Authors: Yuan Li, Dapeng Wu, Yaping Cui, Peng He, Yuan Zhang, Ruyan Wang
Abstract: Image matching is a fundamental and critical task of multisource remote sensing image applications. However, remote sensing images are susceptible to various noises. Accordingly, how to effectively achieve accurate matching in noise images is a challenging problem. To solve this issue, we propose a robust multisource remote sensing image matching method utilizing attention and feature enhancement against noise interference. In the first stage, we combine deep convolution with the attention mechanism of transformer to perform dense feature extraction, constructing feature descriptors with higher discriminability and robustness. Subsequently, we employ a coarse-to-fine matching strategy to achieve dense matches. In the second stage, we introduce an outlier removal network based on a binary classification mechanism, which can establish effective and geometrically consistent correspondences between images; through weighting for each correspondence, inliers vs. outliers classification are performed, as well as removing outliers from dense matches. Ultimately, we can accomplish more efficient and accurate matches. To validate the performance of the proposed method, we conduct experiments using multisource remote sensing image datasets for comparison with other state-of-the-art methods under different scenarios, including noise-free, additive random noise, and periodic stripe noise. Comparative results indicate that the proposed method has a more well-balanced performance and robustness. The proposed method contributes a valuable reference for solving the difficult problem of noise image matching.
Authors: Xingyi Yang, Xinchao Wang
Abstract: This paper introduces a new learning paradigm termed Neural Metamorphosis (NeuMeta), which aims to build self-morphable neural networks. Contrary to crafting separate models for different architectures or sizes, NeuMeta directly learns the continuous weight manifold of neural networks. Once trained, we can sample weights for any-sized network directly from the manifold, even for previously unseen configurations, without retraining. To achieve this ambitious goal, NeuMeta trains neural implicit functions as hypernetworks. They accept coordinates within the model space as input, and generate corresponding weight values on the manifold. In other words, the implicit function is learned in a way, that the predicted weights is well-performed across various models sizes. In training those models, we notice that, the final performance closely relates on smoothness of the learned manifold. In pursuit of enhancing this smoothness, we employ two strategies. First, we permute weight matrices to achieve intra-model smoothness, by solving the Shortest Hamiltonian Path problem. Besides, we add a noise on the input coordinates when training the implicit function, ensuring models with various sizes shows consistent outputs. As such, NeuMeta shows promising results in synthesizing parameters for various network configurations. Our extensive tests in image classification, semantic segmentation, and image generation reveal that NeuMeta sustains full-size performance even at a 75% compression rate.
Authors: Rijun Wang, Guanghao Zhang, Hongyang Chen, Xinye Yu, Yesheng Chen, Fulong Liang, Xiangwei Mou, Bo Wang
Abstract: Attempting to apply deep learning methods to wood panels bark removal equipment to enhance the quality and efficiency of bark removal is a significant and challenging endeavor. This study develops and tests a deep learning-based wood panels bark removal equipment. In accordance with the practical requirements of sawmills, a wood panels bark removal equipment equipped with a vision inspection system is designed. Based on a substantial collection of wood panel images obtained using the visual inspection system, the first general wood panels semantic segmentation dataset is constructed for training the BiSeNetV1 model employed in this study. Furthermore, the calculation methods and processes for the essential key data required in the bark removal process are presented in detail. Comparative experiments of the BiSeNetV1 model and tests of bark removal effectiveness are conducted in both laboratory and sawmill environments. The results of the comparative experiments indicate that the application of the BiSeNetV1 segmentation model is rational and feasible. The results of the bark removal effectiveness tests demonstrate a significant improvement in both the quality and efficiency of bark removal. The developed equipment fully meets the sawmill's requirements for precision and efficiency in bark removal processing.
Authors: Yifei Zhang, Huan-ang Gao, Zhou Jiang, Hao Zhao
Abstract: 3D particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) is a key technique for analyzing turbulent flow, one of the most challenging computational problems of our century. At the core of 3D PTV is the dual-frame fluid motion estimation algorithm, which tracks particles across two consecutive frames. Recently, deep learning-based methods have achieved impressive accuracy in dual-frame fluid motion estimation; however, they heavily depend on large volumes of labeled data. In this paper, we introduce a new method that is completely self-supervised and notably outperforms its fully-supervised counterparts while requiring only 1% of the training samples (without labels) used by previous methods. Our method features a novel zero-divergence loss that is specific to the domain of turbulent flow. Inspired by the success of splat operation in high-dimensional filtering and random fields, we propose a splat-based implementation for this loss which is both efficient and effective. The self-supervised nature of our method naturally supports test-time optimization, leading to the development of a tailored Dynamic Velocimetry Enhancer (DVE) module. We demonstrate that strong cross-domain robustness is achieved through test-time optimization on unseen leave-one-out synthetic domains and real physical/biological domains. Code, data and models are available at https://github.com/Forrest-110/FluidMotionNet.
Authors: Qingqing Cao, Mahyar Najibi, Sachin Mehta
Abstract: Pretraining robust vision or multimodal foundation models (e.g., CLIP) relies on large-scale datasets that may be noisy, potentially misaligned, and have long-tail distributions. Previous works have shown promising results in augmenting datasets by generating synthetic samples. However, they only support domain-specific ad hoc use cases (e.g., either image or text only, but not both), and are limited in data diversity due to a lack of fine-grained control over the synthesis process. In this paper, we design a \emph{controllable} image-text synthesis pipeline, CtrlSynth, for data-efficient and robust multimodal learning. The key idea is to decompose the visual semantics of an image into basic elements, apply user-specified control policies (e.g., remove, add, or replace operations), and recompose them to synthesize images or texts. The decompose and recompose feature in CtrlSynth allows users to control data synthesis in a fine-grained manner by defining customized control policies to manipulate the basic elements. CtrlSynth leverages the capabilities of pretrained foundation models such as large language models or diffusion models to reason and recompose basic elements such that synthetic samples are natural and composed in diverse ways. CtrlSynth is a closed-loop, training-free, and modular framework, making it easy to support different pretrained models. With extensive experiments on 31 datasets spanning different vision and vision-language tasks, we show that CtrlSynth substantially improves zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and compositional reasoning performance of CLIP models.
Authors: Reddy Mandati, Vladyslav Anderson, Po-chen Chen, Ankush Agarwal, Tatjana Dokic, David Barnard, Michael Finn, Jesse Cromer, Andrew Mccauley, Clay Tutaj, Neha Dave, Bobby Besharati, Jamie Barnett, Timothy Krall
Abstract: In the past utilities relied on in-field inspections to identify asset defects. Recently, utilities have started using drone-based inspections to enhance the field-inspection process. We consider a vast repository of drone images, providing a wealth of information about asset health and potential issues. However, making the collected imagery data useful for automated defect detection requires significant manual labeling effort. We propose a novel solution that combines synthetic asset defect images with manually labeled drone images. This solution has several benefits: improves performance of defect detection, reduces the number of hours spent on manual labeling, and enables the capability to generate realistic images of rare defects where not enough real-world data is available. We employ a workflow that combines 3D modeling tools such as Maya and Unreal Engine to create photorealistic 3D models and 2D renderings of defective assets and their surroundings. These synthetic images are then integrated into our training pipeline augmenting the real data. This study implements an end-to-end Artificial Intelligence solution to detect assets and asset defects from the combined imagery repository. The unique contribution of this research lies in the application of advanced computer vision models and the generation of photorealistic 3D renderings of defective assets, aiming to transform the asset inspection process. Our asset detection model has achieved an accuracy of 92 percent, we achieved a performance lift of 67 percent when introducing approximately 2,000 synthetic images of 2k resolution. In our tests, the defect detection model achieved an accuracy of 73 percent across two batches of images. Our analysis demonstrated that synthetic data can be successfully used in place of real-world manually labeled data to train defect detection model.
Authors: Annalisa Chiocchetti, Marco Dossena, Christopher Irwin, Luigi Portinale
Abstract: This work contributes to breast cancer sub-type classification using histopathological images. We utilize masked autoencoders (MAEs) to learn a self-supervised embedding tailored for computer vision tasks in this domain. This embedding captures informative representations of histopathological data, facilitating feature learning without extensive labeled datasets. During pre-training, we investigate employing a random crop technique to generate a large dataset from WSIs automatically. Additionally, we assess the performance of linear probes for multi-class classification tasks of cancer sub-types using the representations learnt by the MAE. Our approach aims to achieve strong performance on downstream tasks by leveraging the complementary strengths of ViTs and autoencoders. We evaluate our model's performance on the BRACS dataset and compare it with existing benchmarks.
Authors: Hazel Doughty, Fida Mohammad Thoker, Cees G. M. Snoek
Abstract: This paper strives for motion-focused video-language representations. Existing methods to learn video-language representations use spatial-focused data, where identifying the objects and scene is often enough to distinguish the relevant caption. We instead propose LocoMotion to learn from motion-focused captions that describe the movement and temporal progression of local object motions. We achieve this by adding synthetic motions to videos and using the parameters of these motions to generate corresponding captions. Furthermore, we propose verb-variation paraphrasing to increase the caption variety and learn the link between primitive motions and high-level verbs. With this, we are able to learn a motion-focused video-language representation. Experiments demonstrate our approach is effective for a variety of downstream tasks, particularly when limited data is available for fine-tuning. Code is available: https://hazeldoughty.github.io/Papers/LocoMotion/
Authors: Shizhe He, Magdalini Paschali, Jiahong Ouyang, Adnan Masood, Akshay Chaudhari, Ehsan Adeli
Abstract: Representation learning has become increasingly important, especially as powerful models have shifted towards learning latent representations before fine-tuning for downstream tasks. This approach is particularly valuable in leveraging the structural information within brain anatomy. However, a common limitation of recent models developed for MRIs is their tendency to ignore or remove geometric information, such as translation and rotation, thereby creating invariance with respect to geometric operations. We contend that incorporating knowledge about these geometric transformations into the model can significantly enhance its ability to learn more detailed anatomical information within brain structures. As a result, we propose a novel method for encoding 3D MRIs that enforces equivariance with respect to all rotations in 3D space, in other words, SO(3)-equivariance (SOE). By explicitly modeling this geometric equivariance in the representation space, we ensure that any rotational operation applied to the input image space is also reflected in the embedding representation space. This approach requires moving beyond traditional representation learning methods, as we need a representation vector space that allows for the application of the same SO(3) operation in that space. To facilitate this, we leverage the concept of vector neurons. The representation space formed by our method captures the brain's structural and anatomical information more effectively. We evaluate SOE pretrained on the structural MRIs of two public data sets with respect to the downstream task of predicting age and diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease from T1-weighted brain scans of the ADNI data set. We demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms other methods but is also robust against various degrees of rotation along different axes. The code is available at https://github.com/shizhehe/SOE-representation-learning.
URLs: https://github.com/shizhehe/SOE-representation-learning.
Authors: Daniel Lichy, Hang Su, Abhishek Badki, Jan Kautz, Orazio Gallo
Abstract: We introduce nvTorchCam, an open-source library under the Apache 2.0 license, designed to make deep learning algorithms camera model-independent. nvTorchCam abstracts critical camera operations such as projection and unprojection, allowing developers to implement algorithms once and apply them across diverse camera models--including pinhole, fisheye, and 360 equirectangular panoramas, which are commonly used in automotive and real estate capture applications. Built on PyTorch, nvTorchCam is fully differentiable and supports GPU acceleration and batching for efficient computation. Furthermore, deep learning models trained for one camera type can be directly transferred to other camera types without requiring additional modification. In this paper, we provide an overview of nvTorchCam, its functionality, and present various code examples and diagrams to demonstrate its usage. Source code and installation instructions can be found on the nvTorchCam GitHub page at https://github.com/NVlabs/nvTorchCam.
Authors: Chenghao Qian, Yuhu Guo, Yuhong Mo, Wenjing Li
Abstract: In this work, we propose a novel approach, namely WeatherDG, that can generate realistic, weather-diverse, and driving-screen images based on the cooperation of two foundation models, i.e, Stable Diffusion (SD) and Large Language Model (LLM). Specifically, we first fine-tune the SD with source data, aligning the content and layout of generated samples with real-world driving scenarios. Then, we propose a procedural prompt generation method based on LLM, which can enrich scenario descriptions and help SD automatically generate more diverse, detailed images. In addition, we introduce a balanced generation strategy, which encourages the SD to generate high-quality objects of tailed classes under various weather conditions, such as riders and motorcycles. This segmentation-model-agnostic method can improve the generalization ability of existing models by additionally adapting them with the generated synthetic data. Experiments on three challenging datasets show that our method can significantly improve the segmentation performance of different state-of-the-art models on target domains. Notably, in the setting of ''Cityscapes to ACDC'', our method improves the baseline HRDA by 13.9% in mIoU.
Authors: Yizhe Liu, Yan Song Hu, Yuhao Chen, John Zelek
Abstract: Image-based Pose-Agnostic 3D Anomaly Detection is an important task that has emerged in industrial quality control. This task seeks to find anomalies from query images of a tested object given a set of reference images of an anomaly-free object. The challenge is that the query views (a.k.a poses) are unknown and can be different from the reference views. Currently, new methods such as OmniposeAD and SplatPose have emerged to bridge the gap by synthesizing pseudo reference images at the query views for pixel-to-pixel comparison. However, none of these methods can infer in real-time, which is critical in industrial quality control for massive production. For this reason, we propose SplatPose+, which employs a hybrid representation consisting of a Structure from Motion (SfM) model for localization and a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model for Novel View Synthesis. Although our proposed pipeline requires the computation of an additional SfM model, it offers real-time inference speeds and faster training compared to SplatPose. Quality-wise, we achieved a new SOTA on the Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection benchmark with the Multi-Pose Anomaly Detection (MAD-SIM) dataset.
Authors: Qishun Wang, Zhengzheng Tu, Kunpeng Wang, Le Gu, Chuanwang Guo
Abstract: Current RGB-Thermal Video Object Detection (RGBT VOD) methods still depend on manually aligning data at the image level, which hampers its practical application in real-world scenarios since image pairs captured by multispectral sensors often differ in both fields of view and resolution. To address this limitation, we propose a Multi-modal Dynamic Local fusion Network (MDLNet) designed to handle unaligned RGBT image pairs. Specifically, our proposed Multi-modal Dynamic Local Fusion (MDLF) module includes a set of predefined boxes, each enhanced with random Gaussian noise to generate a dynamic box. Each box selects a local region from the original high-resolution RGB image. This region is then fused with the corresponding information from another modality and reinserted into the RGB. This method adapts to various data alignment scenarios by interacting with local features across different ranges. Simultaneously, we introduce a Cascaded Temporal Scrambler (CTS) within an end-to-end architecture. This module leverages consistent spatiotemporal information from consecutive frames to enhance the representation capability of the current frame while maintaining network efficiency. We have curated an open dataset called UVT-VOD2024 for unaligned RGBT VOD. It consists of 30,494 pairs of unaligned RGBT images captured directly from a multispectral camera. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation and comparison with MDLNet and state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, demonstrating the superior effectiveness of MDLNet. We will release our code and UVT-VOD2024 to the public for further research.
Authors: Zhimin Chen, Liang Yang, Yingwei Li, Longlong Jing, Bing Li
Abstract: Foundation models have significantly enhanced 2D task performance, and recent works like Bridge3D have successfully applied these models to improve 3D scene understanding through knowledge distillation, marking considerable advancements. Nonetheless, challenges such as the misalignment between 2D and 3D representations and the persistent long-tail distribution in 3D datasets still restrict the effectiveness of knowledge distillation from 2D to 3D using foundation models. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel SAM-guided tokenization method that seamlessly aligns 3D transformer structures with region-level knowledge distillation, replacing the traditional KNN-based tokenization techniques. Additionally, we implement a group-balanced re-weighting strategy to effectively address the long-tail problem in knowledge distillation. Furthermore, inspired by the recent success of masked feature prediction, our framework incorporates a two-stage masked token prediction process in which the student model predicts both the global embeddings and the token-wise local embeddings derived from the teacher models trained in the first stage. Our methodology has been validated across multiple datasets, including SUN RGB-D, ScanNet, and S3DIS, for tasks like 3D object detection and semantic segmentation. The results demonstrate significant improvements over current State-of-the-art self-supervised methods, establishing new benchmarks in this field.
Authors: Timothy Wei, Hsien Xin Peng, Elaine Xu, Bryan Zhao, Lei Ding, Diji Yang
Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence models, such as Large Video-Language models (VLMs), grow in size, their deployment in real-world applications becomes increasingly challenging due to hardware limitations and computational costs. To address this, we design a hybrid edge-cloud solution that leverages the efficiency of smaller models for local processing while deferring to larger, more accurate cloud-based models when necessary. Specifically, we propose a novel unsupervised data generation method, Dual-Model Distillation (DMD), to train a lightweight switcher model that can predict when the edge model's output is uncertain and selectively offload inference to the large model in the cloud. Experimental results on the action classification task show that our framework not only requires less computational overhead, but also improves accuracy compared to using a large model alone. Our framework provides a scalable and adaptable solution for action classification in resource-constrained environments, with potential applications beyond healthcare. Noteworthy, while DMD-generated data is used for optimizing performance and resource usage in our pipeline, we expect the concept of DMD to further support future research on knowledge alignment across multiple models.
Authors: Yiwei Guo, Shaobin Zhuang, Kunchang Li, Yu Qiao, Yali Wang
Abstract: Vision-language foundation models (such as CLIP) have recently shown their power in transfer learning, owing to large-scale image-text pre-training. However, target domain data in the downstream tasks can be highly different from the pre-training phase, which makes it hard for such a single model to generalize well. Alternatively, there exists a wide range of expert models that contain diversified vision and/or language knowledge pre-trained on different modalities, tasks, networks, and datasets. Unfortunately, these models are "isolated agents" with heterogeneous structures, and how to integrate their knowledge for generalizing CLIP-like models has not been fully explored. To bridge this gap, we propose a general and concise TransAgent framework, which transports the knowledge of the isolated agents in a unified manner, and effectively guides CLIP to generalize with multi-source knowledge distillation. With such a distinct framework, we flexibly collaborate with 11 heterogeneous agents to empower vision-language foundation models, without further cost in the inference phase. Finally, our TransAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 visual recognition datasets. Under the same low-shot setting, it outperforms the popular CoOp with around 10% on average, and 20% on EuroSAT which contains large domain shifts.
Authors: Kecheng Chen, Pingping Zhang, Tiexin Qin, Shiqi Wang, Hong Yan, Haoliang Li
Abstract: Current test- or compression-time adaptation image compression (TTA-IC) approaches, which leverage both latent and decoder refinements as a two-step adaptation scheme, have potentially enhanced the rate-distortion (R-D) performance of learned image compression models on cross-domain compression tasks, \textit{e.g.,} from natural to screen content images. However, compared with the emergence of various decoder refinement variants, the latent refinement, as an inseparable ingredient, is barely tailored to cross-domain scenarios. To this end, we aim to develop an advanced latent refinement method by extending the effective hybrid latent refinement (HLR) method, which is designed for \textit{in-domain} inference improvement but shows noticeable degradation of the rate cost in \textit{cross-domain} tasks. Specifically, we first provide theoretical analyses, in a cue of marginalization approximation from in- to cross-domain scenarios, to uncover that the vanilla HLR suffers from an underlying mismatch between refined Gaussian conditional and hyperprior distributions, leading to deteriorated joint probability approximation of marginal distribution with increased rate consumption. To remedy this issue, we introduce a simple Bayesian approximation-endowed \textit{distribution regularization} to encourage learning a better joint probability approximation in a plug-and-play manner. Extensive experiments on six in- and cross-domain datasets demonstrate that our proposed method not only improves the R-D performance compared with other latent refinement counterparts, but also can be flexibly integrated into existing TTA-IC methods with incremental benefits.
Authors: Yan Feng, Alexander Carballo, Kazuya Takeda
Abstract: Predicting pedestrian behavior is challenging yet crucial for applications such as autonomous driving and smart city. Recent deep learning models have achieved remarkable performance in making accurate predictions, but they fail to provide explanations of their inner workings. One reason for this problem is the multi-modal inputs. To bridge this gap, we present Sparse Prototype Network (SPN), an explainable method designed to simultaneously predict a pedestrian's future action, trajectory, and pose. SPN leverages an intermediate prototype bottleneck layer to provide sample-based explanations for its predictions. The prototypes are modality-independent, meaning that they can correspond to any modality from the input. Therefore, SPN can extend to arbitrary combinations of modalities. Regularized by mono-semanticity and clustering constraints, the prototypes learn consistent and human-understandable features and achieve state-of-the-art performance on action, trajectory and pose prediction on TITAN and PIE. Finally, we propose a metric named Top-K Mono-semanticity Scale to quantitatively evaluate the explainability. Qualitative results show the positive correlation between sparsity and explainability. Code available at https://github.com/Equinoxxxxx/SPN.
Authors: Bin Wang, Anwesa Choudhuri, Meng Zheng, Zhongpai Gao, Benjamin Planche, Andong Deng, Qin Liu, Terrence Chen, Ulas Bagci, Ziyan Wu
Abstract: Interactive segmentation aims to accurately segment target objects with minimal user interactions. However, current methods often fail to accurately separate target objects from the background, due to a limited understanding of order, the relative depth between objects in a scene. To address this issue, we propose OIS: order-aware interactive segmentation, where we explicitly encode the relative depth between objects into order maps. We introduce a novel order-aware attention, where the order maps seamlessly guide the user interactions (in the form of clicks) to attend to the image features. We further present an object-aware attention module to incorporate a strong object-level understanding to better differentiate objects with similar order. Our approach allows both dense and sparse integration of user clicks, enhancing both accuracy and efficiency as compared to prior works. Experimental results demonstrate that OIS achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving mIoU after one click by 7.61 on the HQSeg44K dataset and 1.32 on the DAVIS dataset as compared to the previous state-of-the-art SegNext, while also doubling inference speed compared to current leading methods. The project page is https://ukaukaaaa.github.io/projects/OIS/index.html
Authors: Lucas Choi, Ross Greer
Abstract: This paper evaluates the use of vision-language models (VLMs) for zero-shot detection and association of hardhats to enhance construction safety. Given the significant risk of head injuries in construction, proper enforcement of hardhat use is critical. We investigate the applicability of foundation models, specifically OWLv2, for detecting hardhats in real-world construction site images. Our contributions include the creation of a new benchmark dataset, Hardhat Safety Detection Dataset, by filtering and combining existing datasets and the development of a cascaded detection approach. Experimental results on 5,210 images demonstrate that the OWLv2 model achieves an average precision of 0.6493 for hardhat detection. We further analyze the limitations and potential improvements for real-world applications, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of current foundation models in safety perception domains.
