive statistical characteristics, which led us to propose a matching score normalization technique to mitigate the uncertainty in the cases of very small overlapping area. With this new technique, we can maintain a high level of accuracy and reliability in our fingerprint matching, even as the size of the database grows rapidly. Our experimental results on 21 datasets containing over 140K fingerprints of various finger poses and impression types show that LDRF outperforms other fixed-length representations and is robust to sensing technologies and impression types. Besides, the proposed matching score normalization effectively reduces the false match rate (FMR) in large-scale identification experiments comprising over 5.11 million fingerprints. Specifically, this technique results in a reduction of two orders of magnitude compared to matching without matching score normalization and five orders of magnitude compared to prior works.

Communication-Efficient Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Generalized Heavy-Ball Momentum. (arXiv:2311.18578v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Riccardo Zaccone, Carlo Masone, Marco Ciccone

Federated Learning (FL) is the state-of-the-art approach for learning from decentralized data in privacy-constrained scenarios. As the current literature reports, the main problems associated with FL refer to system and statistical challenges: the former ones demand for efficient learning from edge devices, including lowering communication bandwidth and frequency, while the latter require algorithms robust to non-iidness. State-of-art approaches either guarantee convergence at increased communication cost or are not sufficiently robust to handle extreme heterogeneous local distributions. In this work we propose a novel generalization of the heavy-ball momentum, and present FedHBM to effectively address statistical heterogeneity in FL without introducing any communication overhead. We conduct extensive experimentation on common FL vision and NLP datasets, showing that our FedHBM algorithm empirically yields better model quality and higher convergence speed w.r.t. the state-of-art, especially in pathological non-iid scenarios. While being designed for cross-silo settings, we show how FedHBM is applicable in moderate-to-high cross-device scenarios, and how good model initializations (e.g. pre-training) can be exploited for prompt acceleration. Extended experimentation on large-scale real-world federated datasets further corroborates the effectiveness of our approach for real-world FL applications.

Semantic-Aware Frame-Event Fusion based Pattern Recognition via Large Vision-Language Models. (arXiv:2311.18592v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Dong Li, Jiandong Jin, Yuhao Zhang, Yanlin Zhong, Yaoyang Wu, Lan Chen, Xiao Wang, Bin Luo

Pattern recognition through the fusion of RGB frames and Event streams has emerged as a novel research area in recent years. Current methods typically employ backbone networks to individually extract the features of RGB frames and event streams, and subsequently fuse these features for pattern recognition. However, we posit that these methods may suffer from key issues like sematic gaps and small-scale backbone networks. In this study, we introduce a novel pattern recognition framework that consolidates the semantic labels, RGB frames, and event streams, leveraging pre-trained large-scale vision-language models. Specifically, given the input RGB frames, event streams, and all the predefined semantic labels, we employ a pre-trained large-scale vision model (CLIP vision encoder) to extract the RGB and event features. To handle the semantic labels, we initially convert them into language descriptions through prompt engineering, and then obtain the semantic features using the pre-trained large-scale language model (CLIP text encoder). Subsequently, we integrate the RGB/Event features and semantic features using multimodal Transformer networks. The resulting frame and event tokens are further amplified using self-attention layers. Concurrently, we propose to enhance the interactions between text tokens and RGB/Event tokens via cross-attention. Finally, we consolidate all three modalities using self-attention and feed-forward layers for recognition. Comprehensive experiments on the HARDVS and PokerEvent datasets fully substantiate the efficacy of our proposed SAFE model. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/Event-AHU/SAFE_LargeVLM.

Learning Triangular Distribution in Visual World. (arXiv:2311.18605v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Ping Chen, Xingpeng Zhang, Chengtao Zhou, Dichao Fan, Peng Tu, Le Zhang, Yanlin Qian

Convolution neural network is successful in pervasive vision tasks, including label distribution learning, which usually takes the form of learning an injection from the non-linear visual features to the well-defined labels. However, how the discrepancy between features is mapped to the label discrepancy is ambient, and its correctness is not guaranteed.To address these problems, we study the mathematical connection between feature and its label, presenting a general and simple framework for label distribution learning. We propose a so-called Triangular Distribution Transform (TDT) to build an injective function between feature and label, guaranteeing that any symmetric feature discrepancy linearly reflects the difference between labels. The proposed TDT can be used as a plug-in in mainstream backbone networks to address different label distribution learning tasks. Experiments on Facial Age Recognition, Illumination Chromaticity Estimation, and Aesthetics assessment show that TDT achieves on-par or better results than the prior arts.

Contrastive Denoising Score for Text-guided Latent Diffusion Image Editing. (arXiv:2311.18608v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Hyelin Nam, Gihyun Kwon, Geon Yeong Park, Jong Chul Ye

With the remarkable advent of text-to-image diffusion models, image editing methods have become more diverse and continue to evolve. A promising recent approach in this realm is Delta Denoising Score (DDS) - an image editing technique based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) framework that leverages the rich generative prior of text-to-image diffusion models. However, relying solely on the difference between scoring functions is insufficient for preserving specific structural elements from the original image, a crucial aspect of image editing. Inspired by the similarity and importance differences between DDS and the contrastive learning for unpaired image-to-image translation (CUT), here we present an embarrassingly simple yet very powerful modification of DDS, called Contrastive Denoising Score (CDS), for latent diffusion models (LDM). Specifically, to enforce structural correspondence between the input and output while maintaining the controllability of contents, we introduce a straightforward approach to regulate structural consistency using CUT loss within the DDS framework. To calculate this loss, instead of employing auxiliary networks, we utilize the intermediate features of LDM, in particular, those from the self-attention layers, which possesses rich spatial information. Our approach enables zero-shot image-to-image translation and neural radiance field (NeRF) editing, achieving a well-balanced interplay between maintaining the structural details and transforming content. Qualitative results and comparisons demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project page with code is available at https://hyelinnam.github.io/CDS/.

DiffCAD: Weakly-Supervised Probabilistic CAD Model Retrieval and Alignment from an RGB Image. (arXiv:2311.18610v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Daoyi Gao, Dávid Rozenberszki, Stefan Leutenegger, Angela Dai

Perceiving 3D structures from RGB images based on CAD model primitives can enable an effective, efficient 3D object-based representation of scenes. However, current approaches rely on supervision from expensive annotations of CAD models associated with real images, and encounter challenges due to the inherent ambiguities in the task -- both in depth-scale ambiguity in monocular perception, as well as inexact matches of CAD database models to real observations. We thus propose DiffCAD, the first weakly-supervised probabilistic approach to CAD retrieval and alignment from an RGB image. We formulate this as a conditional generative task, leveraging diffusion to learn implicit probabilistic models capturing the shape, pose, and scale of CAD objects in an image. This enables multi-hypothesis generation of different plausible CAD reconstructions, requiring only a few hypotheses to characterize ambiguities in depth/scale and inexact shape matches. Our approach is trained only on synthetic data, leveraging monocular depth and mask estimates to enable robust zero-shot adaptation to various real target domains. Despite being trained solely on synthetic data, our multi-hypothesis approach can even surpass the supervised state-of-the-art on the Scan2CAD dataset by 5.9% with 8 hypotheses.

Cancer-Net PCa-Gen: Synthesis of Realistic Prostate Diffusion Weighted Imaging Data via Anatomic-Conditional Controlled Latent Diffusion. (arXiv:2311.18612v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Aditya Sridhar, Chi-en Amy Tai, Hayden Gunraj, Yuhao Chen, Alexander Wong

In Canada, prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in men and accounted for 20% of new cancer cases for this demographic in 2022. Due to recent successes in leveraging machine learning for clinical decision support, there has been significant interest in the development of deep neural networks for prostate cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning using diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) data. A major challenge hindering widespread adoption in clinical use is poor generalization of such networks due to scarcity of large-scale, diverse, balanced prostate imaging datasets for training such networks. In this study, we explore the efficacy of latent diffusion for generating realistic prostate DWI data through the introduction of an anatomic-conditional controlled latent diffusion strategy. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to leverage conditioning for synthesis of prostate cancer imaging. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy, which we call Cancer-Net PCa-Gen, enhances synthesis of diverse prostate images through controllable tumour locations and better anatomical and textural fidelity. These crucial features make it well-suited for augmenting real patient data, enabling neural networks to be trained on a more diverse and comprehensive data distribution. The Cancer-Net PCa-Gen framework and sample images have been made publicly available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/deetsadi/cancer-net-pca-gen-dataset as a part of a global open-source initiative dedicated to accelerating advancement in machine learning to aid clinicians in the fight against cancer.

Anatomy and Physiology of Artificial Intelligence in PET Imaging. (arXiv:2311.18614v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Tyler J. Bradshaw, Alan B. McMillan

The influence of artificial intelligence (AI) within the field of nuclear medicine has been rapidly growing. Many researchers and clinicians are seeking to apply AI within PET, and clinicians will soon find themselves engaging with AI-based applications all along the chain of molecular imaging, from image reconstruction to enhanced reporting. This expanding presence of AI in PET imaging will result in greater demand for educational resources for those unfamiliar with AI. The objective of this article to is provide an illustrated guide to the core principles of modern AI, with specific focus on aspects that are most likely to be encountered in PET imaging. We describe convolutional neural networks, algorithm training, and explain the components of the commonly used U-Net for segmentation and image synthesis.

JPPF: Multi-task Fusion for Consistent Panoptic-Part Segmentation. (arXiv:2311.18618v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Shishir Muralidhara, Sravan Kumar Jagadeesh, René Schuster, Didier Stricker

Part-aware panoptic segmentation is a problem of computer vision that aims to provide a semantic understanding of the scene at multiple levels of granularity. More precisely, semantic areas, object instances, and semantic parts are predicted simultaneously. In this paper, we present our Joint Panoptic Part Fusion (JPPF) that combines the three individual segmentations effectively to obtain a panoptic-part segmentation. Two aspects are of utmost importance for this: First, a unified model for the three problems is desired that allows for mutually improved and consistent representation learning. Second, balancing the combination so that it gives equal importance to all individual results during fusion. Our proposed JPPF is parameter-free and dynamically balances its input. The method is evaluated and compared on the Cityscapes Panoptic Parts (CPP) and Pascal Panoptic Parts (PPP) datasets in terms of PartPQ and Part-Whole Quality (PWQ). In extensive experiments, we verify the importance of our fair fusion, highlight its most significant impact for areas that can be further segmented into parts, and demonstrate the generalization capabilities of our design without fine-tuning on 5 additional datasets.

A Lightweight Clustering Framework for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation. (arXiv:2311.18628v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yau Shing Jonathan Cheung, Xi Chen, Lihe Yang, Hengshuang Zhao

Unsupervised semantic segmentation aims to label each pixel of an image to a corresponding class without the use of annotated data. It is a widely researched area as obtaining labeled datasets are expensive. While previous works in the field demonstrated a gradual improvement in segmentation performance, most of them required neural network training. This made segmentation equally expensive, especially when dealing with large-scale datasets. We thereby propose a lightweight clustering framework for unsupervised semantic segmentation. Attention features of the self-supervised vision transformer exhibit strong foreground-background differentiability. By clustering these features into a small number of clusters, we could separate foreground and background image patches into distinct groupings. In our clustering framework, we first obtain attention features from the self-supervised vision transformer. Then we extract Dataset-level, Category-level and Image-level masks by clustering features within the same dataset, category and image. We further ensure multilevel clustering consistency across the three levels and this allows us to extract patch-level binary pseudo-masks. Finally, the pseudo-mask is upsampled, refined and class assignment is performed according to the CLS token of object regions. Our framework demonstrates great promise in unsupervised semantic segmentation and achieves state-of-the-art results on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets.

SATHUR: Self Augmenting Task Hallucinal Unified Representation for Generalized Class Incremental Learning. (arXiv:2311.18630v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Sathursan Kanagarajah, Thanuja Ambegoda, Ranga Rodrigo

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) is inspired by the human ability to learn new classes without forgetting previous ones. CIL becomes more challenging in real-world scenarios when the samples in each incremental step are imbalanced. This creates another branch of problem, called Generalized Class Incremental Learning (GCIL) where each incremental step is structured more realistically. Grow When Required (GWR) network, a type of Self-Organizing Map (SOM), dynamically create and remove nodes and edges for adaptive learning. GWR performs incremental learning from feature vectors extracted by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which acts as a feature extractor. The inherent ability of GWR to form distinct clusters, each corresponding to a class in the feature vector space, regardless of the order of samples or class imbalances, is well suited to achieving GCIL. To enhance GWR's classification performance, a high-quality feature extractor is required. However, when the convolutional layers are adapted at each incremental step, the GWR nodes corresponding to prior knowledge are subject to near-invalidation. This work introduces the Self Augmenting Task Hallucinal Unified Representation (SATHUR), which re-initializes the GWR network at each incremental step, aligning it with the current feature extractor. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art GCIL methods on CIFAR-100 and CORe50 datasets.

DiffusionAvatars: Deferred Diffusion for High-fidelity 3D Head Avatars. (arXiv:2311.18635v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Tobias Kirschstein, Simon Giebenhain, Matthias Nießner

DiffusionAvatars synthesizes a high-fidelity 3D head avatar of a person, offering intuitive control over both pose and expression. We propose a diffusion-based neural renderer that leverages generic 2D priors to produce compelling images of faces. For coarse guidance of the expression and head pose, we render a neural parametric head model (NPHM) from the target viewpoint, which acts as a proxy geometry of the person. Additionally, to enhance the modeling of intricate facial expressions, we condition DiffusionAvatars directly on the expression codes obtained from NPHM via cross-attention. Finally, to synthesize consistent surface details across different viewpoints and expressions, we rig learnable spatial features to the head's surface via TriPlane lookup in NPHM's canonical space. We train DiffusionAvatars on RGB videos and corresponding tracked NPHM meshes of a person and test the obtained avatars in both self-reenactment and animation scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that DiffusionAvatars generates temporally consistent and visually appealing videos for novel poses and expressions of a person, outperforming existing approaches.

Stochastic Vision Transformers with Wasserstein Distance-Aware Attention. (arXiv:2311.18645v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Franciskus Xaverius Erick, Mina Rezaei, Johanna Paula Müller, Bernhard Kainz

Self-supervised learning is one of the most promising approaches to acquiring knowledge from limited labeled data. Despite the substantial advancements made in recent years, self-supervised models have posed a challenge to practitioners, as they do not readily provide insight into the model's confidence and uncertainty. Tackling this issue is no simple feat, primarily due to the complexity involved in implementing techniques that can make use of the latent representations learned during pre-training without relying on explicit labels. Motivated by this, we introduce a new stochastic vision transformer that integrates uncertainty and distance awareness into self-supervised learning (SSL) pipelines. Instead of the conventional deterministic vector embedding, our novel stochastic vision transformer encodes image patches into elliptical Gaussian distributional embeddings. Notably, the attention matrices of these stochastic representational embeddings are computed using Wasserstein distance-based attention, effectively capitalizing on the distributional nature of these embeddings. Additionally, we propose a regularization term based on Wasserstein distance for both pre-training and fine-tuning processes, thereby incorporating distance awareness into latent representations. We perform extensive experiments across different tasks such as in-distribution generalization, out-of-distribution detection, dataset corruption, semi-supervised settings, and transfer learning to other datasets and tasks. Our proposed method achieves superior accuracy and calibration, surpassing the self-supervised baseline in a wide range of experiments on a variety of datasets.

Simple Semantic-Aided Few-Shot Learning. (arXiv:2311.18649v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Hai Zhang, Junzhe Xu, Shanlin Jiang, Zhenan He

Learning from a limited amount of data, namely Few-Shot Learning, stands out as a challenging computer vision task. Several works exploit semantics and design complicated semantic fusion mechanisms to compensate for rare representative features within restricted data. However, relying on naive semantics such as class names introduces biases due to their brevity, while acquiring extensive semantics from external knowledge takes a huge time and effort. This limitation severely constrains the potential of semantics in few-shot learning. In this paper, we design an automatic way called Semantic Evolution to generate high-quality semantics. The incorporation of high-quality semantics alleviates the need for complex network structures and learning algorithms used in previous works. Hence, we employ a simple two-layer network termed Semantic Alignment Network to transform semantics and visual features into robust class prototypes with rich discriminative features for few-shot classification. The experimental results show our framework outperforms all previous methods on five benchmarks, demonstrating a simple network with high-quality semantics can beat intricate multi-modal modules on few-shot classification tasks.

LL3DA: Visual Interactive Instruction Tuning for Omni-3D Understanding, Reasoning, and Planning. (arXiv:2311.18651v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Sijin Chen, Xin Chen, Chi Zhang, Mingsheng Li, Gang Yu, Hao Fei, Hongyuan Zhu, Jiayuan Fan, Tao Chen

Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMM) have made it possible for various applications in human-machine interactions. However, developing LMMs that can comprehend, reason, and plan in complex and diverse 3D environments remains a challenging topic, especially considering the demand for understanding permutation-invariant point cloud 3D representations of the 3D scene. Existing works seek help from multi-view images, and project 2D features to 3D space as 3D scene representations. This, however, leads to huge computational overhead and performance degradation. In this paper, we present LL3DA, a Large Language 3D Assistant that takes point cloud as direct input and respond to both textual-instructions and visual-prompts. This help LMMs better comprehend human interactions and further help to remove the ambiguities in cluttered 3D scenes. Experiments show that LL3DA achieves remarkable results, and surpasses various 3D vision-language models on both 3D Dense Captioning and 3D Question Answering.

Detailed Human-Centric Text Description-Driven Large Scene Synthesis. (arXiv:2311.18654v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Gwanghyun Kim, Dong Un Kang, Hoigi Seo, Hayeon Kim, Se Young Chun

Text-driven large scene image synthesis has made significant progress with diffusion models, but controlling it is challenging. While using additional spatial controls with corresponding texts has improved the controllability of large scene synthesis, it is still challenging to faithfully reflect detailed text descriptions without user-provided controls. Here, we propose DetText2Scene, a novel text-driven large-scale image synthesis with high faithfulness, controllability, and naturalness in a global context for the detailed human-centric text description. Our DetText2Scene consists of 1) hierarchical keypoint-box layout generation from the detailed description by leveraging large language model (LLM), 2) view-wise conditioned joint diffusion process to synthesize a large scene from the given detailed text with LLM-generated grounded keypoint-box layout and 3) pixel perturbation-based pyramidal interpolation to progressively refine the large scene for global coherence. Our DetText2Scene significantly outperforms prior arts in text-to-large scene synthesis qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrating strong faithfulness with detailed descriptions, superior controllability, and excellent naturalness in a global context.

