new VideoWorld: Exploring Knowledge Learning from Unlabeled Videos

Authors: Zhongwei Ren, Yunchao Wei, Xun Guo, Yao Zhao, Bingyi Kang, Jiashi Feng, Xiaojie Jin

Abstract: This work explores whether a deep generative model can learn complex knowledge solely from visual input, in contrast to the prevalent focus on text-based models like large language models (LLMs). We develop VideoWorld, an auto-regressive video generation model trained on unlabeled video data, and test its knowledge acquisition abilities in video-based Go and robotic control tasks. Our experiments reveal two key findings: (1) video-only training provides sufficient information for learning knowledge, including rules, reasoning and planning capabilities, and (2) the representation of visual change is crucial for knowledge acquisition. To improve both the efficiency and efficacy of this process, we introduce the Latent Dynamics Model (LDM) as a key component of VideoWorld. Remarkably, VideoWorld reaches a 5-dan professional level in the Video-GoBench with just a 300-million-parameter model, without relying on search algorithms or reward mechanisms typical in reinforcement learning. In robotic tasks, VideoWorld effectively learns diverse control operations and generalizes across environments, approaching the performance of oracle models in CALVIN and RLBench. This study opens new avenues for knowledge acquisition from visual data, with all code, data, and models open-sourced for further research.

new SMPLest-X: Ultimate Scaling for Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation

Authors: Wanqi Yin, Zhongang Cai, Ruisi Wang, Ailing Zeng, Chen Wei, Qingping Sun, Haiyi Mei, Yanjun Wang, Hui En Pang, Mingyuan Zhang, Lei Zhang, Chen Change Loy, Atsushi Yamashita, Lei Yang, Ziwei Liu

Abstract: Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods focus on training innovative architectural designs on confined datasets. In this work, we investigate the impact of scaling up EHPS towards a family of generalist foundation models. 1) For data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 40 EHPS datasets, encompassing a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. Ultimately, we achieve diminishing returns at 10M training instances from diverse data sources. 2) For model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers (up to ViT-Huge as the backbone) to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. To exclude the influence of algorithmic design, we base our experiments on two minimalist architectures: SMPLer-X, which consists of an intermediate step for hand and face localization, and SMPLest-X, an even simpler version that reduces the network to its bare essentials and highlights significant advances in the capture of articulated hands. With big data and the large model, the foundation models exhibit strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turns the generalist into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation models consistently deliver state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA, UBody, EgoBody, and our proposed SynHand dataset for comprehensive hand evaluation. (Code is available at: https://github.com/wqyin/SMPLest-X).

URLs: https://github.com/wqyin/SMPLest-X).

new Lossy Compression with Pretrained Diffusion Models

Authors: Jeremy Vonderfecht, Feng Liu

Abstract: We apply the DiffC algorithm (Theis et al. 2022) to Stable Diffusion 1.5, 2.1, XL, and Flux-dev, and demonstrate that these pretrained models are remarkably capable lossy image compressors. A principled algorithm for lossy compression using pretrained diffusion models has been understood since at least Ho et al. 2020, but challenges in reverse-channel coding have prevented such algorithms from ever being fully implemented. We introduce simple workarounds that lead to the first complete implementation of DiffC, which is capable of compressing and decompressing images using Stable Diffusion in under 10 seconds. Despite requiring no additional training, our method is competitive with other state-of-the-art generative compression methods at low ultra-low bitrates.

new Generalized Single-Image-Based Morphing Attack Detection Using Deep Representations from Vision Transformer

Authors: Haoyu Zhang, Raghavendra Ramachandra, Kiran Raja, Christoph Busch

Abstract: Face morphing attacks have posed severe threats to Face Recognition Systems (FRS), which are operated in border control and passport issuance use cases. Correspondingly, morphing attack detection algorithms (MAD) are needed to defend against such attacks. MAD approaches must be robust enough to handle unknown attacks in an open-set scenario where attacks can originate from various morphing generation algorithms, post-processing and the diversity of printers/scanners. The problem of generalization is further pronounced when the detection has to be made on a single suspected image. In this paper, we propose a generalized single-image-based MAD (S-MAD) algorithm by learning the encoding from Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture. Compared to CNN-based architectures, ViT model has the advantage on integrating local and global information and hence can be suitable to detect the morphing traces widely distributed among the face region. Extensive experiments are carried out on face morphing datasets generated using publicly available FRGC face datasets. Several state-of-the-art (SOTA) MAD algorithms, including representative ones that have been publicly evaluated, have been selected and benchmarked with our ViT-based approach. Obtained results demonstrate the improved detection performance of the proposed S-MAD method on inter-dataset testing (when different data is used for training and testing) and comparable performance on intra-dataset testing (when the same data is used for training and testing) experimental protocol.