Authors: Nanda Febri Istighfarin, HyungGi Jo
Abstract: Visual localization determines an agent's precise position and orientation within an environment using visual data. It has become a critical task in the field of robotics, particularly in applications such as autonomous navigation. This is due to the ability to determine an agent's pose using cost-effective sensors such as RGB cameras. Recent methods in visual localization employ scene coordinate regression to determine the agent's pose. However, these methods face challenges as they attempt to regress 2D-3D correspondences across the entire image region, despite not all regions providing useful information. To address this issue, we introduce an attention network that selectively targets informative regions of the image. Using this network, we identify the highest-scoring features to improve the feature selection process and combine the result with edge detection. This integration ensures that the features chosen for the training buffer are located within robust regions, thereby improving 2D-3D correspondence and overall localization performance. Our approach was tested on the outdoor benchmark dataset, demonstrating superior results compared to previous methods.
Authors: Zhaorong Wang, Yoshihiro Kanamori, Yuki Endo
Abstract: Generalizable neural radiance field (NeRF) enables neural-based digital human rendering without per-scene retraining. When combined with human prior knowledge, high-quality human rendering can be achieved even with sparse input views. However, the inference of these methods is still slow, as a large number of neural network queries on each ray are required to ensure the rendering quality. Moreover, occluded regions often suffer from artifacts, especially when the input views are sparse. To address these issues, we propose a generalizable human NeRF framework that achieves high-quality and real-time rendering with sparse input views by extensively leveraging human prior knowledge. We accelerate the rendering with a two-stage sampling reduction strategy: first constructing boundary meshes around the human geometry to reduce the number of ray samples for sampling guidance regression, and then volume rendering using fewer guided samples. To improve rendering quality, especially in occluded regions, we propose an occlusion-aware attention mechanism to extract occlusion information from the human priors, followed by an image space refinement network to improve rendering quality. Furthermore, for volume rendering, we adopt a signed ray distance function (SRDF) formulation, which allows us to propose an SRDF loss at every sample position to improve the rendering quality further. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in rendering quality and has a competitive rendering speed compared with speed-prioritized novel view synthesis methods.
Authors: Guanming Huang, Aoran Shen, Yuxiang Hu, Junliang Du, Jiacheng Hu, Yingbin Liang
Abstract: This paper explores the application of knowledge distillation technology in target detection tasks, especially the impact of different distillation temperatures on the performance of student models. By using YOLOv5l as the teacher network and a smaller YOLOv5s as the student network, we found that with the increase of distillation temperature, the student's detection accuracy gradually improved, and finally achieved mAP50 and mAP50-95 indicators that were better than the original YOLOv5s model at a specific temperature. Experimental results show that appropriate knowledge distillation strategies can not only improve the accuracy of the model but also help improve the reliability and stability of the model in practical applications. This paper also records in detail the accuracy curve and loss function descent curve during the model training process and shows that the model converges to a stable state after 150 training cycles. These findings provide a theoretical basis and technical reference for further optimizing target detection algorithms.
Authors: Juelin Zhu, Shen Yan, Long Wang, Shengyue Zhang, Yu Liu, Maojun Zhang
Abstract: We propose a new method named LoD-Loc for visual localization in the air. Unlike existing localization algorithms, LoD-Loc does not rely on complex 3D representations and can estimate the pose of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) using a Level-of-Detail (LoD) 3D map. LoD-Loc mainly achieves this goal by aligning the wireframe derived from the LoD projected model with that predicted by the neural network. Specifically, given a coarse pose provided by the UAV sensor, LoD-Loc hierarchically builds a cost volume for uniformly sampled pose hypotheses to describe pose probability distribution and select a pose with maximum probability. Each cost within this volume measures the degree of line alignment between projected and predicted wireframes. LoD-Loc also devises a 6-DoF pose optimization algorithm to refine the previous result with a differentiable Gaussian-Newton method. As no public dataset exists for the studied problem, we collect two datasets with map levels of LoD3.0 and LoD2.0, along with real RGB queries and ground-truth pose annotations. We benchmark our method and demonstrate that LoD-Loc achieves excellent performance, even surpassing current state-of-the-art methods that use textured 3D models for localization. The code and dataset are available at https://victorzoo.github.io/LoD-Loc.github.io/.
Authors: Haobo Zuo, Changhong Fu, Guangze Zheng, Liangliang Yao, Kunhan Lu, Jia Pan
Abstract: Domain adaptation is an inspiring solution to the misalignment issue of day/night image features for nighttime UAV tracking. However, the one-step adaptation paradigm is inadequate in addressing the prevalent difficulties posed by low-resolution (LR) objects when viewed from the UAVs at night, owing to the blurry edge contour and limited detail information. Moreover, these approaches struggle to perceive LR objects disturbed by nighttime noise. To address these challenges, this work proposes a novel progressive alignment paradigm, named domain-aware diffusion model (DaDiff), aligning nighttime LR object features to the daytime by virtue of progressive and stable generations. The proposed DaDiff includes an alignment encoder to enhance the detail information of nighttime LR objects, a tracking-oriented layer designed to achieve close collaboration with tracking tasks, and a successive distribution discriminator presented to distinguish different feature distributions at each diffusion timestep successively. Furthermore, an elaborate nighttime UAV tracking benchmark is constructed for LR objects, namely NUT-LR, consisting of 100 annotated sequences. Exhaustive experiments have demonstrated the robustness and feature alignment ability of the proposed DaDiff. The source code and video demo are available at https://github.com/vision4robotics/DaDiff.
Authors: Pengwei Liang, Junjun Jiang, Qing Ma, Xianming Liu, Jiayi Ma
Abstract: Image fusion is famous as an alternative solution to generate one high-quality image from multiple images in addition to image restoration from a single degraded image. The essence of image fusion is to integrate complementary information from source images. Existing fusion methods struggle with generalization across various tasks and often require labor-intensive designs, in which it is difficult to identify and extract useful information from source images due to the diverse requirements of each fusion task. Additionally, these methods develop highly specialized features for different downstream applications, hindering the adaptation to new and diverse downstream tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce DeFusion++, a novel framework that leverages self-supervised learning (SSL) to enhance the versatility of feature representation for different image fusion tasks. DeFusion++ captures the image fusion task-friendly representations from large-scale data in a self-supervised way, overcoming the constraints of limited fusion datasets. Specifically, we introduce two innovative pretext tasks: common and unique decomposition (CUD) and masked feature modeling (MFM). CUD decomposes source images into abstract common and unique components, while MFM refines these components into robust fused features. Jointly training of these tasks enables DeFusion++ to produce adaptable representations that can effectively extract useful information from various source images, regardless of the fusion task. The resulting fused representations are also highly adaptable for a wide range of downstream tasks, including image segmentation and object detection. DeFusion++ stands out by producing versatile fused representations that can enhance both the quality of image fusion and the effectiveness of downstream high-level vision tasks, simplifying the process with the elegant fusion framework.
Authors: Yong Xie, Karan Aggarwal, Aitzaz Ahmad, Stephen Lau
Abstract: We present a novel approach to automatically generate non-trivial task-specific synthetic datasets for hallucination detection. Our approach features a two-step generation-selection pipeline, using hallucination pattern guidance and a language style alignment during generation. Hallucination pattern guidance leverages the most important task-specific hallucination patterns while language style alignment aligns the style of the synthetic dataset with benchmark text. To obtain robust supervised detectors from synthetic datasets, we also adopt a data mixture strategy to improve performance robustness and generalization. Our results on three datasets show that our generated hallucination text is more closely aligned with non-hallucinated text versus baselines, to train hallucination detectors with better generalization. Our hallucination detectors trained on synthetic datasets outperform in-context-learning (ICL)-based detectors by a large margin of 32%. Our extensive experiments confirm the benefits of our approach with cross-task and cross-generator generalization. Our data-mixture-based training further improves the generalization and robustness of hallucination detection.
Authors: Cheng Yu, Haoyu Xie, Lei Shang, Yang Liu, Jun Dan, Baigui Sun, Liefeng Bo
Abstract: In the field of human-centric personalized image generation, the adapter-based method obtains the ability to customize and generate portraits by text-to-image training on facial data. This allows for identity-preserved personalization without additional fine-tuning in inference. Although there are improvements in efficiency and fidelity, there is often a significant performance decrease in test following ability, controllability, and diversity of generated faces compared to the base model. In this paper, we analyze that the performance degradation is attributed to the failure to decouple identity features from other attributes during extraction, as well as the failure to decouple the portrait generation training from the overall generation task. To address these issues, we propose the Face Adapter with deCoupled Training (FACT) framework, focusing on both model architecture and training strategy. To decouple identity features from others, we leverage a transformer-based face-export encoder and harness fine-grained identity features. To decouple the portrait generation training, we propose Face Adapting Increment Regularization~(FAIR), which effectively constrains the effect of face adapters on the facial region, preserving the generative ability of the base model. Additionally, we incorporate a face condition drop and shuffle mechanism, combined with curriculum learning, to enhance facial controllability and diversity. As a result, FACT solely learns identity preservation from training data, thereby minimizing the impact on the original text-to-image capabilities of the base model. Extensive experiments show that FACT has both controllability and fidelity in both text-to-image generation and inpainting solutions for portrait generation.
Authors: Yunqiu Xu, Linchao Zhu, Yi Yang
Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary vision-language understanding capabilities and shown potential to serve as general-purpose assistants, their abilities to solve instance-level visual-language problems beyond a single image warrant further exploration. In order to assess these unproven abilities of MLLMs, this paper proposes a new visual grounding task called multi-context visual grounding, which aims to localize instances of interest across multiple images based on open-ended text prompts. To facilitate this research, we meticulously construct a new dataset MC-Bench for benchmarking the visual grounding capabilities of MLLMs. MC-Bench features 2K high-quality and manually annotated samples, consisting of instance-level labeled image pairs and corresponding text prompts that indicate the target instances in the images. In total, there are three distinct styles of text prompts, covering 20 practical skills. We benchmark over 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs and foundation models with potential multi-context visual grounding capabilities. Our evaluation reveals a non-trivial performance gap between existing MLLMs and humans across all metrics. We also observe that existing MLLMs typically outperform foundation models without LLMs only on image-level metrics, and the specialist MLLMs trained on single images often struggle to generalize to multi-image scenarios. Moreover, a simple stepwise baseline integrating advanced MLLM and a detector can significantly surpass prior end-to-end MLLMs. We hope our MC-Bench and empirical findings can encourage the research community to further explore and enhance the untapped potentials of MLLMs in instance-level tasks, particularly in multi-image contexts. Project page: https://xuyunqiu.github.io/MC-Bench/.
Authors: Linfeng Xu, Fanman Meng, Qingbo Wu, Lili Pan, Heqian Qiu, Lanxiao Wang, Kailong Chen, Kanglei Geng, Yilei Qian, Haojie Wang, Shuchang Zhou, Shimou Ling, Zejia Liu, Nanlin Chen, Yingjie Xu, Shaoxu Cheng, Bowen Tan, Ziyong Xu, Hongliang Li
Abstract: The application of activity recognition in the ``AI + Education" field is gaining increasing attention. However, current work mainly focuses on the recognition of activities in manually captured videos and a limited number of activity types, with little attention given to recognizing activities in surveillance images from real classrooms. Activity recognition in classroom surveillance images faces multiple challenges, such as class imbalance and high activity similarity. To address this gap, we constructed a novel multimodal dataset focused on classroom surveillance image activity recognition called ARIC (Activity Recognition In Classroom). The ARIC dataset has advantages of multiple perspectives, 32 activity categories, three modalities, and real-world classroom scenarios. In addition to the general activity recognition tasks, we also provide settings for continual learning and few-shot continual learning. We hope that the ARIC dataset can act as a facilitator for future analysis and research for open teaching scenarios. You can download preliminary data from https://ivipclab.github.io/publication_ARIC/ARIC.
Authors: Guopeng Li, Qiang Wang, Ke Yan, Shouhong Ding, Yuan Gao, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract: Most knowledge distillation (KD) methodologies predominantly focus on teacher-student pairs with similar architectures, such as both being convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the potential and flexibility of KD can be greatly improved by expanding it to novel Cross-Architecture KD (CAKD), where the knowledge of homogeneous and heterogeneous teachers can be transferred flexibly to a given student. The primary challenge in CAKD lies in the substantial feature gaps between heterogeneous models, originating from the distinction of their inherent inductive biases and module functions. To this end, we introduce an assistant model as a bridge to facilitate smooth feature knowledge transfer between heterogeneous teachers and students. More importantly, within our proposed design principle, the assistant model combines the advantages of cross-architecture inductive biases and module functions by merging convolution and attention modules derived from both student and teacher module functions. Furthermore, we observe that heterogeneous features exhibit diverse spatial distributions in CAKD, hindering the effectiveness of conventional pixel-wise mean squared error (MSE) loss. Therefore, we leverage a spatial-agnostic InfoNCE loss to align features after spatial smoothing, thereby improving the feature alignments in CAKD. Our proposed method is evaluated across some homogeneous model pairs and arbitrary heterogeneous combinations of CNNs, ViTs, and MLPs, achieving state-of-the-art performance for distilled models with a maximum gain of 11.47% on CIFAR-100 and 3.67% on ImageNet-1K. Our code and models will be released.
Authors: Guanzhou Lan, Qianli Ma, Yuqi Yang, Zhigang Wang, Dong Wang, Yuan Yuan, Bin Zhao
Abstract: Diffusion-based Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) has demonstrated significant success in improving the visibility of low-light images. However, the substantial computational burden introduced by the iterative sampling process remains a major concern. Current acceleration methods, whether training-based or training-free, often lead to significant performance degradation. As a result, to achieve an efficient student model with performance comparable to that of existing multi-step teacher model, it is usually necessary to retrain a more capable teacher model. This approach introduces inflexibility, as it requires additional training to enhance the teacher's performance. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{Re}flectance-aware \textbf{D}iffusion with \textbf{Di}stilled \textbf{T}rajectory (\textbf{ReDDiT}), a step distillation framework specifically designed for LLIE. ReDDiT trains a student model to replicate the teacher's trajectory in fewer steps while also possessing the ability to surpass the teacher's performance. Specifically, we first introduce a trajectory decoder from the teacher model to provide guidance. Subsequently, a reflectance-aware trajectory refinement module is incorporated into the distillation process to enable more deterministic guidance from the teacher model. Our framework achieves comparable performance to previous diffusion-based methods with redundant steps in just 2 steps while establishing new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with 8 or 4 steps. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on 10 benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, consistently outperforming existing SOTA methods.
Authors: Selina Khan, Nanne van Noord
Abstract: Many artwork collections contain textual attributes that provide rich and contextualised descriptions of artworks. Visual grounding offers the potential for localising subjects within these descriptions on images, however, existing approaches are trained on natural images and generalise poorly to art. In this paper, we present CIGAr (Context-Infused GroundingDINO for Art), a visual grounding approach which utilises the artwork descriptions during training as context, thereby enabling visual grounding on art. In addition, we present a new dataset, Ukiyo-eVG, with manually annotated phrase-grounding annotations, and we set a new state-of-the-art for object detection on two artwork datasets.
Authors: Usama Younus, Vinoj Jayasundara, Shivam Mishra, Suleyman Aslan
Abstract: Human actions are based on the mental perception of the environment. Even when all the aspects of an environment are not visible, humans have an internal mental model that can generalize the partially visible scenes to fully constructed and connected views. This internal mental model uses learned abstract representations of spatial and temporal aspects of the environments encountered in the past. Artificial agents in reinforcement learning environments also benefit by learning a representation of the environment from experience. It provides the agent with viewpoints that are not directly visible to it, helping it make better policy decisions. It can also be used to predict the future state of the environment. This project explores learning the top-down view of an RL environment based on the artificial agent's first-person view observations with a generative adversarial network(GAN). The top-down view is useful as it provides a complete overview of the environment by building a map of the entire environment. It provides information about the objects' dimensions and shapes along with their relative positions with one another. Initially, when only a partial observation of the environment is visible to the agent, only a partial top-down view is generated. As the agent explores the environment through a set of actions, the generated top-down view becomes complete. This generated top-down view can assist the agent in deducing better policy decisions. The focus of the project is to learn the top-down view of an RL environment. It doesn't deal with any Reinforcement Learning task.
Authors: Selina Khan, Nanne van Noord
Abstract: In this work we present a large-scale dataset of \textit{Ukiyo-e} woodblock prints. Unlike previous works and datasets in the artistic domain that primarily focus on western art, this paper explores this pre-modern Japanese art form with the aim of broadening the scope for stylistic analysis and to provide a benchmark to evaluate a variety of art focused Computer Vision approaches. Our dataset consists of over $175.000$ prints with corresponding metadata (\eg artist, era, and creation date) from the 17th century to present day. By approaching stylistic analysis as a Multi-Task problem we aim to more efficiently utilize the available metadata, and learn more general representations of style. We show results for well-known baselines and state-of-the-art multi-task learning frameworks to enable future comparison, and to encourage stylistic analysis on this artistic domain.
Authors: Fengji Zhang, Linquan Wu, Huiyu Bai, Guancheng Lin, Xiao Li, Xiao Yu, Yue Wang, Bei Chen, Jacky Keung
Abstract: Coding tasks have been valuable for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs), as they demand the comprehension of high-level instructions, complex reasoning, and the implementation of functional programs -- core capabilities for advancing Artificial General Intelligence. Despite the progress in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which extend LLMs with visual perception and understanding capabilities, there remains a notable lack of coding benchmarks that rigorously assess these models, particularly in tasks that emphasize visual reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce HumanEval-V, a novel and lightweight benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LMMs' visual understanding and reasoning capabilities through code generation. HumanEval-V includes 108 carefully crafted, entry-level Python coding tasks derived from platforms like CodeForces and Stack Overflow. Each task is adapted by modifying the context and algorithmic patterns of the original problems, with visual elements redrawn to ensure distinction from the source, preventing potential data leakage. LMMs are required to complete the code solution based on the provided visual context and a predefined Python function signature outlining the task requirements. Every task is equipped with meticulously handcrafted test cases to ensure a thorough and reliable evaluation of model-generated solutions. We evaluate 19 state-of-the-art LMMs using HumanEval-V, uncovering significant challenges. Proprietary models like GPT-4o achieve only 13% pass@1 and 36.4% pass@10, while open-weight models with 70B parameters score below 4% pass@1. Ablation studies further reveal the limitations of current LMMs in vision reasoning and coding capabilities. These results underscore key areas for future research to enhance LMMs' capabilities. We have open-sourced our code and benchmark at https://github.com/HumanEval-V/HumanEval-V-Benchmark.
Authors: Changcai Li, Zonghua Gu, Gang Chen, Libo Huang, Wei Zhang, Huihui Zhou
Abstract: The ability to promptly respond to environmental changes is crucial for the perception system of autonomous driving. Recently, a new task called streaming perception was proposed. It jointly evaluate the latency and accuracy into a single metric for video online perception. In this work, we introduce StreamDSGN, the first real-time stereo-based 3D object detection framework designed for streaming perception. StreamDSGN is an end-to-end framework that directly predicts the 3D properties of objects in the next moment by leveraging historical information, thereby alleviating the accuracy degradation of streaming perception. Further, StreamDSGN applies three strategies to enhance the perception accuracy: (1) A feature-flow-based fusion method, which generates a pseudo-next feature at the current moment to address the misalignment issue between feature and ground truth. (2) An extra regression loss for explicit supervision of object motion consistency in consecutive frames. (3) A large kernel backbone with a large receptive field for effectively capturing long-range spatial contextual features caused by changes in object positions. Experiments on the KITTI Tracking dataset show that, compared with the strong baseline, StreamDSGN significantly improves the streaming average precision by up to 4.33%. Our code is available at https://github.com/weiyangdaren/streamDSGN-pytorch.
Authors: Yong Zhang, Rui Zhu, Shifeng Zhang, Xu Zhou, Shifeng Chen, Xiaofan Chen
Abstract: Self-supervised contrastive learning heavily relies on the view variance brought by data augmentation, so that it can learn a view-invariant pre-trained representation. Beyond increasing the view variance for contrast, this work focuses on improving the diversity of training data, to improve the generalization and robustness of the pre-trained models. To this end, we propose a unified framework to conduct data augmentation in the feature space, known as feature augmentation. This strategy is domain-agnostic, which augments similar features to the original ones and thus improves the data diversity. We perform a systematic investigation of various feature augmentation architectures, the gradient-flow skill, and the relationship between feature augmentation and traditional data augmentation. Our study reveals some practical principles for feature augmentation in self-contrastive learning. By integrating feature augmentation on the instance discrimination or the instance similarity paradigm, we consistently improve the performance of pre-trained feature learning and gain better generalization over the downstream image classification and object detection task.
Authors: Aozhu Chen, Hazel Doughty, Xirong Li, Cees G. M. Snoek
Abstract: Video-text retrieval has seen significant advancements, yet the ability of models to discern subtle differences in captions still requires verification. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for fine-grained evaluation. Our approach can be applied to existing datasets by automatically generating hard negative test captions with subtle single-word variations across nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions. We perform comprehensive experiments using four state-of-the-art models across two standard benchmarks (MSR-VTT and VATEX) and two specially curated datasets enriched with detailed descriptions (VLN-UVO and VLN-OOPS), resulting in a number of novel insights: 1) our analyses show that the current evaluation benchmarks fall short in detecting a model's ability to perceive subtle single-word differences, 2) our fine-grained evaluation highlights the difficulty models face in distinguishing such subtle variations. To enhance fine-grained understanding, we propose a new baseline that can be easily combined with current methods. Experiments on our fine-grained evaluations demonstrate that this approach enhances a model's ability to understand fine-grained differences.
Authors: Hongduan Tian, Feng Liu, Zhanke Zhou, Tongliang Liu, Chengqi Zhang, Bo Han
Abstract: In cross-domain few-shot classification (CFC), recent works mainly focus on adapting a simple transformation head on top of a frozen pre-trained backbone with few labeled data to project embeddings into a task-specific metric space where classification can be performed by measuring similarities between image instance and prototype representations. Technically, an assumption implicitly adopted in such a framework is that the prototype and image instance embeddings share the same representation transformation. However, in this paper, we find that there naturally exists a gap, which resembles the modality gap, between the prototype and image instance embeddings extracted from the frozen pre-trained backbone, and simply applying the same transformation during the adaptation phase constrains exploring the optimal representations and shrinks the gap between prototype and image representations. To solve this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method, contrastive prototype-image adaptation (CoPA), to adapt different transformations respectively for prototypes and images similarly to CLIP by treating prototypes as text prompts. Extensive experiments on Meta-Dataset demonstrate that CoPA achieves the state-of-the-art performance more efficiently. Meanwhile, further analyses also indicate that CoPA can learn better representation clusters, enlarge the gap, and achieve minimal validation loss at the enlarged gap.