Learning Part Segmentation from Synthetic Animals. (arXiv:2311.18661v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jiawei Peng, Ju He, Prakhar Kaushik, Zihao Xiao, Jiteng Mu, Alan Yuille

Semantic part segmentation provides an intricate and interpretable understanding of an object, thereby benefiting numerous downstream tasks. However, the need for exhaustive annotations impedes its usage across diverse object types. This paper focuses on learning part segmentation from synthetic animals, leveraging the Skinned Multi-Animal Linear (SMAL) models to scale up existing synthetic data generated by computer-aided design (CAD) animal models. Compared to CAD models, SMAL models generate data with a wider range of poses observed in real-world scenarios. As a result, our first contribution is to construct a synthetic animal dataset of tigers and horses with more pose diversity, termed Synthetic Animal Parts (SAP). We then benchmark Syn-to-Real animal part segmentation from SAP to PartImageNet, namely SynRealPart, with existing semantic segmentation domain adaptation methods and further improve them as our second contribution. Concretely, we examine three Syn-to-Real adaptation methods but observe relative performance drop due to the innate difference between the two tasks. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method called Class-Balanced Fourier Data Mixing (CB-FDM). Fourier Data Mixing aligns the spectral amplitudes of synthetic images with real images, thereby making the mixed images have more similar frequency content to real images. We further use Class-Balanced Pseudo-Label Re-Weighting to alleviate the imbalanced class distribution. We demonstrate the efficacy of CB-FDM on SynRealPart over previous methods with significant performance improvements. Remarkably, our third contribution is to reveal that the learned parts from synthetic tiger and horse are transferable across all quadrupeds in PartImageNet, further underscoring the utility and potential applications of animal part segmentation.

Multi-task learning with cross-task consistency for improved depth estimation in colonoscopy. (arXiv:2311.18664v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Pedro Esteban Chavarrias Solano, Andrew Bulpitt, Venkataraman Subramanian, Sharib Ali

Colonoscopy screening is the gold standard procedure for assessing abnormalities in the colon and rectum, such as ulcers and cancerous polyps. Measuring the abnormal mucosal area and its 3D reconstruction can help quantify the surveyed area and objectively evaluate disease burden. However, due to the complex topology of these organs and variable physical conditions, for example, lighting, large homogeneous texture, and image modality estimating distance from the camera aka depth) is highly challenging. Moreover, most colonoscopic video acquisition is monocular, making the depth estimation a non-trivial problem. While methods in computer vision for depth estimation have been proposed and advanced on natural scene datasets, the efficacy of these techniques has not been widely quantified on colonoscopy datasets. As the colonic mucosa has several low-texture regions that are not well pronounced, learning representations from an auxiliary task can improve salient feature extraction, allowing estimation of accurate camera depths. In this work, we propose to develop a novel multi-task learning (MTL) approach with a shared encoder and two decoders, namely a surface normal decoder and a depth estimator decoder. Our depth estimator incorporates attention mechanisms to enhance global context awareness. We leverage the surface normal prediction to improve geometric feature extraction. Also, we apply a cross-task consistency loss among the two geometrically related tasks, surface normal and camera depth. We demonstrate an improvement of 14.17% on relative error and 10.4% improvement on $\delta_{1}$ accuracy over the most accurate baseline state-of-the-art BTS approach. All experiments are conducted on a recently released C3VD dataset; thus, we provide a first benchmark of state-of-the-art methods.

Pose Estimation and Tracking for ASIST. (arXiv:2311.18665v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Ari Goodman, Gurpreet Singh, Ryan O'Shea, Peter Teague, James Hing

Aircraft Ship Integrated Secure and Traverse (ASIST) is a system designed to arrest helicopters safely and efficiently on ships. Originally, a precision Helicopter Position Sensing Equipment (HPSE) tracked and monitored the position of the helicopter relative to the Rapid Securing Device (RSD). However, using the HPSE component was determined to be infeasible in the transition of the ASIST system due to the hardware installation requirements. As a result, sailors track the position of the helicopters with their eyes with no sensor or artificially intelligent decision aid. Manually tracking the helicopter takes additional time and makes recoveries more difficult, especially at high sea states. Performing recoveries without the decision aid leads to higher uncertainty and cognitive load. PETA (Pose Estimation and Tracking for ASIST) is a research effort to create a helicopter tracking system prototype without hardware installation requirements for ASIST system operators. Its overall goal is to improve situational awareness and reduce operator uncertainty with respect to the aircrafts position relative to the RSD, and consequently increase the allowable landing area. The authors produced a prototype system capable of tracking helicopters with respect to the RSD. The software included a helicopter pose estimation component, camera pose estimation component, and a user interface component. PETA demonstrated the potential for state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms Faster R-CNN and HRNet (High-Resolution Network) to be used to estimate the pose of helicopters in real-time, returning ASIST to its originally intended capability. PETA also demonstrated that traditional methods of encoder-decoders could be used to estimate the orientation of the helicopter and could be used to confirm the output from HRNet.

Action Recognition in Video Recordings from Gynecologic Laparoscopy. (arXiv:2311.18666v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Sahar Nasirihaghighi, Negin Ghamsarian, Daniela Stefanics, Klaus Schoeffmann, Heinrich Husslein

Action recognition is a prerequisite for many applications in laparoscopic video analysis including but not limited to surgical training, operation room planning, follow-up surgery preparation, post-operative surgical assessment, and surgical outcome estimation. However, automatic action recognition in laparoscopic surgeries involves numerous challenges such as (I) cross-action and intra-action duration variation, (II) relevant content distortion due to smoke, blood accumulation, fast camera motions, organ movements, object occlusion, and (III) surgical scene variations due to different illuminations and viewpoints. Besides, action annotations in laparoscopy surgeries are limited and expensive due to requiring expert knowledge. In this study, we design and evaluate a CNN-RNN architecture as well as a customized training-inference framework to deal with the mentioned challenges in laparoscopic surgery action recognition. Using stacked recurrent layers, our proposed network takes advantage of inter-frame dependencies to negate the negative effect of content distortion and variation in action recognition. Furthermore, our proposed frame sampling strategy effectively manages the duration variations in surgical actions to enable action recognition with high temporal resolution. Our extensive experiments confirm the superiority of our proposed method in action recognition compared to static CNNs.

Cascaded Interaction with Eroded Deep Supervision for Salient Object Detection. (arXiv:2311.18675v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Hewen Xiao, Jie Mei, Guangfu Ma, Weiren Wu

Deep convolutional neural networks have been widely applied in salient object detection and have achieved remarkable results in this field. However, existing models suffer from information distortion caused by interpolation during up-sampling and down-sampling. In response to this drawback, this article starts from two directions in the network: feature and label. On the one hand, a novel cascaded interaction network with a guidance module named global-local aligned attention (GAA) is designed to reduce the negative impact of interpolation on the feature side. On the other hand, a deep supervision strategy based on edge erosion is proposed to reduce the negative guidance of label interpolation on lateral output. Extensive experiments on five popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

RaDialog: A Large Vision-Language Model for Radiology Report Generation and Conversational Assistance. (arXiv:2311.18681v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Chantal Pellegrini, Ege Özsoy, Benjamin Busam, Nassir Navab, Matthias Keicher

Conversational AI tools that can generate and discuss clinically correct radiology reports for a given medical image have the potential to transform radiology. Such a human-in-the-loop radiology assistant could facilitate a collaborative diagnostic process, thus saving time and improving the quality of reports. Towards this goal, we introduce RaDialog, the first thoroughly evaluated and publicly available large vision-language model for radiology report generation and interactive dialog. RaDialog effectively integrates visual image features and structured pathology findings with a large language model (LLM) while simultaneously adapting it to a specialized domain using parameter-efficient fine-tuning. To keep the conversational abilities of the underlying LLM, we propose a comprehensive, semi-automatically labeled, image-grounded instruct dataset for chest X-ray radiology tasks. By training with this dataset, our method achieves state-of-the-art clinical correctness in report generation and shows impressive abilities in interactive tasks such as correcting reports and answering questions, serving as a foundational step toward clinical dialog systems. Our code is available on github: https://github.com/ChantalMP/RaDialog.

Seg2Reg: Differentiable 2D Segmentation to 1D Regression Rendering for 360 Room Layout Reconstruction. (arXiv:2311.18695v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Cheng Sun, Wei-En Tai, Yu-Lin Shih, Kuan-Wei Chen, Yong-Jing Syu, Kent Selwyn The, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Hwann-Tzong Chen

State-of-the-art single-view 360-degree room layout reconstruction methods formulate the problem as a high-level 1D (per-column) regression task. On the other hand, traditional low-level 2D layout segmentation is simpler to learn and can represent occluded regions, but it requires complex post-processing for the targeting layout polygon and sacrifices accuracy. We present Seg2Reg to render 1D layout depth regression from the 2D segmentation map in a differentiable and occlusion-aware way, marrying the merits of both sides. Specifically, our model predicts floor-plan density for the input equirectangular 360-degree image. Formulating the 2D layout representation as a density field enables us to employ `flattened' volume rendering to form 1D layout depth regression. In addition, we propose a novel 3D warping augmentation on layout to improve generalization. Finally, we re-implement recent room layout reconstruction methods into our codebase for benchmarking and explore modern backbones and training techniques to serve as the strong baseline. Our model significantly outperforms previous arts. The code will be made available upon publication.

Meta-Prior: Meta learning for Adaptive Inverse Problem Solvers. (arXiv:2311.18710v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Matthieu Terris, Thomas Moreau

Deep neural networks have become a foundational tool for addressing imaging inverse problems. They are typically trained for a specific task, with a supervised loss to learn a mapping from the observations to the image to recover. However, real-world imaging challenges often lack ground truth data, rendering traditional supervised approaches ineffective. Moreover, for each new imaging task, a new model needs to be trained from scratch, wasting time and resources. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel approach based on meta-learning. Our method trains a meta-model on a diverse set of imaging tasks that allows the model to be efficiently fine-tuned for specific tasks with few fine-tuning steps. We show that the proposed method extends to the unsupervised setting, where no ground truth data is available. In its bilevel formulation, the outer level uses a supervised loss, that evaluates how well the fine-tuned model performs, while the inner loss can be either supervised or unsupervised, relying only on the measurement operator. This allows the meta-model to leverage a few ground truth samples for each task while being able to generalize to new imaging tasks. We show that in simple settings, this approach recovers the Bayes optimal estimator, illustrating the soundness of our approach. We also demonstrate our method's effectiveness on various tasks, including image processing and magnetic resonance imaging.

Dodging DeepFake Detection via Implicit Spatial-Domain Notch Filtering. (arXiv:2009.09213v5 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yihao Huang, Felix Juefei-Xu, Qing Guo, Yang Liu, Geguang Pu

The current high-fidelity generation and high-precision detection of DeepFake images are at an arms race. We believe that producing DeepFakes that are highly realistic and 'detection evasive' can serve the ultimate goal of improving future generation DeepFake detection capabilities. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful pipeline to reduce the artifact patterns of fake images without hurting image quality by performing implicit spatial-domain notch filtering. We first demonstrate that frequency-domain notch filtering, although famously shown to be effective in removing periodic noise in the spatial domain, is infeasible for our task at hand due to the manual designs required for the notch filters. We, therefore, resort to a learning-based approach to reproduce the notch filtering effects, but solely in the spatial domain. We adopt a combination of adding overwhelming spatial noise for breaking the periodic noise pattern and deep image filtering to reconstruct the noise-free fake images, and we name our method DeepNotch. Deep image filtering provides a specialized filter for each pixel in the noisy image, producing filtered images with high fidelity compared to their DeepFake counterparts. Moreover, we also use the semantic information of the image to generate an adversarial guidance map to add noise intelligently. Our large-scale evaluation on 3 representative state-of-the-art DeepFake detection methods (tested on 16 types of DeepFakes) has demonstrated that our technique significantly reduces the accuracy of these 3 fake image detection methods, 36.79% on average and up to 97.02% in the best case.

Monocular Camera Localization for Automated Vehicles Using Image Retrieval. (arXiv:2109.06296v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Eunhyek Joa, Yibo Sun, Francesco Borrelli

We address the problem of finding the current position and heading angle of an autonomous vehicle in real-time using a single camera. Compared to methods which require LiDARs and high definition (HD) 3D maps in real-time, the proposed approach is easily scalable and computationally efficient, at the price of lower precision.

The new method combines and adapts existing algorithms in three different fields: image retrieval, mapping database, and particle filtering. The result is a simple, real-time localization method using an image retrieval method whose performance is comparable to other monocular camera localization methods which use a map built with LiDARs.

We evaluate the proposed method using the KITTI odometry dataset and via closed-loop experiments with an indoor 1:10 autonomous vehicle. The tests demonstrate real-time capability and a 10cm level accuracy. Also, experimental results of the closed-loop indoor tests show the presence of a positive feedback loop between the localization error and the control error. Such phenomena is analysed in details at the end of the article.

Recent Advances of Continual Learning in Computer Vision: An Overview. (arXiv:2109.11369v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Haoxuan Qu, Hossein Rahmani, Li Xu, Bryan Williams, Jun Liu

In contrast to batch learning where all training data is available at once, continual learning represents a family of methods that accumulate knowledge and learn continuously with data available in sequential order. Similar to the human learning process with the ability of learning, fusing, and accumulating new knowledge coming at different time steps, continual learning is considered to have high practical significance. Hence, continual learning has been studied in various artificial intelligence tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the recent progress of continual learning in computer vision. In particular, the works are grouped by their representative techniques, including regularization, knowledge distillation, memory, generative replay, parameter isolation, and a combination of the above techniques. For each category of these techniques, both its characteristics and applications in computer vision are presented. At the end of this overview, several subareas, where continuous knowledge accumulation is potentially helpful while continual learning has not been well studied, are discussed.

Generating More Pertinent Captions by Leveraging Semantics and Style on Multi-Source Datasets. (arXiv:2111.12727v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Giuseppe Fiameni, Rita Cucchiara

This paper addresses the task of generating fluent descriptions by training on a non-uniform combination of data sources, containing both human-annotated and web-collected captions. Large-scale datasets with noisy image-text pairs, indeed, provide a sub-optimal source of supervision because of their low-quality descriptive style, while human-annotated datasets are cleaner but smaller in scale. To get the best of both worlds, we propose to leverage and separate semantics and descriptive style through the incorporation of a style token and keywords extracted through a retrieval component. The proposed model avoids the need of object detectors, is trained with a single objective of prompt language modeling, and can replicate the style of human-collected captions while training on sources with different input styles. Experimentally, the model shows a strong capability of recognizing real-world concepts and producing high-quality captions. Extensive experiments are performed on different image captioning datasets, including CC3M, nocaps, and the competitive COCO dataset, where our model consistently outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art approaches.

Handwriting recognition and automatic scoring for descriptive answers in Japanese language tests. (arXiv:2201.03215v2 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

Authors: Hung Tuan Nguyen, Cuong Tuan Nguyen, Haruki Oka, Tsunenori Ishioka, Masaki Nakagawa

This paper presents an experiment of automatically scoring handwritten descriptive answers in the trial tests for the new Japanese university entrance examination, which were made for about 120,000 examinees in 2017 and 2018. There are about 400,000 answers with more than 20 million characters. Although all answers have been scored by human examiners, handwritten characters are not labeled. We present our attempt to adapt deep neural network-based handwriting recognizers trained on a labeled handwriting dataset into this unlabeled answer set. Our proposed method combines different training strategies, ensembles multiple recognizers, and uses a language model built from a large general corpus to avoid overfitting into specific data. In our experiment, the proposed method records character accuracy of over 97% using about 2,000 verified labeled answers that account for less than 0.5% of the dataset. Then, the recognized answers are fed into a pre-trained automatic scoring system based on the BERT model without correcting misrecognized characters and providing rubric annotations. The automatic scoring system achieves from 0.84 to 0.98 of Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK). As QWK is over 0.8, it represents an acceptable similarity of scoring between the automatic scoring system and the human examiners. These results are promising for further research on end-to-end automatic scoring of descriptive answers.

Attribute Descent: Simulating Object-Centric Datasets on the Content Level and Beyond. (arXiv:2202.14034v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yue Yao, Liang Zheng, Xiaodong Yang, Milind Napthade, Tom Gedeon

This article aims to use graphic engines to simulate a large number of training data that have free annotations and possibly strongly resemble to real-world data. Between synthetic and real, a two-level domain gap exists, involving content level and appearance level. While the latter is concerned with appearance style, the former problem arises from a different mechanism, i.e, content mismatch in attributes such as camera viewpoint, object placement and lighting conditions. In contrast to the widely-studied appearance-level gap, the content-level discrepancy has not been broadly studied. To address the content-level misalignment, we propose an attribute descent approach that automatically optimizes engine attributes to enable synthetic data to approximate real-world data. We verify our method on object-centric tasks, wherein an object takes up a major portion of an image. In these tasks, the search space is relatively small, and the optimization of each attribute yields sufficiently obvious supervision signals. We collect a new synthetic asset VehicleX, and reformat and reuse existing the synthetic assets ObjectX and PersonX. Extensive experiments on image classification and object re-identification confirm that adapted synthetic data can be effectively used in three scenarios: training with synthetic data only, training data augmentation and numerically understanding dataset content.

RandoMix: A mixed sample data augmentation method with multiple mixed modes. (arXiv:2205.08728v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Xiaoliang Liu, Furao Shen, Jian Zhao, Changhai Nie

Data augmentation plays a crucial role in enhancing the robustness and performance of machine learning models across various domains. In this study, we introduce a novel mixed-sample data augmentation method called RandoMix. RandoMix is specifically designed to simultaneously address robustness and diversity challenges. It leverages a combination of linear and mask-mixed modes, introducing flexibility in candidate selection and weight adjustments. We evaluate the effectiveness of RandoMix on diverse datasets, including CIFAR-10/100, Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet, and Google Speech Commands. Our results demonstrate its superior performance compared to existing techniques such as Mixup, CutMix, Fmix, and ResizeMix. Notably, RandoMix excels in enhancing model robustness against adversarial noise, natural noise, and sample occlusion. The comprehensive experimental results and insights into parameter tuning underscore the potential of RandoMix as a versatile and effective data augmentation method. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates into the training pipeline.

Real-World Light Field Image Super-Resolution via Degradation Modulation. (arXiv:2206.06214v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yingqian Wang, Zhengyu Liang, Longguang Wang, Jungang Yang, Wei An, Yulan Guo

Recent years have witnessed the great advances of deep neural networks (DNNs) in light field (LF) image super-resolution (SR). However, existing DNN-based LF image SR methods are developed on a single fixed degradation (e.g., bicubic downsampling), and thus cannot be applied to super-resolve real LF images with diverse degradation. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method for real-world LF image SR. In our method, a practical LF degradation model is developed to formulate the degradation process of real LF images. Then, a convolutional neural network is designed to incorporate the degradation prior into the SR process. By training on LF images using our formulated degradation, our network can learn to modulate different degradation while incorporating both spatial and angular information in LF images. Extensive experiments on both synthetically degraded and real-world LF images demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Compared with existing state-of-the-art single and LF image SR methods, our method achieves superior SR performance under a wide range of degradation, and generalizes better to real LF images. Codes and models are available at https://yingqianwang.github.io/LF-DMnet/.