new PIXELS: Progressive Image Xemplar-based Editing with Latent Surgery

Authors: Shristi Das Biswas, Matthew Shreve, Xuelu Li, Prateek Singhal, Kaushik Roy

Abstract: Recent advancements in language-guided diffusion models for image editing are often bottle-necked by cumbersome prompt engineering to precisely articulate desired changes. An intuitive alternative calls on guidance from in-the-wild image exemplars to help users bring their imagined edits to life. Contemporary exemplar-based editing methods shy away from leveraging the rich latent space learnt by pre-existing large text-to-image (TTI) models and fall back on training with curated objective functions to achieve the task. Though somewhat effective, this demands significant computational resources and lacks compatibility with diverse base models and arbitrary exemplar count. On further investigation, we also find that these techniques restrict user control to only applying uniform global changes over the entire edited region. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for progressive exemplar-driven editing with off-the-shelf diffusion models, dubbed PIXELS, to enable customization by providing granular control over edits, allowing adjustments at the pixel or region level. Our method operates solely during inference to facilitate imitative editing, enabling users to draw inspiration from a dynamic number of reference images, or multimodal prompts, and progressively incorporate all the desired changes without retraining or fine-tuning existing TTI models. This capability of fine-grained control opens up a range of new possibilities, including selective modification of individual objects and specifying gradual spatial changes. We demonstrate that PIXELS delivers high-quality edits efficiently, leading to a notable improvement in quantitative metrics as well as human evaluation. By making high-quality image editing more accessible, PIXELS has the potential to enable professional-grade edits to a wider audience with the ease of using any open-source image generation model.

new EraseBench: Understanding The Ripple Effects of Concept Erasure Techniques

Authors: Ibtihel Amara, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Ivana Kajic, Zarana Parekh, Natalie Harris, Sarah Young, Chirag Nagpal, Najoung Kim, Junfeng He, Cristina Nader Vasconcelos, Deepak Ramachandran, Goolnoosh Farnadi, Katherine Heller, Mohammad Havaei, Negar Rostamzadeh

Abstract: Concept erasure techniques have recently gained significant attention for their potential to remove unwanted concepts from text-to-image models. While these methods often demonstrate success in controlled scenarios, their robustness in real-world applications and readiness for deployment remain uncertain. In this work, we identify a critical gap in evaluating sanitized models, particularly in terms of their performance across various concept dimensions. We systematically investigate the failure modes of current concept erasure techniques, with a focus on visually similar, binomial, and semantically related concepts. We propose that these interconnected relationships give rise to a phenomenon of concept entanglement resulting in ripple effects and degradation in image quality. To facilitate more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce EraseBENCH, a multi-dimensional benchmark designed to assess concept erasure methods with greater depth. Our dataset includes over 100 diverse concepts and more than 1,000 tailored prompts, paired with a comprehensive suite of metrics that together offer a holistic view of erasure efficacy. Our findings reveal that even state-of-the-art techniques struggle with maintaining quality post-erasure, indicating that these approaches are not yet ready for real-world deployment. This highlights the gap in reliability of the concept erasure techniques.

new CrossModalityDiffusion: Multi-Modal Novel View Synthesis with Unified Intermediate Representation

Authors: Alex Berian, Daniel Brignac, JhihYang Wu, Natnael Daba, Abhijit Mahalanobis

Abstract: Geospatial imaging leverages data from diverse sensing modalities-such as EO, SAR, and LiDAR, ranging from ground-level drones to satellite views. These heterogeneous inputs offer significant opportunities for scene understanding but present challenges in interpreting geometry accurately, particularly in the absence of precise ground truth data. To address this, we propose CrossModalityDiffusion, a modular framework designed to generate images across different modalities and viewpoints without prior knowledge of scene geometry. CrossModalityDiffusion employs modality-specific encoders that take multiple input images and produce geometry-aware feature volumes that encode scene structure relative to their input camera positions. The space where the feature volumes are placed acts as a common ground for unifying input modalities. These feature volumes are overlapped and rendered into feature images from novel perspectives using volumetric rendering techniques. The rendered feature images are used as conditioning inputs for a modality-specific diffusion model, enabling the synthesis of novel images for the desired output modality. In this paper, we show that jointly training different modules ensures consistent geometric understanding across all modalities within the framework. We validate CrossModalityDiffusion's capabilities on the synthetic ShapeNet cars dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating accurate and consistent novel views across multiple imaging modalities and perspectives.