Authors: Arnela Hadzic, Lea Bogensperger, Simon Johannes Joham, Martin Urschler
Abstract: Deep learning techniques for anatomical landmark localization (ALL) have shown great success, but their reliance on large annotated datasets remains a problem due to the tedious and costly nature of medical data acquisition and annotation. While traditional data augmentation, variational autoencoders (VAEs), and generative adversarial networks (GANs) have already been used to synthetically expand medical datasets, diffusion-based generative models have recently started to gain attention for their ability to generate high-quality synthetic images. In this study, we explore the use of denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) for generating medical images and their corresponding heatmaps of landmarks to enhance the training of a supervised deep learning model for ALL. Our novel approach involves a DDPM with a 2-channel input, incorporating both the original medical image and its heatmap of annotated landmarks. We also propose a novel way to assess the quality of the generated images using a Markov Random Field (MRF) model for landmark matching and a Statistical Shape Model (SSM) to check landmark plausibility, before we evaluate the DDPM-augmented dataset in the context of an ALL task involving hand X-Rays.
Authors: Yongxin Zhu, Bocheng Li, Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Linli Xu, Lidong Bing
Abstract: Latent-based image generative models, such as Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) and Mask Image Models (MIMs), have achieved notable success in image generation tasks. These models typically leverage reconstructive autoencoders like VQGAN or VAE to encode pixels into a more compact latent space and learn the data distribution in the latent space instead of directly from pixels. However, this practice raises a pertinent question: Is it truly the optimal choice? In response, we begin with an intriguing observation: despite sharing the same latent space, autoregressive models significantly lag behind LDMs and MIMs in image generation. This finding contrasts sharply with the field of NLP, where the autoregressive model GPT has established a commanding presence. To address this discrepancy, we introduce a unified perspective on the relationship between latent space and generative models, emphasizing the stability of latent space in image generative modeling. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective discrete image tokenizer to stabilize the latent space for image generative modeling. Experimental results show that image autoregressive modeling with our tokenizer (DiGIT) benefits both image understanding and image generation with the next token prediction principle, which is inherently straightforward for GPT models but challenging for other generative models. Remarkably, for the first time, a GPT-style autoregressive model for images outperforms LDMs, which also exhibits substantial improvement akin to GPT when scaling up model size. Our findings underscore the potential of an optimized latent space and the integration of discrete tokenization in advancing the capabilities of image generative models. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/DiGIT}.
Authors: Jiabao Wei, Zhiyuan Ma
Abstract: Virtual Try-ON (VTON) aims to synthesis specific person images dressed in given garments, which recently receives numerous attention in online shopping scenarios. Currently, the core challenges of the VTON task mainly lie in the fine-grained semantic extraction (i.e.,deep semantics) of the given reference garments during depth estimation and effective texture preservation when the garments are synthesized and warped onto human body. To cope with these issues, we propose DH-VTON, a deep text-driven virtual try-on model featuring a special hybrid attention learning strategy and deep garment semantic preservation module. By standing on the shoulder of a well-built pre-trained paint-by-example (abbr. PBE) approach, we present our DH-VTON pipeline in this work. Specifically, to extract the deep semantics of the garments, we first introduce InternViT-6B as fine-grained feature learner, which can be trained to align with the large-scale intrinsic knowledge with deep text semantics (e.g.,"neckline" or "girdle") to make up for the deficiency of the commonly adopted CLIP encoder. Based on this, to enhance the customized dressing abilities, we further introduce Garment-Feature ControlNet Plus (abbr. GFC+) module and propose to leverage a fresh hybrid attention strategy for training, which can adaptively integrate fine-grained characteristics of the garments into the different layers of the VTON model, so as to achieve multi-scale features preservation effects. Extensive experiments on several representative datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous diffusion-based and GAN-based approaches, showing competitive performance in preserving garment details and generating authentic human images.
Authors: Hudson M. S. Bruno, Esther L. Colombini, Sidney N. Givigi Jr
Abstract: Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM) is a fundamental technology for robotics applications. While VSLAM research has achieved significant advancements, its robustness under challenging situations, such as poor lighting, dynamic environments, motion blur, and sensor failures, remains a challenging issue. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel RGB-D dataset designed for evaluating the robustness of VSLAM systems. The dataset comprises real-world indoor scenes with dynamic objects, motion blur, and varying illumination, as well as emulated camera failures, including lens dirt, condensation, underexposure, and overexposure. Additionally, we offer open-source scripts for injecting camera failures into any images, enabling further customization by the research community. Our experiments demonstrate that ORB-SLAM2, a traditional VSLAM algorithm, and TartanVO, a Deep Learning-based VO algorithm, can experience performance degradation under these challenging conditions. Therefore, this dataset and the camera failure open-source tools provide a valuable resource for developing more robust VSLAM systems capable of handling real-world challenges.
Authors: Tomoya Sawada, Marie Katsurai
Abstract: Stroke-based rendering aims to reconstruct an input image into an oil painting style by predicting brush stroke sequences. Conventional methods perform this prediction stroke-by-stroke or require multiple inference steps due to the limitations of a predictable number of strokes. This procedure leads to inefficient translation speed, limiting their practicality. In this study, we propose MambaPainter, capable of predicting a sequence of over 100 brush strokes in a single inference step, resulting in rapid translation. We achieve this sequence prediction by incorporating the selective state-space model. Additionally, we introduce a simple extension to patch-based rendering, which we use to translate high-resolution images, improving the visual quality with a minimal increase in computational cost. Experimental results demonstrate that MambaPainter can efficiently translate inputs to oil painting-style images compared to state-of-the-art methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/STomoya/MambaPainter.
Authors: Mingce Guo, Jingxuan He, Shengeng Tang, Zhangye Wang, Lechao Cheng
Abstract: Text-driven video editing utilizing generative diffusion models has garnered significant attention due to their potential applications. However, existing approaches are constrained by the limited word embeddings provided in pre-training, which hinders nuanced editing targeting open concepts with specific attributes. Directly altering the keywords in target prompts often results in unintended disruptions to the attention mechanisms. To achieve more flexible editing easily, this work proposes an improved concept-augmented video editing approach that generates diverse and stable target videos flexibly by devising abstract conceptual pairs. Specifically, the framework involves concept-augmented textual inversion and a dual prior supervision mechanism. The former enables plug-and-play guidance of stable diffusion for video editing, effectively capturing target attributes for more stylized results. The dual prior supervision mechanism significantly enhances video stability and fidelity. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach generates more stable and lifelike videos, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Chan Young Shin, Ah Hyun Lee, Jun Young Lee, Ji Min Lee, Soo Jin Park
Abstract: As we enter the era of big data, collecting high-quality data is very important. However, collecting data by humans is not only very time-consuming but also expensive. Therefore, many scientists have devised various methods to collect data using computers. Among them, there is a method called web crawling, but the authors found that the crawling method has a problem in that unintended data is collected along with the user. The authors found that this can be filtered using the object recognition model YOLOv10. However, there are cases where data that is not properly filtered remains. Here, image reclassification was performed by additionally utilizing the distance output from the Siamese network, and higher performance was recorded than other classification models. (average \_f1 score YOLO+MobileNet 0.678->YOLO+SiameseNet 0.772)) The user can specify a distance threshold to adjust the balance between data deficiency and noise-robustness. The authors also found that the Siamese network can achieve higher performance with fewer resources because the cropped images are used for object recognition when processing images in the Siamese network. (Class 20 mean-based f1 score, non-crop+Siamese(MobileNetV3-Small) 80.94 -> crop preprocessing+Siamese(MobileNetV3-Small) 82.31) In this way, the image retrieval system that utilizes two consecutive models to reduce errors can save users' time and effort, and build better quality data faster and with fewer resources than before.
Authors: Yao Shen, Ziwei Wei, Chunmeng Liu, Shuming Wei, Qi Zhao, Kaiyang Zeng, Guangyao Li
Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong performance in image segmentation of natural scene images. However, its effectiveness diminishes markedly when applied to specific scientific domains, such as Scanning Probe Microscope (SPM) images. This decline in accuracy can be attributed to the distinct data distribution and limited availability of the data inherent in the scientific images. On the other hand, the acquisition of adequate SPM datasets is both time-intensive and laborious as well as skill-dependent. To address these challenges, we propose an Adaptive Prompt Learning with SAM (APL-SAM) framework tailored for few-shot SPM image segmentation. Our approach incorporates two key innovations to enhance SAM: 1) An Adaptive Prompt Learning module leverages few-shot embeddings derived from limited support set to learn adaptively central representatives, serving as visual prompts. This innovation eliminates the need for time-consuming online user interactions for providing prompts, such as exhaustively marking points and bounding boxes slice by slice; 2) A multi-source, multi-level mask decoder specifically designed for few-shot SPM image segmentation is introduced, which can effectively capture the correspondence between the support and query images. To facilitate comprehensive training and evaluation, we introduce a new dataset, SPM-Seg, curated for SPM image segmentation. Extensive experiments on this dataset reveal that the proposed APL-SAM framework significantly outperforms the original SAM, achieving over a 30% improvement in terms of Dice Similarity Coefficient with only one-shot guidance. Moreover, APL-SAM surpasses state-of-the-art few-shot segmentation methods and even fully supervised approaches in performance. Code and dataset used in this study will be made available upon acceptance.
Authors: Jiacheng Ruan, Yebin Yang, Zehao Lin, Feiyu Xiong, Zeyun Tang, Zhiyu Li
Abstract: Benefiting from the revolutionary advances in large language models (LLMs) and foundational vision models, large vision-language models (LVLMs) have also made significant progress. However, current benchmarks focus on tasks that evaluating only a single aspect of LVLM capabilities (e.g., recognition, detection, understanding). These tasks fail to fully demonstrate LVLMs' potential in complex application scenarios. To comprehensively assess the performance of existing LVLMs, we propose a more challenging task called the Flow Text with Image Insertion task (FTII). This task requires LVLMs to simultaneously possess outstanding abilities in image comprehension, instruction understanding, and long-text interpretation. Specifically, given several text paragraphs and a set of candidate images, as the text paragraphs accumulate, the LVLMs are required to select the most suitable image from the candidates to insert after the corresponding paragraph. Constructing a benchmark for such a task is highly challenging, particularly in determining the sequence of flowing text and images. To address this challenge, we turn to professional news reports, which naturally contain a gold standard for image-text sequences. Based on this, we introduce the Flow Text with Image Insertion Benchmark (FTII-Bench), which includes 318 high-quality Chinese image-text news articles and 307 high-quality English image-text news articles, covering 10 different news domains. Using these 625 high-quality articles, we construct problems of two different types with multiple levels of difficulty. Furthermore, we establish two different evaluation pipelines based on the CLIP model and existing LVLMs. We evaluate 9 open-source and 2 closed-source LVLMs as well as 2 CLIP-based models. Results indicate that even the most advanced models (e.g., GPT-4o) face significant challenges when tackling the FTII task.
Authors: Bartlomiej Sobieski, Jakub Grzywaczewski, Bartlomiej Sadlej, Matthew Tivnan, Przemyslaw Biecek
Abstract: Visual counterfactual explanations (VCEs) have recently gained immense popularity as a tool for clarifying the decision-making process of image classifiers. This trend is largely motivated by what these explanations promise to deliver -- indicate semantically meaningful factors that change the classifier's decision. However, we argue that current state-of-the-art approaches lack a crucial component -- the region constraint -- whose absence prevents from drawing explicit conclusions, and may even lead to faulty reasoning due to phenomenons like confirmation bias. To address the issue of previous methods, which modify images in a very entangled and widely dispersed manner, we propose region-constrained VCEs (RVCEs), which assume that only a predefined image region can be modified to influence the model's prediction. To effectively sample from this subclass of VCEs, we propose Region-Constrained Counterfactual Schr\"odinger Bridges (RCSB), an adaptation of a tractable subclass of Schr\"odinger Bridges to the problem of conditional inpainting, where the conditioning signal originates from the classifier of interest. In addition to setting a new state-of-the-art by a large margin, we extend RCSB to allow for exact counterfactual reasoning, where the predefined region contains only the factor of interest, and incorporating the user to actively interact with the RVCE by predefining the regions manually.
Authors: Minkyoung Cho, Yulong Cao, Jiachen Sun, Qingzhao Zhang, Marco Pavone, Jeong Joon Park, Heng Yang, Z. Morley Mao
Abstract: An important paradigm in 3D object detection is the use of multiple modalities to enhance accuracy in both normal and challenging conditions, particularly for long-tail scenarios. To address this, recent studies have explored two directions of adaptive approaches: MoE-based adaptive fusion, which struggles with uncertainties arising from distinct object configurations, and late fusion for output-level adaptive fusion, which relies on separate detection pipelines and limits comprehensive understanding. In this work, we introduce Cocoon, an object- and feature-level uncertainty-aware fusion framework. The key innovation lies in uncertainty quantification for heterogeneous representations, enabling fair comparison across modalities through the introduction of a feature aligner and a learnable surrogate ground truth, termed feature impression. We also define a training objective to ensure that their relationship provides a valid metric for uncertainty quantification. Cocoon consistently outperforms existing static and adaptive methods in both normal and challenging conditions, including those with natural and artificial corruptions. Furthermore, we show the validity and efficacy of our uncertainty metric across diverse datasets.
Authors: Zhiyuan Ma, Jianjun Li, Guohui Li, Kaiyan Huang
Abstract: With the flourishing of social media platforms, vision-language pre-training (VLP) recently has received great attention and many remarkable progresses have been achieved. The success of VLP largely benefits from the information complementation and enhancement between different modalities. However, most of recent studies focus on cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) to promote image-text alignment by pulling embeddings of positive sample pairs together while pushing those of negative pairs apart, which ignores the natural asymmetry property between different modalities and requires large-scale image-text corpus to achieve arduous progress. To mitigate this predicament, we propose CMAL, a Cross-Modal Associative Learning framework with anchor points detection and cross-modal associative learning for VLP. Specifically, we first respectively embed visual objects and textual tokens into separate hypersphere spaces to learn intra-modal hidden features, and then design a cross-modal associative prompt layer to perform anchor point masking and swap feature filling for constructing a hybrid cross-modal associative prompt. Afterwards, we exploit a unified semantic encoder to learn their cross-modal interactive features for context adaptation. Finally, we design an associative mapping classification layer to learn potential associative mappings between modalities at anchor points, within which we develop a fresh self-supervised associative mapping classification task to boost CMAL's performance. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of CMAL, showing that it achieves competitive performance against previous CMCL-based methods on four common downstream vision-and-language tasks, with significantly fewer corpus. Especially, CMAL obtains new state-of-the-art results on SNLI-VE and REC (testA).
Authors: Zhiyuan Zhao, Hengrui Kang, Bin Wang, Conghui He
Abstract: Document Layout Analysis is crucial for real-world document understanding systems, but it encounters a challenging trade-off between speed and accuracy: multimodal methods leveraging both text and visual features achieve higher accuracy but suffer from significant latency, whereas unimodal methods relying solely on visual features offer faster processing speeds at the expense of accuracy. To address this dilemma, we introduce DocLayout-YOLO, a novel approach that enhances accuracy while maintaining speed advantages through document-specific optimizations in both pre-training and model design. For robust document pre-training, we introduce the Mesh-candidate BestFit algorithm, which frames document synthesis as a two-dimensional bin packing problem, generating the large-scale, diverse DocSynth-300K dataset. Pre-training on the resulting DocSynth-300K dataset significantly improves fine-tuning performance across various document types. In terms of model optimization, we propose a Global-to-Local Controllable Receptive Module that is capable of better handling multi-scale variations of document elements. Furthermore, to validate performance across different document types, we introduce a complex and challenging benchmark named DocStructBench. Extensive experiments on downstream datasets demonstrate that DocLayout-YOLO excels in both speed and accuracy. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/opendatalab/DocLayout-YOLO.
Authors: Shicheng Xu, Liang Pang, Yunchang Zhu, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
Abstract: Vision-language alignment in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) successfully enables LLMs to understand visual input. However, we find that existing vision-language alignment methods fail to transfer the existing safety mechanism for text in LLMs to vision, which leads to vulnerabilities in toxic image. To explore the cause of this problem, we give the insightful explanation of where and how the safety mechanism of LVLMs operates and conduct comparative analysis between text and vision. We find that the hidden states at the specific transformer layers play a crucial role in the successful activation of safety mechanism, while the vision-language alignment at hidden states level in current methods is insufficient. This results in a semantic shift for input images compared to text in hidden states, therefore misleads the safety mechanism. To address this, we propose a novel Text-Guided vision-language Alignment method (TGA) for LVLMs. TGA retrieves the texts related to input vision and uses them to guide the projection of vision into the hidden states space in LLMs. Experiments show that TGA not only successfully transfers the safety mechanism for text in basic LLMs to vision in vision-language alignment for LVLMs without any safety fine-tuning on the visual modality but also maintains the general performance on various vision tasks (Safe and Good).
Authors: Dewei Zhou, Ji Xie, Zongxin Yang, Yi Yang
Abstract: The increasing demand for controllable outputs in text-to-image generation has spurred advancements in multi-instance generation (MIG), allowing users to define both instance layouts and attributes. However, unlike image-conditional generation methods such as ControlNet, MIG techniques have not been widely adopted in state-of-the-art models like SD2 and SDXL, primarily due to the challenge of building robust renderers that simultaneously handle instance positioning and attribute rendering. In this paper, we introduce Depth-Driven Decoupled Instance Synthesis (3DIS), a novel framework that decouples the MIG process into two stages: (i) generating a coarse scene depth map for accurate instance positioning and scene composition, and (ii) rendering fine-grained attributes using pre-trained ControlNet on any foundational model, without additional training. Our 3DIS framework integrates a custom adapter into LDM3D for precise depth-based layouts and employs a finetuning-free method for enhanced instance-level attribute rendering. Extensive experiments on COCO-Position and COCO-MIG benchmarks demonstrate that 3DIS significantly outperforms existing methods in both layout precision and attribute rendering. Notably, 3DIS offers seamless compatibility with diverse foundational models, providing a robust, adaptable solution for advanced multi-instance generation. The code is available at: https://github.com/limuloo/3DIS.
Authors: Zihan You, Hao Wang, Qichao Zhao, Jinxiang Wang
Abstract: A stable 3D object detection model based on BEV paradigm with temporal information is very important for autonomous driving systems. However, current temporal fusion model use convolutional layer or deformable self-attention is not conducive to the exchange of global information of BEV space and has more computational cost. Recently, a newly proposed based model specialized in processing sequence called mamba has shown great potential in multiple downstream task. In this work, we proposed a mamba2-based BEV 3D object detection model named MambaBEV. We also adapt an end to end self driving paradigm to test the performance of the model. Our work performs pretty good results on nucences datasets:Our base version achieves 51.7% NDS. Our code will be available soon.
Authors: Mohamad Abdi, Gerardo Hemosillo Valadez, Halid Ziya Yerebakan
Abstract: Anatomical landmarks are vital in medical imaging for navigation and anomaly detection. Modern large language models (LLMs), like Llama-2, offer promise for automating the mapping of these landmarks in free-text radiology reports to corresponding positions in image data. Recent studies propose LLMs may develop coherent representations of generative processes. Motivated by these insights, we investigated whether LLMs accurately represent the spatial positions of anatomical landmarks. Through experiments with Llama-2 models, we found that they can linearly represent anatomical landmarks in space with considerable robustness to different prompts. These results underscore the potential of LLMs to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of medical imaging workflows.
Authors: Alice Oh, Inyoung Noh, Jian Choo, Jihoo Lee, Justin Park, Kate Hwang, Sanghyeon Kim, Soo Min Oh
Abstract: Brain tumor detection and classification are critical tasks in medical image analysis, particularly in early-stage diagnosis, where accurate and timely detection can significantly improve treatment outcomes. In this study, we apply various statistical and machine learning models to detect and classify brain tumors using brain MRI images. We explore a variety of statistical models including linear, logistic, and Bayesian regressions, and the machine learning models including decision tree, random forest, single-layer perceptron, multi-layer perceptron, convolutional neural network (CNN), recurrent neural network, and long short-term memory. Our findings show that CNN outperforms other models, achieving the best performance. Additionally, we confirm that the CNN model can also work for multi-class classification, distinguishing between four categories of brain MRI images such as normal, glioma, meningioma, and pituitary tumor images. This study demonstrates that machine learning approaches are suitable for brain tumor detection and classification, facilitating real-world medical applications in assisting radiologists with early and accurate diagnosis.
Authors: Lingxiao Luo, Bingda Tang, Xuanzhong Chen, Rong Han, Ting Chen
Abstract: Recent advancements in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable promise in generating visually grounded responses. However, their application in the medical domain is hindered by unique challenges. For instance, most VLMs rely on a single method of visual grounding, whereas complex medical tasks demand more versatile approaches. Additionally, while most VLMs process only 2D images, a large portion of medical images are 3D. The lack of medical data further compounds these obstacles. To address these challenges, we present VividMed, a vision language model with versatile visual grounding for medicine. Our model supports generating both semantic segmentation masks and instance-level bounding boxes, and accommodates various imaging modalities, including both 2D and 3D data. We design a three-stage training procedure and an automatic data synthesis pipeline based on open datasets and models. Besides visual grounding tasks, VividMed also excels in other common downstream tasks, including Visual Question Answering (VQA) and report generation. Ablation studies empirically show that the integration of visual grounding ability leads to improved performance on these tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/function2-llx/MMMM.
Authors: Phoenix Yu, Tilo Burghardt, Andrew W Dowsey, Neill W Campbell
Abstract: We present MultiCamCows2024, a farm-scale image dataset filmed across multiple cameras for the biometric identification of individual Holstein-Friesian cattle exploiting their unique black and white coat-patterns. Captured by three ceiling-mounted visual sensors covering adjacent barn areas over seven days on a working dairy farm, the dataset comprises 101, 329 images of 90 cows, plus the underlying original CCTV footage. The dataset is provided alongside full computer vision recognition baselines, that is both a supervised and self-supervised learning framework for individual cow identification trained on cattle tracklets. We report a performance above 96% single image identification accuracy from the dataset and demonstrate that combining data from multiple cameras during learning enhances self-supervised identification. We show that our framework enables fully automatic cattle identification, barring only the simple human verification of tracklet integrity during data collection. Crucially, our study highlights that multi-camera, supervised and self-supervised components in tandem not only deliver highly accurate individual cow identification but also achieve this efficiently with no labelling of cattle identities by humans at all. We argue that this improvement in efficacy has practical implications for livestock management, behaviour analysis, and agricultural monitoring. For full reproducibility and practical ease of use, we publish all key software and code including re-identification components and the species detector with this paper.