MMOTU: A Multi-Modality Ovarian Tumor Ultrasound Image Dataset for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation. (arXiv:2207.06799v4 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Qi Zhao, Shuchang Lyu, Wenpei Bai, Linghan Cai, Binghao Liu, Guangliang Cheng, Meijing Wu, Xiubo Sang, Min Yang, Lijiang Chen

Ovarian cancer is one of the most harmful gynecological diseases. Detecting ovarian tumors in early stage with computer-aided techniques can efficiently decrease the mortality rate. With the improvement of medical treatment standard, ultrasound images are widely applied in clinical treatment. However, recent notable methods mainly focus on single-modality ultrasound ovarian tumor segmentation or recognition, which means there still lacks researches on exploring the representation capability of multi-modality ultrasound ovarian tumor images. To solve this problem, we propose a Multi-Modality Ovarian Tumor Ultrasound (MMOTU) image dataset containing 1469 2d ultrasound images and 170 contrast enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS) images with pixel-wise and global-wise annotations. Based on MMOTU, we mainly focus on unsupervised cross-domain semantic segmentation task. To solve the domain shift problem, we propose a feature alignment based architecture named Dual-Scheme Domain-Selected Network (DS2Net). Specifically, we first design source-encoder and target-encoder to extract two-style features of source and target images. Then, we propose Domain-Distinct Selected Module (DDSM) and Domain-Universal Selected Module (DUSM) to extract the distinct and universal features in two styles (source-style or target-style). Finally, we fuse these two kinds of features and feed them into the source-decoder and target-decoder to generate final predictions. Extensive comparison experiments and analysis on MMOTU image dataset show that DS2Net can boost the segmentation performance for bidirectional cross-domain adaptation of 2d ultrasound images and CEUS images. Our proposed dataset and code are all available at https://github.com/cv516Buaa/MMOTU_DS2Net.

Local Low-light Image Enhancement via Region-Aware Normalization. (arXiv:2208.07711v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Shihurong Yao, Yizhan Huang, Xiaogang Xu

In the realm of Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE), existing research primarily focuses on enhancing images globally. However, many applications require local LLIE, where users are allowed to illuminate specific regions using an input mask, such as creating a protagonist stage or spotlight effect. However, this task has received limited attention currently. This paper aims to systematically define the requirements of local LLIE and proposes a novel strategy to convert current existing global LLIE methods into local versions. The image space is divided into three regions: Masked Area A be enlightened to achieve the desired lighting effects; Transition Area B is a smooth transition from the enlightened area (Area A) to the unchanged region (Area C). To achieve the task of local LLIE, we introduce Region-Aware Normalization for Local Enhancement, dubbed as RANLEN. RANLEN uses a dynamically designed mask-based normalization operation, which enhances an image in a spatially varying manner, ensuring that the enhancement results are consistent with the requirements specified by the input mask. Additionally, a set of region-aware loss terms is formulated to facilitate the learning of the local LLIE framework. Our strategy can be applied to existing global LLIE networks with varying structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can produce the desired lighting effects compared to global LLIE, all the while offering controllable local enhancement with various mask shapes.

Table Detection in the Wild: A Novel Diverse Table Detection Dataset and Method. (arXiv:2209.09207v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Mrinal Haloi, Shashank Shekhar, Nikhil Fande, Siddhant Swaroop Dash, Sanjay G

Recent deep learning approaches in table detection achieved outstanding performance and proved to be effective in identifying document layouts. Currently, available table detection benchmarks have many limitations, including the lack of samples diversity, simple table structure, the lack of training cases, and samples quality. In this paper, we introduce a diverse large-scale dataset for table detection with more than seven thousand samples containing a wide variety of table structures collected from many diverse sources. In addition to that, we also present baseline results using a convolutional neural network-based method to detect table structure in documents. Experimental results show the superiority of applying convolutional deep learning methods over classical computer vision-based methods. The introduction of this diverse table detection dataset will enable the community to develop high throughput deep learning methods for understanding document layout and tabular data processing. Dataset is available at: 1. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/mrinalim/stdw-dataset 2. https://huggingface.co/datasets/n3011/STDW

Fast-ParC: Capturing Position Aware Global Feature for ConvNets and ViTs. (arXiv:2210.04020v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Tao Yang, Haokui Zhang, Wenze Hu, Changwen Chen, Xiaoyu Wang

Transformer models have made tremendous progress in various fields in recent years. In the field of computer vision, vision transformers (ViTs) also become strong alternatives to convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), yet they have not been able to replace ConvNets since both have their own merits. For instance, ViTs are good at extracting global features with attention mechanisms while ConvNets are more efficient in modeling local relationships due to their strong inductive bias. A natural idea that arises is to combine the strengths of both ConvNets and ViTs to design new structures. In this paper, we propose a new basic neural network operator named position-aware circular convolution (ParC) and its accelerated version Fast-ParC. The ParC operator can capture global features by using a global kernel and circular convolution while keeping location sensitiveness by employing position embeddings. Our Fast-ParC further reduces the O(n2) time complexity of ParC to O(n log n) using Fast Fourier Transform. This acceleration makes it possible to use global convolution in the early stages of models with large feature maps, yet still maintains the overall computational cost comparable with using 3x3 or 7x7 kernels. The proposed operation can be used in a plug-and-play manner to 1) convert ViTs to pure-ConvNet architecture to enjoy wider hardware support and achieve higher inference speed; 2) replacing traditional convolutions in the deep stage of ConvNets to improve accuracy by enlarging the effective receptive field. Experiment results show that our ParC op can effectively enlarge the receptive field of traditional ConvNets, and adopting the proposed op benefits both ViTs and ConvNet models on all three popular vision tasks, image classification, object

Gotcha: Real-Time Video Deepfake Detection via Challenge-Response. (arXiv:2210.06186v2 [cs.CR] UPDATED)

Authors: Govind Mittal, Chinmay Hegde, Nasir Memon

With the rise of AI-enabled Real-Time Deepfakes (RTDFs), the integrity of online video interactions has become a growing concern. RTDFs have now made it feasible to replace an imposter's face with their victim in live video interactions. Such advancement in deepfakes also coaxes detection to rise to the same standard. However, existing deepfake detection techniques are asynchronous and hence ill-suited for RTDFs. To bridge this gap, we propose a challenge-response approach that establishes authenticity in live settings. We focus on talking-head style video interaction and present a taxonomy of challenges that specifically target inherent limitations of RTDF generation pipelines. We evaluate representative examples from the taxonomy by collecting a unique dataset comprising eight challenges, which consistently and visibly degrades the quality of state-of-the-art deepfake generators. These results are corroborated both by humans and a new automated scoring function, leading to 88.6\% and 73.2% AUC, respectively. The findings underscore the promising potential of challenge-response systems for explainable and scalable real-time deepfake detection in practical scenarios.

Point-DAE: Denoising Autoencoders for Self-supervised Point Cloud Learning. (arXiv:2211.06841v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yabin Zhang, Jiehong Lin, Ruihuang Li, Kui Jia, Lei Zhang

Masked autoencoder has demonstrated its effectiveness in self-supervised point cloud learning. Considering that masking is a kind of corruption, in this work we explore a more general denoising autoencoder for point cloud learning (Point-DAE) by investigating more types of corruptions beyond masking. Specifically, we degrade the point cloud with certain corruptions as input, and learn an encoder-decoder model to reconstruct the original point cloud from its corrupted version. Three corruption families (\ie, density/masking, noise, and affine transformation) and a total of fourteen corruption types are investigated with traditional non-Transformer encoders. Besides the popular masking corruption, we identify another effective corruption family, \ie, affine transformation. The affine transformation disturbs all points globally, which is complementary to the masking corruption where some local regions are dropped. We also validate the effectiveness of affine transformation corruption with the Transformer backbones, where we decompose the reconstruction of the complete point cloud into the reconstructions of detailed local patches and rough global shape, alleviating the position leakage problem in the reconstruction. Extensive experiments on tasks of object classification, few-shot learning, robustness testing, part segmentation, and 3D object detection validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/YBZh/Point-DAE}.

Beyond the Field-of-View: Enhancing Scene Visibility and Perception with Clip-Recurrent Transformer. (arXiv:2211.11293v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Hao Shi, Qi Jiang, Kailun Yang, Xiaoting Yin, Huajian Ni, Kaiwei Wang

Vision sensors are widely applied in vehicles, robots, and roadside infrastructure. However, due to limitations in hardware cost and system size, camera Field-of-View (FoV) is often restricted and may not provide sufficient coverage. Nevertheless, from a spatiotemporal perspective, it is possible to obtain information beyond the camera's physical FoV from past video streams. In this paper, we propose the concept of online video inpainting for autonomous vehicles to expand the field of view, thereby enhancing scene visibility, perception, and system safety. To achieve this, we introduce the FlowLens architecture, which explicitly employs optical flow and implicitly incorporates a novel clip-recurrent transformer for feature propagation. FlowLens offers two key features: 1) FlowLens includes a newly designed Clip-Recurrent Hub with 3D-Decoupled Cross Attention (DDCA) to progressively process global information accumulated over time. 2) It integrates a multi-branch Mix Fusion Feed Forward Network (MixF3N) to enhance the precise spatial flow of local features. To facilitate training and evaluation, we derive the KITTI360 dataset with various FoV mask, which covers both outer- and inner FoV expansion scenarios. We also conduct quantitative assessments of beyond-FoV semantics across different models and perform qualitative comparisons of beyond-FoV object detection. We illustrate that employing FlowLens to reconstruct unseen scenes even enhances perception within the field of view by providing reliable semantic context. Extensive experiments and user studies involving offline and online video inpainting, as well as beyond-FoV perception tasks, demonstrate that FlowLens achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code and dataset are made publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/FlowLens.

Benchmarking Robustness to Adversarial Image Obfuscations. (arXiv:2301.12993v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Florian Stimberg, Ayan Chakrabarti, Chun-Ta Lu, Hussein Hazimeh, Otilia Stretcu, Wei Qiao, Yintao Liu, Merve Kaya, Cyrus Rashtchian, Ariel Fuxman, Mehmet Tek, Sven Gowal

Automated content filtering and moderation is an important tool that allows online platforms to build striving user communities that facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse. Unfortunately, resourceful actors try to bypass automated filters in a bid to post content that violate platform policies and codes of conduct. To reach this goal, these malicious actors may obfuscate policy violating images (e.g. overlay harmful images by carefully selected benign images or visual patterns) to prevent machine learning models from reaching the correct decision. In this paper, we invite researchers to tackle this specific issue and present a new image benchmark. This benchmark, based on ImageNet, simulates the type of obfuscations created by malicious actors. It goes beyond ImageNet-$\textrm{C}$ and ImageNet-$\bar{\textrm{C}}$ by proposing general, drastic, adversarial modifications that preserve the original content intent. It aims to tackle a more common adversarial threat than the one considered by $\ell_p$-norm bounded adversaries. We evaluate 33 pretrained models on the benchmark and train models with different augmentations, architectures and training methods on subsets of the obfuscations to measure generalization. We hope this benchmark will encourage researchers to test their models and methods and try to find new approaches that are more robust to these obfuscations.

Improving Scene Text Image Super-resolution via Dual Prior Modulation Network. (arXiv:2302.10414v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Shipeng Zhu, Zuoyan Zhao, Pengfei Fang, Hui Xue

Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims to simultaneously increase the resolution and legibility of the text images, and the resulting images will significantly affect the performance of downstream tasks. Although numerous progress has been made, existing approaches raise two crucial issues: (1) They neglect the global structure of the text, which bounds the semantic determinism of the scene text. (2) The priors, e.g., text prior or stroke prior, employed in existing works, are extracted from pre-trained text recognizers. That said, such priors suffer from the domain gap including low resolution and blurriness caused by poor imaging conditions, leading to incorrect guidance. Our work addresses these gaps and proposes a plug-and-play module dubbed Dual Prior Modulation Network (DPMN), which leverages dual image-level priors to bring performance gain over existing approaches. Specifically, two types of prior-guided refinement modules, each using the text mask or graphic recognition result of the low-quality SR image from the preceding layer, are designed to improve the structural clarity and semantic accuracy of the text, respectively. The following attention mechanism hence modulates two quality-enhanced images to attain a superior SR result. Extensive experiments validate that our method improves the image quality and boosts the performance of downstream tasks over five typical approaches on the benchmark. Substantial visualizations and ablation studies demonstrate the advantages of the proposed DPMN. Code is available at: https://github.com/jdfxzzy/DPMN.

Structured Pruning for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks: A survey. (arXiv:2303.00566v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yang He, Lingao Xiao

The remarkable performance of deep Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is generally attributed to their deeper and wider architectures, which can come with significant computational costs. Pruning neural networks has thus gained interest since it effectively lowers storage and computational costs. In contrast to weight pruning, which results in unstructured models, structured pruning provides the benefit of realistic acceleration by producing models that are friendly to hardware implementation. The special requirements of structured pruning have led to the discovery of numerous new challenges and the development of innovative solutions. This article surveys the recent progress towards structured pruning of deep CNNs. We summarize and compare the state-of-the-art structured pruning techniques with respect to filter ranking methods, regularization methods, dynamic execution, neural architecture search, the lottery ticket hypothesis, and the applications of pruning. While discussing structured pruning algorithms, we briefly introduce the unstructured pruning counterpart to emphasize their differences. Furthermore, we provide insights into potential research opportunities in the field of structured pruning. A curated list of neural network pruning papers can be found at https://github.com/he-y/Awesome-Pruning . A dedicated website offering a more interactive comparison of structured pruning methods can be found at: https://huggingface.co/spaces/he-yang/Structured-Pruning-Survey .

Dense Pixel-to-Pixel Harmonization via Continuous Image Representation. (arXiv:2303.01681v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jianqi Chen, Yilan Zhang, Zhengxia Zou, Keyan Chen, Zhenwei Shi

High-resolution (HR) image harmonization is of great significance in real-world applications such as image synthesis and image editing. However, due to the high memory costs, existing dense pixel-to-pixel harmonization methods are mainly focusing on processing low-resolution (LR) images. Some recent works resort to combining with color-to-color transformations but are either limited to certain resolutions or heavily depend on hand-crafted image filters. In this work, we explore leveraging the implicit neural representation (INR) and propose a novel image Harmonization method based on Implicit neural Networks (HINet), which to the best of our knowledge, is the first dense pixel-to-pixel method applicable to HR images without any hand-crafted filter design. Inspired by the Retinex theory, we decouple the MLPs into two parts to respectively capture the content and environment of composite images. A Low-Resolution Image Prior (LRIP) network is designed to alleviate the Boundary Inconsistency problem, and we also propose new designs for the training and inference process. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, some interesting and practical applications of the proposed method are explored. Our code is available at https://github.com/WindVChen/INR-Harmonization.

Guided Slot Attention for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation. (arXiv:2303.08314v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Minhyeok Lee, Suhwan Cho, Dogyoon Lee, Chaewon Park, Jungho Lee, Sangyoun Lee

Unsupervised video object segmentation aims to segment the most prominent object in a video sequence. However, the existence of complex backgrounds and multiple foreground objects make this task challenging. To address this issue, we propose a guided slot attention network to reinforce spatial structural information and obtain better foreground--background separation. The foreground and background slots, which are initialized with query guidance, are iteratively refined based on interactions with template information. Furthermore, to improve slot--template interaction and effectively fuse global and local features in the target and reference frames, K-nearest neighbors filtering and a feature aggregation transformer are introduced. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed model in challenging scenes through various comparative experiments.

ViC-MAE: Self-Supervised Representation Learning from Images and Video with Contrastive Masked Autoencoders. (arXiv:2303.12001v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jefferson Hernandez, Ruben Villegas, Vicente Ordonez

We propose ViC-MAE, a model that combines both Masked AutoEncoders (MAE) and contrastive learning. ViC-MAE is trained using a global featured obtained by pooling the local representations learned under an MAE reconstruction loss and leveraging this representation under a contrastive objective across images and video frames. We show that visual representations learned under ViC-MAE generalize well to both video and image classification tasks. Particularly, ViC-MAE obtains state-of-the-art transfer learning performance from video to images on Imagenet-1k compared to the recently proposed OmniMAE by achieving a top-1 accuracy of 86% (+1.3% absolute improvement) when trained on the same data and 87.1% (+2.4% absolute improvement) when training on extra data. At the same time ViC-MAE outperforms most other methods on video benchmarks by obtaining 75.9% top-1 accuracy on the challenging Something something-v2 video benchmark . When training on videos and images from a diverse combination of datasets, our method maintains a balanced transfer-learning performance between video and image classification benchmarks, coming only as a close second to the best supervised method.

DreamAvatar: Text-and-Shape Guided 3D Human Avatar Generation via Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2304.00916v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yukang Cao, Yan-Pei Cao, Kai Han, Ying Shan, Kwan-Yee K. Wong

We present DreamAvatar, a text-and-shape guided framework for generating high-quality 3D human avatars with controllable poses. While encouraging results have been reported by recent methods on text-guided 3D common object generation, generating high-quality human avatars remains an open challenge due to the complexity of the human body's shape, pose, and appearance. We propose DreamAvatar to tackle this challenge, which utilizes a trainable NeRF for predicting density and color for 3D points and pretrained text-to-image diffusion models for providing 2D self-supervision. Specifically, we leverage the SMPL model to provide shape and pose guidance for the generation. We introduce a dual-observation-space design that involves the joint optimization of a canonical space and a posed space that are related by a learnable deformation field. This facilitates the generation of more complete textures and geometry faithful to the target pose. We also jointly optimize the losses computed from the full body and from the zoomed-in 3D head to alleviate the common multi-face ''Janus'' problem and improve facial details in the generated avatars. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that DreamAvatar significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a new state-of-the-art for text-and-shape guided 3D human avatar generation.

RegionPLC: Regional Point-Language Contrastive Learning for Open-World 3D Scene Understanding. (arXiv:2304.00962v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jihan Yang, Runyu Ding, Weipeng Deng, Zhe Wang, Xiaojuan Qi

We propose a lightweight and scalable Regional Point-Language Contrastive learning framework, namely \textbf{RegionPLC}, for open-world 3D scene understanding, aiming to identify and recognize open-set objects and categories. Specifically, based on our empirical studies, we introduce a 3D-aware SFusion strategy that fuses 3D vision-language pairs derived from multiple 2D foundation models, yielding high-quality, dense region-level language descriptions without human 3D annotations. Subsequently, we devise a region-aware point-discriminative contrastive learning objective to enable robust and effective 3D learning from dense regional language supervision. We carry out extensive experiments on ScanNet, ScanNet200, and nuScenes datasets, and our model outperforms prior 3D open-world scene understanding approaches by an average of 17.2\% and 9.1\% for semantic and instance segmentation, respectively, while maintaining greater scalability and lower resource demands. Furthermore, our method has the flexibility to be effortlessly integrated with language models to enable open-ended grounded 3D reasoning without extra task-specific training. Code will be released.

ClothCombo: Modeling Inter-Cloth Interaction for Draping Multi-Layered Clothes. (arXiv:2304.03492v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Dohae Lee, Hyun Kang, In-Kwon Lee

We present ClothCombo, a pipeline to drape arbitrary combinations of clothes on 3D human models with varying body shapes and poses. While existing learning-based approaches for draping clothes have shown promising results, multi-layered clothing remains challenging as it is non-trivial to model inter-cloth interaction. To this end, our method utilizes a GNN-based network to efficiently model the interaction between clothes in different layers, thus enabling multi-layered clothing. Specifically, we first create feature embedding for each cloth using a topology-agnostic network. Then, the draping network deforms all clothes to fit the target body shape and pose without considering inter-cloth interaction. Lastly, the untangling network predicts the per-vertex displacements in a way that resolves interpenetration between clothes. In experiments, the proposed model demonstrates strong performance in complex multi-layered scenarios. Being agnostic to cloth topology, our method can be readily used for layered virtual try-on of real clothes in diverse poses and combinations of clothes.