new ASTRA: A Scene-aware TRAnsformer-based model for trajectory prediction

Authors: Izzeddin Teeti, Aniket Thomas, Munish Monga, Sachin Kumar, Uddeshya Singh, Andrew Bradley, Biplab Banerjee, Fabio Cuzzolin

Abstract: We present ASTRA (A} Scene-aware TRAnsformer-based model for trajectory prediction), a light-weight pedestrian trajectory forecasting model that integrates the scene context, spatial dynamics, social inter-agent interactions and temporal progressions for precise forecasting. We utilised a U-Net-based feature extractor, via its latent vector representation, to capture scene representations and a graph-aware transformer encoder for capturing social interactions. These components are integrated to learn an agent-scene aware embedding, enabling the model to learn spatial dynamics and forecast the future trajectory of pedestrians. The model is designed to produce both deterministic and stochastic outcomes, with the stochastic predictions being generated by incorporating a Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE). ASTRA also proposes a simple yet effective weighted penalty loss function, which helps to yield predictions that outperform a wide array of state-of-the-art deterministic and generative models. ASTRA demonstrates an average improvement of 27%/10% in deterministic/stochastic settings on the ETH-UCY dataset, and 26% improvement on the PIE dataset, respectively, along with seven times fewer parameters than the existing state-of-the-art model (see Figure 1). Additionally, the model's versatility allows it to generalize across different perspectives, such as Bird's Eye View (BEV) and Ego-Vehicle View (EVV).

new Semi-Supervised Image-Based Narrative Extraction: A Case Study with Historical Photographic Records

Authors: Fausto German, Brian Keith, Mauricio Matus, Diego Urrutia, Claudio Meneses

Abstract: This paper presents a semi-supervised approach to extracting narratives from historical photographic records using an adaptation of the narrative maps algorithm. We extend the original unsupervised text-based method to work with image data, leveraging deep learning techniques for visual feature extraction and similarity computation. Our method is applied to the ROGER dataset, a collection of photographs from the 1928 Sacambaya Expedition in Bolivia captured by Robert Gerstmann. We compare our algorithmically extracted visual narratives with expert-curated timelines of varying lengths (5 to 30 images) to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. In particular, we use the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm to match the extracted narratives with the expert-curated baseline. In addition, we asked an expert on the topic to qualitatively evaluate a representative example of the resulting narratives. Our findings show that the narrative maps approach generally outperforms random sampling for longer timelines (10+ images, p < 0.05), with expert evaluation confirming the historical accuracy and coherence of the extracted narratives. This research contributes to the field of computational analysis of visual cultural heritage, offering new tools for historians, archivists, and digital humanities scholars to explore and understand large-scale image collections. The method's ability to generate meaningful narratives from visual data opens up new possibilities for the study and interpretation of historical events through photographic evidence.

new FLORA: Formal Language Model Enables Robust Training-free Zero-shot Object Referring Analysis

Authors: Zhe Chen, Zijing Chen

Abstract: Object Referring Analysis (ORA), commonly known as referring expression comprehension, requires the identification and localization of specific objects in an image based on natural descriptions. Unlike generic object detection, ORA requires both accurate language understanding and precise visual localization, making it inherently more complex. Although recent pre-trained large visual grounding detectors have achieved significant progress, they heavily rely on extensively labeled data and time-consuming learning. To address these, we introduce a novel, training-free framework for zero-shot ORA, termed FLORA (Formal Language for Object Referring and Analysis). FLORA harnesses the inherent reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and integrates a formal language model - a logical framework that regulates language within structured, rule-based descriptions - to provide effective zero-shot ORA. More specifically, our formal language model (FLM) enables an effective, logic-driven interpretation of object descriptions without necessitating any training processes. Built upon FLM-regulated LLM outputs, we further devise a Bayesian inference framework and employ appropriate off-the-shelf interpretive models to finalize the reasoning, delivering favorable robustness against LLM hallucinations and compelling ORA performance in a training-free manner. In practice, our FLORA boosts the zero-shot performance of existing pretrained grounding detectors by up to around 45%. Our comprehensive evaluation across different challenging datasets also confirms that FLORA consistently surpasses current state-of-the-art zero-shot methods in both detection and segmentation tasks associated with zero-shot ORA. We believe our probabilistic parsing and reasoning of the LLM outputs elevate the reliability and interpretability of zero-shot ORA. We shall release codes upon publication.

new FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching

Authors: Bowen Wen, Matthew Trepte, Joseph Aribido, Jan Kautz, Orazio Gallo, Stan Birchfield

Abstract: Tremendous progress has been made in deep stereo matching to excel on benchmark datasets through per-domain fine-tuning. However, achieving strong zero-shot generalization - a hallmark of foundation models in other computer vision tasks - remains challenging for stereo matching. We introduce FoundationStereo, a foundation model for stereo depth estimation designed to achieve strong zero-shot generalization. To this end, we first construct a large-scale (1M stereo pairs) synthetic training dataset featuring large diversity and high photorealism, followed by an automatic self-curation pipeline to remove ambiguous samples. We then design a number of network architecture components to enhance scalability, including a side-tuning feature backbone that adapts rich monocular priors from vision foundation models to mitigate the sim-to-real gap, and long-range context reasoning for effective cost volume filtering. Together, these components lead to strong robustness and accuracy across domains, establishing a new standard in zero-shot stereo depth estimation.

new TalkingEyes: Pluralistic Speech-Driven 3D Eye Gaze Animation

Authors: Yixiang Zhuang, Chunshan Ma, Yao Cheng, Xuan Cheng, Jing Liao, Juncong Lin

Abstract: Although significant progress has been made in the field of speech-driven 3D facial animation recently, the speech-driven animation of an indispensable facial component, eye gaze, has been overlooked by recent research. This is primarily due to the weak correlation between speech and eye gaze, as well as the scarcity of audio-gaze data, making it very challenging to generate 3D eye gaze motion from speech alone. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven method which can generate diverse 3D eye gaze motions in harmony with the speech. To achieve this, we firstly construct an audio-gaze dataset that contains about 14 hours of audio-mesh sequences featuring high-quality eye gaze motion, head motion and facial motion simultaneously. The motion data is acquired by performing lightweight eye gaze fitting and face reconstruction on videos from existing audio-visual datasets. We then tailor a novel speech-to-motion translation framework in which the head motions and eye gaze motions are jointly generated from speech but are modeled in two separate latent spaces. This design stems from the physiological knowledge that the rotation range of eyeballs is less than that of head. Through mapping the speech embedding into the two latent spaces, the difficulty in modeling the weak correlation between speech and non-verbal motion is thus attenuated. Finally, our TalkingEyes, integrated with a speech-driven 3D facial motion generator, can synthesize eye gaze motion, eye blinks, head motion and facial motion collectively from speech. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in generating diverse and natural 3D eye gaze motions from speech. The project page of this paper is: https://lkjkjoiuiu.github.io/TalkingEyes_Home/

URLs: https://lkjkjoiuiu.github.io/TalkingEyes_Home/

new IE-Bench: Advancing the Measurement of Text-Driven Image Editing for Human Perception Alignment

Authors: Shangkun Sun, Bowen Qu, Xiaoyu Liang, Songlin Fan, Wei Gao

Abstract: Recent advances in text-driven image editing have been significant, yet the task of accurately evaluating these edited images continues to pose a considerable challenge. Different from the assessment of text-driven image generation, text-driven image editing is characterized by simultaneously conditioning on both text and a source image. The edited images often retain an intrinsic connection to the original image, which dynamically change with the semantics of the text. However, previous methods tend to solely focus on text-image alignment or have not aligned with human perception. In this work, we introduce the Text-driven Image Editing Benchmark suite (IE-Bench) to enhance the assessment of text-driven edited images. IE-Bench includes a database contains diverse source images, various editing prompts and the corresponding results different editing methods, and total 3,010 Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) provided by 25 human subjects. Furthermore, we introduce IE-QA, a multi-modality source-aware quality assessment method for text-driven image editing. To the best of our knowledge, IE-Bench offers the first IQA dataset and model tailored for text-driven image editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate IE-QA's superior subjective-alignments on the text-driven image editing task compared with previous metrics. We will make all related data and code available to the public.

new A Multi-Scale Feature Extraction and Fusion Deep Learning Method for Classification of Wheat Diseases