Authors: DuoSheng Chen, Binghui Chen, Yifeng Geng, Liefeng Bo
Abstract: Recently, several point-based image editing methods (e.g., DragDiffusion, FreeDrag, DragNoise) have emerged, yielding precise and high-quality results based on user instructions. However, these methods often make insufficient use of semantic information, leading to less desirable results. In this paper, we proposed a novel mask-free point-based image editing method, AdaptiveDrag, which provides a more flexible editing approach and generates images that better align with user intent. Specifically, we design an auto mask generation module using super-pixel division for user-friendliness. Next, we leverage a pre-trained diffusion model to optimize the latent, enabling the dragging of features from handle points to target points. To ensure a comprehensive connection between the input image and the drag process, we have developed a semantic-driven optimization. We design adaptive steps that are supervised by the positions of the points and the semantic regions derived from super-pixel segmentation. This refined optimization process also leads to more realistic and accurate drag results. Furthermore, to address the limitations in the generative consistency of the diffusion model, we introduce an innovative corresponding loss during the sampling process. Building on these effective designs, our method delivers superior generation results using only the single input image and the handle-target point pairs. Extensive experiments have been conducted and demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms others in handling various drag instructions (e.g., resize, movement, extension) across different domains (e.g., animals, human face, land space, clothing).
Authors: Xingqi Wang, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie, Jia Jia
Abstract: Recent advancements in diffusion models trained on large-scale data have enabled the generation of indistinguishable human-level images, yet they often produce harmful content misaligned with human values, e.g., social bias, and offensive content. Despite extensive research on Large Language Models (LLMs), the challenge of Text-to-Image (T2I) model alignment remains largely unexplored. Addressing this problem, we propose LiVO (Lightweight Value Optimization), a novel lightweight method for aligning T2I models with human values. LiVO only optimizes a plug-and-play value encoder to integrate a specified value principle with the input prompt, allowing the control of generated images over both semantics and values. Specifically, we design a diffusion model-tailored preference optimization loss, which theoretically approximates the Bradley-Terry model used in LLM alignment but provides a more flexible trade-off between image quality and value conformity. To optimize the value encoder, we also develop a framework to automatically construct a text-image preference dataset of 86k (prompt, aligned image, violating image, value principle) samples. Without updating most model parameters and through adaptive value selection from the input prompt, LiVO significantly reduces harmful outputs and achieves faster convergence, surpassing several strong baselines and taking an initial step towards ethically aligned T2I models.
Authors: Asish Bera, Ondrej Krejcar, Debotosh Bhattacharjee
Abstract: Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have facilitated remarkable success in recognizing various food items and agricultural stress. A decent performance boost has been witnessed in solving the agro-food challenges by mining and analyzing of region-based partial feature descriptors. Also, computationally expensive ensemble learning schemes using multiple CNNs have been studied in earlier works. This work proposes a region attention scheme for modelling long-range dependencies by building a correlation among different regions within an input image. The attention method enhances feature representation by learning the usefulness of context information from complementary regions. Spatial pyramidal pooling and average pooling pair aggregate partial descriptors into a holistic representation. Both pooling methods establish spatial and channel-wise relationships without incurring extra parameters. A context gating scheme is applied to refine the descriptiveness of weighted attentional features, which is relevant for classification. The proposed Region Attention network for Food items and Agricultural stress recognition method, dubbed RAFA-Net, has been experimented on three public food datasets, and has achieved state-of-the-art performances with distinct margins. The highest top-1 accuracies of RAFA-Net are 91.69%, 91.56%, and 96.97% on the UECFood-100, UECFood-256, and MAFood-121 datasets, respectively. In addition, better accuracies have been achieved on two benchmark agricultural stress datasets. The best top-1 accuracies on the Insect Pest (IP-102) and PlantDoc-27 plant disease datasets are 92.36%, and 85.54%, respectively; implying RAFA-Net's generalization capability.
Authors: Shen Fan, Przemyslaw Musialski
Abstract: Implicit neural representations have emerged as a powerful tool in learning 3D geometry, offering unparalleled advantages over conventional representations like mesh-based methods. A common type of INR implicitly encodes a shape's boundary as the zero-level set of the learned continuous function and learns a mapping from a low-dimensional latent space to the space of all possible shapes represented by its signed distance function. However, most INRs struggle to retain high-frequency details, which are crucial for accurate geometric depiction, and they are computationally expensive. To address these limitations, we present a novel approach that both reduces computational expenses and enhances the capture of fine details. Our method integrates periodic activation functions, positional encodings, and normals into the neural network architecture. This integration significantly enhances the model's ability to learn the entire space of 3D shapes while preserving intricate details and sharp features, areas where conventional representations often fall short.
Authors: Asish Bera, Debotosh Bhattacharjee, Ondrej Krejcar
Abstract: Crop yield production could be enhanced for agricultural growth if various plant nutrition deficiencies, and diseases are identified and detected at early stages. The deep learning methods have proven its superior performances in the automated detection of plant diseases and nutrition deficiencies from visual symptoms in leaves. This article proposes a new deep learning method for plant nutrition deficiencies and disease classification using a graph convolutional network (GNN), added upon a base convolutional neural network (CNN). Sometimes, a global feature descriptor might fail to capture the vital region of a diseased leaf, which causes inaccurate classification of disease. To address this issue, regional feature learning is crucial for a holistic feature aggregation. In this work, region-based feature summarization at multi-scales is explored using spatial pyramidal pooling for discriminative feature representation. A GCN is developed to capacitate learning of finer details for classifying plant diseases and insufficiency of nutrients. The proposed method, called Plant Nutrition Deficiency and Disease Network (PND-Net), is evaluated on two public datasets for nutrition deficiency, and two for disease classification using four CNNs. The best classification performances are: (a) 90.00% Banana and 90.54% Coffee nutrition deficiency; and (b) 96.18% Potato diseases and 84.30% on PlantDoc datasets using Xception backbone. Furthermore, additional experiments have been carried out for generalization, and the proposed method has achieved state-of-the-art performances on two public datasets, namely the Breast Cancer Histopathology Image Classification (BreakHis 40X: 95.50%, and BreakHis 100X: 96.79% accuracy) and Single cells in Pap smear images for cervical cancer classification (SIPaKMeD: 99.18% accuracy). Also, PND-Net achieves improved performances using five-fold cross validation.
Authors: Jaehong Yoon, Shoubin Yu, Vaidehi Patil, Huaxiu Yao, Mohit Bansal
Abstract: Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly enhanced their ability to generate high-quality images and videos, but they have also increased the risk of producing unsafe content. Existing unlearning/editing-based methods for safe generation remove harmful concepts from models but face several challenges: (1) They cannot instantly remove harmful concepts without training. (2) Their safe generation capabilities depend on collected training data. (3) They alter model weights, risking degradation in quality for content unrelated to toxic concepts. To address these, we propose SAFREE, a novel, training-free approach for safe T2I and T2V, that does not alter the model's weights. Specifically, we detect a subspace corresponding to a set of toxic concepts in the text embedding space and steer prompt embeddings away from this subspace, thereby filtering out harmful content while preserving intended semantics. To balance the trade-off between filtering toxicity and preserving safe concepts, SAFREE incorporates a novel self-validating filtering mechanism that dynamically adjusts the denoising steps when applying the filtered embeddings. Additionally, we incorporate adaptive re-attention mechanisms within the diffusion latent space to selectively diminish the influence of features related to toxic concepts at the pixel level. In the end, SAFREE ensures coherent safety checking, preserving the fidelity, quality, and safety of the output. SAFREE achieves SOTA performance in suppressing unsafe content in T2I generation compared to training-free baselines and effectively filters targeted concepts while maintaining high-quality images. It also shows competitive results against training-based methods. We extend SAFREE to various T2I backbones and T2V tasks, showcasing its flexibility and generalization. SAFREE provides a robust and adaptable safeguard for ensuring safe visual generation.
Authors: Linfei Pan, Marc Pollefeys, D\'aniel Bar\'ath
Abstract: Reconstructing a 3D scene from unordered images is pivotal in computer vision and robotics, with applications spanning crowd-sourced mapping and beyond. While global Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques are scalable and fast, they often compromise on accuracy. To address this, we introduce a principled approach that integrates gravity direction into the rotation averaging phase of global pipelines, enhancing camera orientation accuracy and reducing the degrees of freedom. This additional information is commonly available in recent consumer devices, such as smartphones, mixed-reality devices and drones, making the proposed method readily accessible. Rooted in circular regression, our algorithm has similar convergence guarantees as linear regression. It also supports scenarios where only a subset of cameras have known gravity. Additionally, we propose a mechanism to refine error-prone gravity. We achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on four large-scale datasets. Particularly, the proposed method improves upon the SfM baseline by 13 AUC@$1^\circ$ points, on average, while running eight times faster. It also outperforms the standard planar pose graph optimization technique by 23 AUC@$1^\circ$ points. The code is at https://github.com/colmap/glomap.
Authors: Ji\v{r}\'i Vysko\v{c}il, Lukas Picek
Abstract: This paper describes the search for an alternative approach to the automatic categorization of camera trap images. First, we benchmark state-of-the-art classifiers using a single model for all images. Next, we evaluate methods combining MegaDetector with one or more classifiers and Segment Anything to assess their impact on reducing location-specific overfitting. Last, we propose and test two approaches using large language and foundational models, such as DINOv2, BioCLIP, BLIP, and ChatGPT, in a zero-shot scenario. Evaluation carried out on two publicly available datasets (WCT from New Zealand, CCT20 from the Southwestern US) and a private dataset (CEF from Central Europe) revealed that combining MegaDetector with two separate classifiers achieves the highest accuracy. This approach reduced the relative error of a single BEiTV2 classifier by approximately 42\% on CCT20, 48\% on CEF, and 75\% on WCT. Besides, as the background is removed, the error in terms of accuracy in new locations is reduced to half. The proposed zero-shot pipeline based on DINOv2 and FAISS achieved competitive results (1.0\% and 4.7\% smaller on CCT20, and CEF, respectively), which highlights the potential of zero-shot approaches for camera trap image categorization.
Authors: Hongcheng Gao, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Taihang Hu, Zhijie Deng, Min Lin
Abstract: With the rapid progress of diffusion-based content generation, significant efforts are being made to unlearn harmful or copyrighted concepts from pretrained diffusion models (DMs) to prevent potential model misuse. However, it is observed that even when DMs are properly unlearned before release, malicious finetuning can compromise this process, causing DMs to relearn the unlearned concepts. This occurs partly because certain benign concepts (e.g., "skin") retained in DMs are related to the unlearned ones (e.g., "nudity"), facilitating their relearning via finetuning. To address this, we propose meta-unlearning on DMs. Intuitively, a meta-unlearned DM should behave like an unlearned DM when used as is; moreover, if the meta-unlearned DM undergoes malicious finetuning on unlearned concepts, the related benign concepts retained within it will be triggered to self-destruct, hindering the relearning of unlearned concepts. Our meta-unlearning framework is compatible with most existing unlearning methods, requiring only the addition of an easy-to-implement meta objective. We validate our approach through empirical experiments on meta-unlearning concepts from Stable Diffusion models (SD-v1-4 and SDXL), supported by extensive ablation studies. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Meta-Unlearning.
Authors: Chen Ziwen, Hao Tan, Kai Zhang, Sai Bi, Fujun Luan, Yicong Hong, Li Fuxin, Zexiang Xu
Abstract: We propose Long-LRM, a generalizable 3D Gaussian reconstruction model that is capable of reconstructing a large scene from a long sequence of input images. Specifically, our model can process 32 source images at 960x540 resolution within only 1.3 seconds on a single A100 80G GPU. Our architecture features a mixture of the recent Mamba2 blocks and the classical transformer blocks which allowed many more tokens to be processed than prior work, enhanced by efficient token merging and Gaussian pruning steps that balance between quality and efficiency. Unlike previous feed-forward models that are limited to processing 1~4 input images and can only reconstruct a small portion of a large scene, Long-LRM reconstructs the entire scene in a single feed-forward step. On large-scale scene datasets such as DL3DV-140 and Tanks and Temples, our method achieves performance comparable to optimization-based approaches while being two orders of magnitude more efficient. Project page: https://arthurhero.github.io/projects/llrm
Authors: Sicong Leng, Yun Xing, Zesen Cheng, Yang Zhou, Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Deli Zhao, Shijian Lu, Chunyan Miao, Lidong Bing
Abstract: Recent advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly enhanced performance across diverse tasks, with ongoing efforts to further integrate additional modalities such as video and audio. However, most existing LMMs remain vulnerable to hallucinations, the discrepancy between the factual multimodal input and the generated textual output, which has limited their applicability in various real-world scenarios. This paper presents the first systematic investigation of hallucinations in LMMs involving the three most common modalities: language, visual, and audio. Our study reveals two key contributors to hallucinations: overreliance on unimodal priors and spurious inter-modality correlations. To address these challenges, we introduce the benchmark The Curse of Multi-Modalities (CMM), which comprehensively evaluates hallucinations in LMMs, providing a detailed analysis of their underlying issues. Our findings highlight key vulnerabilities, including imbalances in modality integration and biases from training data, underscoring the need for balanced cross-modal learning and enhanced hallucination mitigation strategies. Based on our observations and findings, we suggest potential research directions that could enhance the reliability of LMMs.
Authors: Ce Zhang, Simon Stepputtis, Katia Sycara, Yaqi Xie
Abstract: Test-time adaptation, which enables models to generalize to diverse data with unlabeled test samples, holds significant value in real-world scenarios. Recently, researchers have applied this setting to advanced pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), developing approaches such as test-time prompt tuning to further extend their practical applicability. However, these methods typically focus solely on adapting VLMs from a single modality and fail to accumulate task-specific knowledge as more samples are processed. To address this, we introduce Dual Prototype Evolving (DPE), a novel test-time adaptation approach for VLMs that effectively accumulates task-specific knowledge from multi-modalities. Specifically, we create and evolve two sets of prototypes--textual and visual--to progressively capture more accurate multi-modal representations for target classes during test time. Moreover, to promote consistent multi-modal representations, we introduce and optimize learnable residuals for each test sample to align the prototypes from both modalities. Extensive experimental results on 15 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed DPE consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods while also exhibiting competitive computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangce01/DPE-CLIP.
Authors: Alexandra Bernadotte, Victor Buchstaber
Abstract: This paper provides a brief introduction of the mathematical theory behind the time series unfolding method. The algorithms presented serve as a valuable mathematical and analytical tool for analyzing data collected from brain-computer interfaces. In our study, we implement a mathematical model based on polyharmonic signals to interpret the data from brain-computer interface sensors. The analysis of data coming to the brain-computer interface sensors is based on a mathematical model of the signal in the form of a polyharmonic signal. Our main focus is on addressing the problem of evaluating the number of sources, or active brain oscillators. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated through analysis of data recorded from a non-invasive brain-computer interface developed by the author.
Authors: Chengyuan Xu, Kuo-Chin Lien, Tobias H\"ollerer
Abstract: When designing an AI-assisted decision-making system, there is often a tradeoff between precision and recall in the AI's recommendations. We argue that careful exploitation of this tradeoff can harness the complementary strengths in the human-AI collaboration to significantly improve team performance. We investigate a real-world video anonymization task for which recall is paramount and more costly to improve. We analyze the performance of 78 professional annotators working with a) no AI assistance, b) a high-precision "restrained" AI, and c) a high-recall "zealous" AI in over 3,466 person-hours of annotation work. In comparison, the zealous AI helps human teammates achieve significantly shorter task completion time and higher recall. In a follow-up study, we remove AI assistance for everyone and find negative training effects on annotators trained with the restrained AI. These findings and our analysis point to important implications for the design of AI assistance in recall-demanding scenarios.
Authors: Risheek Garrepalli, Shweta Mahajan, Munawar Hayat, Fatih Porikli
Abstract: Diffusion models excel at generative modeling (e.g., text-to-image) but sampling requires multiple denoising network passes, limiting practicality. Efforts such as progressive distillation or consistency distillation have shown promise by reducing the number of passes at the expense of quality of the generated samples. In this work we identify co-variate shift as one of reason for poor performance of multi-step distilled models from compounding error at inference time. To address co-variate shift, we formulate diffusion distillation within imitation learning (DDIL) framework and enhance training distribution for distilling diffusion models on both data distribution (forward diffusion) and student induced distributions (backward diffusion). Training on data distribution helps to diversify the generations by preserving marginal data distribution and training on student distribution addresses compounding error by correcting covariate shift. In addition, we adopt reflected diffusion formulation for distillation and demonstrate improved performance, stable training across different distillation methods. We show that DDIL consistency improves on baseline algorithms of progressive distillation (PD), Latent consistency models (LCM) and Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD2).
Authors: Mykhaylo Andriluka, Baruch Tabanpour, C. Daniel Freeman, Cristian Sminchisescu
Abstract: We propose a novel neural network approach, LARP (Learned Articulated Rigid body Physics), to model the dynamics of articulated human motion with contact. Our goal is to develop a faster and more convenient methodological alternative to traditional physics simulators for use in computer vision tasks such as human motion reconstruction from video. To that end we introduce a training procedure and model components that support the construction of a recurrent neural architecture to accurately simulate articulated rigid body dynamics. Our neural architecture supports features typically found in traditional physics simulators, such as modeling of joint motors, variable dimensions of body parts, contact between body parts and objects, and is an order of magnitude faster than traditional systems when multiple simulations are run in parallel. To demonstrate the value of LARP we use it as a drop-in replacement for a state of the art classical non-differentiable simulator in an existing video-based reconstruction framework and show comparative or better 3D human pose reconstruction accuracy.
Authors: Tuan Dang, Khang Nguyen, Mandfred Huber
Abstract: Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in highly dynamic environments is challenging due to the correlation complexity between moving objects and the camera pose. Many methods have been proposed to deal with this problem; however, the moving properties of dynamic objects with a moving camera remain unclear. Therefore, to improve SLAM's performance, minimizing disruptive events of moving objects with a physical understanding of 3D shapes and dynamics of objects is needed. In this paper, we propose a robust method, V3D-SLAM, to remove moving objects via two lightweight re-evaluation stages, including identifying potentially moving and static objects using a spatial-reasoned Hough voting mechanism and refining static objects by detecting dynamic noise caused by intra-object motions using Chamfer distances as similarity measurements. Our experiment on the TUM RGB-D benchmark on dynamic sequences with ground-truth camera trajectories showed that our methods outperform the most recent state-of-the-art SLAM methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/tuantdang/v3d-slam.
Authors: Arushi Goel, Karan Sapra, Matthieu Le, Rafael Valle, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in text generation and comprehension, with recent advancements extending into multimodal LLMs that integrate visual and audio inputs. However, these models continue to struggle with fine-grained, cross-modal temporal understanding, particularly when correlating events across audio and video streams. We address these challenges with two key contributions: a new dataset and model, called OCTAV and OMCAT respectively. OCTAV (Omni Context and Temporal Audio Video) is a novel dataset designed to capture event transitions across audio and video. Second, OMCAT (Omni Context Aware Transformer) is a powerful model that leverages RoTE (Rotary Time Embeddings), an innovative extension of RoPE, to enhance temporal grounding and computational efficiency in time-anchored tasks. Through a robust three-stage training pipeline-feature alignment, instruction tuning, and OCTAV-specific training-OMCAT excels in cross-modal temporal understanding. Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) tasks and the OCTAV benchmark, showcasing significant gains in temporal reasoning and cross-modal alignment, as validated through comprehensive experiments and ablation studies. Our dataset and code will be made publicly available. The link to our demo page is https://om-cat.github.io.
Authors: Al Amin, Kamrul Hasan, Saleh Zein-Sabatto, Liang Hong, Sachin Shetty, Imtiaz Ahmed, Tariqul Islam
Abstract: Healthcare industries face challenges when experiencing rare diseases due to limited samples. Artificial Intelligence (AI) communities overcome this situation to create synthetic data which is an ethical and privacy issue in the medical domain. This research introduces the CAT-U-Net framework as a new approach to overcome these limitations, which enhances feature extraction from medical images without the need for large datasets. The proposed framework adds an extra concatenation layer with downsampling parts, thereby improving its ability to learn from limited data while maintaining patient privacy. To validate, the proposed framework's robustness, different medical conditioning datasets were utilized including COVID-19, brain tumors, and wrist fractures. The framework achieved nearly 98% reconstruction accuracy, with a Dice coefficient close to 0.946. The proposed CAT-U-Net has the potential to make a big difference in medical image diagnostics in settings with limited data.
Authors: Maxime Kayser, Bayar Menzat, Cornelius Emde, Bogdan Bercean, Alex Novak, Abdala Espinosa, Bartlomiej W. Papiez, Susanne Gaube, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Oana-Maria Camburu
Abstract: The growing capabilities of AI models are leading to their wider use, including in safety-critical domains. Explainable AI (XAI) aims to make these models safer to use by making their inference process more transparent. However, current explainability methods are seldom evaluated in the way they are intended to be used: by real-world end users. To address this, we conducted a large-scale user study with 85 healthcare practitioners in the context of human-AI collaborative chest X-ray analysis. We evaluated three types of explanations: visual explanations (saliency maps), natural language explanations, and a combination of both modalities. We specifically examined how different explanation types influence users depending on whether the AI advice and explanations are factually correct. We find that text-based explanations lead to significant over-reliance, which is alleviated by combining them with saliency maps. We also observe that the quality of explanations, that is, how much factually correct information they entail, and how much this aligns with AI correctness, significantly impacts the usefulness of the different explanation types.
Authors: Linwei Tao, Haolan Guo, Minjing Dong, Chang Xu
Abstract: Calibration is crucial in deep learning applications, especially in fields like healthcare and autonomous driving, where accurate confidence estimates are vital for decision-making. However, deep neural networks often suffer from miscalibration, with reliability diagrams and Expected Calibration Error (ECE) being the only standard perspective for evaluating calibration performance. In this paper, we introduce the concept of consistency as an alternative perspective on model calibration, inspired by uncertainty estimation literature in large language models (LLMs). We highlight its advantages over the traditional reliability-based view. Building on this concept, we propose a post-hoc calibration method called Consistency Calibration (CC), which adjusts confidence based on the model's consistency across perturbed inputs. CC is particularly effective in locally uncertainty estimation, as it requires no additional data samples or label information, instead generating input perturbations directly from the source data. Moreover, we show that performing perturbations at the logit level significantly improves computational efficiency. We validate the effectiveness of CC through extensive comparisons with various post-hoc and training-time calibration methods, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, as well as on long-tailed datasets like ImageNet-LT.