Analyzing the Domain Shift Immunity of Deep Homography Estimation. (arXiv:2304.09976v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Mingzhen Shao, Tolga Tasdizen, Sarang Joshi

Homography estimation serves as a fundamental technique for image alignment in a wide array of applications. The advent of convolutional neural networks has introduced learning-based methodologies that have exhibited remarkable efficacy in this realm. Yet, the generalizability of these approaches across distinct domains remains underexplored. Unlike other conventional tasks, CNN-driven homography estimation models show a distinctive immunity to domain shifts, enabling seamless deployment from one dataset to another without the necessity of transfer learning. This study explores the resilience of a variety of deep homography estimation models to domain shifts, revealing that the network architecture itself is not a contributing factor to this remarkable adaptability. By closely examining the models' focal regions and subjecting input images to a variety of modifications, we confirm that the models heavily rely on local textures such as edges and corner points for homography estimation. Moreover, our analysis underscores that the domain shift immunity itself is intricately tied to the utilization of these local textures.

Image retrieval outperforms diffusion models on data augmentation. (arXiv:2304.10253v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Max F. Burg, Florian Wenzel, Dominik Zietlow, Max Horn, Osama Makansi, Francesco Locatello, Chris Russell

Many approaches have been proposed to use diffusion models to augment training datasets for downstream tasks, such as classification. However, diffusion models are themselves trained on large datasets, often with noisy annotations, and it remains an open question to which extent these models contribute to downstream classification performance. In particular, it remains unclear if they generalize enough to improve over directly using the additional data of their pre-training process for augmentation. We systematically evaluate a range of existing methods to generate images from diffusion models and study new extensions to assess their benefit for data augmentation. Personalizing diffusion models towards the target data outperforms simpler prompting strategies. However, using the pre-training data of the diffusion model alone, via a simple nearest-neighbor retrieval procedure, leads to even stronger downstream performance. Our study explores the potential of diffusion models in generating new training data, and surprisingly finds that these sophisticated models are not yet able to beat a simple and strong image retrieval baseline on simple downstream vision tasks.

FreMIM: Fourier Transform Meets Masked Image Modeling for Medical Image Segmentation. (arXiv:2304.10864v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Wenxuan Wang, Jing Wang, Chen Chen, Jianbo Jiao, Yuanxiu Cai, Shanshan Song, Jiangyun Li

The research community has witnessed the powerful potential of self-supervised Masked Image Modeling (MIM), which enables the models capable of learning visual representation from unlabeled data. In this paper, to incorporate both the crucial global structural information and local details for dense prediction tasks, we alter the perspective to the frequency domain and present a new MIM-based framework named FreMIM for self-supervised pre-training to better accomplish medical image segmentation tasks. Based on the observations that the detailed structural information mainly lies in the high-frequency components and the high-level semantics are abundant in the low-frequency counterparts, we further incorporate multi-stage supervision to guide the representation learning during the pre-training phase. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show the superior advantage of our FreMIM over previous state-of-the-art MIM methods. Compared with various baselines trained from scratch, our FreMIM could consistently bring considerable improvements to model performance. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Rubics-Xuan/FreMIM.

Med-Tuning: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning with Fine-Grained Feature Enhancement for Medical Volumetric Segmentation. (arXiv:2304.10880v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Wenxuan Wang, Jiachen Shen, Chen Chen, Jianbo Jiao, Jing Liu, Yan Zhang, Shanshan Song, Jiangyun Li

Deep learning-based medical volumetric segmentation methods either train the model from scratch or follow the standard ``pre-training then fine-tuning" paradigm. Although fine-tuning a pre-trained model on downstream tasks can harness its representation power, the standard full fine-tuning is costly in terms of computation and memory footprint. In this paper, we present the study on parameter-efficient transfer learning for medical volumetric segmentation and propose a new framework named Med-Tuning based on intra-stage feature enhancement and inter-stage feature interaction. Additionally, aiming at exploiting the intrinsic global properties of Fourier Transform for parameter-efficient transfer learning, a new adapter block namely Med-Adapter with a well-designed Fourier Transform branch is proposed for effectively and efficiently modeling the crucial global context for medical volumetric segmentation. Given a large-scale pre-trained model on 2D natural images, our method can exploit both the crucial spatial multi-scale feature and volumetric correlations along slices for accurate segmentation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (including CT and MRI) show that our method can achieve better results than previous parameter-efficient transfer learning methods on segmentation tasks, with much less tuned parameter costs. Compared to full fine-tuning, our method reduces the fine-tuned model parameters by up to 4x, with even better segmentation performance. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/jessie-chen99/Med-Tuning.

Self-Chained Image-Language Model for Video Localization and Question Answering. (arXiv:2305.06988v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Shoubin Yu, Jaemin Cho, Prateek Yadav, Mohit Bansal

Recent studies have shown promising results on utilizing large pre-trained image-language models for video question answering. While these image-language models can efficiently bootstrap the representation learning of video-language models, they typically concatenate uniformly sampled video frames as visual inputs without explicit language-aware, temporal modeling. When only a portion of a video input is relevant to the language query, such uniform frame sampling can often lead to missing important visual cues. Although humans often find a video moment to focus on and rewind the moment to answer questions, training a query-aware video moment localizer often requires expensive annotations and high computational costs. To address this issue, we propose Self-Chained Video Localization-Answering (SeViLA), a novel framework that leverages a single image-language model (BLIP-2) to tackle both temporal keyframe localization and QA on videos. SeViLA framework consists of two modules: Localizer and Answerer, where both are parameter-efficiently fine-tuned from BLIP-2. We propose two ways of chaining these modules for cascaded inference and self-refinement. First, in the forward chain, the Localizer finds multiple language-aware keyframes in a video, which the Answerer uses to predict the answer. Second, in the reverse chain, the Answerer generates keyframe pseudo-labels to refine the Localizer, alleviating the need for expensive video moment localization annotations. Our SeViLA framework outperforms several strong baselines on 5 challenging video QA and event prediction benchmarks, and achieves the state-of-the-art in both fine-tuning (NExT-QA, STAR) and zero-shot (NExT-QA, STAR, How2QA, VLEP) settings. We also analyze the impact of Localizer, comparisons of Localizer with other temporal localization models, pre-training/self-refinement of Localizer, and varying the number of keyframes.

Diffusion Models for Imperceptible and Transferable Adversarial Attack. (arXiv:2305.08192v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jianqi Chen, Hao Chen, Keyan Chen, Yilan Zhang, Zhengxia Zou, Zhenwei Shi

Many existing adversarial attacks generate $L_p$-norm perturbations on image RGB space. Despite some achievements in transferability and attack success rate, the crafted adversarial examples are easily perceived by human eyes. Towards visual imperceptibility, some recent works explore unrestricted attacks without $L_p$-norm constraints, yet lacking transferability of attacking black-box models. In this work, we propose a novel imperceptible and transferable attack by leveraging both the generative and discriminative power of diffusion models. Specifically, instead of direct manipulation in pixel space, we craft perturbations in the latent space of diffusion models. Combined with well-designed content-preserving structures, we can generate human-insensitive perturbations embedded with semantic clues. For better transferability, we further "deceive" the diffusion model which can be viewed as an implicit recognition surrogate, by distracting its attention away from the target regions. To our knowledge, our proposed method, DiffAttack, is the first that introduces diffusion models into the adversarial attack field. Extensive experiments on various model structures, datasets, and defense methods have demonstrated the superiority of our attack over the existing attack methods.

Editing Large Language Models: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities. (arXiv:2305.13172v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Yunzhi Yao, Peng Wang, Bozhong Tian, Siyuan Cheng, Zhoubo Li, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang

Despite the ability to train capable LLMs, the methodology for maintaining their relevancy and rectifying errors remains elusive. To this end, the past few years have witnessed a surge in techniques for editing LLMs, the objective of which is to efficiently alter the behavior of LLMs within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. This paper embarks on a deep exploration of the problems, methods, and opportunities related to model editing for LLMs. In particular, we provide an exhaustive overview of the task definition and challenges associated with model editing, along with an in-depth empirical analysis of the most progressive methods currently at our disposal. We also build a new benchmark dataset to facilitate a more robust evaluation and pinpoint enduring issues intrinsic to existing techniques. Our objective is to provide valuable insights into the effectiveness and feasibility of each editing technique, thereby assisting the community in making informed decisions on the selection of the most appropriate method for a specific task or context. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

Extending Explainable Boosting Machines to Scientific Image Data. (arXiv:2305.16526v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Daniel Schug, Sai Yerramreddy, Rich Caruana, Craig Greenberg, Justyna P. Zwolak

As the deployment of computer vision technology becomes increasingly common in science, the need for explanations of the system and its output has become a focus of great concern. Driven by the pressing need for interpretable models in science, we propose the use of Explainable Boosting Machines (EBMs) for scientific image data. Inspired by an important application underpinning the development of quantum technologies, we apply EBMs to cold-atom soliton image data tabularized using Gabor Wavelet Transform-based techniques that preserve the spatial structure of the data. In doing so, we demonstrate the use of EBMs for image data for the first time and show that our approach provides explanations that are consistent with human intuition about the data.

Caterpillar: A Pure-MLP Architecture with Shifted-Pillars-Concatenation. (arXiv:2305.17644v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jin Sun, Xiaoshuang Shi, Zhiyuan Wang, Kaidi Xu, Heng Tao Shen, Xiaofeng Zhu

Modeling in Computer Vision has evolved to MLPs. Vision MLPs naturally lack local modeling capability, to which the simplest treatment is combined with convolutional layers. Convolution, famous for its sliding window scheme, also suffers from this scheme of redundancy and low computational efficiency. In this paper, we seek to dispense with the windowing scheme and introduce a more elaborate and effective approach to exploiting locality. To this end, we propose a new MLP module, namely Shifted-Pillars-Concatenation (SPC), that consists of two steps of processes: (1) Pillars-Shift, which generates four neighboring maps by shifting the input image along four directions, and (2) Pillars-Concatenation, which applies linear transformations and concatenation on the maps to aggregate local features. SPC module offers superior local modeling power and performance gains, making it a promising alternative to the convolutional layer. Then, we build a pure-MLP architecture called Caterpillar by replacing the convolutional layer with the SPC module in a hybrid model of sMLPNet. Extensive experiments show Caterpillar's excellent performance and scalability on both ImageNet-1K and small-scale classification benchmarks.

Learning by Aligning 2D Skeleton Sequences in Time. (arXiv:2305.19480v4 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Quoc-Huy Tran, Muhammad Ahmed, Murad Popattia, M. Hassan Ahmed, Andrey Konin, M. Zeeshan Zia

This paper presents a self-supervised temporal video alignment framework which is useful for several fine-grained human activity understanding applications. In contrast with the state-of-the-art method of CASA, where sequences of 3D skeleton coordinates are taken directly as input, our key idea is to use sequences of 2D skeleton heatmaps as input. Unlike CASA which performs self-attention in the temporal domain only, we feed 2D skeleton heatmaps to a video transformer which performs self-attention both in the spatial and temporal domains for extracting effective spatiotemporal and contextual features. In addition, we introduce simple heatmap augmentation techniques based on 2D skeletons for self-supervised learning. Despite the lack of 3D information, our approach achieves not only higher accuracy but also better robustness against missing and noisy keypoints than CASA. Furthermore, extensive evaluations on three public datasets, i.e., Penn Action, IKEA ASM, and H2O, demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods in different fine-grained human activity understanding tasks. Finally, fusing 2D skeleton heatmaps with RGB videos yields the state-of-the-art on all metrics and datasets. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to utilize 2D skeleton heatmap inputs and the first to explore multi-modality fusion for temporal video alignment.

Control4D: Efficient 4D Portrait Editing with Text. (arXiv:2305.20082v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Ruizhi Shao, Jingxiang Sun, Cheng Peng, Zerong Zheng, Boyao Zhou, Hongwen Zhang, Yebin Liu

We introduce Control4D, an innovative framework for editing dynamic 4D portraits using text instructions. Our method addresses the prevalent challenges in 4D editing, notably the inefficiencies of existing 4D representations and the inconsistent editing effect caused by diffusion-based editors. We first propose GaussianPlanes, a novel 4D representation that makes Gaussian Splatting more structured by applying plane-based decomposition in 3D space and time. This enhances both efficiency and robustness in 4D editing. Furthermore, we propose to leverage a 4D generator to learn a more continuous generation space from inconsistent edited images produced by the diffusion-based editor, which effectively improves the consistency and quality of 4D editing. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates the superiority of Control4D, including significantly reduced training time, high-quality rendering, and spatial-temporal consistency in 4D portrait editing. The link to our project website is https://control4darxiv.github.io.

DiffInDScene: Diffusion-based High-Quality 3D Indoor Scene Generation. (arXiv:2306.00519v4 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Xiaoliang Ju, Zhaoyang Huang, Yijin Li, Guofeng Zhang, Yu Qiao, Hongsheng Li

We present DiffInDScene, a novel framework for tackling the problem of high-quality 3D indoor scene generation, which is challenging due to the complexity and diversity of the indoor scene geometry. Although diffusion-based generative models have previously demonstrated impressive performance in image generation and object-level 3D generation, they have not yet been applied to room-level 3D generation due to their computationally intensive costs. In DiffInDScene, we propose a cascaded 3D diffusion pipeline that is efficient and possesses strong generative performance for Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF). The whole pipeline is designed to run on a sparse occupancy space in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Inspired by KinectFusion's incremental alignment and fusion of local TSDF volumes, we propose a diffusion-based SDF fusion approach that iteratively diffuses and fuses local TSDF volumes, facilitating the generation of an entire room environment. The generated results demonstrate that our work is capable to achieve high-quality room generation directly in three-dimensional space, starting from scratch. In addition to the scene generation, the final part of DiffInDScene can be used as a post-processing module to refine the 3D reconstruction results from multi-view stereo. According to the user study, the mesh quality generated by our DiffInDScene can even outperform the ground truth mesh provided by ScanNet. Please visit our project page for the latest progress and demonstrations: https://github.com/AkiraHero/diffindscene.

Intelligent Grimm -- Open-ended Visual Storytelling via Latent Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2306.00973v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Chang Liu, Haoning Wu, Yujie Zhong, Xiaoyun Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie

Generative models have recently exhibited exceptional capabilities in text-to-image generation, but still struggle to generate image sequences coherently. In this work, we focus on a novel, yet challenging task of generating a coherent image sequence based on a given storyline, denoted as open-ended visual storytelling. We make the following three contributions: (i) to fulfill the task of visual storytelling, we propose a learning-based auto-regressive image generation model, termed as StoryGen, with a novel vision-language context module, that enables to generate the current frame by conditioning on the corresponding text prompt and preceding image-caption pairs; (ii) to address the data shortage of visual storytelling, we collect paired image-text sequences by sourcing from online videos and open-source E-books, establishing processing pipeline for constructing a large-scale dataset with diverse characters, storylines, and artistic styles, named StorySalon; (iii) Quantitative experiments and human evaluations have validated the superiority of our StoryGen, where we show StoryGen can generalize to unseen characters without any optimization, and generate image sequences with coherent content and consistent character. The code, model, and dataset will be made publicly available to the research community.

Discovering Failure Modes of Text-guided Diffusion Models via Adversarial Search. (arXiv:2306.00974v5 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Qihao Liu, Adam Kortylewski, Yutong Bai, Song Bai, Alan Yuille

Text-guided diffusion models (TDMs) are widely applied but can fail unexpectedly. Common failures include: (i) natural-looking text prompts generating images with the wrong content, or (ii) different random samples of the latent variables that generate vastly different, and even unrelated, outputs despite being conditioned on the same text prompt. In this work, we aim to study and understand the failure modes of TDMs in more detail. To achieve this, we propose SAGE, the first adversarial search method on TDMs that systematically explores the discrete prompt space and the high-dimensional latent space, to automatically discover undesirable behaviors and failure cases in image generation. We use image classifiers as surrogate loss functions during searching, and employ human inspections to validate the identified failures. For the first time, our method enables efficient exploration of both the discrete and intricate human language space and the challenging latent space, overcoming the gradient vanishing problem. Then, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SAGE on five widely used generative models and reveal four typical failure modes: (1) We find a variety of natural text prompts that generate images failing to capture the semantics of input texts. We further discuss the underlying causes and potential solutions based on the results. (2) We find regions in the latent space that lead to distorted images independent of the text prompt, suggesting that parts of the latent space are not well-structured. (3) We also find latent samples that result in natural-looking images unrelated to the text prompt, implying a possible misalignment between the latent and prompt spaces. (4) By appending a single adversarial token embedding to any input prompts, we can generate a variety of specified target objects. Project page: https://sage-diffusion.github.io/

Enhancing Point Annotations with Superpixel and Confidence Learning Guided for Improving Semi-Supervised OCT Fluid Segmentation. (arXiv:2306.02582v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Tengjin Weng, Yang Shen, Kai Jin, Zhiming Cheng, Yunxiang Li, Gewen Zhang, Shuai Wang, Yaqi Wang

Automatic segmentation of fluid in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images is beneficial for ophthalmologists to make an accurate diagnosis. Although semi-supervised OCT fluid segmentation networks enhance their performance by introducing additional unlabeled data, the performance enhancement is limited. To address this, we propose Superpixel and Confident Learning Guide Point Annotations Network (SCLGPA-Net) based on the teacher-student architecture, which can learn OCT fluid segmentation from limited fully-annotated data and abundant point-annotated data. Specifically, we use points to annotate fluid regions in unlabeled OCT images and the Superpixel-Guided Pseudo-Label Generation (SGPLG) module generates pseudo-labels and pixel-level label trust maps from the point annotations. The label trust maps provide an indication of the reliability of the pseudo-labels. Furthermore, we propose the Confident Learning Guided Label Refinement (CLGLR) module identifies error information in the pseudo-labels and leads to further refinement. Experiments on the RETOUCH dataset show that we are able to reduce the need for fully-annotated data by 94.22\%, closing the gap with the best fully supervised baselines to a mean IoU of only 2\%. Furthermore, We constructed a private 2D OCT fluid segmentation dataset for evaluation. Compared with other methods, comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve excellent performance in OCT fluid segmentation.

Motion-DVAE: Unsupervised learning for fast human motion denoising. (arXiv:2306.05846v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Guénolé Fiche, Simon Leglaive, Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Renaud Séguier

Pose and motion priors are crucial for recovering realistic and accurate human motion from noisy observations. Substantial progress has been made on pose and shape estimation from images, and recent works showed impressive results using priors to refine frame-wise predictions. However, a lot of motion priors only model transitions between consecutive poses and are used in time-consuming optimization procedures, which is problematic for many applications requiring real-time motion capture. We introduce Motion-DVAE, a motion prior to capture the short-term dependencies of human motion. As part of the dynamical variational autoencoder (DVAE) models family, Motion-DVAE combines the generative capability of VAE models and the temporal modeling of recurrent architectures. Together with Motion-DVAE, we introduce an unsupervised learned denoising method unifying regression- and optimization-based approaches in a single framework for real-time 3D human pose estimation. Experiments show that the proposed approach reaches competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods while being much faster.