Authors: Sajjad Saleem, Adil Hussain, Nabila Majeed, Zahid Akhtar, Kamran Siddique

Abstract: Wheat is an important source of dietary fiber and protein that is negatively impacted by a number of risks to its growth. The difficulty of identifying and classifying wheat diseases is discussed with an emphasis on wheat loose smut, leaf rust, and crown and root rot. Addressing conditions like crown and root rot, this study introduces an innovative approach that integrates multi-scale feature extraction with advanced image segmentation techniques to enhance classification accuracy. The proposed method uses neural network models Xception, Inception V3, and ResNet 50 to train on a large wheat disease classification dataset 2020 in conjunction with an ensemble of machine vision classifiers, including voting and stacking. The study shows that the suggested methodology has a superior accuracy of 99.75% in the classification of wheat diseases when compared to current state-of-the-art approaches. A deep learning ensemble model Xception showed the highest accuracy.

new Surface-SOS: Self-Supervised Object Segmentation via Neural Surface Representation

Authors: Xiaoyun Zheng, Liwei Liao, Jianbo Jiao, Feng Gao, Ronggang Wang

Abstract: Self-supervised Object Segmentation (SOS) aims to segment objects without any annotations. Under conditions of multi-camera inputs, the structural, textural and geometrical consistency among each view can be leveraged to achieve fine-grained object segmentation. To make better use of the above information, we propose Surface representation based Self-supervised Object Segmentation (Surface-SOS), a new framework to segment objects for each view by 3D surface representation from multi-view images of a scene. To model high-quality geometry surfaces for complex scenes, we design a novel scene representation scheme, which decomposes the scene into two complementary neural representation modules respectively with a Signed Distance Function (SDF). Moreover, Surface-SOS is able to refine single-view segmentation with multi-view unlabeled images, by introducing coarse segmentation masks as additional input. To the best of our knowledge, Surface-SOS is the first self-supervised approach that leverages neural surface representation to break the dependence on large amounts of annotated data and strong constraints. These constraints typically involve observing target objects against a static background or relying on temporal supervision in videos. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks including LLFF, CO3D, BlendedMVS, TUM and several real-world scenes show that Surface-SOS always yields finer object masks than its NeRF-based counterparts and surpasses supervised single-view baselines remarkably. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhengxyun/Surface-SOS.

URLs: https://github.com/zhengxyun/Surface-SOS.

new Discrete Prior-based Temporal-coherent Content Prediction for Blind Face Video Restoration

Authors: Lianxin Xie, Bingbing Zheng, Wen Xue, Yunfei Zhang, Le Jiang, Ruotao Xu, Si Wu, Hau-San Wong

Abstract: Blind face video restoration aims to restore high-fidelity details from videos subjected to complex and unknown degradations. This task poses a significant challenge of managing temporal heterogeneity while at the same time maintaining stable face attributes. In this paper, we introduce a Discrete Prior-based Temporal-Coherent content prediction transformer to address the challenge, and our model is referred to as DP-TempCoh. Specifically, we incorporate a spatial-temporal-aware content prediction module to synthesize high-quality content from discrete visual priors, conditioned on degraded video tokens. To further enhance the temporal coherence of the predicted content, a motion statistics modulation module is designed to adjust the content, based on discrete motion priors in terms of cross-frame mean and variance. As a result, the statistics of the predicted content can match with that of real videos over time. By performing extensive experiments, we verify the effectiveness of the design elements and demonstrate the superior performance of our DP-TempCoh in both synthetically and naturally degraded video restoration.

new GaussianAvatar-Editor: Photorealistic Animatable Gaussian Head Avatar Editor

Authors: Xiangyue Liu, Kunming Luo, Heng Li, Qi Zhang, Yuan Liu, Li Yi, Ping Tan

Abstract: We introduce GaussianAvatar-Editor, an innovative framework for text-driven editing of animatable Gaussian head avatars that can be fully controlled in expression, pose, and viewpoint. Unlike static 3D Gaussian editing, editing animatable 4D Gaussian avatars presents challenges related to motion occlusion and spatial-temporal inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose the Weighted Alpha Blending Equation (WABE). This function enhances the blending weight of visible Gaussians while suppressing the influence on non-visible Gaussians, effectively handling motion occlusion during editing. Furthermore, to improve editing quality and ensure 4D consistency, we incorporate conditional adversarial learning into the editing process. This strategy helps to refine the edited results and maintain consistency throughout the animation. By integrating these methods, our GaussianAvatar-Editor achieves photorealistic and consistent results in animatable 4D Gaussian editing. We conduct comprehensive experiments across various subjects to validate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques, which demonstrates the superiority of our approach over existing methods. More results and code are available at: [Project Link](https://xiangyueliu.github.io/GaussianAvatar-Editor/).