Authors: Fengpeng Li, Kemou Li, Haiwei Wu, Jinyu Tian, Jiantao Zhou
Abstract: To protect deep neural networks (DNNs) from adversarial attacks, adversarial training (AT) is developed by incorporating adversarial examples (AEs) into model training. Recent studies show that adversarial attacks disproportionately impact the patterns within the phase of the sample's frequency spectrum -- typically containing crucial semantic information -- more than those in the amplitude, resulting in the model's erroneous categorization of AEs. We find that, by mixing the amplitude of training samples' frequency spectrum with those of distractor images for AT, the model can be guided to focus on phase patterns unaffected by adversarial perturbations. As a result, the model's robustness can be improved. Unfortunately, it is still challenging to select appropriate distractor images, which should mix the amplitude without affecting the phase patterns. To this end, in this paper, we propose an optimized Adversarial Amplitude Generator (AAG) to achieve a better tradeoff between improving the model's robustness and retaining phase patterns. Based on this generator, together with an efficient AE production procedure, we design a new Dual Adversarial Training (DAT) strategy. Experiments on various datasets show that our proposed DAT leads to significantly improved robustness against diverse adversarial attacks.
Authors: Guanghao Li, Yu Cao, Qi Chen, Yifan Yang, Jian Pu
Abstract: In point-line SLAM systems, the utilization of line structural information and the optimization of lines are two significant problems. The former is usually addressed through structural regularities, while the latter typically involves using minimal parameter representations of lines in optimization. However, separating these two steps leads to the loss of constraint information to each other. We anchor lines with similar directions to a principal axis and optimize them with $n+2$ parameters for $n$ lines, solving both problems together. Our method considers scene structural information, which can be easily extended to different world hypotheses while significantly reducing the number of line parameters to be optimized, enabling rapid and accurate mapping and tracking. To further enhance the system's robustness and avoid mismatch, we have modeled the line-axis probabilistic data association and provided the algorithm for axis creation, updating, and optimization. Additionally, considering that most real-world scenes conform to the Atlanta World hypothesis, we provide a structural line detection strategy based on vertical priors and vanishing points. Experimental results and ablation studies on various indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.
Authors: Oskar {\AA}str\"om, Alexandros Sopasakis
Abstract: We propose a novel Conditional Latent space Variational Autoencoder (CL-VAE) to perform improved pre-processing for anomaly detection on data with known inlier classes and unknown outlier classes. This proposed variational autoencoder (VAE) improves latent space separation by conditioning on information within the data. The method fits a unique prior distribution to each class in the dataset, effectively expanding the classic prior distribution for VAEs to include a Gaussian mixture model. An ensemble of these VAEs are merged in the latent spaces to form a group consensus that greatly improves the accuracy of anomaly detection across data sets. Our approach is compared against the capabilities of a typical VAE, a CNN, and a PCA, with regards AUC for anomaly detection. The proposed model shows increased accuracy in anomaly detection, achieving an AUC of 97.4% on the MNIST dataset compared to 95.7% for the second best model. In addition, the CL-VAE shows increased benefits from ensembling, a more interpretable latent space, and an increased ability to learn patterns in complex data with limited model sizes.
Authors: Moritz Rempe, Lukas Heine, Constantin Seibold, Fabian H\"orst, Jens Kleesiek
Abstract: Medical data employed in research frequently comprises sensitive patient health information (PHI), which is subject to rigorous legal frameworks such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Consequently, these types of data must be pseudonymized prior to utilisation, which presents a significant challenge for many researchers. Given the vast array of medical data, it is necessary to employ a variety of de-identification techniques. To facilitate the anonymization process for medical imaging data, we have developed an open-source tool that can be used to de-identify DICOM magnetic resonance images, computer tomography images, whole slide images and magnetic resonance twix raw data. Furthermore, the implementation of a neural network enables the removal of text within the images. The proposed tool automates an elaborate anonymization pipeline for multiple types of inputs, reducing the need for additional tools used for de-identification of imaging data. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/code-lukas/medical_image_deidentification.
URLs: https://github.com/code-lukas/medical_image_deidentification.
Authors: Arun N. Sivakumar, Federico Magistri, Mateus V. Gasparino, Jens Behley, Cyrill Stachniss, Girish Chowdhary
Abstract: Under-canopy agricultural robots can enable various applications like precise monitoring, spraying, weeding, and plant manipulation tasks throughout the growing season. Autonomous navigation under the canopy is challenging due to the degradation in accuracy of RTK-GPS and the large variability in the visual appearance of the scene over time. In prior work, we developed a supervised learning-based perception system with semantic keypoint representation and deployed this in various field conditions. A large number of failures of this system can be attributed to the inability of the perception model to adapt to the domain shift encountered during deployment. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised online adaptation method for adapting the semantic keypoint representation using a visual foundational model, geometric prior, and pseudo labeling. Our preliminary experiments show that with minimal data and fine-tuning of parameters, the keypoint prediction model trained with labels on the source domain can be adapted in a self-supervised manner to various challenging target domains onboard the robot computer using our method. This can enable fully autonomous row-following capability in under-canopy robots across fields and crops without requiring human intervention.
Authors: Jiajie Yang
Abstract: Recent advancements in Radiance Fields have significantly improved novel-view synthesis. However, in many real-world applications, the more advanced challenge lies in inverse rendering, which seeks to derive the physical properties of a scene, including light, geometry, textures, and materials. Meshes, as a traditional representation adopted by many simulation pipeline, however, still show limited influence in radiance field for inverse rendering. This paper introduces a novel framework called Triangle Patchlet (abbr. Triplet), a mesh-based representation, to comprehensively approximate these scene parameters. We begin by assembling Triplets with either randomly generated points or sparse points obtained from camera calibration where all faces are treated as an independent element. Next, we simulate the physical interaction of light and optimize the scene parameters using traditional graphics rendering techniques like rasterization and ray tracing, accompanying with density control and propagation. An iterative mesh extracting process is also suggested, where we continue to optimize on geometry and materials with graph-based operation. We also introduce several regulation terms to enable better generalization of materials property. Our framework could precisely estimate the light, materials and geometry with mesh without prior of light, materials and geometry in a unified framework. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art visual quality while reconstructing high-quality geometry and accurate material properties.
Authors: Yuxuan Cheng, Chenxi Shao, Jie Ma, Guoliang Li
Abstract: Medical image segmentation is a pivotal step in diagnostic and therapeutic processes. However, the acquisition of high-quality annotated data is often constrained by scarcity and cost. Semi-supervised learning offers a promising approach to enhance model performance by using unlabeled data. While consistency regularization is a prevalent method in semi-supervised image segmentation, there is a dearth of research on perturbation strategies tailored for semi-supervised medical image segmentation tasks. This paper introduces an attention-guided perturbation strategy for semi-supervised consistency regularization in the context of medical image segmentation. We add the perturbation based on the attention from the model in the image and feature level to achieve consistency regularization. The method is adept at accommodating the intricate structures and high-dimensional semantics inherent in medical images, thereby enhancing the performance of semi-supervised segmentation tasks. Our method achieved state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets, including a 90.4\% Dice score on the ACDC dataset in the 7-case scenario.
Authors: Hok Shing Wong, Matthias J. Ehrhardt, Subhadip Mukherjee
Abstract: We address the optimization problem in a data-driven variational reconstruction framework, where the regularizer is parameterized by an input-convex neural network (ICNN). While gradient-based methods are commonly used to solve such problems, they struggle to effectively handle non-smoothness which often leads to slow convergence. Moreover, the nested structure of the neural network complicates the application of standard non-smooth optimization techniques, such as proximal algorithms. To overcome these challenges, we reformulate the problem and eliminate the network's nested structure. By relating this reformulation to epigraphical projections of the activation functions, we transform the problem into a convex optimization problem that can be efficiently solved using a primal-dual algorithm. We also prove that this reformulation is equivalent to the original variational problem. Through experiments on several imaging tasks, we demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms subgradient methods in terms of both speed and stability.
Authors: Kathrin Khadra, Utku T\"urkbey
Abstract: The scarcity of publicly available medical imaging data limits the development of effective AI models. This work proposes a memory-efficient patch-wise denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) for generating synthetic medical images, focusing on CT scans with lung nodules. Our approach generates high-utility synthetic images with nodule segmentation while efficiently managing memory constraints, enabling the creation of training datasets. We evaluate the method in two scenarios: training a segmentation model exclusively on synthetic data, and augmenting real-world training data with synthetic images. In the first case, models trained solely on synthetic data achieve Dice scores comparable to those trained on real-world data benchmarks. In the second case, augmenting real-world data with synthetic images significantly improves segmentation performance. The generated images demonstrate their potential to enhance medical image datasets in scenarios with limited real-world data.
Authors: Kevin Frans, Danijar Hafner, Sergey Levine, Pieter Abbeel
Abstract: Diffusion models and flow-matching models have enabled generating diverse and realistic images by learning to transfer noise to data. However, sampling from these models involves iterative denoising over many neural network passes, making generation slow and expensive. Previous approaches for speeding up sampling require complex training regimes, such as multiple training phases, multiple networks, or fragile scheduling. We introduce shortcut models, a family of generative models that use a single network and training phase to produce high-quality samples in a single or multiple sampling steps. Shortcut models condition the network not only on the current noise level but also on the desired step size, allowing the model to skip ahead in the generation process. Across a wide range of sampling step budgets, shortcut models consistently produce higher quality samples than previous approaches, such as consistency models and reflow. Compared to distillation, shortcut models reduce complexity to a single network and training phase and additionally allow varying step budgets at inference time.
Authors: Md. Sohanur Rahman, Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury, Hasib Ryan Rahman, Mosabber Uddin Ahmed, Muhammad Ashad Kabir, Sanjiban Sekhar Roy, Rusab Sarmun
Abstract: In this study, we propose a novel and robust framework, Self-DenseMobileNet, designed to enhance the classification of nodules and non-nodules in chest radiographs (CXRs). Our approach integrates advanced image standardization and enhancement techniques to optimize the input quality, thereby improving classification accuracy. To enhance predictive accuracy and leverage the strengths of multiple models, the prediction probabilities from Self-DenseMobileNet were transformed into tabular data and used to train eight classical machine learning (ML) models; the top three performers were then combined via a stacking algorithm, creating a robust meta-classifier that integrates their collective insights for superior classification performance. To enhance the interpretability of our results, we employed class activation mapping (CAM) to visualize the decision-making process of the best-performing model. Our proposed framework demonstrated remarkable performance on internal validation data, achieving an accuracy of 99.28\% using a Meta-Random Forest Classifier. When tested on an external dataset, the framework maintained strong generalizability with an accuracy of 89.40\%. These results highlight a significant improvement in the classification of CXRs with lung nodules.
Authors: Danny Falero, Muhammad Ashad Kabir, Nusrat Homaira
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising tool for predicting COVID-19 from medical images. In this paper, we propose a novel continual learning-based approach and present the design and implementation of a mobile application for screening COVID-19. Our approach demonstrates the ability to adapt to evolving datasets, including data collected from different locations or hospitals, varying virus strains, and diverse clinical presentations, without retraining from scratch. We have evaluated state-of-the-art continual learning methods for detecting COVID-19 from chest X-rays and selected the best-performing model for our mobile app. We evaluated various deep learning architectures to select the best-performing one as a foundation model for continual learning. Both regularization and memory-based methods for continual learning were tested, using different memory sizes to develop the optimal continual learning model for our app. DenseNet161 emerged as the best foundation model with 96.87\% accuracy, and Learning without Forgetting (LwF) was the top continual learning method with an overall performance of 71.99\%. The mobile app design considers both patient and doctor perspectives. It incorporates the continual learning DenseNet161 LwF model on a cloud server, enabling the model to learn from new instances of chest X-rays and their classifications as they are submitted. The app is designed, implemented, and evaluated to ensure it provides an efficient tool for COVID-19 screening. The app is available to download from https://github.com/DannyFGitHub/COVID-19PneumoCheckApp.
URLs: https://github.com/DannyFGitHub/COVID-19PneumoCheckApp.
Authors: Yedi Hu, Yunzhi Yao, Ningyu Zhang, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen
Abstract: Model merging has become one of the key technologies for enhancing the capabilities and efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, our understanding of the expected performance gains and principles when merging any two models remains limited. In this work, we introduce model kinship, the degree of similarity or relatedness between LLMs, analogous to biological evolution. With comprehensive empirical analysis, we find that there is a certain relationship between model kinship and the performance gains after model merging, which can help guide our selection of candidate models. Inspired by this, we propose a new model merging strategy: Top-k Greedy Merging with Model Kinship, which can yield better performance on benchmark datasets. Specifically, we discover that using model kinship as a criterion can assist us in continuously performing model merging, alleviating the degradation (local optima) in model evolution, whereas model kinship can serve as a guide to escape these traps. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/ModelKinship.
Authors: Luca Marsilio, Davide Marzorati, Matteo Rossi, Andrea Moglia, Luca Mainardi, Alfonso Manzotti, Pietro Cerveri
Abstract: Osteoarthritis is a degenerative condition affecting bones and cartilage, often leading to osteophyte formation, bone density loss, and joint space narrowing. Treatment options to restore normal joint function vary depending on the severity of the condition. This work introduces an innovative deep-learning framework processing shoulder CT scans. It features the semantic segmentation of the proximal humerus and scapula, the 3D reconstruction of bone surfaces, the identification of the glenohumeral (GH) joint region, and the staging of three common osteoarthritic-related pathologies: osteophyte formation (OS), GH space reduction (JS), and humeroscapular alignment (HSA). The pipeline comprises two cascaded CNN architectures: 3D CEL-UNet for segmentation and 3D Arthro-Net for threefold classification. A retrospective dataset of 571 CT scans featuring patients with various degrees of GH osteoarthritic-related pathologies was used to train, validate, and test the pipeline. Root mean squared error and Hausdorff distance median values for 3D reconstruction were 0.22mm and 1.48mm for the humerus and 0.24mm and 1.48mm for the scapula, outperforming state-of-the-art architectures and making it potentially suitable for a PSI-based shoulder arthroplasty preoperative plan context. The classification accuracy for OS, JS, and HSA consistently reached around 90% across all three categories. The computational time for the inference pipeline was less than 15s, showcasing the framework's efficiency and compatibility with orthopedic radiology practice. The outcomes represent a promising advancement toward the medical translation of artificial intelligence tools. This progress aims to streamline the preoperative planning pipeline delivering high-quality bone surfaces and supporting surgeons in selecting the most suitable surgical approach according to the unique patient joint conditions.
Authors: Genta Indra Winata, Frederikus Hudi, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, David Anugraha, Rifki Afina Putri, Yutong Wang, Adam Nohejl, Ubaidillah Ariq Prathama, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Afifa Amriani, Anar Rzayev, Anirban Das, Ashmari Pramodya, Aulia Adila, Bryan Wilie, Candy Olivia Mawalim, Ching Lam Cheng, Daud Abolade, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Fariz Ikhwantri, Garry Kuwanto, Hanyang Zhao, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Holy Lovenia, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Jan Wira Gotama Putra, Junho Myung, Lucky Susanto, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Marina Zhukova, Michael Anugraha, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Natasha Santosa, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raj Dabre, Rio Alexander Audino, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephanie Yulia Salim, Yi Zhou, Yinxuan Gui, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Shogo Okada, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji, Taro Watanabe, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Alice Oh, Chong-Wah Ngo
Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with culture-specific knowledge, particularly in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. To evaluate their understanding of such knowledge, we introduce WorldCuisines, a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicultural, visually grounded language understanding. This benchmark includes a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects, spanning 9 language families and featuring over 1 million data points, making it the largest multicultural VQA benchmark to date. It includes tasks for identifying dish names and their origins. We provide evaluation datasets in two sizes (12k and 60k instances) alongside a training dataset (1 million instances). Our findings show that while VLMs perform better with correct location context, they struggle with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. To support future research, we release a knowledge base with annotated food entries and images along with the VQA data.
Authors: Bolin Lai, Miao Liu, Fiona Ryan, James M. Rehg
Abstract: In this paper, we present the first transformer-based model to address the challenging problem of egocentric gaze estimation. We observe that the connection between the global scene context and local visual information is vital for localizing the gaze fixation from egocentric video frames. To this end, we design the transformer encoder to embed the global context as one additional visual token and further propose a novel Global-Local Correlation (GLC) module to explicitly model the correlation of the global token and each local token. We validate our model on two egocentric video datasets - EGTEA Gaze+ and Ego4D. Our detailed ablation studies demonstrate the benefits of our method. In addition, our approach exceeds previous state-of-the-arts by a large margin. We also provide additional visualizations to support our claim that global-local correlation serves a key representation for predicting gaze fixation from egocentric videos. More details can be found in our website (https://bolinlai.github.io/GLC-EgoGazeEst).
Authors: Florinel-Alin Croitoru, Vlad Hondru, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Mubarak Shah
Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models have recently attracted the interest of many researchers, and inverting the diffusion process can play an important role in better understanding the generative process and how to engineer prompts in order to obtain the desired images. To this end, we study the task of predicting the prompt embedding given an image generated by a generative diffusion model. We consider a series of white-box and black-box models (with and without access to the weights of the diffusion network) to deal with the proposed task. We propose a novel learning framework comprising a joint prompt regression and multi-label vocabulary classification objective that generates improved prompts. To further improve our method, we employ a curriculum learning procedure that promotes the learning of image-prompt pairs with lower labeling noise (i.e. that are better aligned). We conduct experiments on the DiffusionDB data set, predicting text prompts from images generated by Stable Diffusion. In addition, we make an interesting discovery: training a diffusion model on the prompt generation task can make the model generate images that are much better aligned with the input prompts, when the model is directly reused for text-to-image generation. Our code is publicly available for download at https://github.com/CroitoruAlin/Reverse-Stable-Diffusion.
URLs: https://github.com/CroitoruAlin/Reverse-Stable-Diffusion.
Authors: Yinpeng Chen, Dongdong Chen, Xiyang Dai, Mengchen Liu, Yinan Feng, Youzuo Lin, Lu Yuan, Zicheng Liu
Abstract: In this paper, we empirically reveal an invariance over images-images share a set of one-way wave equations with latent speeds. Each image is uniquely associated with a solution to these wave equations, allowing for its reconstruction with high fidelity from an initial condition. We demonstrate it using an intuitive encoder-decoder framework where each image is encoded into its corresponding initial condition (a single vector). Subsequently, the initial condition undergoes a specialized decoder, transforming the one-way wave equations into a first-order norm + linear autoregressive process. This process propagates the initial condition along the x and y directions, generating a high-resolution feature map (up to the image resolution), followed by a few convolutional layers to reconstruct image pixels. The revealed invariance, rooted in the shared wave equations, offers a fresh perspective for comprehending images, establishing a promising avenue for further exploration.
Authors: Xiaodan Du, Nicholas Kolkin, Greg Shakhnarovich, Anand Bhattad
Abstract: Generative models excel at mimicking real scenes, suggesting they might inherently encode important intrinsic scene properties. In this paper, we aim to explore the following key questions: (1) What intrinsic knowledge do generative models like GANs, Autoregressive models, and Diffusion models encode? (2) Can we establish a general framework to recover intrinsic representations from these models, regardless of their architecture or model type? (3) How minimal can the required learnable parameters and labeled data be to successfully recover this knowledge? (4) Is there a direct link between the quality of a generative model and the accuracy of the recovered scene intrinsics? Our findings indicate that a small Low-Rank Adaptators (LoRA) can recover intrinsic images-depth, normals, albedo and shading-across different generators (Autoregressive, GANs and Diffusion) while using the same decoder head that generates the image. As LoRA is lightweight, we introduce very few learnable parameters (as few as 0.04% of Stable Diffusion model weights for a rank of 2), and we find that as few as 250 labeled images are enough to generate intrinsic images with these LoRA modules. Finally, we also show a positive correlation between the generative model's quality and the accuracy of the recovered intrinsics through control experiments.
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Siyu Ren, Junhui Hou, Jinjian Wu, Yixuan Yuan, Guangming Shi
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel self-supervised learning framework for enhancing 3D perception in autonomous driving scenes. Specifically, our approach, namely NCLR, focuses on 2D-3D neural calibration, a novel pretext task that estimates the rigid pose aligning camera and LiDAR coordinate systems. First, we propose the learnable transformation alignment to bridge the domain gap between image and point cloud data, converting features into a unified representation space for effective comparison and matching. Second, we identify the overlapping area between the image and point cloud with the fused features. Third, we establish dense 2D-3D correspondences to estimate the rigid pose. The framework not only learns fine-grained matching from points to pixels but also achieves alignment of the image and point cloud at a holistic level, understanding their relative pose. We demonstrate the efficacy of NCLR by applying the pre-trained backbone to downstream tasks, such as LiDAR-based 3D semantic segmentation, object detection, and panoptic segmentation. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets illustrate the superiority of NCLR over existing self-supervised methods. The results confirm that joint learning from different modalities significantly enhances the network's understanding abilities and effectiveness of learned representation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Eaphan/NCLR.
Authors: Fu-Yun Wang, Zhaoyang Huang, Weikang Bian, Xiaoyu Shi, Keqiang Sun, Guanglu Song, Yu Liu, Hongsheng Li
Abstract: This paper introduces an effective method for computation-efficient personalized style video generation without requiring access to any personalized video data. It reduces the necessary generation time of similarly sized video diffusion models from 25 seconds to around 1 second while maintaining the same level of performance. The method's effectiveness lies in its dual-level decoupling learning approach: 1) separating the learning of video style from video generation acceleration, which allows for personalized style video generation without any personalized style video data, and 2) separating the acceleration of image generation from the acceleration of video motion generation, enhancing training efficiency and mitigating the negative effects of low-quality video data.
Authors: Yunji Jung, Seokju Lee, Tair Djanibekov, Hyunjung Shim, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Text-guided non-rigid editing involves complex edits for input images, such as changing motion or compositions within their surroundings. Since it requires manipulating the input structure, existing methods often struggle with preserving object identity and background, particularly when combined with Stable Diffusion. In this work, we propose a training-free approach for non-rigid editing with Stable Diffusion, aimed at improving the identity preservation quality without compromising editability. Our approach comprises three stages: text optimization, latent inversion, and timestep-aware text injection sampling. Inspired by the success of Imagic, we employ their text optimization for smooth editing. Then, we introduce latent inversion to preserve the input image's identity without additional model fine-tuning. To fully utilize the input reconstruction ability of latent inversion, we suggest timestep-aware text injection sampling. This effectively retains the structure of the input image by injecting the source text prompt in early sampling steps and then transitioning to the target prompt in subsequent sampling steps. This strategic approach seamlessly harmonizes with text optimization, facilitating complex non-rigid edits to the input without losing the original identity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of identity preservation, editability, and aesthetic quality through extensive experiments.