Compositor: Bottom-up Clustering and Compositing for Robust Part and Object Segmentation. (arXiv:2306.07404v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Ju He, Jieneng Chen, Ming-Xian Lin, Qihang Yu, Alan Yuille

In this work, we present a robust approach for joint part and object segmentation. Specifically, we reformulate object and part segmentation as an optimization problem and build a hierarchical feature representation including pixel, part, and object-level embeddings to solve it in a bottom-up clustering manner. Pixels are grouped into several clusters where the part-level embeddings serve as cluster centers. Afterwards, object masks are obtained by compositing the part proposals. This bottom-up interaction is shown to be effective in integrating information from lower semantic levels to higher semantic levels. Based on that, our novel approach Compositor produces part and object segmentation masks simultaneously while improving the mask quality. Compositor achieves state-of-the-art performance on PartImageNet and Pascal-Part by outperforming previous methods by around 0.9% and 1.3% on PartImageNet, 0.4% and 1.7% on Pascal-Part in terms of part and object mIoU and demonstrates better robustness against occlusion by around 4.4% and 7.1% on part and object respectively. Code will be available at https://github.com/TACJu/Compositor.

MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing. (arXiv:2306.10012v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Kai Zhang, Lingbo Mo, Wenhu Chen, Huan Sun, Yu Su

Text-guided image editing is widely needed in daily life, ranging from personal use to professional applications such as Photoshop. However, existing methods are either zero-shot or trained on an automatically synthesized dataset, which contains a high volume of noise. Thus, they still require lots of manual tuning to produce desirable outcomes in practice. To address this issue, we introduce MagicBrush (https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/MagicBrush/), the first large-scale, manually annotated dataset for instruction-guided real image editing that covers diverse scenarios: single-turn, multi-turn, mask-provided, and mask-free editing. MagicBrush comprises over 10K manually annotated triplets (source image, instruction, target image), which supports trainining large-scale text-guided image editing models. We fine-tune InstructPix2Pix on MagicBrush and show that the new model can produce much better images according to human evaluation. We further conduct extensive experiments to evaluate current image editing baselines from multiple dimensions including quantitative, qualitative, and human evaluations. The results reveal the challenging nature of our dataset and the gap between current baselines and real-world editing needs.

Fantastic Weights and How to Find Them: Where to Prune in Dynamic Sparse Training. (arXiv:2306.12230v2 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

Authors: Aleksandra I. Nowak, Bram Grooten, Decebal Constantin Mocanu, Jacek Tabor

Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) is a rapidly evolving area of research that seeks to optimize the sparse initialization of a neural network by adapting its topology during training. It has been shown that under specific conditions, DST is able to outperform dense models. The key components of this framework are the pruning and growing criteria, which are repeatedly applied during the training process to adjust the network's sparse connectivity. While the growing criterion's impact on DST performance is relatively well studied, the influence of the pruning criterion remains overlooked. To address this issue, we design and perform an extensive empirical analysis of various pruning criteria to better understand their impact on the dynamics of DST solutions. Surprisingly, we find that most of the studied methods yield similar results. The differences become more significant in the low-density regime, where the best performance is predominantly given by the simplest technique: magnitude-based pruning. The code is provided at https://github.com/alooow/fantastic_weights_paper

A Fully Unsupervised Instance Segmentation Technique for White Blood Cell Images. (arXiv:2306.14875v2 [eess.IV] UPDATED)

Authors: Shrijeet Biswas, Amartya Bhattacharya

White blood cells, also known as leukocytes are group of heterogeneously nucleated cells which act as salient immune system cells. These are originated in the bone marrow and are found in blood, plasma, and lymph tissues. Leukocytes kill the bacteria, virus and other kind of pathogens which invade human body through phagocytosis that in turn results immunity. Detection of a white blood cell count can reveal camouflaged infections and warn doctors about chronic medical conditions such as autoimmune diseases, immune deficiencies, and blood disorders. Segmentation plays an important role in identification of white blood cells (WBC) from microscopic image analysis. The goal of segmentation in a microscopic image is to divide the image into different distinct regions. In our paper, we tried to propose a novel instance segmentation method for segmenting the WBCs containing both the nucleus and the cytoplasm, from bone marrow images.

ID-Pose: Sparse-view Camera Pose Estimation by Inverting Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2306.17140v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Weihao Cheng, Yan-Pei Cao, Ying Shan

Given sparse views of a 3D object, estimating their camera poses is a long-standing and intractable problem. Toward this goal, we consider harnessing the pre-trained diffusion model of novel views conditioned on viewpoints (Zero-1-to-3). We present ID-Pose which inverses the denoising diffusion process to estimate the relative pose given two input images. ID-Pose adds a noise to one image, and predicts the noise conditioned on the other image and a hypothesis of the relative pose. The prediction error is used as the minimization objective to find the optimal pose with the gradient descent method. We extend ID-Pose to handle more than two images and estimate each pose with multiple image pairs from triangular relations. ID-Pose requires no training and generalizes to open-world images. We conduct extensive experiments using casually captured photos and rendered images with random viewpoints. The results demonstrate that ID-Pose significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Test-Time Adaptation for Nighttime Color-Thermal Semantic Segmentation. (arXiv:2307.04470v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yexin Liu, Weiming Zhang, Guoyang Zhao, Jinjing Zhu, Athanasios Vasilakos, Lin Wang

The ability to scene understanding in adverse visual conditions, e.g., nighttime, has sparked active research for RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation. However, it is essentially hampered by two critical problems: 1) the day-night gap of RGB images is larger than that of thermal images, and 2) the class-wise performance of RGB images at night is not consistently higher or lower than that of thermal images. we propose the first test-time adaptation (TTA) framework, dubbed Night-TTA, to address the problems for nighttime RGBT semantic segmentation without access to the source (daytime) data during adaptation. Our method enjoys three key technical parts. Firstly, as one modality (e.g., RGB) suffers from a larger domain gap than that of the other (e.g., thermal), Imaging Heterogeneity Refinement (IHR) employs an interaction branch on the basis of RGB and thermal branches to prevent cross-modal discrepancy and performance degradation. Then, Class Aware Refinement (CAR) is introduced to obtain reliable ensemble logits based on pixel-level distribution aggregation of the three branches. In addition, we also design a specific learning scheme for our TTA framework, which enables the ensemble logits and three student logits to collaboratively learn to improve the quality of predictions during the testing phase of our Night TTA. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance with a 13.07% boost in mIoU.

DRM-IR: Task-Adaptive Deep Unfolding Network for All-In-One Image Restoration. (arXiv:2307.07688v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yuanshuo Cheng, Mingwen Shao, Yecong Wan, Chao Wang

Existing All-In-One image restoration (IR) methods usually lack flexible modeling on various types of degradation, thus impeding the restoration performance. To achieve All-In-One IR with higher task dexterity, this work proposes an efficient Dynamic Reference Modeling paradigm (DRM-IR), which consists of task-adaptive degradation modeling and model-based image restoring. Specifically, these two subtasks are formalized as a pair of entangled reference-based maximum a posteriori (MAP) inferences, which are optimized synchronously in an unfolding-based manner. With the two cascaded subtasks, DRM-IR first dynamically models the task-specific degradation based on a reference image pair and further restores the image with the collected degradation statistics. Besides, to bridge the semantic gap between the reference and target degraded images, we further devise a Degradation Prior Transmitter (DPT) that restrains the instance-specific feature differences. DRM-IR explicitly provides superior flexibility for All-in-One IR while being interpretable. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that our DRM-IR achieves state-of-the-art in All-In-One IR.

SCA-PVNet: Self-and-Cross Attention Based Aggregation of Point Cloud and Multi-View for 3D Object Retrieval. (arXiv:2307.10601v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Dongyun Lin, Yi Cheng, Aiyuan Guo, Shangbo Mao, Yiqun Li

To address 3D object retrieval, substantial efforts have been made to generate highly discriminative descriptors of 3D objects represented by a single modality, e.g., voxels, point clouds or multi-view images. It is promising to leverage the complementary information from multi-modality representations of 3D objects to further improve retrieval performance. However, multi-modality 3D object retrieval is rarely developed and analyzed on large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose self-and-cross attention based aggregation of point cloud and multi-view images (SCA-PVNet) for 3D object retrieval. With deep features extracted from point clouds and multi-view images, we design two types of feature aggregation modules, namely the In-Modality Aggregation Module (IMAM) and the Cross-Modality Aggregation Module (CMAM), for effective feature fusion. IMAM leverages a self-attention mechanism to aggregate multi-view features while CMAM exploits a cross-attention mechanism to interact point cloud features with multi-view features. The final descriptor of a 3D object for object retrieval can be obtained via concatenating the aggregated features from both modules. Extensive experiments and analysis are conducted on three datasets, ranging from small to large scale, to show the superiority of the proposed SCA-PVNet over the state-of-the-art methods.

SACReg: Scene-Agnostic Coordinate Regression for Visual Localization. (arXiv:2307.11702v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jerome Revaud, Yohann Cabon, Romain Brégier, JongMin Lee, Philippe Weinzaepfel

Scene coordinates regression (SCR), i.e., predicting 3D coordinates for every pixel of a given image, has recently shown promising potential. However, existing methods remain limited to small scenes memorized during training, and thus hardly scale to realistic datasets and scenarios. In this paper, we propose a generalized SCR model trained once to be deployed in new test scenes, regardless of their scale, without any finetuning. Instead of encoding the scene coordinates into the network weights, our model takes as input a database image with some sparse 2D pixel to 3D coordinate annotations, extracted from e.g. off-the-shelf Structure-from-Motion or RGB-D data, and a query image for which are predicted a dense 3D coordinate map and its confidence, based on cross-attention. At test time, we rely on existing off-the-shelf image retrieval systems and fuse the predictions from a shortlist of relevant database images w.r.t. the query. Afterwards camera pose is obtained using standard Perspective-n-Point (PnP). Starting from selfsupervised CroCo pretrained weights, we train our model on diverse datasets to ensure generalizabilty across various scenarios, and significantly outperform other scene regression approaches, including scene-specific models, on multiple visual localization benchmarks. Finally, we show that the database representation of images and their 2D-3D annotations can be highly compressed with negligible loss of localization performance.

Microscopy Image Segmentation via Point and Shape Regularized Data Synthesis. (arXiv:2308.09835v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Shijie Li, Mengwei Ren, Thomas Ach, Guido Gerig

Current deep learning-based approaches for the segmentation of microscopy images heavily rely on large amount of training data with dense annotation, which is highly costly and laborious in practice. Compared to full annotation where the complete contour of objects is depicted, point annotations, specifically object centroids, are much easier to acquire and still provide crucial information about the objects for subsequent segmentation. In this paper, we assume access to point annotations only during training and develop a unified pipeline for microscopy image segmentation using synthetically generated training data. Our framework includes three stages: (1) it takes point annotations and samples a pseudo dense segmentation mask constrained with shape priors; (2) with an image generative model trained in an unpaired manner, it translates the mask to a realistic microscopy image regularized by object level consistency; (3) the pseudo masks along with the synthetic images then constitute a pairwise dataset for training an ad-hoc segmentation model. On the public MoNuSeg dataset, our synthesis pipeline produces more diverse and realistic images than baseline models while maintaining high coherence between input masks and generated images. When using the identical segmentation backbones, the models trained on our synthetic dataset significantly outperform those trained with pseudo-labels or baseline-generated images. Moreover, our framework achieves comparable results to models trained on authentic microscopy images with dense labels, demonstrating its potential as a reliable and highly efficient alternative to labor-intensive manual pixel-wise annotations in microscopy image segmentation. The code is available.

MDCS: More Diverse Experts with Consistency Self-distillation for Long-tailed Recognition. (arXiv:2308.09922v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Qihao Zhao, Chen Jiang, Wei Hu, Fan Zhang, Jun Liu

Recently, multi-expert methods have led to significant improvements in long-tail recognition (LTR). We summarize two aspects that need further enhancement to contribute to LTR boosting: (1) More diverse experts; (2) Lower model variance. However, the previous methods didn't handle them well. To this end, we propose More Diverse experts with Consistency Self-distillation (MDCS) to bridge the gap left by earlier methods. Our MDCS approach consists of two core components: Diversity Loss (DL) and Consistency Self-distillation (CS). In detail, DL promotes diversity among experts by controlling their focus on different categories. To reduce the model variance, we employ KL divergence to distill the richer knowledge of weakly augmented instances for the experts' self-distillation. In particular, we design Confident Instance Sampling (CIS) to select the correctly classified instances for CS to avoid biased/noisy knowledge. In the analysis and ablation study, we demonstrate that our method compared with previous work can effectively increase the diversity of experts, significantly reduce the variance of the model, and improve recognition accuracy. Moreover, the roles of our DL and CS are mutually reinforcing and coupled: the diversity of experts benefits from the CS, and the CS cannot achieve remarkable results without the DL. Experiments show our MDCS outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1% $\sim$ 2% on five popular long-tailed benchmarks, including CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, Places-LT, and iNaturalist 2018. The code is available at https://github.com/fistyee/MDCS.

MarkovGen: Structured Prediction for Efficient Text-to-Image Generation. (arXiv:2308.10997v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Sadeep Jayasumana, Daniel Glasner, Srikumar Ramalingam, Andreas Veit, Ayan Chakrabarti, Sanjiv Kumar

Modern text-to-image generation models produce high-quality images that are both photorealistic and faithful to the text prompts. However, this quality comes at significant computational cost: nearly all of these models are iterative and require running sampling multiple times with large models. This iterative process is needed to ensure that different regions of the image are not only aligned with the text prompt, but also compatible with each other. In this work, we propose a light-weight approach to achieving this compatibility between different regions of an image, using a Markov Random Field (MRF) model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on top of the latent token-based Muse text-to-image model. The MRF richly encodes the compatibility among image tokens at different spatial locations to improve quality and significantly reduce the required number of Muse sampling steps. Inference with the MRF is significantly cheaper, and its parameters can be quickly learned through back-propagation by modeling MRF inference as a differentiable neural-network layer. Our full model, MarkovGen, uses this proposed MRF model to both speed up Muse by 1.5X and produce higher quality images by decreasing undesirable image artifacts.

Less is More -- Towards parsimonious multi-task models using structured sparsity. (arXiv:2308.12114v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Richa Upadhyay, Ronald Phlypo, Rajkumar Saini, Marcus Liwicki

Model sparsification in deep learning promotes simpler, more interpretable models with fewer parameters. This not only reduces the model's memory footprint and computational needs but also shortens inference time. This work focuses on creating sparse models optimized for multiple tasks with fewer parameters. These parsimonious models also possess the potential to match or outperform dense models in terms of performance. In this work, we introduce channel-wise l1/l2 group sparsity in the shared convolutional layers parameters (or weights) of the multi-task learning model. This approach facilitates the removal of extraneous groups i.e., channels (due to l1 regularization) and also imposes a penalty on the weights, further enhancing the learning efficiency for all tasks (due to l2 regularization). We analyzed the results of group sparsity in both single-task and multi-task settings on two widely-used Multi-Task Learning (MTL) datasets: NYU-v2 and CelebAMask-HQ. On both datasets, which consist of three different computer vision tasks each, multi-task models with approximately 70% sparsity outperform their dense equivalents. We also investigate how changing the degree of sparsification influences the model's performance, the overall sparsity percentage, the patterns of sparsity, and the inference time.

Generative-based Fusion Mechanism for Multi-Modal Tracking. (arXiv:2309.01728v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Zhangyong Tang, Tianyang Xu, Xuefeng Zhu, Xiao-Jun Wu, Josef Kittler

Generative models (GMs) have received increasing research interest for their remarkable capacity to achieve comprehensive understanding. However, their potential application in the domain of multi-modal tracking has remained relatively unexplored. In this context, we seek to uncover the potential of harnessing generative techniques to address the critical challenge, information fusion, in multi-modal tracking. In this paper, we delve into two prominent GM techniques, namely, Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs). Different from the standard fusion process where the features from each modality are directly fed into the fusion block, we condition these multi-modal features with random noise in the GM framework, effectively transforming the original training samples into harder instances. This design excels at extracting discriminative clues from the features, enhancing the ultimate tracking performance. To quantitatively gauge the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments across two multi-modal tracking tasks, three baseline methods, and three challenging benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed generative-based fusion mechanism achieves state-of-the-art performance, setting new records on LasHeR and RGBD1K.

Prompt-based Context- and Domain-aware Pretraining for Vision and Language Navigation. (arXiv:2309.03661v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Ting Liu, Wansen Wu, Yue Hu, Youkai Wang, Kai Xu, Quanjun Yin

With strong representation capabilities, pretrained vision-language models are widely used in vision and language navigation (VLN). However, most of them are trained on web-crawled general-purpose datasets, which incurs a considerable domain gap when used for VLN tasks. Another challenge for VLN is how the agent understands the contextual relations between actions on a trajectory and performs cross-modal alignment sequentially. In this paper, we propose a novel Prompt-bAsed coNtext- and Domain-Aware (PANDA) pretraining framework to address these problems. It performs prompting in two stages. In the domain-aware stage, we apply a low-cost prompt tuning paradigm to learn soft visual prompts from an in-domain dataset for equipping the pretrained models with object-level and scene-level cross-modal alignment in VLN tasks. Furthermore, in the context-aware stage, we design a set of hard context prompts to capture the sequence-level semantics and instill both out-of-context and contextual knowledge in the instruction into cross-modal representations. They enable further tuning of the pretrained models via contrastive learning. Experimental results on both R2R and REVERIE show the superiority of PANDA compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Editing 3D Scenes via Text Prompts without Retraining. (arXiv:2309.04917v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Shuangkang Fang, Yufeng Wang, Yi Yang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Wenrui Ding, Shuchang Zhou, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Numerous diffusion models have recently been applied to image synthesis and editing. However, editing 3D scenes is still in its early stages. It poses various challenges, such as the requirement to design specific methods for different editing types, retraining new models for various 3D scenes, and the absence of convenient human interaction during editing. To tackle these issues, we introduce a text-driven editing method, termed DN2N, which allows for the direct acquisition of a NeRF model with universal editing capabilities, eliminating the requirement for retraining. Our method employs off-the-shelf text-based editing models of 2D images to modify the 3D scene images, followed by a filtering process to discard poorly edited images that disrupt 3D consistency. We then consider the remaining inconsistency as a problem of removing noise perturbation, which can be solved by generating training data with similar perturbation characteristics for training. We further propose cross-view regularization terms to help the generalized NeRF model mitigate these perturbations. Our text-driven method allows users to edit a 3D scene with their desired description, which is more friendly, intuitive, and practical than prior works. Empirical results show that our method achieves multiple editing types, including but not limited to appearance editing, weather transition, material changing, and style transfer. Most importantly, our method generalizes well with editing abilities shared among a set of model parameters without requiring a customized editing model for some specific scenes, thus inferring novel views with editing effects directly from user input. The project website is available at https://sk-fun.fun/DN2N

Language Models as Black-Box Optimizers for Vision-Language Models. (arXiv:2309.05950v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Shihong Liu, Zhiqiu Lin, Samuel Yu, Ryan Lee, Tiffany Ling, Deepak Pathak, Deva Ramanan

Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on web-scale datasets have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on downstream tasks when fine-tuned with minimal data. However, many VLMs rely on proprietary data and are not open-source, which restricts the use of white-box approaches for fine-tuning. As such, we aim to develop a black-box approach to optimize VLMs through natural language prompts, thereby avoiding the need to access model parameters, feature embeddings, or even output logits. We propose employing chat-based LLMs to search for the best text prompt for VLMs. Specifically, we adopt an automatic hill-climbing procedure that converges to an effective prompt by evaluating the performance of current prompts and asking LLMs to refine them based on textual feedback, all within a conversational process without human-in-the-loop. In a challenging 1-shot image classification setup, our simple approach surpasses the white-box continuous prompting method (CoOp) by an average of 1.5% across 11 datasets including ImageNet. Our approach also outperforms both human-engineered and LLM-generated prompts. We highlight the advantage of conversational feedback that incorporates both positive and negative prompts, suggesting that LLMs can utilize the implicit gradient direction in textual feedback for a more efficient search. In addition, we find that the text prompts generated through our strategy are not only more interpretable but also transfer well across different VLM architectures in a black-box manner. Lastly, we demonstrate our framework on a state-of-the-art black-box VLM (DALL-E 3) for text-to-image optimization.