URLs: https://xiangyueliu.github.io/GaussianAvatar-Editor/).

new Aneumo: A Large-Scale Comprehensive Synthetic Dataset of Aneurysm Hemodynamics

Authors: Xigui Li, Yuanye Zhou, Feiyang Xiao, Xin Guo, Yichi Zhang, Chen Jiang, Jianchao Ge, Xiansheng Wang, Qimeng Wang, Taiwei Zhang, Chensen Lin, Yuan Cheng, Yuan Qi

Abstract: Intracranial aneurysm (IA) is a common cerebrovascular disease that is usually asymptomatic but may cause severe subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) if ruptured. Although clinical practice is usually based on individual factors and morphological features of the aneurysm, its pathophysiology and hemodynamic mechanisms remain controversial. To address the limitations of current research, this study constructed a comprehensive hemodynamic dataset of intracranial aneurysms. The dataset is based on 466 real aneurysm models, and 10,000 synthetic models were generated by resection and deformation operations, including 466 aneurysm-free models and 9,534 deformed aneurysm models. The dataset also provides medical image-like segmentation mask files to support insightful analysis. In addition, the dataset contains hemodynamic data measured at eight steady-state flow rates (0.001 to 0.004 kg/s), including critical parameters such as flow velocity, pressure, and wall shear stress, providing a valuable resource for investigating aneurysm pathogenesis and clinical prediction. This dataset will help advance the understanding of the pathologic features and hemodynamic mechanisms of intracranial aneurysms and support in-depth research in related fields. Dataset hosted at https://github.com/Xigui-Li/Aneumo.

URLs: https://github.com/Xigui-Li/Aneumo.

new RichSpace: Enriching Text-to-Video Prompt Space via Text Embedding Interpolation

Authors: Yuefan Cao, Chengyue Gong, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song

Abstract: Text-to-video generation models have made impressive progress, but they still struggle with generating videos with complex features. This limitation often arises from the inability of the text encoder to produce accurate embeddings, which hinders the video generation model. In this work, we propose a novel approach to overcome this challenge by selecting the optimal text embedding through interpolation in the embedding space. We demonstrate that this method enables the video generation model to produce the desired videos. Additionally, we introduce a simple algorithm using perpendicular foot embeddings and cosine similarity to identify the optimal interpolation embedding. Our findings highlight the importance of accurate text embeddings and offer a pathway for improving text-to-video generation performance.

new Multi-Modal Attention Networks for Enhanced Segmentation and Depth Estimation of Subsurface Defects in Pulse Thermography

Authors: Mohammed Salah, Naoufel Werghi, Davor Svetinovic, Yusra Abdulrahman

Abstract: AI-driven pulse thermography (PT) has become a crucial tool in non-destructive testing (NDT), enabling automatic detection of hidden anomalies in various industrial components. Current state-of-the-art techniques feed segmentation and depth estimation networks compressed PT sequences using either Principal Component Analysis (PCA) or Thermographic Signal Reconstruction (TSR). However, treating these two modalities independently constrains the performance of PT inspection models as these representations possess complementary semantic features. To address this limitation, this work proposes PT-Fusion, a multi-modal attention-based fusion network that fuses both PCA and TSR modalities for defect segmentation and depth estimation of subsurface defects in PT setups. PT-Fusion introduces novel feature fusion modules, Encoder Attention Fusion Gate (EAFG) and Attention Enhanced Decoding Block (AEDB), to fuse PCA and TSR features for enhanced segmentation and depth estimation of subsurface defects. In addition, a novel data augmentation technique is proposed based on random data sampling from thermographic sequences to alleviate the scarcity of PT datasets. The proposed method is benchmarked against state-of-the-art PT inspection models, including U-Net, attention U-Net, and 3D-CNN on the Universit\'e Laval IRT-PVC dataset. The results demonstrate that PT-Fusion outperforms the aforementioned models in defect segmentation and depth estimation accuracies with a margin of 10%.

new Deep Learning for Early Alzheimer Disease Detection with MRI Scans

Authors: Mohammad Rafsan, Tamer Oraby, Upal Roy, Sanjeev Kumar, Hansapani Rodrigo