Authors: Jieren Deng, Haojian Zhang, Kun Ding, Jianhua Hu, Xingxuan Zhang, Yunkuan Wang
Abstract: This paper presents Incremental Vision-Language Object Detection (IVLOD), a novel learning task designed to incrementally adapt pre-trained Vision-Language Object Detection Models (VLODMs) to various specialized domains, while simultaneously preserving their zero-shot generalization capabilities for the generalized domain. To address this new challenge, we present the Zero-interference Reparameterizable Adaptation (ZiRa), a novel method that introduces Zero-interference Loss and reparameterization techniques to tackle IVLOD without incurring additional inference costs or a significant increase in memory usage. Comprehensive experiments on COCO and ODinW-13 datasets demonstrate that ZiRa effectively safeguards the zero-shot generalization ability of VLODMs while continuously adapting to new tasks. Specifically, after training on ODinW-13 datasets, ZiRa exhibits superior performance compared to CL-DETR and iDETR, boosting zero-shot generalizability by substantial 13.91 and 8.74 AP, respectively.Our code is available at https://github.com/JarintotionDin/ZiRaGroundingDINO.
Authors: Wangbo Zhao, Jiasheng Tang, Yizeng Han, Yibing Song, Kai Wang, Gao Huang, Fan Wang, Yang You
Abstract: Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have achieved significant success on vision transformers (ViTs) adaptation by improving parameter efficiency. However, the exploration of enhancing inference efficiency during adaptation remains underexplored. This limits the broader application of pre-trained ViT models, especially when the model is computationally extensive. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Tuning (DyT), a novel approach to improve both parameter and inference efficiency for ViT adaptation. Specifically, besides using the lightweight adapter modules, we propose a token dispatcher to distinguish informative tokens from less important ones, allowing the latter to dynamically skip the original block, thereby reducing the redundant computation during inference. Additionally, we explore multiple design variants to find the best practice of DyT. Finally, inspired by the mixture-of-experts (MoE) mechanism, we introduce an enhanced adapter to further boost the adaptation performance. We validate DyT across various tasks, including image/video recognition and semantic segmentation. For instance, DyT achieves superior performance compared to existing PEFT methods while evoking only 71% of their FLOPs on the VTAB-1K benchmark.
Authors: Guangchi Fang, Bing Wang
Abstract: In this study, we explore the challenge of efficiently representing scenes with a constrained number of Gaussians. Our analysis shifts from traditional graphics and 2D computer vision to the perspective of point clouds, highlighting the inefficient spatial distribution of Gaussian representation as a key limitation in model performance. To address this, we introduce strategies for densification including blur split and depth reinitialization, and simplification through intersection preserving and sampling. These techniques reorganize the spatial positions of the Gaussians, resulting in significant improvements across various datasets and benchmarks in terms of rendering quality, resource consumption, and storage compression. Our Mini-Splatting integrates seamlessly with the original rasterization pipeline, providing a strong baseline for future research in Gaussian-Splatting-based works. \href{https://github.com/fatPeter/mini-splatting}{Code is available}.
Authors: Ibrahim Ethem Hamamci, Sezgin Er, Furkan Almas, Ayse Gulnihan Simsek, Sevval Nil Esirgun, Irem Dogan, Muhammed Furkan Dasdelen, Omer Faruk Durugol, Bastian Wittmann, Tamaz Amiranashvili, Enis Simsar, Mehmet Simsar, Emine Bensu Erdemir, Abdullah Alanbay, Anjany Sekuboyina, Berkan Lafci, Christian Bluethgen, Mehmet Kemal Ozdemir, Bjoern Menze
Abstract: While computer vision has achieved tremendous success with multimodal encoding and direct textual interaction with images via chat-based large language models, similar advancements in medical imaging AI, particularly in 3D imaging, have been limited due to the scarcity of comprehensive datasets. To address this critical gap, we introduce CT-RATE, the first dataset that pairs 3D medical images with corresponding textual reports. CT-RATE comprises 25,692 non-contrast 3D chest CT scans from 21,304 unique patients. Through various reconstructions, these scans are expanded to 50,188 volumes, totaling over 14.3 million 2D slices. Each scan is accompanied by its corresponding radiology report. Leveraging CT-RATE, we develop CT-CLIP, a CT-focused contrastive language-image pretraining framework designed for broad applications without the need for task-specific training. We demonstrate how CT-CLIP can be used in two tasks: multi-abnormality detection and case retrieval. Remarkably, in multi-abnormality detection, CT-CLIP outperforms state-of-the-art fully supervised models across all key metrics, effectively eliminating the need for manual annotation. In case retrieval, it efficiently retrieves relevant cases using either image or textual queries, thereby enhancing knowledge dissemination. By combining CT-CLIP's vision encoder with a pretrained large language model, we create CT-CHAT, a vision-language foundational chat model for 3D chest CT volumes. Finetuned on over 2.7 million question-answer pairs derived from the CT-RATE dataset, CT-CHAT surpasses other multimodal AI assistants, underscoring the necessity for specialized methods in 3D medical imaging. Collectively, the open-source release of CT-RATE, CT-CLIP, and CT-CHAT not only addresses critical challenges in 3D medical imaging but also lays the groundwork for future innovations in medical AI and improved patient care.
Authors: Shadi Alijani, Jamil Fayyad, Homayoun Najjaran
Abstract: Deep learning models are often evaluated in scenarios where the data distribution is different from those used in the training and validation phases. The discrepancy presents a challenge for accurately predicting the performance of models once deployed on the target distribution. Domain adaptation and generalization are widely recognized as effective strategies for addressing such shifts, thereby ensuring reliable performance. The recent promising results in applying vision transformers in computer vision tasks, coupled with advancements in self-attention mechanisms, have demonstrated their significant potential for robustness and generalization in handling distribution shifts. Motivated by the increased interest from the research community, our paper investigates the deployment of vision transformers in domain adaptation and domain generalization scenarios. For domain adaptation methods, we categorize research into feature-level, instance-level, model-level adaptations, and hybrid approaches, along with other categorizations with respect to diverse strategies for enhancing domain adaptation. Similarly, for domain generalization, we categorize research into multi-domain learning, meta-learning, regularization techniques, and data augmentation strategies. We further classify diverse strategies in research, underscoring the various approaches researchers have taken to address distribution shifts by integrating vision transformers. The inclusion of comprehensive tables summarizing these categories is a distinct feature of our work, offering valuable insights for researchers. These findings highlight the versatility of vision transformers in managing distribution shifts, crucial for real-world applications, especially in critical safety and decision-making scenarios.
Authors: Marc Guti\'errez-P\'erez, Antonio Agudo
Abstract: Broadcast sports field registration is traditionally addressed as a homography estimation task, mapping the visible image area to a planar field model, predominantly focusing on the main camera shot. Addressing the shortcomings of previous approaches, we propose a novel calibration pipeline enabling camera calibration using a 3D soccer field model and extending the process to assess the multiple-view nature of broadcast videos. Our approach begins with a keypoint generation pipeline derived from SoccerNet dataset annotations, leveraging the geometric properties of the court. Subsequently, we execute classical camera calibration through DLT algorithm in a minimalist fashion, without further refinement. Through extensive experimentation on real-world soccer broadcast datasets such as SoccerNet-Calibration, WorldCup 2014 and TS- WorldCup, our method demonstrates superior performance in both multiple- and single-view 3D camera calibration while maintaining competitive results in homography estimation compared to state-of-the-art techniques.
Authors: Jinliang Zheng, Jianxiong Li, Sijie Cheng, Yinan Zheng, Jiaming Li, Jihao Liu, Yu Liu, Jingjing Liu, Xianyuan Zhan
Abstract: Instruction following is crucial in contemporary LLM. However, when extended to multimodal setting, it often suffers from misalignment between specific textual instruction and targeted local region of an image. To achieve more accurate and nuanced multimodal instruction following, we introduce Instruction-guided Visual Masking (IVM), a new versatile visual grounding model that is compatible with diverse multimodal models, such as LMM and robot model. By constructing visual masks for instruction-irrelevant regions, IVM-enhanced multimodal models can effectively focus on task-relevant image regions to better align with complex instructions. Specifically, we design a visual masking data generation pipeline and create an IVM-Mix-1M dataset with 1 million image-instruction pairs. We further introduce a new learning technique, Discriminator Weighted Supervised Learning (DWSL) for preferential IVM training that prioritizes high-quality data samples. Experimental results on generic multimodal tasks such as VQA and embodied robotic control demonstrate the versatility of IVM, which as a plug-and-play tool, significantly boosts the performance of diverse multimodal models, yielding new state-of-the-art results across challenging multimodal benchmarks. Code, model and data are available at https://github.com/2toinf/IVM.
Authors: Jihe Li, Xiang Liu, Fabian Zhang, Xia Li, Xixin Cao, Ye Zhang, Joachim Buhmann
Abstract: Deformable Image Registration (DIR) is essential for aligning medical images that exhibit anatomical variations, facilitating applications such as disease tracking and radiotherapy planning. While classical iterative methods and deep learning approaches have achieved success in DIR, they are often hindered by computational inefficiency or poor generalization. In this paper, we introduce GaussianDIR, a novel, case-specific optimization DIR method inspired by 3D Gaussian splatting. In general, GaussianDIR represents image deformations using a sparse set of mobile and flexible Gaussian primitives, each defined by a center position, covariance, and local rigid transformation. This compact and explicit representation reduces noise and computational overhead while improving interpretability. Furthermore, the movement of individual voxel is derived via blending the local rigid transformation of the neighboring Gaussian primitives. By this, GaussianDIR captures both global smoothness and local rigidity as well as reduces the computational burden. To address varying levels of deformation complexity, GaussianDIR also integrates an adaptive density control mechanism that dynamically adjusts the density of Gaussian primitives. Additionally, we employ multi-scale Gaussian primitives to capture both coarse and fine deformations, reducing optimization to local minima. Experimental results on brain MRI, lung CT, and cardiac MRI datasets demonstrate that GaussianDIR outperforms existing DIR methods in both accuracy and efficiency, highlighting its potential for clinical applications. Finally, as a training-free approach, it challenges the stereotype that iterative methods are inherently slow and transcend the limitations of poor generalization.
Authors: Liyan Wang, Cong Wang, Jinshan Pan, Xiaofeng Liu, Weixiang Zhou, Xiaoran Sun, Wei Wang, Zhixun Su
Abstract: Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) image restoration has acquired remarkable attention due to its practical demand. In this paper, we construct UHD snow and rain benchmarks, named UHD-Snow and UHD-Rain, to remedy the deficiency in this field. The UHD-Snow/UHD-Rain is established by simulating the physics process of rain/snow into consideration and each benchmark contains 3200 degraded/clear image pairs of 4K resolution. Furthermore, we propose an effective UHD image restoration solution by considering gradient and normal priors in model design thanks to these priors' spatial and detail contributions. Specifically, our method contains two branches: (a) feature fusion and reconstruction branch in high-resolution space and (b) prior feature interaction branch in low-resolution space. The former learns high-resolution features and fuses prior-guided low-resolution features to reconstruct clear images, while the latter utilizes normal and gradient priors to mine useful spatial features and detail features to guide high-resolution recovery better. To better utilize these priors, we introduce single prior feature interaction and dual prior feature interaction, where the former respectively fuses normal and gradient priors with high-resolution features to enhance prior ones, while the latter calculates the similarity between enhanced prior ones and further exploits dual guided filtering to boost the feature interaction of dual priors. We conduct experiments on both new and existing public datasets and demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method on UHD image low-light enhancement, dehazing, deblurring, desonwing, and deraining. The source codes and benchmarks are available at \url{https://github.com/wlydlut/UHDDIP}.
Authors: Savva Ignatyev, Nina Konovalova, Daniil Selikhanovych, Oleg Voynov, Nikolay Patakin, Ilya Olkov, Dmitry Senushkin, Alexey Artemov, Anton Konushin, Alexander Filippov, Peter Wonka, Evgeny Burnaev
Abstract: We tackle the problem of text-driven 3D generation from a geometry alignment perspective. Given a set of text prompts, we aim to generate a collection of objects with semantically corresponding parts aligned across them. Recent methods based on Score Distillation have succeeded in distilling the knowledge from 2D diffusion models to high-quality representations of the 3D objects. These methods handle multiple text queries separately, and therefore the resulting objects have a high variability in object pose and structure. However, in some applications, such as 3D asset design, it may be desirable to obtain a set of objects aligned with each other. In order to achieve the alignment of the corresponding parts of the generated objects, we propose to embed these objects into a common latent space and optimize the continuous transitions between these objects. We enforce two kinds of properties of these transitions: smoothness of the transition and plausibility of the intermediate objects along the transition. We demonstrate that both of these properties are essential for good alignment. We provide several practical scenarios that benefit from alignment between the objects, including 3D editing and object hybridization, and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. https://voyleg.github.io/a3d/
Authors: Michael Welter
Abstract: Deep learning has been impressively successful in the last decade in predicting human head poses from monocular images. However, for in-the-wild inputs the research community relies predominantly on a single training set, 300W-LP, of semisynthetic nature without many alternatives. This paper focuses on gradual extension and improvement of the data to explore the performance achievable with augmentation and synthesis strategies further. Modeling-wise a novel multitask head/loss design which includes uncertainty estimation is proposed. Overall, the thus obtained models are small, efficient, suitable for full 6 DoF pose estimation, and exhibit very competitive accuracy.
Authors: Jooyeol Yun, Jaegul Choo
Abstract: The task of personalized image aesthetic assessment seeks to tailor aesthetic score prediction models to match individual preferences with just a few user-provided inputs. However, the scalability and generalization capabilities of current approaches are considerably restricted by their reliance on an expensive curated database. To overcome this long-standing scalability challenge, we present a unique approach that leverages readily available databases for general image aesthetic assessment and image quality assessment. Specifically, we view each database as a distinct image score regression task that exhibits varying degrees of personalization potential. By determining optimal combinations of task vectors, known to represent specific traits of each database, we successfully create personalized models for individuals. This approach of integrating multiple models allows us to harness a substantial amount of data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generalizing to previously unseen domains-a challenge previous approaches have struggled to achieve-making it highly applicable to real-world scenarios. Our novel approach significantly advances the field by offering scalable solutions for personalized aesthetic assessment and establishing high standards for future research. https://yeolj00.github.io/personal-projects/personalized-aesthetics/
URLs: https://yeolj00.github.io/personal-projects/personalized-aesthetics/
Authors: Jinlong Li, Dong Zhao, Zequn Jie, Elisa Ricci, Lin Ma, Nicu Sebe
Abstract: Efficient fine-tuning of vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP for specific downstream tasks is gaining significant attention. Previous works primarily focus on prompt learning to adapt the CLIP into a variety of downstream tasks, however, suffering from task overfitting when fine-tuned on a small data set. In this paper, we introduce an orthogonal fine-tuning method for efficiently fine-tuning pretrained weights and enabling enhanced robustness and generalization, while a self-regularization strategy is further exploited to maintain the stability in terms of zero-shot generalization of VLMs, dubbed OrthSR. Specifically, trainable orthogonal matrices are injected seamlessly into the transformer architecture and enforced with orthogonality constraint during the training, benefiting from the norm-preserving property and thus leading to stable and faster convergence, while keeping the pre-trained weights frozen. To alleviate deviation from fine-tuning, a self-regularization strategy is further employed to retain the generalization of the model during the training within a bypass manner. In addition, to enrich the sample diversity for downstream tasks under the small dataset scenario, we first explore attentive CutOut data augmentation to boost the efficient fine-tuning, leading to better model fitting capacity for specific downstream task. Then we support the theoretical analysis on how our approach improves the specific downstream performance and maintains the generalizability. For the first time, we revisit the CLIP and CoOp with our method to effectively improve the model on few-shot image classficiation scenario on par with the elaborated prompt learning methods.
Authors: Han Ling, Quansen Sun
Abstract: Perceiving and understanding 3D motion is a core technology in fields such as autonomous driving, robots, and motion prediction. This paper proposes a 3D motion perception method called ScaleFlow++ that is easy to generalize. With just a pair of RGB images, ScaleFlow++ can robustly estimate optical flow and motion-in-depth (MID). Most existing methods directly regress MID from two RGB frames or optical flow, resulting in inaccurate and unstable results. Our key insight is cross-scale matching, which extracts deep motion clues by matching objects in pairs of images at different scales. Unlike previous methods, ScaleFlow++ integrates optical flow and MID estimation into a unified architecture, estimating optical flow and MID end-to-end based on feature matching. Moreover, we also proposed modules such as global initialization network, global iterative optimizer, and hybrid training pipeline to integrate global motion information, reduce the number of iterations, and prevent overfitting during training. On KITTI, ScaleFlow++ achieved the best monocular scene flow estimation performance, reducing SF-all from 6.21 to 5.79. The evaluation of MID even surpasses RGBD-based methods. In addition, ScaleFlow++ has achieved stunning zero-shot generalization performance in both rigid and nonrigid scenes. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/HanLingsgjk/CSCV}.
Authors: Yu Xie, Qian Qiao, Jun Gao, Tianxiang Wu, Jiaqing Fan, Yue Zhang, Jielei Zhang, Huyang Sun
Abstract: More and more end-to-end text spotting methods based on Transformer architecture have demonstrated superior performance. These methods utilize a bipartite graph matching algorithm to perform one-to-one optimal matching between predicted objects and actual objects. However, the instability of bipartite graph matching can lead to inconsistent optimization targets, thereby affecting the training performance of the model. Existing literature applies denoising training to solve the problem of bipartite graph matching instability in object detection tasks. Unfortunately, this denoising training method cannot be directly applied to text spotting tasks, as these tasks need to perform irregular shape detection tasks and more complex text recognition tasks than classification. To address this issue, we propose a novel denoising training method (DNTextSpotter) for arbitrary-shaped text spotting. Specifically, we decompose the queries of the denoising part into noised positional queries and noised content queries. We use the four Bezier control points of the Bezier center curve to generate the noised positional queries. For the noised content queries, considering that the output of the text in a fixed positional order is not conducive to aligning position with content, we employ a masked character sliding method to initialize noised content queries, thereby assisting in the alignment of text content and position. To improve the model's perception of the background, we further utilize an additional loss function for background characters classification in the denoising training part.Although DNTextSpotter is conceptually simple, it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four benchmarks (Total-Text, SCUT-CTW1500, ICDAR15, and Inverse-Text), especially yielding an improvement of 11.3% against the best approach in Inverse-Text dataset.
Authors: Renjith Prasad, Chathurangi Shyalika, Ramtin Zand, Fadi El Kalach, Revathy Venkataramanan, Ramy Harik, Amit Sheth
Abstract: Anomaly detection in manufacturing pipelines remains a critical challenge, intensified by the complexity and variability of industrial environments. This paper introduces AssemAI, an interpretable image-based anomaly detection system tailored for smart manufacturing pipelines. Utilizing a curated image dataset from an industry-focused rocket assembly pipeline, we address the challenge of imbalanced image data and demonstrate the importance of image-based methods in anomaly detection. Our primary contributions include deriving an image dataset, fine-tuning an object detection model YOLO-FF, and implementing a custom anomaly detection model for assembly pipelines. The proposed approach leverages domain knowledge in data preparation, model development and reasoning. We implement several anomaly detection models on the derived image dataset, including a Convolutional Neural Network, Vision Transformer (ViT), and pre-trained versions of these models. Additionally, we incorporate explainability techniques at both user and model levels, utilizing ontology for user-level explanations and SCORE-CAM for in-depth feature and model analysis. Finally, the best-performing anomaly detection model and YOLO-FF are deployed in a real-time setting. Our results include ablation studies on the baselines and a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed system. This work highlights the broader impact of advanced image-based anomaly detection in enhancing the reliability and efficiency of smart manufacturing processes. The image dataset, codes to reproduce the results and additional experiments are available at https://github.com/renjithk4/AssemAI.
Authors: Junde Wu, Jiayuan Zhu, Yunli Qi, Jingkun Chen, Min Xu, Filippo Menolascina, Vicente Grau
Abstract: We introduce a novel graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework specifically designed for the medical domain, called \textbf{MedGraphRAG}, aimed at enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities for generating evidence-based medical responses, thereby improving safety and reliability when handling private medical data. Graph-based RAG (GraphRAG) leverages LLMs to organize RAG data into graphs, showing strong potential for gaining holistic insights from long-form documents. However, its standard implementation is overly complex for general use and lacks the ability to generate evidence-based responses, limiting its effectiveness in the medical field. To extend the capabilities of GraphRAG to the medical domain, we propose unique Triple Graph Construction and U-Retrieval techniques over it. In our graph construction, we create a triple-linked structure that connects user documents to credible medical sources and controlled vocabularies. In the retrieval process, we propose U-Retrieval which combines Top-down Precise Retrieval with Bottom-up Response Refinement to balance global context awareness with precise indexing. These effort enable both source information retrieval and comprehensive response generation. Our approach is validated on 9 medical Q\&A benchmarks, 2 health fact-checking benchmarks, and one collected dataset testing long-form generation. The results show that MedGraphRAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models across all benchmarks, while also ensuring that responses include credible source documentation and definitions. Our code is released at: https://github.com/MedicineToken/Medical-Graph-RAG.
Authors: Yifan Feng, Jiangang Huang, Shaoyi Du, Shihui Ying, Jun-Hai Yong, Yipeng Li, Guiguang Ding, Rongrong Ji, Yue Gao
Abstract: We introduce Hyper-YOLO, a new object detection method that integrates hypergraph computations to capture the complex high-order correlations among visual features. Traditional YOLO models, while powerful, have limitations in their neck designs that restrict the integration of cross-level features and the exploitation of high-order feature interrelationships. To address these challenges, we propose the Hypergraph Computation Empowered Semantic Collecting and Scattering (HGC-SCS) framework, which transposes visual feature maps into a semantic space and constructs a hypergraph for high-order message propagation. This enables the model to acquire both semantic and structural information, advancing beyond conventional feature-focused learning. Hyper-YOLO incorporates the proposed Mixed Aggregation Network (MANet) in its backbone for enhanced feature extraction and introduces the Hypergraph-Based Cross-Level and Cross-Position Representation Network (HyperC2Net) in its neck. HyperC2Net operates across five scales and breaks free from traditional grid structures, allowing for sophisticated high-order interactions across levels and positions. This synergy of components positions Hyper-YOLO as a state-of-the-art architecture in various scale models, as evidenced by its superior performance on the COCO dataset. Specifically, Hyper-YOLO-N significantly outperforms the advanced YOLOv8-N and YOLOv9-T with 12\% $\text{AP}^{val}$ and 9\% $\text{AP}^{val}$ improvements. The source codes are at ttps://github.com/iMoonLab/Hyper-YOLO.