Differentiable JPEG: The Devil is in the Details. (arXiv:2309.06978v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Christoph Reich, Biplob Debnath, Deep Patel, Srimat Chakradhar

JPEG remains one of the most widespread lossy image coding methods. However, the non-differentiable nature of JPEG restricts the application in deep learning pipelines. Several differentiable approximations of JPEG have recently been proposed to address this issue. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of existing diff. JPEG approaches and identifies critical details that have been missed by previous methods. To this end, we propose a novel diff. JPEG approach, overcoming previous limitations. Our approach is differentiable w.r.t. the input image, the JPEG quality, the quantization tables, and the color conversion parameters. We evaluate the forward and backward performance of our diff. JPEG approach against existing methods. Additionally, extensive ablations are performed to evaluate crucial design choices. Our proposed diff. JPEG resembles the (non-diff.) reference implementation best, significantly surpassing the recent-best diff. approach by $3.47$dB (PSNR) on average. For strong compression rates, we can even improve PSNR by $9.51$dB. Strong adversarial attack results are yielded by our diff. JPEG, demonstrating the effective gradient approximation. Our code is available at https://github.com/necla-ml/Diff-JPEG.

Moving Object Detection and Tracking with 4D Radar Point Cloud. (arXiv:2309.09737v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Zhijun Pan, Fangqiang Ding, Hantao Zhong, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu

Mobile autonomy relies on the precise perception of dynamic environments. Robustly tracking moving objects in 3D world thus plays a pivotal role for applications like trajectory prediction, obstacle avoidance, and path planning. While most current methods utilize LiDARs or cameras for Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), the capabilities of 4D imaging radars remain largely unexplored. Recognizing the challenges posed by radar noise and point sparsity in 4D radar data, we introduce RaTrack, an innovative solution tailored for radar-based tracking. Bypassing the typical reliance on specific object types and 3D bounding boxes, our method focuses on motion segmentation and clustering, enriched by a motion estimation module. Evaluated on the View-of-Delft dataset, RaTrack showcases superior tracking precision of moving objects, largely surpassing the performance of the state of the art.

A Continual Learning Paradigm for Non-differentiable Visual Programming Frameworks on Visual Reasoning Tasks. (arXiv:2309.09809v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Wentao Wan, Nan Kang, Zeqing Wang, Zhuojie Yang, Liang Lin, Keze Wang

Recently, the visual programming framework (VisProg) has emerged as a significant framework for executing compositional visual tasks due to its interpretability and flexibility. However, the performance of VisProg on specific Visual Reasoning (VR) tasks is markedly inferior compared to well-trained task-specific models since its employed visual sub-modules have limited generalization capabilities. Due to the non-differentiability of VisProg, it is quite challenging to improve these visual sub-modules within VisProg for the specific VR task while maintaining their generalizability on the un-seen tasks. Attempt to overcome these difficulties, we propose CLVP, a Continuous Learning paradigm for VisProg across various visual reasoning tasks. Specifically, our CLVP distills the capabilities of well-trained task-specific models into the visual sub-modules in a stepwise and anti-forgetting manner. This can continually improve the performance of VisProg on multiple visual tasks while preserving the flexibility of VisProg. Extensive and comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our CLVP obtains significant performance gains on specific VR benchmarks, i.e., GQA (+1.4%) and NLVRv2 (+5.6%), compared to the VisProg baseline, and also maintains a promising generalizability for VR on un-seen and previous learned tasks.

On Sparse Modern Hopfield Model. (arXiv:2309.12673v2 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

Authors: Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Donglin Yang, Dennis Wu, Chenwei Xu, Bo-Yu Chen, Han Liu

We introduce the sparse modern Hopfield model as a sparse extension of the modern Hopfield model. Like its dense counterpart, the sparse modern Hopfield model equips a memory-retrieval dynamics whose one-step approximation corresponds to the sparse attention mechanism. Theoretically, our key contribution is a principled derivation of a closed-form sparse Hopfield energy using the convex conjugate of the sparse entropic regularizer. Building upon this, we derive the sparse memory retrieval dynamics from the sparse energy function and show its one-step approximation is equivalent to the sparse-structured attention. Importantly, we provide a sparsity-dependent memory retrieval error bound which is provably tighter than its dense analog. The conditions for the benefits of sparsity to arise are therefore identified and discussed. In addition, we show that the sparse modern Hopfield model maintains the robust theoretical properties of its dense counterpart, including rapid fixed point convergence and exponential memory capacity. Empirically, we use both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate that the sparse Hopfield model outperforms its dense counterpart in many situations.

Rethinking Domain Generalization: Discriminability and Generalizability. (arXiv:2309.16483v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Shaocong Long, Qianyu Zhou, Chenhao Ying, Lizhuang Ma, Yuan Luo

Domain generalization (DG) endeavors to develop robust models that possess strong generalizability while preserving excellent discriminability. Nonetheless, pivotal DG techniques tend to improve the feature generalizability by learning domain-invariant representations, inadvertently overlooking the feature discriminability. On the one hand, the simultaneous attainment of generalizability and discriminability of features presents a complex challenge, often entailing inherent contradictions. This challenge becomes particularly pronounced when domain-invariant features manifest reduced discriminability owing to the inclusion of unstable factors, \emph{i.e.,} spurious correlations. On the other hand, prevailing domain-invariant methods can be categorized as category-level alignment, susceptible to discarding indispensable features possessing substantial generalizability and narrowing intra-class variations. To surmount these obstacles, we rethink DG from a new perspective that concurrently imbues features with formidable discriminability and robust generalizability, and present a novel framework, namely, Discriminative Microscopic Distribution Alignment (DMDA). DMDA incorporates two core components: Selective Channel Pruning~(SCP) and Micro-level Distribution Alignment (MDA). Concretely, SCP attempts to curtail redundancy within neural networks, prioritizing stable attributes conducive to accurate classification. This approach alleviates the adverse effect of spurious domain invariance and amplifies the feature discriminability. Besides, MDA accentuates micro-level alignment within each class, going beyond mere category-level alignment. This strategy accommodates sufficient generalizable features and facilitates within-class variations. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets corroborate the efficacy of our method.

Pose-Free Generalizable Rendering Transformer. (arXiv:2310.03704v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Zhiwen Fan, Panwang Pan, Peihao Wang, Yifan Jiang, Hanwen Jiang, Dejia Xu, Zehao Zhu, Dilin Wang, Zhangyang Wang

In the field of novel-view synthesis, the necessity of knowing camera poses (e.g., via Structure from Motion) before rendering has been a common practice. However, the consistent acquisition of accurate camera poses remains elusive, and errors in pose extraction can adversely impact the view synthesis process. To address this challenge, we introduce PF-GRT, a new Pose-Free framework for Generalizable Rendering Transformer, eliminating the need for pre-computed camera poses and instead leveraging feature-matching learned directly from data. PF-GRT is parameterized using a local relative coordinate system, where one of the source images is set as the origin. An OmniView Transformer is designed for fusing multi-view cues under the pose-free setting, where unposed-view fusion and origin-centric aggregation are performed. The 3D point feature along target ray is sampled by projecting onto the selected origin plane. The final pixel intensities are modulated and decoded using another Transformer. PF-GRT demonstrates an impressive ability to generalize to new scenes that were not encountered during the training phase, without the need of pre-computing camera poses. Our experiments with zero-shot rendering on the LLFF, RealEstate-10k, Shiny, and Blender datasets reveal that it produces superior quality in generating photo-realistic images. Moreover, it demonstrates robustness against noise in test camera poses. Code is available at https://zhiwenfan.github.io/PF-GRT/.

Multi-scale MRI reconstruction via dilated ensemble networks. (arXiv:2310.04705v2 [eess.IV] UPDATED)

Authors: Wendi Ma, Marlon Bran Lorenzana, Wei Dai, Hongfu Sun, Shekhar S. Chandra

As aliasing artefacts are highly structural and non-local, many MRI reconstruction networks use pooling to enlarge filter coverage and incorporate global context. However, this inadvertently impedes fine detail recovery as downsampling creates a resolution bottleneck. Moreover, real and imaginary features are commonly split into separate channels, discarding phase information particularly important to high frequency textures. In this work, we introduce an efficient multi-scale reconstruction network using dilated convolutions to preserve resolution and experiment with a complex-valued version using complex convolutions. Inspired by parallel dilated filters, multiple receptive fields are processed simultaneously with branches that see both large structural artefacts and fine local features. We also adopt dense residual connections for feature aggregation to efficiently increase scale and the deep cascade global architecture to reduce overfitting. The real-valued version of this model outperformed common reconstruction architectures as well as a state-of-the-art multi-scale network whilst being three times more efficient. The complex-valued network yielded better qualitative results when more phase information was present.

Tailored Visions: Enhancing Text-to-Image Generation with Personalized Prompt Rewriting. (arXiv:2310.08129v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Zijie Chen, Lichao Zhang, Fangsheng Weng, Lili Pan, Zhenzhong Lan

Despite significant progress in the field, it is still challenging to create personalized visual representations that align closely with the desires and preferences of individual users. This process requires users to articulate their ideas in words that are both comprehensible to the models and accurately capture their vision, posing difficulties for many users. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by leveraging historical user interactions with the system to enhance user prompts. We propose a novel approach that involves rewriting user prompts based on a newly collected large-scale text-to-image dataset with over 300k prompts from 3115 users. Our rewriting model enhances the expressiveness and alignment of user prompts with their intended visual outputs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods over baseline approaches, as evidenced in our new offline evaluation method and online tests. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zzjchen/Tailored-Visions .

Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions in h-space of Pre-trained Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2310.09912v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Zijian Zhang, Luping Liu, Zhijie Lin, Yichen Zhu, Zhou Zhao

We propose the first unsupervised and learning-based method to identify interpretable directions in h-space of pre-trained diffusion models. Our method is derived from an existing technique that operates on the GAN latent space. Specifically, we employ a shift control module that works on h-space of pre-trained diffusion models to manipulate a sample into a shifted version of itself, followed by a reconstructor to reproduce both the type and the strength of the manipulation. By jointly optimizing them, the model will spontaneously discover disentangled and interpretable directions. To prevent the discovery of meaningless and destructive directions, we employ a discriminator to maintain the fidelity of shifted sample. Due to the iterative generative process of diffusion models, our training requires a substantial amount of GPU VRAM to store numerous intermediate tensors for back-propagating gradient. To address this issue, we propose a general VRAM-efficient training algorithm based on gradient checkpointing technique to back-propagate any gradient through the whole generative process, with acceptable occupancy of VRAM and sacrifice of training efficiency. Compared with existing related works on diffusion models, our method inherently identifies global and scalable directions, without necessitating any other complicated procedures. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Towards Generalizable Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection via Perspective Debiasing. (arXiv:2310.11346v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Hao Lu, Yunpeng Zhang, Qing Lian, Dalong Du, Yingcong Chen

Detecting objects in 3D space using multiple cameras, known as Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection (MC3D-Det), has gained prominence with the advent of bird's-eye view (BEV) approaches. However, these methods often struggle when faced with unfamiliar testing environments due to the lack of diverse training data encompassing various viewpoints and environments. To address this, we propose a novel method that aligns 3D detection with 2D camera plane results, ensuring consistent and accurate detections. Our framework, anchored in perspective debiasing, helps the learning of features resilient to domain shifts. In our approach, we render diverse view maps from BEV features and rectify the perspective bias of these maps, leveraging implicit foreground volumes to bridge the camera and BEV planes. This two-step process promotes the learning of perspective- and context-independent features, crucial for accurate object detection across varying viewpoints, camera parameters and environment conditions. Notably, our model-agnostic approach preserves the original network structure without incurring additional inference costs, facilitating seamless integration across various models and simplifying deployment. Furthermore, we also show our approach achieves satisfactory results in real data when trained only with virtual datasets, eliminating the need for real scene annotations. Experimental results on both Domain Generalization (DG) and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) clearly demonstrate its effectiveness. Our code will be released.

TransXNet: Learning Both Global and Local Dynamics with a Dual Dynamic Token Mixer for Visual Recognition. (arXiv:2310.19380v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Meng Lou, Hong-Yu Zhou, Sibei Yang, Yizhou Yu

Recent studies have integrated convolution into transformers to introduce inductive bias and improve generalization performance. However, the static nature of conventional convolution prevents it from dynamically adapting to input variations, resulting in a representation discrepancy between convolution and self-attention as self-attention calculates attention matrices dynamically. Furthermore, when stacking token mixers that consist of convolution and self-attention to form a deep network, the static nature of convolution hinders the fusion of features previously generated by self-attention into convolution kernels. These two limitations result in a sub-optimal representation capacity of the constructed networks. To find a solution, we propose a lightweight Dual Dynamic Token Mixer (D-Mixer) that aggregates global information and local details in an input-dependent way. D-Mixer works by applying an efficient global attention module and an input-dependent depthwise convolution separately on evenly split feature segments, endowing the network with strong inductive bias and an enlarged effective receptive field. We use D-Mixer as the basic building block to design TransXNet, a novel hybrid CNN-Transformer vision backbone network that delivers compelling performance. In the ImageNet-1K image classification task, TransXNet-T surpasses Swin-T by 0.3% in top-1 accuracy while requiring less than half of the computational cost. Furthermore, TransXNet-S and TransXNet-B exhibit excellent model scalability, achieving top-1 accuracy of 83.8% and 84.6% respectively, with reasonable computational costs. Additionally, our proposed network architecture demonstrates strong generalization capabilities in various dense prediction tasks, outperforming other state-of-the-art networks while having lower computational costs. Code is available at https://github.com/LMMMEng/TransXNet.

EXIM: A Hybrid Explicit-Implicit Representation for Text-Guided 3D Shape Generation. (arXiv:2311.01714v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Zhengzhe Liu, Jingyu Hu, Ka-Hei Hui, Xiaojuan Qi, Daniel Cohen-Or, Chi-Wing Fu

This paper presents a new text-guided technique for generating 3D shapes. The technique leverages a hybrid 3D shape representation, namely EXIM, combining the strengths of explicit and implicit representations. Specifically, the explicit stage controls the topology of the generated 3D shapes and enables local modifications, whereas the implicit stage refines the shape and paints it with plausible colors. Also, the hybrid approach separates the shape and color and generates color conditioned on shape to ensure shape-color consistency. Unlike the existing state-of-the-art methods, we achieve high-fidelity shape generation from natural-language descriptions without the need for time-consuming per-shape optimization or reliance on human-annotated texts during training or test-time optimization. Further, we demonstrate the applicability of our approach to generate indoor scenes with consistent styles using text-induced 3D shapes. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the compelling quality of our results and the high coherency of our generated shapes with the input texts, surpassing the performance of existing methods by a significant margin. Codes and models are released at https://github.com/liuzhengzhe/EXIM.

Towards Calibrated Robust Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Models. (arXiv:2311.01723v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Changdae Oh, Mijoo Kim, Hyesu Lim, Junhyeok Park, Euiseog Jeong, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Kyungwoo Song

While fine-tuning unlocks the potential of a pre-trained model for a specific task, it compromises the model's ability to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. To mitigate this, robust fine-tuning aims to ensure performance on OOD datasets as well as on an in-distribution (ID) dataset for which the model is being tuned. However, another criterion for reliable machine learning (ML), confidence calibration, has been overlooked despite its increasing demand for real-world high-stakes ML applications (e.g., autonomous driving and medical diagnosis). For the first time, we raise concerns about the calibration of fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) under distribution shift by showing that naive fine-tuning and even state-of-the-art robust fine-tuning methods hurt the calibration of pre-trained VLMs, especially on OOD datasets. To address this issue, we provide a simple approach, called calibrated robust fine-tuning (CaRot), that incentivizes calibration and robustness on both ID and OOD datasets. Empirical results on ImageNet-1K distribution shift evaluation verify the effectiveness of our method.

AnyText: Multilingual Visual Text Generation And Editing. (arXiv:2311.03054v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yuxiang Tuo, Wangmeng Xiang, Jun-Yan He, Yifeng Geng, Xuansong Xie

Diffusion model based Text-to-Image has achieved impressive achievements recently. Although current technology for synthesizing images is highly advanced and capable of generating images with high fidelity, it is still possible to give the show away when focusing on the text area in the generated image. To address this issue, we introduce AnyText, a diffusion-based multilingual visual text generation and editing model, that focuses on rendering accurate and coherent text in the image. AnyText comprises a diffusion pipeline with two primary elements: an auxiliary latent module and a text embedding module. The former uses inputs like text glyph, position, and masked image to generate latent features for text generation or editing. The latter employs an OCR model for encoding stroke data as embeddings, which blend with image caption embeddings from the tokenizer to generate texts that seamlessly integrate with the background. We employed text-control diffusion loss and text perceptual loss for training to further enhance writing accuracy. AnyText can write characters in multiple languages, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address multilingual visual text generation. It is worth mentioning that AnyText can be plugged into existing diffusion models from the community for rendering or editing text accurately. After conducting extensive evaluation experiments, our method has outperformed all other approaches by a significant margin. Additionally, we contribute the first large-scale multilingual text images dataset, AnyWord-3M, containing 3 million image-text pairs with OCR annotations in multiple languages. Based on AnyWord-3M dataset, we propose AnyText-benchmark for the evaluation of visual text generation accuracy and quality. Our project will be open-sourced on https://github.com/tyxsspa/AnyText to improve and promote the development of text generation technology.

DocPedia: Unleashing the Power of Large Multimodal Model in the Frequency Domain for Versatile Document Understanding. (arXiv:2311.11810v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Hao Feng, Qi Liu, Hao Liu, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li, Can Huang

This work presents DocPedia, a novel large multimodal model (LMM) for versatile OCR-free document understanding, capable of parsing images up to 2,560$\times$2,560 resolution. Unlike existing work either struggle with high-resolution documents or give up the large language model thus vision or language ability constrained, our DocPedia directly processes visual input in the frequency domain rather than the pixel space. The unique characteristic enables DocPedia to capture a greater amount of visual and textual information using a limited number of visual tokens. To consistently enhance both perception and comprehension abilities of our model, we develop a dual-stage training strategy and enrich instructions/annotations of all training tasks covering multiple document types. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on various publicly available benchmarks confirm the mutual benefits of jointly learning perception and comprehension tasks. The results provide further evidence of the effectiveness and superior performance of our DocPedia over other methods.