Authors: Xinjie Jiang, Chenxi Zheng, Xuemiao Xu, Bangzhen Liu, Weiying Zheng, Huaidong Zhang, Shengfeng He
Abstract: Video Visual Relation Detection (VidVRD) focuses on understanding how entities interact over time and space in videos, a key step for gaining deeper insights into video scenes beyond basic visual tasks. Traditional methods for VidVRD, challenged by its complexity, typically split the task into two parts: one for identifying what relation categories are present and another for determining their temporal boundaries. This split overlooks the inherent connection between these elements. Addressing the need to recognize entity pairs' spatiotemporal interactions across a range of durations, we propose VrdONE, a streamlined yet efficacious one-stage model. VrdONE combines the features of subjects and objects, turning predicate detection into 1D instance segmentation on their combined representations. This setup allows for both relation category identification and binary mask generation in one go, eliminating the need for extra steps like proposal generation or post-processing. VrdONE facilitates the interaction of features across various frames, adeptly capturing both short-lived and enduring relations. Additionally, we introduce the Subject-Object Synergy (SOS) module, enhancing how subjects and objects perceive each other before combining. VrdONE achieves state-of-the-art performances on the VidOR benchmark and ImageNet-VidVRD, showcasing its superior capability in discerning relations across different temporal scales. The code is available at https://github.com/lucaspk512/vrdone.
Authors: Shengzhu Yang, Jiawei Du, Jia Guo, Weihang Zhang, Hanruo Liu, Huiqi Li, Ningli Wang
Abstract: Subtle semantic differences in retinal image and text data present great challenges for pre-training visual-language models. Moreover, false negative samples, i.e., image-text pairs having the same semantics but incorrectly regarded as negatives, disrupt the visual-language pre-training process and affect the model's learning ability. This work aims to develop a retinal foundation model, called ViLReF, by pre-training on a paired dataset comprising 451,956 retinal images and corresponding diagnostic text reports. In our vision-language pre-training strategy, we leverage expert knowledge to facilitate the extraction of labels and propose a novel constraint, the Weighted Similarity Coupling Loss, to adjust the speed of pushing sample pairs further apart dynamically within the feature space. Furthermore, we employ a batch expansion module with dynamic memory queues, maintained by momentum encoders, to supply extra samples and compensate for the vacancies caused by eliminating false negatives. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple datasets for downstream classification and segmentation tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the powerful zero-shot and transfer learning capabilities of ViLReF, verifying the effectiveness of our pre-training strategy. Our ViLReF model is available at: https://github.com/T6Yang/ViLReF.
Authors: Yepeng Liu, Baosheng Yu, Tian Chen, Yuliang Gu, Bo Du, Yongchao Xu, Jun Cheng
Abstract: Retinal image registration plays an important role in the ophthalmological diagnosis process. Since there exist variances in viewing angles and anatomical structures across different retinal images, keypoint-based approaches become the mainstream methods for retinal image registration thanks to their robustness and low latency. These methods typically assume the retinal surfaces are planar, and adopt feature matching to obtain the homography matrix that represents the global transformation between images. Yet, such a planar hypothesis inevitably introduces registration errors since retinal surface is approximately curved. This limitation is more prominent when registering image pairs with significant differences in viewing angles. To address this problem, we propose a hybrid registration framework called HybridRetina, which progressively registers retinal images with global and local deformable transformations. For that, we use a keypoint detector and a deformation network called GAMorph to estimate the global transformation and local deformable transformation, respectively. Specifically, we integrate multi-level pixel relation knowledge to guide the training of GAMorph. Additionally, we utilize an edge attention module that includes the geometric priors of the images, ensuring the deformation field focuses more on the vascular regions of clinical interest. Experiments on two widely-used datasets, FIRE and FLoRI21, show that our proposed HybridRetina significantly outperforms some state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/lyp-deeplearning/awesome-retinal-registration.
URLs: https://github.com/lyp-deeplearning/awesome-retinal-registration.
Authors: Saeid Asgari Taghanaki, Joseph Lambourne, Alana Mongkhounsavath
Abstract: Large foundation models have revolutionized the field, yet challenges remain in optimizing multi-modal models for specialized visual tasks. We propose a novel, generalizable methodology to identify preferred image distributions for black-box Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by measuring output consistency across varied input prompts. Applying this to different rendering types of 3D objects, we demonstrate its efficacy across various domains requiring precise interpretation of complex structures, with a focus on Computer-Aided Design (CAD) as an exemplar field. We further refine VLM outputs using in-context learning with human feedback, significantly enhancing explanation quality. To address the lack of benchmarks in specialized domains, we introduce CAD-VQA, a new dataset for evaluating VLMs on CAD-related visual question answering tasks. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art VLMs on CAD-VQA establishes baseline performance levels, providing a framework for advancing VLM capabilities in complex visual reasoning tasks across various fields requiring expert-level visual interpretation. We release the dataset and evaluation codes at \url{https://github.com/asgsaeid/cad_vqa}.
Authors: Pu Sun, Honggang Qi, Yuezun Li
Abstract: DeepFake technology has gained significant attention due to its ability to manipulate facial attributes with high realism, raising serious societal concerns. Face-Swap DeepFake is the most harmful among these techniques, which fabricates behaviors by swapping original faces with synthesized ones. Existing forensic methods, primarily based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), effectively expose these manipulations and have become important authenticity indicators. However, these methods mainly concentrate on capturing the blending inconsistency in DeepFake faces, raising a new security issue, termed Active Fake, emerges when individuals intentionally create blending inconsistency in their authentic videos to evade responsibility. This tactic is called DeepFake Camouflage. To achieve this, we introduce a new framework for creating DeepFake camouflage that generates blending inconsistencies while ensuring imperceptibility, effectiveness, and transferability. This framework, optimized via an adversarial learning strategy, crafts imperceptible yet effective inconsistencies to mislead forensic detectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, highlighting the need for further research in active fake detection.
Authors: Jing He, Haodong Li, Wei Yin, Yixun Liang, Leheng Li, Kaiqiang Zhou, Hongbo Zhang, Bingbing Liu, Ying-Cong Chen
Abstract: Leveraging the visual priors of pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models offers a promising solution to enhance zero-shot generalization in dense prediction tasks. However, existing methods often uncritically use the original diffusion formulation, which may not be optimal due to the fundamental differences between dense prediction and image generation. In this paper, we provide a systemic analysis of the diffusion formulation for the dense prediction, focusing on both quality and efficiency. And we find that the original parameterization type for image generation, which learns to predict noise, is harmful for dense prediction; the multi-step noising/denoising diffusion process is also unnecessary and challenging to optimize. Based on these insights, we introduce Lotus, a diffusion-based visual foundation model with a simple yet effective adaptation protocol for dense prediction. Specifically, Lotus is trained to directly predict annotations instead of noise, thereby avoiding harmful variance. We also reformulate the diffusion process into a single-step procedure, simplifying optimization and significantly boosting inference speed. Additionally, we introduce a novel tuning strategy called detail preserver, which achieves more accurate and fine-grained predictions. Without scaling up the training data or model capacity, Lotus achieves SoTA performance in zero-shot depth and normal estimation across various datasets. It also enhances efficiency, being significantly faster than most existing diffusion-based methods. Lotus' superior quality and efficiency also enable a wide range of practical applications, such as joint estimation, single/multi-view 3D reconstruction, etc. Project page: https://lotus3d.github.io/.
Authors: Sikai Yang
Abstract: As human eyes serve as conduits of rich information, unveiling emotions, intentions, and even aspects of an individual's health and overall well-being, gaze tracking also enables various human-computer interaction applications, as well as insights in psychological and medical research. However, existing gaze tracking solutions fall short at handling free user movement, and also require laborious user effort in system calibration. We introduce Tri-Cam, a practical deep learning-based gaze tracking system using three affordable RGB webcams. It features a split network structure for efficient training, as well as designated network designs to handle the separated gaze tracking tasks. Tri-Cam is also equipped with an implicit calibration module, which makes use of mouse click opportunities to reduce calibration overhead on the user's end. We evaluate Tri-Cam against Tobii, the state-of-the-art commercial eye tracker, achieving comparable accuracy, while supporting a wider free movement area. In conclusion, Tri-Cam provides a user-friendly, affordable, and robust gaze tracking solution that could practically enable various applications.
Authors: Rohaifa Khaldi, Domingo Alcaraz-Segura, Ignacio S\'anchez-Herrera, Javier Martinez-Lopez, Carlos Javier Navarro, Siham Tabik
Abstract: Social media images have proven to be a valuable source of information for understanding human interactions with important subjects such as cultural heritage, biodiversity, and nature, among others. The task of grouping such images into a number of semantically meaningful clusters without labels is challenging due to the high diversity and complex nature of the visual content in addition to their large volume. On the other hand, recent advances in Large Visual Models (LVMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) provide an important opportunity to explore new productive and scalable solutions. This work proposes, analyzes, and compares various approaches based on one or more state-of-the-art LVM, LLM, and LVLM, for mapping social media images into a number of predefined classes. As a case study, we consider the problem of understanding the interactions between humans and nature, also known as Nature's Contribution to People or Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES). Our experiments show that the highest-performing approaches, with accuracy above 95%, still require the creation of a small labeled dataset. These include the fine-tuned LVM DINOv2 and the LVLM LLaVA-1.5 combined with a fine-tuned LLM. The top fully unsupervised approaches, achieving accuracy above 84%, are the LVLMs, specifically the proprietary GPT-4 model and the public LLaVA-1.5 model. Additionally, the LVM DINOv2, when applied in a 10-shot learning setup, delivered competitive results with an accuracy of 83.99%, closely matching the performance of the LVLM LLaVA-1.5.
Authors: Chengkai Hou, Zhengrong Xue, Bingyang Zhou, Jinghan Ke, Lin Shao, Huazhe Xu
Abstract: Detecting 3D keypoints with semantic consistency is widely used in many scenarios such as pose estimation, shape registration and robotics. Currently, most unsupervised 3D keypoint detection methods focus on the rigid-body objects. However, when faced with deformable objects, the keypoints they identify do not preserve semantic consistency well. In this paper, we introduce an innovative unsupervised keypoint detector Key-Grid for both the rigid-body and deformable objects, which is an autoencoder framework. The encoder predicts keypoints and the decoder utilizes the generated keypoints to reconstruct the objects. Unlike previous work, we leverage the identified keypoint in formation to form a 3D grid feature heatmap called grid heatmap, which is used in the decoder section. Grid heatmap is a novel concept that represents the latent variables for grid points sampled uniformly in the 3D cubic space, where these variables are the shortest distance between the grid points and the skeleton connected by keypoint pairs. Meanwhile, we incorporate the information from each layer of the encoder into the decoder section. We conduct an extensive evaluation of Key-Grid on a list of benchmark datasets. Key-Grid achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the semantic consistency and position accuracy of keypoints. Moreover, we demonstrate the robustness of Key-Grid to noise and downsampling. In addition, we achieve SE-(3) invariance of keypoints though generalizing Key-Grid to a SE(3)-invariant backbone.
Authors: Zhaorui Tan, Xi Yang, Qiufeng Wang, Anh Nguyen, Kaizhu Huang
Abstract: Vision models excel in image classification but struggle to generalize to unseen data, such as classifying images from unseen domains or discovering novel categories. In this paper, we explore the relationship between logical reasoning and deep learning generalization in visual classification. A logical regularization termed L-Reg is derived which bridges a logical analysis framework to image classification. Our work reveals that L-Reg reduces the complexity of the model in terms of the feature distribution and classifier weights. Specifically, we unveil the interpretability brought by L-Reg, as it enables the model to extract the salient features, such as faces to persons, for classification. Theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate that L-Reg enhances generalization across various scenarios, including multi-domain generalization and generalized category discovery. In complex real-world scenarios where images span unknown classes and unseen domains, L-Reg consistently improves generalization, highlighting its practical efficacy.
Authors: Jiazi Bu, Pengyang Ling, Pan Zhang, Tong Wu, Xiaoyi Dong, Yuhang Zang, Yuhang Cao, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang
Abstract: The text-to-video (T2V) generation models, offering convenient visual creation, have recently garnered increasing attention. Despite their substantial potential, the generated videos may present artifacts, including structural implausibility, temporal inconsistency, and a lack of motion, often resulting in near-static video. In this work, we have identified a correlation between the disparity of temporal attention maps across different blocks and the occurrence of temporal inconsistencies. Additionally, we have observed that the energy contained within the temporal attention maps is directly related to the magnitude of motion amplitude in the generated videos. Based on these observations, we present BroadWay, a training-free method to improve the quality of text-to-video generation without introducing additional parameters, augmenting memory or sampling time. Specifically, BroadWay is composed of two principal components: 1) Temporal Self-Guidance improves the structural plausibility and temporal consistency of generated videos by reducing the disparity between the temporal attention maps across various decoder blocks. 2) Fourier-based Motion Enhancement enhances the magnitude and richness of motion by amplifying the energy of the map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BroadWay significantly improves the quality of text-to-video generation with negligible additional cost.
Authors: Qidong Huang, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Yuhang Cao, Jiaqi Wang, Dahua Lin, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
Abstract: We present the Modality Integration Rate (MIR), an effective, robust, and generalized metric to indicate the multi-modal pre-training quality of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs). Large-scale pre-training plays a critical role in building capable LVLMs, while evaluating its training quality without the costly supervised fine-tuning stage is under-explored. Loss, perplexity, and in-context evaluation results are commonly used pre-training metrics for Large Language Models (LLMs), while we observed that these metrics are less indicative when aligning a well-trained LLM with a new modality. Due to the lack of proper metrics, the research of LVLMs in the critical pre-training stage is hindered greatly, including the training data choice, efficient module design, etc. In this paper, we propose evaluating the pre-training quality from the inter-modal distribution distance perspective and present MIR, the Modality Integration Rate, which is 1) \textbf{Effective} to represent the pre-training quality and show a positive relation with the benchmark performance after supervised fine-tuning. 2) \textbf{Robust} toward different training/evaluation data. 3) \textbf{Generalize} across training configurations and architecture choices. We conduct a series of pre-training experiments to explore the effectiveness of MIR and observe satisfactory results that MIR is indicative about training data selection, training strategy schedule, and model architecture design to get better pre-training results. We hope MIR could be a helpful metric for building capable LVLMs and inspire the following research about modality alignment in different areas. Our code is at: https://github.com/shikiw/Modality-Integration-Rate.
Authors: Takahiro Shindo, Taiju Watanabe, Yui Tatsumi, Hiroshi Watanabe
Abstract: Image Coding for Machines (ICM) is becoming more important as research in computer vision progresses. ICM is a vital research field that pursues the use of images for image recognition models, facilitating efficient image transmission and storage. The demand for recognition models is growing rapidly among the general public, and their performance continues to improve. To meet these needs, exchanging image data between consumer devices and cloud AI using ICM technology could be one possible solution. In ICM, various image compression methods have adopted Learned Image Compression (LIC). LIC includes an entropy model for estimating the bitrate of latent features, and the design of this model significantly affects its performance. Typically, LIC methods assume that the distribution of latent features follows a normal distribution. This assumption is effective for compressing images intended for human vision. However, employing an entropy model based on normal distribution is inefficient in ICM due to the limitation of image parts that require precise decoding. To address this, we propose Delta-ICM, which uses a probability distribution based on a delta function. Assuming the delta distribution as a distribution of latent features reduces the entropy of image portions unnecessary for machines. We compress the remaining portions using an entropy model based on normal distribution, similar to existing methods. Delta-ICM selects between the entropy model based on the delta distribution and the one based on the normal distribution for each latent feature. Our method outperforms existing ICM methods in image compression performance aimed at machines.
Authors: Yue Zhang, Minhao Liu, Zhaokang Chen, Bin Wu, Yubin Zeng, Chao Zhan, Yingjie He, Junxin Huang, Wenjiang Zhou
Abstract: Achieving high-resolution, identity consistency, and accurate lip-speech synchronization in face visual dubbing presents significant challenges, particularly for real-time applications like live video streaming. We propose MuseTalk, which generates lip-sync targets in a latent space encoded by a Variational Autoencoder, enabling high-fidelity talking face video generation with efficient inference. Specifically, we project the occluded lower half of the face image and itself as an reference into a low-dimensional latent space and use a multi-scale U-Net to fuse audio and visual features at various levels. We further propose a novel sampling strategy during training, which selects reference images with head poses closely matching the target, allowing the model to focus on precise lip movement by filtering out redundant information. Additionally, we analyze the mechanism of lip-sync loss and reveal its relationship with input information volume. Extensive experiments show that MuseTalk consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods in visual fidelity and achieves comparable lip-sync accuracy. As MuseTalk supports the online generation of face at 256x256 at more than 30 FPS with negligible starting latency, it paves the way for real-time applications.
Authors: Kai Han, Jianyuan Guo, Yehui Tang, Wei He, Enhua Wu, Yunhe Wang
Abstract: Vision-language large models have achieved remarkable success in various multi-modal tasks, yet applying them to video understanding remains challenging due to the inherent complexity and computational demands of video data. While training-based video-LLMs deliver high performance, they often require substantial resources for training and inference. Conversely, training-free approaches offer a more efficient alternative by adapting pre-trained image-LLMs models for video tasks without additional training, but they face inference efficiency bottlenecks due to the large number of visual tokens generated from video frames. In this work, we present a novel prompt-guided visual perception framework (abbreviated as Free Video-LLM) for efficient inference of training-free video LLMs. The proposed framework decouples spatial-temporal dimension and performs temporal frame sampling and spatial RoI cropping respectively based on task-specific prompts. Our method effectively reduces the number of visual tokens while maintaining high performance across multiple video question-answering benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive results with significantly fewer tokens, offering an optimal trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art video LLMs. The code will be available at https://github.com/contrastive/FreeVideoLLM.
Authors: Zhouqiang Jiang, Bowen Wang, Junhao Chen, Yuta Nakashima
Abstract: Recent approaches for visually-rich document understanding (VrDU) uses manually annotated semantic groups, where a semantic group encompasses all semantically relevant but not obviously grouped words. As OCR tools are unable to automatically identify such grouping, we argue that current VrDU approaches are unrealistic. We thus introduce a new variant of the VrDU task, real-world visually-rich document understanding (ReVrDU), that does not allow for using manually annotated semantic groups. We also propose a new method, ReLayout, compliant with the ReVrDU scenario, which learns to capture semantic grouping through arranging words and bringing the representations of words that belong to the potential same semantic group closer together. Our experimental results demonstrate the performance of existing methods is deteriorated with the ReVrDU task, while ReLayout shows superiour performance.
Authors: Pranav Gupta, Rishabh Rengarajan, Viren Bankapur, Vedansh Mannem, Lakshit Ahuja, Surya Vijay, Kevin Wang
Abstract: Combining LiDAR and Camera-view data has become a common approach for 3D Object Detection. However, previous approaches combine the two input streams at a point-level, throwing away semantic information derived from camera features. In this paper we propose Cross-View Center Point-Fusion, a state-of-the-art model to perform 3D object detection by combining camera and LiDAR-derived features in the BEV space to preserve semantic density from the camera stream while incorporating spacial data from the LiDAR stream. Our architecture utilizes aspects from previously established algorithms, Cross-View Transformers and CenterPoint, and runs their backbones in parallel, allowing efficient computation for real-time processing and application. In this paper we find that while an implicitly calculated depth-estimate may be sufficiently accurate in a 2D map-view representation, explicitly calculated geometric and spacial information is needed for precise bounding box prediction in the 3D world-view space.
Authors: Dabbrata Das, Argho Deb Das, Farhan Sadaf
Abstract: Estimating depth from a single 2D image is a challenging task because of the need for stereo or multi-view data, which normally provides depth information. This paper deals with this challenge by introducing a novel deep learning-based approach using an encoder-decoder architecture, where the Inception-ResNet-v2 model is utilized as the encoder. According to the available literature, this is the first instance of using Inception-ResNet-v2 as an encoder for monocular depth estimation, illustrating better performance than previous models. The use of Inception-ResNet-v2 enables our model to capture complex objects and fine-grained details effectively that are generally difficult to predict. Besides, our model incorporates multi-scale feature extraction to enhance depth prediction accuracy across different kinds of object sizes and distances. We propose a composite loss function consisting of depth loss, gradient edge loss, and SSIM loss, where the weights are fine-tuned to optimize the weighted sum, ensuring better balance across different aspects of depth estimation. Experimental results on the NYU Depth V2 dataset show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an ARE of 0.064, RMSE of 0.228, and accuracy ($\delta$ $<1.25$) of 89.3%. These metrics demonstrate that our model effectively predicts depth, even in challenging circumstances, providing a scalable solution for real-world applications in robotics, 3D reconstruction, and augmented reality.
Authors: Fan Yang, Yihao Huang, Kailong Wang, Ling Shi, Geguang Pu, Yang Liu, Haoyu Wang
Abstract: Vision-language pre-training (VLP) models, trained on large-scale image-text pairs, have become widely used across a variety of downstream vision-and-language (V+L) tasks. This widespread adoption raises concerns about their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Non-universal adversarial attacks, while effective, are often impractical for real-time online applications due to their high computational demands per data instance. Recently, universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) have been introduced as a solution, but existing generator-based UAP methods are significantly time-consuming. To overcome the limitation, we propose a direct optimization-based UAP approach, termed DO-UAP, which significantly reduces resource consumption while maintaining high attack performance. Specifically, we explore the necessity of multimodal loss design and introduce a useful data augmentation strategy. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark VLP datasets, six popular VLP models, and three classical downstream tasks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of DO-UAP. Specifically, our approach drastically decreases the time consumption by 23-fold while achieving a better attack performance.