Quality and Quantity: Unveiling a Million High-Quality Images for Text-to-Image Synthesis in Fashion Design. (arXiv:2311.12067v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jia Yu, Lichao Zhang, Zijie Chen, Fayu Pan, MiaoMiao Wen, Yuming Yan, Fangsheng Weng, Shuai Zhang, Lili Pan, Zhenzhong Lan

The fusion of AI and fashion design has emerged as a promising research area. However, the lack of extensive, interrelated data on clothing and try-on stages has hindered the full potential of AI in this domain. Addressing this, we present the Fashion-Diffusion dataset, a product of multiple years' rigorous effort. This dataset, the first of its kind, comprises over a million high-quality fashion images, paired with detailed text descriptions. Sourced from a diverse range of geographical locations and cultural backgrounds, the dataset encapsulates global fashion trends. The images have been meticulously annotated with fine-grained attributes related to clothing and humans, simplifying the fashion design process into a Text-to-Image (T2I) task. The Fashion-Diffusion dataset not only provides high-quality text-image pairs and diverse human-garment pairs but also serves as a large-scale resource about humans, thereby facilitating research in T2I generation. Moreover, to foster standardization in the T2I-based fashion design field, we propose a new benchmark comprising multiple datasets for evaluating the performance of fashion design models. This work represents a significant leap forward in the realm of AI-driven fashion design, setting a new standard for future research in this field.

Cascade Learning Localises Discriminant Features in Visual Scene Classification. (arXiv:2311.12704v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Junwen Wang, Katayoun Farrahi

Lack of interpretability of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) is a well-known problem particularly in the medical domain as clinicians want trustworthy automated decisions. One way to improve trust is to demonstrate the localisation of feature representations with respect to expert labeled regions of interest. In this work, we investigate the localisation of features learned via two varied learning paradigms and demonstrate the superiority of one learning approach with respect to localisation. Our analysis on medical and natural datasets show that the traditional end-to-end (E2E) learning strategy has a limited ability to localise discriminative features across multiple network layers. We show that a layer-wise learning strategy, namely cascade learning (CL), results in more localised features. Considering localisation accuracy, we not only show that CL outperforms E2E but that it is a promising method of predicting regions. On the YOLO object detection framework, our best result shows that CL outperforms the E2E scheme by $2\%$ in mAP.

ECNR: Efficient Compressive Neural Representation of Time-Varying Volumetric Datasets. (arXiv:2311.12831v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Kaiyuan Tang, Chaoli Wang

Due to its conceptual simplicity and generality, compressive neural representation has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional compression methods for managing massive volumetric datasets. The current practice of neural compression utilizes a single large multilayer perceptron (MLP) to encode the global volume, incurring slow training and inference. This paper presents an efficient compressive neural representation (ECNR) solution for time-varying data compression, utilizing the Laplacian pyramid for adaptive signal fitting. Following a multiscale structure, we leverage multiple small MLPs at each scale for fitting local content or residual blocks. By assigning similar blocks to the same MLP via size uniformization, we enable balanced parallelization among MLPs to significantly speed up training and inference. Working in concert with the multiscale structure, we tailor a deep compression strategy to compact the resulting model. We show the effectiveness of ECNR with multiple datasets and compare it with state-of-the-art compression methods (mainly SZ3, TTHRESH, and neurcomp). The results position ECNR as a promising solution for volumetric data compression.

Assessment of Deep Learning Segmentation for Real-Time Free-Breathing Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging. (arXiv:2311.14049v2 [eess.IV] UPDATED)

Authors: Martin Schilling, Christina Unterberg-Buchwald, Joachim Lotz, Martin Uecker

In recent years, a variety of deep learning networks for cardiac MRI (CMR) segmentation have been developed and analyzed. However, nearly all of them are focused on cine CMR under breathold. In this work, accuracy of deep learning methods is assessed for volumetric analysis (via segmentation) of the left ventricle in real-time free-breathing CMR at rest and under exercise stress. Data from healthy volunteers (n=15) for cine and real-time free-breathing CMR were analyzed retrospectively. Segmentations of a commercial software (comDL) and a freely available neural network (nnU-Net), were compared to a reference created via the manual correction of comDL segmentation. Segmentation of left ventricular endocardium (LV), left ventricular myocardium (MYO), and right ventricle (RV) is evaluated for both end-systolic and end-diastolic phases and analyzed with Dice's coefficient (DC). The volumetric analysis includes LV end-diastolic volume (EDV), LV end-systolic volume (ESV), and LV ejection fraction (EF). For cine CMR, nnU-Net and comDL achieve a DC above 0.95 for LV and 0.9 for MYO, and RV. For real-time CMR, the accuracy of nnU-Net exceeds that of comDL overall. For real-time CMR at rest, nnU-Net achieves a DC of 0.94 for LV, 0.89 for MYO, and 0.90 for RV; mean absolute differences between nnU-Net and reference are 2.9mL for EDV, 3.5mL for ESV and 2.6% for EF. For real-time CMR under exercise stress, nnU-Net achieves a DC of 0.92 for LV, 0.85 for MYO, and 0.83 for RV; mean absolute differences between nnU-Net and reference are 11.4mL for EDV, 2.9mL for ESV and 3.6% for EF. Deep learning methods designed or trained for cine CMR segmentation can perform well on real-time CMR. For real-time free-breathing CMR at rest, the performance of deep learning methods is comparable to inter-observer variability in cine CMR and is usable or fully automatic segmentation.

CatVersion: Concatenating Embeddings for Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Personalization. (arXiv:2311.14631v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Ruoyu Zhao, Mingrui Zhu, Shiyin Dong, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao

We propose CatVersion, an inversion-based method that learns the personalized concept through a handful of examples. Subsequently, users can utilize text prompts to generate images that embody the personalized concept, thereby achieving text-to-image personalization. In contrast to existing approaches that emphasize word embedding learning or parameter fine-tuning for the diffusion model, which potentially causes concept dilution or overfitting, our method concatenates embeddings on the feature-dense space of the text encoder in the diffusion model to learn the gap between the personalized concept and its base class, aiming to maximize the preservation of prior knowledge in diffusion models while restoring the personalized concepts. To this end, we first dissect the text encoder's integration in the image generation process to identify the feature-dense space of the encoder. Afterward, we concatenate embeddings on the Keys and Values in this space to learn the gap between the personalized concept and its base class. In this way, the concatenated embeddings ultimately manifest as a residual on the original attention output. To more accurately and unbiasedly quantify the results of personalized image generation, we improve the CLIP image alignment score based on masks. Qualitatively and quantitatively, CatVersion helps to restore personalization concepts more faithfully and enables more robust editing.

Charting New Territories: Exploring the Geographic and Geospatial Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs. (arXiv:2311.14656v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jonathan Roberts, Timo Lüddecke, Rehan Sheikh, Kai Han, Samuel Albanie

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a broad range of tasks but their knowledge and abilities in the geographic and geospatial domains are yet to be explored, despite potential wide-ranging benefits to navigation, environmental research, urban development, and disaster response. We conduct a series of experiments exploring various vision capabilities of MLLMs within these domains, particularly focusing on the frontier model GPT-4V, and benchmark its performance against open-source counterparts. Our methodology involves challenging these models with a small-scale geographic benchmark consisting of a suite of visual tasks, testing their abilities across a spectrum of complexity. The analysis uncovers not only where such models excel, including instances where they outperform humans, but also where they falter, providing a balanced view of their capabilities in the geographic domain. To enable the comparison and evaluation of future models, our benchmark will be publicly released.

Benchmarking Robustness of Text-Image Composed Retrieval. (arXiv:2311.14837v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Shitong Sun, Jindong Gu, Shaogang Gong

Text-image composed retrieval aims to retrieve the target image through the composed query, which is specified in the form of an image plus some text that describes desired modifications to the input image. It has recently attracted attention due to its ability to leverage both information-rich images and concise language to precisely express the requirements for target images. However, the robustness of these approaches against real-world corruptions or further text understanding has never been studied. In this paper, we perform the first robustness study and establish three new diversified benchmarks for systematic analysis of text-image composed retrieval against natural corruptions in both vision and text and further probe textural understanding. For natural corruption analysis, we introduce two new large-scale benchmark datasets, CIRR-C and FashionIQ-C for testing in open domain and fashion domain respectively, both of which apply 15 visual corruptions and 7 textural corruptions. For textural understanding analysis, we introduce a new diagnostic dataset CIRR-D by expanding the original raw data with synthetic data, which contains modified text to better probe textual understanding ability including numerical variation, attribute variation, object removal, background variation, and fine-grained evaluation. The code and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/SunTongtongtong/Benchmark-Robustness-Text-Image-Compose-Retrieval.

Towards Scalable 3D Anomaly Detection and Localization: A Benchmark via 3D Anomaly Synthesis and A Self-Supervised Learning Network. (arXiv:2311.14897v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Wenqiao Li, Xiaohao Xu, Yao Gu, Bozhong Zheng, Shenghua Gao, Yingna Wu

Recently, 3D anomaly detection, a crucial problem involving fine-grained geometry discrimination, is getting more attention. However, the lack of abundant real 3D anomaly data limits the scalability of current models. To enable scalable anomaly data collection, we propose a 3D anomaly synthesis pipeline to adapt existing large-scale 3Dmodels for 3D anomaly detection. Specifically, we construct a synthetic dataset, i.e., Anomaly-ShapeNet, basedon ShapeNet. Anomaly-ShapeNet consists of 1600 point cloud samples under 40 categories, which provides a rich and varied collection of data, enabling efficient training and enhancing adaptability to industrial scenarios. Meanwhile,to enable scalable representation learning for 3D anomaly localization, we propose a self-supervised method, i.e., Iterative Mask Reconstruction Network (IMRNet). During training, we propose a geometry-aware sample module to preserve potentially anomalous local regions during point cloud down-sampling. Then, we randomly mask out point patches and sent the visible patches to a transformer for reconstruction-based self-supervision. During testing, the point cloud repeatedly goes through the Mask Reconstruction Network, with each iteration's output becoming the next input. By merging and contrasting the final reconstructed point cloud with the initial input, our method successfully locates anomalies. Experiments show that IMRNet outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving 66.1% in I-AUC on Anomaly-ShapeNet dataset and 72.5% in I-AUC on Real3D-AD dataset. Our dataset will be released at https://github.com/Chopper-233/Anomaly-ShapeNet

Effective Backdoor Mitigation Depends on the Pre-training Objective. (arXiv:2311.14948v2 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

Authors: Sahil Verma, Gantavya Bhatt, Avi Schwarzschild, Soumye Singhal, Arnav Mohanty Das, Chirag Shah, John P Dickerson, Jeff Bilmes

Despite the advanced capabilities of contemporary machine learning (ML) models, they remain vulnerable to adversarial and backdoor attacks. This vulnerability is particularly concerning in real-world deployments, where compromised models may exhibit unpredictable behavior in critical scenarios. Such risks are heightened by the prevalent practice of collecting massive, internet-sourced datasets for pre-training multimodal models, as these datasets may harbor backdoors. Various techniques have been proposed to mitigate the effects of backdooring in these models such as CleanCLIP which is the current state-of-the-art approach. In this work, we demonstrate that the efficacy of CleanCLIP in mitigating backdoors is highly dependent on the particular objective used during model pre-training. We observe that stronger pre-training objectives correlate with harder to remove backdoors behaviors. We show this by training multimodal models on two large datasets consisting of 3 million (CC3M) and 6 million (CC6M) datapoints, under various pre-training objectives, followed by poison removal using CleanCLIP. We find that CleanCLIP is ineffective when stronger pre-training objectives are used, even with extensive hyperparameter tuning. Our findings underscore critical considerations for ML practitioners who pre-train models using large-scale web-curated data and are concerned about potential backdoor threats. Notably, our results suggest that simpler pre-training objectives are more amenable to effective backdoor removal. This insight is pivotal for practitioners seeking to balance the trade-offs between using stronger pre-training objectives and security against backdoor attacks.

Adapter is All You Need for Tuning Visual Tasks. (arXiv:2311.15010v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Dongshuo Yin, Leiyi Hu, Bin Li, Youqun Zhang

Pre-training & fine-tuning can enhance the transferring efficiency and performance in visual tasks. Recent delta-tuning methods provide more options for visual classification tasks. Despite their success, existing visual delta-tuning art fails to exceed the upper limit of full fine-tuning on challenging tasks like instance segmentation and semantic segmentation. To find a competitive alternative to full fine-tuning, we propose the Multi-cognitive Visual Adapter (Mona) tuning, a novel adapter-based tuning method. First, we introduce multiple vision-friendly filters into the adapter to enhance its ability to process visual signals, while previous methods mainly rely on language-friendly linear filters. Second, we add the scaled normalization layer in the adapter to regulate the distribution of input features for visual filters. To fully demonstrate the practicality and generality of Mona, we conduct experiments on multiple representative visual tasks, including instance segmentation on COCO, semantic segmentation on ADE20K, object detection on Pascal VOC, and image classification on several common datasets. Exciting results illustrate that Mona surpasses full fine-tuning on all these tasks and is the only delta-tuning method outperforming full fine-tuning on instance segmentation and semantic segmentation tasks. For example, Mona achieves a 1% performance gain on the COCO dataset compared to full fine-tuning. Comprehensive results suggest that Mona-tuning is more suitable for retaining and utilizing the capabilities of pre-trained models than full fine-tuning. The code will be released at https://github.com/Leiyi-Hu/mona.

Dual-stream contrastive predictive network with joint handcrafted feature view for SAR ship classification. (arXiv:2311.15202v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Xianting Feng, Hao zheng, Zhigang Hu, Liu Yang, Meiguang Zheng

Most existing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship classification technologies heavily rely on correctly labeled data, ignoring the discriminative features of unlabeled SAR ship images. Even though researchers try to enrich CNN-based features by introducing traditional handcrafted features, existing methods easily cause information redundancy and fail to capture the interaction between them. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual-stream contrastive predictive network (DCPNet), which consists of two asymmetric task designs and the false negative sample elimination module. The first task is to construct positive sample pairs, guiding the core encoder to learn more general representations. The second task is to encourage adaptive capture of the correspondence between deep features and handcrated features, achieving knowledge transfer within the model, and effectively improving the redundancy caused by the feature fusion. To increase the separability between clusters, we also design a cluster-level tasks. The experimental results on OpenSARShip and FUSAR-Ship datasets demonstrate the improvement in classification accuracy of supervised models and confirm the capability of learning effective representations of DCPNet.

KOPPA: Improving Prompt-based Continual Learning with Key-Query Orthogonal Projection and Prototype-based One-Versus-All. (arXiv:2311.15414v2 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

Authors: Quyen Tran, Lam Tran, Khoat Than, Toan Tran, Dinh Phung, Trung Le

Drawing inspiration from prompt tuning techniques applied to Large Language Models, recent methods based on pre-trained ViT networks have achieved remarkable results in the field of Continual Learning. Specifically, these approaches propose to maintain a set of prompts and allocate a subset of them to learn each task using a key-query matching strategy. However, they may encounter limitations when lacking control over the correlations between old task queries and keys of future tasks, the shift of features in the latent space, and the relative separation of latent vectors learned in independent tasks. In this work, we introduce a novel key-query learning strategy based on orthogonal projection, inspired by model-agnostic meta-learning, to enhance prompt matching efficiency and address the challenge of shifting features. Furthermore, we introduce a One-Versus-All (OVA) prototype-based component that enhances the classification head distinction. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method empowers the model to achieve results surpassing those of current state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin of up to 20%.

Check, Locate, Rectify: A Training-Free Layout Calibration System for Text-to-Image Generation. (arXiv:2311.15773v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Biao Gong, Siteng Huang, Yutong Feng, Shiwei Zhang, Yuyuan Li, Yu Liu

Diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable progress in generating realistic images. However, challenges remain in accurately understanding and synthesizing the layout requirements in the textual prompts. To align the generated image with layout instructions, we present a training-free layout calibration system SimM that intervenes in the generative process on the fly during inference time. Specifically, following a "check-locate-rectify" pipeline, the system first analyses the prompt to generate the target layout and compares it with the intermediate outputs to automatically detect errors. Then, by moving the located activations and making intra- and inter-map adjustments, the rectification process can be performed with negligible computational overhead. To evaluate SimM over a range of layout requirements, we present a benchmark SimMBench that compensates for the lack of superlative spatial relations in existing datasets. And both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SimM in calibrating the layout inconsistencies. Our project page is at https://simm-t2i.github.io/SimM.

Learning Disentangled Identifiers for Action-Customized Text-to-Image Generation. (arXiv:2311.15841v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Siteng Huang, Biao Gong, Yutong Feng, Xi Chen, Yuqian Fu, Yu Liu, Donglin Wang

This study focuses on a novel task in text-to-image (T2I) generation, namely action customization. The objective of this task is to learn the co-existing action from limited data and generalize it to unseen humans or even animals. Experimental results show that existing subject-driven customization methods fail to learn the representative characteristics of actions and struggle in decoupling actions from context features, including appearance. To overcome the preference for low-level features and the entanglement of high-level features, we propose an inversion-based method Action-Disentangled Identifier (ADI) to learn action-specific identifiers from the exemplar images. ADI first expands the semantic conditioning space by introducing layer-wise identifier tokens, thereby increasing the representational richness while distributing the inversion across different features. Then, to block the inversion of action-agnostic features, ADI extracts the gradient invariance from the constructed sample triples and masks the updates of irrelevant channels. To comprehensively evaluate the task, we present an ActionBench that includes a variety of actions, each accompanied by meticulously selected samples. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that our ADI outperforms existing baselines in action-customized T2I generation. Our project page is at https://adi-t2i.github.io/ADI.

Diffusion-TTA: Test-time Adaptation of Discriminative Models via Generative Feedback. (arXiv:2311.16102v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Mihir Prabhudesai, Tsung-Wei Ke, Alexander C. Li, Deepak Pathak, Katerina Fragkiadaki

The advancements in generative modeling, particularly the advent of diffusion models, have sparked a fundamental question: how can these models be effectively used for discriminative tasks? In this work, we find that generative models can be great test-time adapters for discriminative models. Our method, Diffusion-TTA, adapts pre-trained discriminative models such as image classifiers, segmenters and depth predictors, to each unlabelled example in the test set using generative feedback from a diffusion model. We achieve this by modulating the conditioning of the diffusion model using the output of the discriminative model. We then maximize the image likelihood objective by backpropagating the gradients to discriminative model's parameters. We show Diffusion-TTA significantly enhances the accuracy of various large-scale pre-trained discriminative models, such as, ImageNet classifiers, CLIP models, image pixel labellers and image depth predictors. Diffusion-TTA outperforms existing test-time adaptation methods, including TTT-MAE and TENT, and particularly shines in online adaptation setups, where the discriminative model is continually adapted to each example in the test set. We provide access to code, results, and visualizations on our website: https://diffusion-tta.github.io/.