Authors: Zhiyuan Ma, Yuzhu Zhang, Guoli Jia, Liangliang Zhao, Yichao Ma, Mingjie Ma, Gaofeng Liu, Kaiyan Zhang, Jianjun Li, Bowen Zhou
Abstract: As one of the most popular and sought-after generative models in the recent years, diffusion models have sparked the interests of many researchers and steadily shown excellent advantage in various generative tasks such as image synthesis, video generation, molecule design, 3D scene rendering and multimodal generation, relying on their dense theoretical principles and reliable application practices. The remarkable success of these recent efforts on diffusion models comes largely from progressive design principles and efficient architecture, training, inference, and deployment methodologies. However, there has not been a comprehensive and in-depth review to summarize these principles and practices to help the rapid understanding and application of diffusion models. In this survey, we provide a new efficiency-oriented perspective on these existing efforts, which mainly focuses on the profound principles and efficient practices in architecture designs, model training, fast inference and reliable deployment, to guide further theoretical research, algorithm migration and model application for new scenarios in a reader-friendly way. \url{https://github.com/ponyzym/Efficient-DMs-Survey}
Authors: Mingyuan Meng, Bingxin Gu, Michael Fulham, Shaoli Song, Dagan Feng, Lei Bi, Jinman Kim
Abstract: Survival prediction is a major concern for cancer management. Deep survival models based on deep learning have been widely adopted to perform end-to-end survival prediction from medical images. Recent deep survival models achieved promising performance by jointly performing tumor segmentation with survival prediction, where the models were guided to extract tumor-related information through Multi-Task Learning (MTL). However, these deep survival models have difficulties in exploring out-of-tumor prognostic information. In addition, existing deep survival models are unable to effectively leverage multi-modality images. Empirically-designed fusion strategies were commonly adopted to fuse multi-modality information via task-specific manually-designed networks, thus limiting the adaptability to different scenarios. In this study, we propose an Adaptive Multi-modality Segmentation-to-Survival model (AdaMSS) for survival prediction from PET/CT images. Instead of adopting MTL, we propose a novel Segmentation-to-Survival Learning (SSL) strategy, where our AdaMSS is trained for tumor segmentation and survival prediction sequentially in two stages. This strategy enables the AdaMSS to focus on tumor regions in the first stage and gradually expand its focus to include other prognosis-related regions in the second stage. We also propose a data-driven strategy to fuse multi-modality information, which realizes adaptive optimization of fusion strategies based on training data during training. With the SSL and data-driven fusion strategies, our AdaMSS is designed as an adaptive model that can self-adapt its focus regions and fusion strategy for different training stages. Extensive experiments with two large clinical datasets show that our AdaMSS outperforms state-of-the-art survival prediction methods.
Authors: Yatong Bai, Mo Zhou, Vishal M. Patel, Somayeh Sojoudi
Abstract: Adversarial robustness often comes at the cost of degraded accuracy, impeding real-life applications of robust classification models. Training-based solutions for better trade-offs are limited by incompatibilities with already-trained high-performance large models, necessitating the exploration of training-free ensemble approaches. Observing that robust models are more confident in correct predictions than in incorrect ones on clean and adversarial data alike, we speculate amplifying this "benign confidence property" can reconcile accuracy and robustness in an ensemble setting. To achieve so, we propose "MixedNUTS", a training-free method where the output logits of a robust classifier and a standard non-robust classifier are processed by nonlinear transformations with only three parameters, which are optimized through an efficient algorithm. MixedNUTS then converts the transformed logits into probabilities and mixes them as the overall output. On CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, experimental results with custom strong adaptive attacks demonstrate MixedNUTS's vastly improved accuracy and near-SOTA robustness -- it boosts CIFAR-100 clean accuracy by 7.86 points, sacrificing merely 0.87 points in robust accuracy.
Authors: Chunwei Tian, Xuanyu Zhang, Tao Wang, Yongjun Zhang, Qi Zhu, Chia-Wen Lin
Abstract: Convolutional neural networks can automatically learn features via deep network architectures and given input samples. However, the robustness of obtained models may face challenges in varying scenes. Bigger differences in network architecture are beneficial to extract more diversified structural information to strengthen the robustness of an obtained super-resolution model. In this paper, we proposed a adaptive convolutional neural network for image super-resolution (ADSRNet). To capture more information, ADSRNet is implemented by a heterogeneous parallel network. The upper network can enhance relation of context information, salient information relation of a kernel mapping and relations of shallow and deep layers to improve performance of image super-resolution. That can strengthen adaptability of an obtained super-resolution model for different scenes. The lower network utilizes a symmetric architecture to enhance relations of different layers to mine more structural information, which is complementary with a upper network for image super-resolution. The relevant experimental results show that the proposed ADSRNet is effective to deal with image resolving. Codes are obtained at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/ADSRNet.
Authors: Arkadiy Saakyan, Shreyas Kulkarni, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Smaranda Muresan
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks requiring a fine-grained understanding of literal meaning in images and text, such as visual question-answering or visual entailment. However, there has been little exploration of these models' capabilities when presented with images and captions containing figurative meaning, such as metaphors or humor. To close this gap, we propose a new task framing the figurative meaning understanding problem as an explainable visual entailment task, where the model has to predict whether the image (premise) entails a caption (hypothesis) and justify the predicted label with a textual explanation. The figurative phenomena can be present either in the image, the caption, or both. Utilizing a human-AI collaboration approach, we build the accompanying expert-verified dataset V-FLUTE, containing 6,027 {image, caption, label, explanation} instances spanning five diverse figurative phenomena: metaphors, similes, idioms, sarcasm, and humor. Through automatic evaluation, we find that VLMs struggle to generalize from literal to figurative meaning, particularly when it is present in images. Further, we identify common types of errors in VLM reasoning via human evaluation.
Authors: Franco Coltraro, Jaume Amor\'os, Maria Alberich-Carrami\~nana, Carme Torras
Abstract: In this work, we study the perception problem for sampled surfaces (possibly with boundary) using tools from computational topology, specifically, how to identify their underlying topology starting from point-cloud samples in space, such as those obtained with 3D scanners. We present a reconstruction algorithm based on a careful topological study of the point sample that allows us to obtain a cellular decomposition of it using a Morse function. No triangulation or local implicit equations are used as intermediate steps, avoiding in this way reconstruction-induced artifices. The algorithm can be run without any prior knowledge of the surface topology, density or regularity of the point-sample. The results consist of a piece-wise decomposition of the given surface as a union of Morse cells (i.e. topological disks), suitable for tasks such as mesh-independent reparametrization or noise-filtering, and a small-rank cellular complex determining the topology of the surface. The algorithm, which we test with several real and synthetic surfaces, can be applied to smooth surfaces with or without boundary, embedded in an ambient space of any dimension.
Authors: Yunzhi Yao, Ningyu Zhang, Zekun Xi, Mengru Wang, Ziwen Xu, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen
Abstract: The remarkable capabilities of modern large language models are rooted in their vast repositories of knowledge encoded within their parameters, enabling them to perceive the world and engage in reasoning. The inner workings of how these models store knowledge have long been a subject of intense interest and investigation among researchers. To date, most studies have concentrated on isolated components within these models, such as the Multilayer Perceptrons and attention head. In this paper, we delve into the computation graph of the language model to uncover the knowledge circuits that are instrumental in articulating specific knowledge. The experiments, conducted with GPT2 and TinyLLAMA, have allowed us to observe how certain information heads, relation heads, and Multilayer Perceptrons collaboratively encode knowledge within the model. Moreover, we evaluate the impact of current knowledge editing techniques on these knowledge circuits, providing deeper insights into the functioning and constraints of these editing methodologies. Finally, we utilize knowledge circuits to analyze and interpret language model behaviors such as hallucinations and in-context learning. We believe the knowledge circuits hold potential for advancing our understanding of Transformers and guiding the improved design of knowledge editing. Code and data are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowledgeCircuits.
Authors: Bowen Jiang, Yangxinyu Xie, Xiaomeng Wang, Yuan Yuan, Zhuoqun Hao, Xinyi Bai, Weijie J. Su, Camillo J. Taylor, Tanwi Mallick
Abstract: Rationality is the quality of being guided by reason, characterized by decision-making that aligns with evidence and logical principles. It plays a crucial role in reliable problem-solving by ensuring well-grounded and consistent solutions. While large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in generating human-like text, they still exhibit limitations such as bounded knowledge space and inconsistent outputs. In response, recent efforts have shifted toward developing multimodal and multi-agent systems, as well as integrating modules like external tools, programming codes, symbolic reasoners, utility function, and conformal risk controls rather than relying solely on a single LLM for decision-making. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art advancements in language and multimodal agents, evaluates how they contribute to make intelligent agents more rational, and identifies open challenges and future research directions. We maintain an open repository at https://github.com/bowen-upenn/Agent_Rationality.
Authors: Shengkang Wang, Hongzhan Lin, Ziyang Luo, Zhen Ye, Guang Chen, Jing Ma
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have significantly improved multimodal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering and image captioning. These models embed multimodal facts within their parameters, rather than relying on external knowledge bases to store factual information explicitly. However, the content discerned by LVLMs may deviate from actual facts due to inherent bias or incorrect inference. To address this issue, we introduce MFC-Bench, a rigorous and comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the factual accuracy of LVLMs across three stages of verdict prediction for MFC: Manipulation, Out-of-Context, and Veracity Classification. Through our evaluation on MFC-Bench, we benchmarked a dozen diverse and representative LVLMs, uncovering that current models still fall short in multimodal fact-checking and demonstrate insensitivity to various forms of manipulated content. We hope that MFC-Bench could raise attention to the trustworthy AI potentially assisted by LVLMs in the future. The MFC-Bench and accompanying resources are publicly accessible at https://github.com/wskbest/MFC-Bench, contributing to ongoing research in the multimodal fact-checking field.
Authors: Chuyan Xiong, Chengyu Shen, Xiaoqi Li, Kaichen Zhou, Jiaming Liu, Ruiping Wang, Hao Dong
Abstract: The ability to reflect on and correct failures is crucial for robotic systems to interact stably with real-life objects. Observing the generalization and reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), previous approaches have aimed to utilize these models to enhance robotic systems accordingly. However, these methods typically focus on high-level planning corrections using an additional MLLM, with limited utilization of failed samples to correct low-level contact poses which is particularly prone to occur during articulated object manipulation. To address this gap, we propose an Autonomous Interactive Correction (AIC) MLLM, which makes use of previous low-level interaction experiences to correct SE(3) pose predictions for articulated object. Specifically, AIC MLLM is initially fine-tuned to acquire both pose prediction and feedback prompt comprehension abilities. We design two types of prompt instructions for interactions with objects: 1) visual masks to highlight unmovable parts for position correction, and 2) textual descriptions to indicate potential directions for rotation correction. During inference, a Feedback Information Extraction module is introduced to recognize the failure cause, allowing AIC MLLM to adaptively correct the pose prediction using the corresponding prompts. To further enhance manipulation stability, we devise a Test Time Adaptation strategy that enables AIC MLLM to better adapt to the current scene configuration. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted in both simulated and real-world environments to evaluate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that our AIC MLLM can efficiently correct failure samples by leveraging interaction experience prompts. Our project website is https://sites.google.com/view/aic-mllm.
Authors: Manjie Xu, Chenxing Li, Xinyi Tu, Yong Ren, Rilin Chen, Yu Gu, Wei Liang, Dong Yu
Abstract: Generating semantically and temporally aligned audio content in accordance with video input has become a focal point for researchers, particularly following the remarkable breakthrough in text-to-video generation. In this work, we aim to offer insights into the video-to-audio generation paradigm, focusing on three crucial aspects: vision encoders, auxiliary embeddings, and data augmentation techniques. Beginning with a foundational model built on a simple yet surprisingly effective intuition, we explore various vision encoders and auxiliary embeddings through ablation studies. Employing a comprehensive evaluation pipeline that emphasizes generation quality and video-audio synchronization alignment, we demonstrate that our model exhibits state-of-the-art video-to-audio generation capabilities. Furthermore, we provide critical insights into the impact of different data augmentation methods on enhancing the generation framework's overall capacity. We showcase possibilities to advance the challenge of generating synchronized audio from semantic and temporal perspectives. We hope these insights will serve as a stepping stone toward developing more realistic and accurate audio-visual generation models.
Authors: Donghoon Han, Eunhwan Park, Gisang Lee, Adam Lee, Nojun Kwak
Abstract: The rapid expansion of multimedia content has made accurately retrieving relevant videos from large collections increasingly challenging. Recent advancements in text-video retrieval have focused on cross-modal interactions, large-scale foundation model training, and probabilistic modeling, yet often neglect the crucial user perspective, leading to discrepancies between user queries and the content retrieved. To address this, we introduce MERLIN (Multimodal Embedding Refinement via LLM-based Iterative Navigation), a novel, training-free pipeline that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for iterative feedback learning. MERLIN refines query embeddings from a user perspective, enhancing alignment between queries and video content through a dynamic question answering process. Experimental results on datasets like MSR-VTT, MSVD, and ActivityNet demonstrate that MERLIN substantially improves Recall@1, outperforming existing systems and confirming the benefits of integrating LLMs into multimodal retrieval systems for more responsive and context-aware multimedia retrieval.
Authors: Joshua Genova, Eric Cabrera, Vedhus Hoskere
Abstract: Surface cracks in infrastructure can lead to significant deterioration and costly maintenance if not efficiently repaired. Manual repair methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and imprecise and thus difficult to scale to large areas. While advancements in robotic perception and manipulation have progressed autonomous crack repair, existing methods still face three key challenges: accurate localization of cracks within the robot's coordinate frame, (ii) adaptability to varying crack depths and widths, and (iii) validation of the repair process under realistic conditions. This paper presents an adaptive, autonomous system for surface crack detection and repair using robotics with advanced sensing technologies to enhance precision and safety for humans. The system uses an RGB-D camera for crack detection, a laser scanner for precise measurement, and an extruder and pump for material deposition. To address one of the key challenges, the laser scanner is used to enhance the crack coordinates for accurate localization. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates that an adaptive crack-filling method is more efficient and effective than a fixed-speed approach, with experimental results confirming both precision and consistency. In addition, to ensure real-world applicability and testing repeatability, we introduce a novel validation procedure using 3D-printed crack specimens that accurately simulate real-world conditions. This research contributes to the evolving field of human-robot interaction in construction by demonstrating how adaptive robotic systems can reduce the need for manual labor, improve safety, and enhance the efficiency of maintenance operations, ultimately paving the way for more sophisticated and integrated construction robotics.
Authors: Vighnesh Birodkar, Gabriel Barcik, James Lyon, Sergey Ioffe, David Minnen, Joshua V. Dillon
Abstract: For learned image representations, basic autoencoders often produce blurry results. Reconstruction quality can be improved by incorporating additional penalties such as adversarial (GAN) and perceptual losses. Arguably, these approaches lack a principled interpretation. Concurrently, in generative settings diffusion has demonstrated a remarkable ability to create crisp, high quality results and has solid theoretical underpinnings (from variational inference to direct study as the Fisher Divergence). Our work combines autoencoder representation learning with diffusion and is, to our knowledge, the first to demonstrate the efficacy of jointly learning a continuous encoder and decoder under a diffusion-based loss. We demonstrate that this approach yields better reconstruction quality as compared to GAN-based autoencoders while being easier to tune. We also show that the resulting representation is easier to model with a latent diffusion model as compared to the representation obtained from a state-of-the-art GAN-based loss. Since our decoder is stochastic, it can generate details not encoded in the otherwise deterministic latent representation; we therefore name our approach "Sample what you can't compress", or SWYCC for short.
Authors: Andrew Lee, Ian Chuang, Ling-Yuan Chen, Iman Soltani
Abstract: Bimanual manipulation presents unique challenges compared to unimanual tasks due to the complexity of coordinating two robotic arms. In this paper, we introduce InterACT: Inter-dependency aware Action Chunking with Hierarchical Attention Transformers, a novel imitation learning framework designed specifically for bimanual manipulation. InterACT leverages hierarchical attention mechanisms to effectively capture inter-dependencies between dual-arm joint states and visual inputs. The framework comprises a Hierarchical Attention Encoder, which processes multi-modal inputs through segment-wise and cross-segment attention mechanisms, and a Multi-arm Decoder that generates each arm's action predictions in parallel, while sharing information between the arms through synchronization blocks by providing the other arm's intermediate output as context. Our experiments, conducted on various simulated and real-world bimanual manipulation tasks, demonstrate that InterACT outperforms existing methods. Detailed ablation studies further validate the significance of key components, including the impact of CLS tokens, cross-segment encoders, and synchronization blocks on task performance. We provide supplementary materials and videos on our project page.
Authors: Sikai Yang, Gang Yan
Abstract: Losing track of reading progress during line switching can be frustrating. Eye gaze tracking technology offers a potential solution by highlighting read paragraphs, aiding users in avoiding wrong line switches. However, the gap between gaze tracking accuracy (2-3 cm) and text line spacing (3-5 mm) makes direct application impractical. Existing methods leverage the linear reading pattern but fail during jump reading. This paper presents a reading tracking and highlighting system that supports both linear and jump reading. Based on experimental insights from the gaze nature study of 16 users, two gaze error models are designed to enable both jump reading detection and relocation. The system further leverages the large language model's contextual perception capability in aiding reading tracking. A reading tracking domain-specific line-gaze alignment opportunity is also exploited to enable dynamic and frequent calibration of the gaze results. Controlled experiments demonstrate reliable linear reading tracking, as well as 84% accuracy in tracking jump reading. Furthermore, real field tests with 18 volunteers demonstrated the system's effectiveness in tracking and highlighting read paragraphs, improving reading efficiency, and enhancing user experience.
Authors: Eunji Kim, Kyuhong Shim, Simyung Chang, Sungroh Yoon
Abstract: A text encoder within Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP plays a crucial role in translating textual input into an embedding space shared with images, thereby facilitating the interpretative analysis of vision tasks through natural language. Despite the varying significance of different textual elements within a sentence depending on the context, efforts to account for variation of importance in constructing text embeddings have been lacking. We propose a framework of Semantic Token Reweighting to build Interpretable text embeddings (SToRI), which incorporates controllability as well. SToRI refines the text encoding process in CLIP by differentially weighting semantic elements based on contextual importance, enabling finer control over emphasis responsive to data-driven insights and user preferences. The efficacy of SToRI is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on few-shot image classification and image retrieval tailored to user preferences.
Authors: Jun Luo, Chen Chen, Shandong Wu
Abstract: Prompt learning for pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP has demonstrated potent applicability across diverse downstream tasks. This lightweight approach has quickly gained traction from federated learning (FL) researchers who seek to efficiently adapt VLMs to heterogeneous scenarios. However, current federated prompt learning methods are habitually restricted to the traditional FL paradigm, where the participating clients are generally only allowed to download a single globally aggregated model from the server. While justifiable for training full-sized models under federated settings, in this work, we argue that this paradigm is ill-suited for lightweight prompts. By facilitating the clients to download multiple pre-aggregated prompts as fixed non-local experts, we propose Personalized Federated Mixture of Adaptive Prompts (pFedMoAP), a novel FL framework that personalizes the prompt learning process through the lens of Mixture of Experts (MoE). pFedMoAP implements a local attention-based gating network that learns to generate enhanced text features for better alignment with local image data on the client, benefiting from both local and downloaded non-local adaptive prompt experts. The non-local experts are sparsely selected from a server-maintained pool, fostering collaborative learning across clients. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, we conduct extensive experiments across 9 datasets under various heterogeneous federated settings. The results show that pFedMoAP consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives, underscoring its efficacy in personalizing prompt learning for CLIP within the federated learning paradigm.
Authors: Kaidong Zhang, Pengzhen Ren, Bingqian Lin, Junfan Lin, Shikui Ma, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract: Language-guided robotic manipulation is a challenging task that requires an embodied agent to follow abstract user instructions to accomplish various complex manipulation tasks. Previous work trivially fitting the data without revealing the relation between instruction and low-level executable actions, these models are prone to memorizing the surficial pattern of the data instead of acquiring the transferable knowledge, and thus are fragile to dynamic environment changes. To address this issue, we propose a PrIrmitive-driVen waypOinT-aware world model for Robotic manipulation (PIVOT-R) that focuses solely on the prediction of task-relevant waypoints. Specifically, PIVOT-R consists of a Waypoint-aware World Model (WAWM) and a lightweight action prediction module. The former performs primitive action parsing and primitive-driven waypoint prediction, while the latter focuses on decoding low-level actions. Additionally, we also design an asynchronous hierarchical executor (AHE), which can use different execution frequencies for different modules of the model, thereby helping the model reduce computational redundancy and improve model execution efficiency. Our PIVOT-R outperforms state-of-the-art (SoTA) open-source models on the SeaWave benchmark, achieving an average relative improvement of 19.45% across four levels of instruction tasks. Moreover, compared to the synchronously executed PIVOT-R, the execution efficiency of PIVOT-R with AHE is increased by 28-fold, with only a 2.9% drop in performance. These results provide compelling evidence that our PIVOT-R can significantly improve both the performance and efficiency of robotic manipulation.
Authors: Chenyu Zhang, Wenxue Guan, Xiaodan Xing, Guang Yang
Abstract: Whole heart segmentation (WHS) supports cardiovascular disease (CVD) diagnosis, disease monitoring, treatment planning, and prognosis. Deep learning has become the most widely used method for WHS applications in recent years. However, segmentation of whole-heart structures faces numerous challenges including heart shape variability during the cardiac cycle, clinical artifacts like motion and poor contrast-to-noise ratio, domain shifts in multi-center data, and the distinct modalities of CT and MRI. To address these limitations and improve segmentation quality, this paper introduces a new topology-preserving module that is integrated into deep neural networks. The implementation achieves anatomically plausible segmentation by using learned topology-preserving fields, which are based entirely on 3D convolution and are therefore very effective for 3D voxel data. We incorporate natural constraints between structures into the end-to-end training and enrich the feature representation of the neural network. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on an open-source medical heart dataset, specifically using the WHS++ data. The results demonstrate that the architecture performs exceptionally well, achieving a Dice coefficient of 0.939 during testing. This indicates full topology preservation for individual structures and significantly outperforms other baselines in preserving the overall scene topology.
Authors: Zhifei Xie, Changqiao Wu
Abstract: GPT-4o, an all-encompassing model, represents a milestone in the development of large multi-modal language models. It can understand visual, auditory, and textual modalities, directly output audio, and support flexible duplex interaction. Models from the open-source community often achieve some functionalities of GPT-4o, such as visual understanding and voice chat. Nevertheless, training a unified model that incorporates all modalities is challenging due to the complexities of multi-modal data, intricate model architectures, and training processes. In this paper, we introduce Mini-Omni2, a visual-audio assistant capable of providing real-time, end-to-end voice responses to visoin and audio queries. By integrating pretrained visual and auditory encoders, Mini-Omni2 maintains performance in individual modalities. We propose a three-stage training process to align modalities, allowing the language model to handle multi-modal inputs and outputs after training on a limited dataset. For interaction, we introduce a command-based interruption mechanism, enabling more flexible interaction with users. To the best of our knowledge, Mini-Omni2 is one of the closest reproductions of GPT-4o, which have similar form of functionality, and we hope it can offer valuable insights for subsequent research.