Animatable 3D Gaussian: Fast and High-Quality Reconstruction of Multiple Human Avatars. (arXiv:2311.16482v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yang Liu, Xiang Huang, Minghan Qin, Qinwei Lin, Haoqian Wang

Neural radiance fields are capable of reconstructing high-quality drivable human avatars but are expensive to train and render. To reduce consumption, we propose Animatable 3D Gaussian, which learns human avatars from input images and poses. We extend 3D Gaussians to dynamic human scenes by modeling a set of skinned 3D Gaussians and a corresponding skeleton in canonical space and deforming 3D Gaussians to posed space according to the input poses. We introduce hash-encoded shape and appearance to speed up training and propose time-dependent ambient occlusion to achieve high-quality reconstructions in scenes containing complex motions and dynamic shadows. On both novel view synthesis and novel pose synthesis tasks, our method outperforms existing methods in terms of training time, rendering speed, and reconstruction quality. Our method can be easily extended to multi-human scenes and achieve comparable novel view synthesis results on a scene with ten people in only 25 seconds of training.

CoSeR: Bridging Image and Language for Cognitive Super-Resolution. (arXiv:2311.16512v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Haoze Sun, Wenbo Li, Jianzhuang Liu, Haoyu Chen, Renjing Pei, Xueyi Zou, Youliang Yan, Yujiu Yang

Existing super-resolution (SR) models primarily focus on restoring local texture details, often neglecting the global semantic information within the scene. This oversight can lead to the omission of crucial semantic details or the introduction of inaccurate textures during the recovery process. In our work, we introduce the Cognitive Super-Resolution (CoSeR) framework, empowering SR models with the capacity to comprehend low-resolution images. We achieve this by marrying image appearance and language understanding to generate a cognitive embedding, which not only activates prior information from large text-to-image diffusion models but also facilitates the generation of high-quality reference images to optimize the SR process. To further improve image fidelity, we propose a novel condition injection scheme called "All-in-Attention", consolidating all conditional information into a single module. Consequently, our method successfully restores semantically correct and photorealistic details, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks. Code: https://github.com/VINHYU/CoSeR

CADTalk: An Algorithm and Benchmark for Semantic Commenting of CAD Programs. (arXiv:2311.16703v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Haocheng Yuan, Jing Xu, Hao Pan, Adrien Bousseau, Niloy Mitra, Changjian Li

CAD programs are a popular way to compactly encode shapes as a sequence of operations that are easy to parametrically modify. However, without sufficient semantic comments and structure, such programs can be challenging to understand, let alone modify. We introduce the problem of semantic commenting CAD programs, wherein the goal is to segment the input program into code blocks corresponding to semantically meaningful shape parts and assign a semantic label to each block. We solve the problem by combining program parsing with visual-semantic analysis afforded by recent advances in foundational language and vision models. Specifically, by executing the input programs, we create shapes, which we use to generate conditional photorealistic images to make use of semantic annotators for such images. We then distill the information across the images and link back to the original programs to semantically comment on them. Additionally, we collected and annotated a benchmark dataset, CADTalk, consisting of 5,280 machine-made programs and 45 human-made programs with ground truth semantic comments to foster future research. We extensively evaluated our approach, compared to a GPT-based baseline approach, and an open-set shape segmentation baseline, i.e., PartSLIP, and reported an 83.24% accuracy on the new CADTalk dataset. Project page: https://enigma-li.github.io/CADTalk/.

LLaFS: When Large-Language Models Meet Few-Shot Segmentation. (arXiv:2311.16926v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Lanyun Zhu, Tianrun Chen, Deyi Ji, Jieping Ye, Jun Liu

This paper proposes LLaFS, the first attempt to leverage large language models (LLMs) in few-shot segmentation. In contrast to the conventional few-shot segmentation methods that only rely on the limited and biased information from the annotated support images, LLaFS leverages the vast prior knowledge gained by LLM as an effective supplement and directly uses the LLM to segment images in a few-shot manner. To enable the text-based LLM to handle image-related tasks, we carefully design an input instruction that allows the LLM to produce segmentation results represented as polygons, and propose a region-attribute table to simulate the human visual mechanism and provide multi-modal guidance. We also synthesize pseudo samples and use curriculum learning for pretraining to augment data and achieve better optimization. LLaFS achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets, showing the potential of using LLMs for few-shot computer vision tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/lanyunzhu99/LLaFS.

Ranni: Taming Text-to-Image Diffusion for Accurate Instruction Following. (arXiv:2311.17002v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yutong Feng, Biao Gong, Di Chen, Yujun Shen, Yu Liu, Jingren Zhou

Existing text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models usually struggle in interpreting complex prompts, especially those with quantity, object-attribute binding, and multi-subject descriptions. In this work, we introduce a semantic panel as the middleware in decoding texts to images, supporting the generator to better follow instructions. The panel is obtained through arranging the visual concepts parsed from the input text by the aid of large language models, and then injected into the denoising network as a detailed control signal to complement the text condition. To facilitate text-to-panel learning, we come up with a carefully designed semantic formatting protocol, accompanied by a fully-automatic data preparation pipeline. Thanks to such a design, our approach, which we call Ranni, manages to enhance a pre-trained T2I generator regarding its textual controllability. More importantly, the introduction of the generative middleware brings a more convenient form of interaction (i.e., directly adjusting the elements in the panel or using language instructions) and further allows users to finely customize their generation, based on which we develop a practical system and showcase its potential in continuous generation and chatting-based editing. Our project page is at https://ranni-t2i.github.io/Ranni.

How does spatial structure affect psychological restoration? A method based on Graph Neural Networks and Street View Imagery. (arXiv:2311.17361v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Haoran Ma, Yan Zhang, Pengyuan Liu, Fan Zhang, Pengyu Zhu

The Attention Restoration Theory (ART) presents a theoretical framework with four essential indicators (being away, extent, fascinating, and compatibility) for comprehending urban and natural restoration quality. However, previous studies relied on non-sequential data and non-spatial dependent methods, which overlooks the impact of spatial structure defined here as the positional relationships between scene entities on restoration quality. The past methods also make it challenging to measure restoration quality on an urban scale. In this work, a spatial-dependent graph neural networks (GNNs) approach is proposed to reveal the relation between spatial structure and restoration quality on an urban scale. Specifically, we constructed two different types of graphs at the street and city levels. The street-level graphs, using sequential street view images (SVIs) of road segments to capture position relationships between entities, were used to represent spatial structure. The city-level graph, modeling the topological relationships of roads as non-Euclidean data structures and embedding urban features (including Perception-features, Spatial-features, and Socioeconomic-features), was used to measure restoration quality. The results demonstrate that: 1) spatial-dependent GNNs model outperforms traditional methods (Acc = 0.735, F1 = 0.732); 2) spatial structure portrayed through sequential SVIs data significantly influences restoration quality; 3) spaces with the same restoration quality exhibited distinct spatial structures patterns. This study clarifies the association between spatial structure and restoration quality, providing a new perspective to improve urban well-being in the future.

Spectral and Polarization Vision: Spectro-polarimetric Real-world Dataset. (arXiv:2311.17396v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yujin Jeon, Eunsue Choi, Youngchan Kim, Yunseong Moon, Khalid Omer, Felix Heide, Seung-Hwan Baek

Image datasets are essential not only in validating existing methods in computer vision but also in developing new methods. Most existing image datasets focus on trichromatic intensity images to mimic human vision. However, polarization and spectrum, the wave properties of light that animals in harsh environments and with limited brain capacity often rely on, remain underrepresented in existing datasets. Although spectro-polarimetric datasets exist, these datasets have insufficient object diversity, limited illumination conditions, linear-only polarization data, and inadequate image count. Here, we introduce two spectro-polarimetric datasets: trichromatic Stokes images and hyperspectral Stokes images. These novel datasets encompass both linear and circular polarization; they introduce multiple spectral channels; and they feature a broad selection of real-world scenes. With our dataset in hand, we analyze the spectro-polarimetric image statistics, develop efficient representations of such high-dimensional data, and evaluate spectral dependency of shape-from-polarization methods. As such, the proposed dataset promises a foundation for data-driven spectro-polarimetric imaging and vision research. Dataset and code will be publicly available.

Talking Head(?) Anime from a Single Image 4: Improved Model and Its Distillation. (arXiv:2311.17409v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Pramook Khungurn

We study the problem of creating a character model that can be controlled in real time from a single image of an anime character. A solution to this problem would greatly reduce the cost of creating avatars, computer games, and other interactive applications.

Talking Head Anime 3 (THA3) is an open source project that attempts to directly address the problem. It takes as input (1) an image of an anime character's upper body and (2) a 45-dimensional pose vector and outputs a new image of the same character taking the specified pose. The range of possible movements is expressive enough for personal avatars and certain types of game characters. However, the system is too slow to generate animations in real time on common PCs, and its image quality can be improved.

In this paper, we improve THA3 in two ways. First, we propose new architectures for constituent networks that rotate the character's head and body based on U-Nets with attention that are widely used in modern generative models. The new architectures consistently yield better image quality than the THA3 baseline. Nevertheless, they also make the whole system much slower: it takes up to 150 milliseconds to generate a frame. Second, we propose a technique to distill the system into a small network (less than 2 MB) that can generate 512x512 animation frames in real time (under 30 FPS) using consumer gaming GPUs while keeping the image quality close to that of the full system. This improvement makes the whole system practical for real-time applications.

W-HMR: Human Mesh Recovery in World Space with Weak-supervised Camera Calibration and Orientation Correction. (arXiv:2311.17460v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Wei Yao, Hongwen Zhang, Yunlian Sun, Jinhui Tang

For a long time, in the field of reconstructing 3D human bodies from monocular images, most methods opted to simplify the task by minimizing the influence of the camera. Using a coarse focal length setting results in the reconstructed bodies not aligning well with distorted images. Ignoring camera rotation leads to an unrealistic reconstructed body pose in world space. Consequently, existing methods' application scenarios are confined to controlled environments. And they struggle to achieve accurate and reasonable reconstruction in world space when confronted with complex and diverse in-the-wild images. To address the above issues, we propose W-HMR, which decouples global body recovery into camera calibration, local body recovery and global body orientation correction. We design the first weak-supervised camera calibration method for body distortion, eliminating dependence on focal length labels and achieving finer mesh-image alignment. We propose a novel orientation correction module to allow the reconstructed human body to remain normal in world space. Decoupling body orientation and body pose enables our model to consider the accuracy in camera coordinate and the reasonableness in world coordinate simultaneously, expanding the range of applications. As a result, W-HMR achieves high-quality reconstruction in dual coordinate systems, particularly in challenging scenes. Codes will be released on https://yw0208.github.io/w-hmr/ after publication.

StructRe: Rewriting for Structured Shape Modeling. (arXiv:2311.17510v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jiepeng Wang, Hao Pan, Yang Liu, Xin Tong, Taku Komura, Wenping Wang

Man-made 3D shapes are naturally organized in parts and hierarchies; such structures provide important constraints for shape reconstruction and generation. Modeling shape structures is difficult, because there can be multiple hierarchies for a given shape, causing ambiguity, and across different categories the shape structures are correlated with semantics, limiting generalization. We present StructRe, a structure rewriting system, as a novel approach to structured shape modeling. Given a 3D object represented by points and components, StructRe can rewrite it upward into more concise structures, or downward into more detailed structures; by iterating the rewriting process, hierarchies are obtained. Such a localized rewriting process enables probabilistic modeling of ambiguous structures and robust generalization across object categories. We train StructRe on PartNet data and show its generalization to cross-category and multiple object hierarchies, and test its extension to ShapeNet. We also demonstrate the benefits of probabilistic and generalizable structure modeling for shape reconstruction, generation and editing tasks.

Continual Self-supervised Learning: Towards Universal Multi-modal Medical Data Representation Learning. (arXiv:2311.17597v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yiwen Ye, Yutong Xie, Jianpeng Zhang, Ziyang Chen, Qi Wu, Yong Xia

Self-supervised learning is an efficient pre-training method for medical image analysis. However, current research is mostly confined to specific-modality data pre-training, consuming considerable time and resources without achieving universality across different modalities. A straightforward solution is combining all modality data for joint self-supervised pre-training, which poses practical challenges. Firstly, our experiments reveal conflicts in representation learning as the number of modalities increases. Secondly, multi-modal data collected in advance cannot cover all real-world scenarios. In this paper, we reconsider versatile self-supervised learning from the perspective of continual learning and propose MedCoSS, a continuous self-supervised learning approach for multi-modal medical data. Unlike joint self-supervised learning, MedCoSS assigns different modality data to different training stages, forming a multi-stage pre-training process. To balance modal conflicts and prevent catastrophic forgetting, we propose a rehearsal-based continual learning method. We introduce the k-means sampling strategy to retain data from previous modalities and rehearse it when learning new modalities. Instead of executing the pretext task on buffer data, a feature distillation strategy and an intra-modal mixup strategy are applied to these data for knowledge retention. We conduct continuous self-supervised pre-training on a large-scale multi-modal unlabeled dataset, including clinical reports, X-rays, CT scans, MRI scans, and pathological images. Experimental results demonstrate MedCoSS's exceptional generalization ability across nine downstream datasets and its significant scalability in integrating new modality data. Code and pre-trained weight are available at https://github.com/yeerwen/MedCoSS.

ShapeGPT: 3D Shape Generation with A Unified Multi-modal Language Model. (arXiv:2311.17618v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Fukun Yin, Xin Chen, Chi Zhang, Biao Jiang, Zibo Zhao, Jiayuan Fan, Gang Yu, Taihao Li, Tao Chen

The advent of large language models, enabling flexibility through instruction-driven approaches, has revolutionized many traditional generative tasks, but large models for 3D data, particularly in comprehensively handling 3D shapes with other modalities, are still under-explored. By achieving instruction-based shape generations, versatile multimodal generative shape models can significantly benefit various fields like 3D virtual construction and network-aided design. In this work, we present ShapeGPT, a shape-included multi-modal framework to leverage strong pre-trained language models to address multiple shape-relevant tasks. Specifically, ShapeGPT employs a word-sentence-paragraph framework to discretize continuous shapes into shape words, further assembles these words for shape sentences, as well as integrates shape with instructional text for multi-modal paragraphs. To learn this shape-language model, we use a three-stage training scheme, including shape representation, multimodal alignment, and instruction-based generation, to align shape-language codebooks and learn the intricate correlations among these modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShapeGPT achieves comparable performance across shape-relevant tasks, including text-to-shape, shape-to-text, shape completion, and shape editing.

DAP: Domain-aware Prompt Learning for Vision-and-Language Navigation. (arXiv:2311.17812v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Ting Liu, Yue Hu, Wansen Wu, Youkai Wang, Kai Xu, Quanjun Yin

Following language instructions to navigate in unseen environments is a challenging task for autonomous embodied agents. With strong representation capabilities, pretrained vision-and-language models are widely used in VLN. However, most of them are trained on web-crawled general-purpose datasets, which incurs a considerable domain gap when used for VLN tasks. To address the problem, we propose a novel and model-agnostic domain-aware prompt learning (DAP) framework. For equipping the pretrained models with specific object-level and scene-level cross-modal alignment in VLN tasks, DAP applies a low-cost prompt tuning paradigm to learn soft visual prompts for extracting in-domain image semantics. Specifically, we first generate a set of in-domain image-text pairs with the help of the CLIP model. Then we introduce soft visual prompts in the input space of the visual encoder in a pretrained model. DAP injects in-domain visual knowledge into the visual encoder of the pretrained model in an efficient way. Experimental results on both R2R and REVERIE show the superiority of DAP compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

SPiC-E : Structural Priors in 3D Diffusion Models using Cross-Entity Attention. (arXiv:2311.17834v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Etai Sella, Gal Fiebelman, Noam Atia, Hadar Averbuch-Elor

We are witnessing rapid progress in automatically generating and manipulating 3D assets due to the availability of pretrained text-image diffusion models. However, time-consuming optimization procedures are required for synthesizing each sample, hindering their potential for democratizing 3D content creation. Conversely, 3D diffusion models now train on million-scale 3D datasets, yielding high-quality text-conditional 3D samples within seconds. In this work, we present SPiC-E - a neural network that adds structural guidance to 3D diffusion models, extending their usage beyond text-conditional generation. At its core, our framework introduces a cross-entity attention mechanism that allows for multiple entities (in particular, paired input and guidance 3D shapes) to interact via their internal representations within the denoising network. We utilize this mechanism for learning task-specific structural priors in 3D diffusion models from auxiliary guidance shapes. We show that our approach supports a variety of applications, including 3D stylization, semantic shape editing and text-conditional abstraction-to-3D, which transforms primitive-based abstractions into highly-expressive shapes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPiC-E achieves SOTA performance over these tasks while often being considerably faster than alternative methods. Importantly, this is accomplished without tailoring our approach for any specific task.

Knowledge Pursuit Prompting for Zero-Shot Multimodal Synthesis. (arXiv:2311.17898v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jinqi Luo, Kwan Ho Ryan Chan, Dimitris Dimos, René Vidal

Hallucinations and unfaithful synthesis due to inaccurate prompts with insufficient semantic details are widely observed in multimodal generative models. A prevalent strategy to align multiple modalities is to fine-tune the generator with a large number of annotated text-image pairs. However, such a procedure is labor-consuming and resource-draining. The key question we ask is: can we enhance the quality and faithfulness of text-driven generative models beyond extensive text-image pair annotations? To address this question, we propose Knowledge Pursuit Prompting (KPP), a zero-shot framework that iteratively incorporates external knowledge to help generators produce reliable visual content. Instead of training generators to handle generic prompts, KPP employs a recursive knowledge query process to gather informative external facts from the knowledge base, instructs a language model to compress the acquired knowledge for prompt refinement, and utilizes text-driven generators for visual synthesis. The entire process is zero-shot, without accessing the architectures and parameters of generative models. We evaluate the framework across multiple text-driven generative tasks (image, 3D rendering, and video) on datasets of different domains. We further demonstrate the extensibility and adaptability of KPP through varying foundation model bases and instructions. Our results show that KPP is capable of generating faithful and semantically rich content across diverse visual domains, offering a promising solution to improve multimodal generative models.

Do text-free diffusion models learn discriminative visual representations?. (arXiv:2311.17921v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Soumik Mukhopadhyay, Matthew Gwilliam, Yosuke Yamaguchi, Vatsal Agarwal, Namitha Padmanabhan, Archana Swaminathan, Tianyi Zhou, Abhinav Shrivastava

While many unsupervised learning models focus on one family of tasks, either generative or discriminative, we explore the possibility of a unified representation learner: a model which addresses both families of tasks simultaneously. We identify diffusion models, a state-of-the-art method for generative tasks, as a prime candidate. Such models involve training a U-Net to iteratively predict and remove noise, and the resulting model can synthesize high-fidelity, diverse, novel images. We find that the intermediate feature maps of the U-Net are diverse, discriminative feature representations. We propose a novel attention mechanism for pooling feature maps and further leverage this mechanism as DifFormer, a transformer feature fusion of features from different diffusion U-Net blocks and noise steps. We also develop DifFeed, a novel feedback mechanism tailored to diffusion. We find that diffusion models are better than GANs, and, with our fusion and feedback mechanisms, can compete with state-of-the-art unsupervised image representation learning methods for discriminative tasks - image classification with full and semi-supervision, transfer for fine-grained classification, object detection and segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our project website (https://mgwillia.github.io/diffssl/) and code (https://github.com/soumik-kanad/diffssl) are available publicly.