Abstract: Alzheimer's Disease is a neurodegenerative condition characterized by dementia and impairment in neurological function. The study primarily focuses on the individuals above age 40, affecting their memory, behavior, and cognitive processes of the brain. Alzheimer's disease requires diagnosis by a detailed assessment of MRI scans and neuropsychological tests of the patients. This project compares existing deep learning models in the pursuit of enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of AD diagnosis, specifically focusing on the Convolutional Neural Network, Bayesian Convolutional Neural Network, and the U-net model with the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies brain MRI dataset. Besides, to ensure robustness and reliability in the model evaluations, we address the challenge of imbalance in data. We then perform rigorous evaluation to determine strengths and weaknesses for each model by considering sensitivity, specificity, and computational efficiency. This comparative analysis would shed light on the future role of AI in revolutionizing AD diagnostics but also paved ways for future innovation in medical imaging and the management of neurodegenerative diseases.

new Mitigating Hallucinations on Object Attributes using Multiview Images and Negative Instructions

Authors: Zhijie Tan, Yuzhi Li, Shengwei Meng, Xiang Yuan, Weiping Li, Tong Mo, Bingce Wang, Xu Chu

Abstract: Current popular Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are suffering from Hallucinations on Object Attributes (HoOA), leading to incorrect determination of fine-grained attributes in the input images. Leveraging significant advancements in 3D generation from a single image, this paper proposes a novel method to mitigate HoOA in LVLMs. This method utilizes multiview images sampled from generated 3D representations as visual prompts for LVLMs, thereby providing more visual information from other viewpoints. Furthermore, we observe the input order of multiple multiview images significantly affects the performance of LVLMs. Consequently, we have devised Multiview Image Augmented VLM (MIAVLM), incorporating a Multiview Attributes Perceiver (MAP) submodule capable of simultaneously eliminating the influence of input image order and aligning visual information from multiview images with Large Language Models (LLMs). Besides, we designed and employed negative instructions to mitigate LVLMs' bias towards ``Yes" responses. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

new DiffuEraser: A Diffusion Model for Video Inpainting

Authors: Xiaowen Li, Haolan Xue, Peiran Ren, Liefeng Bo

Abstract: Recent video inpainting algorithms integrate flow-based pixel propagation with transformer-based generation to leverage optical flow for restoring textures and objects using information from neighboring frames, while completing masked regions through visual Transformers. However, these approaches often encounter blurring and temporal inconsistencies when dealing with large masks, highlighting the need for models with enhanced generative capabilities. Recently, diffusion models have emerged as a prominent technique in image and video generation due to their impressive performance. In this paper, we introduce DiffuEraser, a video inpainting model based on stable diffusion, designed to fill masked regions with greater details and more coherent structures. We incorporate prior information to provide initialization and weak conditioning,which helps mitigate noisy artifacts and suppress hallucinations. Additionally, to improve temporal consistency during long-sequence inference, we expand the temporal receptive fields of both the prior model and DiffuEraser, and further enhance consistency by leveraging the temporal smoothing property of Video Diffusion Models. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in both content completeness and temporal consistency while maintaining acceptable efficiency.

new Textoon: Generating Vivid 2D Cartoon Characters from Text Descriptions

Authors: Chao He, Jianqiang Ren, Liefeng Bo

Abstract: The 2D cartoon style is a prominent art form in digital character creation, particularly popular among younger audiences. While advancements in digital human technology have spurred extensive research into photorealistic digital humans and 3D characters, interactive 2D cartoon characters have received comparatively less attention. Unlike 3D counterparts, which require sophisticated construction and resource-intensive rendering, Live2D, a widely-used format for 2D cartoon characters, offers a more efficient alternative, which allows to animate 2D characters in a manner that simulates 3D movement without the necessity of building a complete 3D model. Furthermore, Live2D employs lightweight HTML5 (H5) rendering, improving both accessibility and efficiency. In this technical report, we introduce Textoon, an innovative method for generating diverse 2D cartoon characters in the Live2D format based on text descriptions. The Textoon leverages cutting-edge language and vision models to comprehend textual intentions and generate 2D appearance, capable of creating a wide variety of stunning and interactive 2D characters within one minute. The project homepage is https://human3daigc.github.io/Textoon_webpage/.

URLs: https://human3daigc.github.io/Textoon_webpage/.

new X-Dyna: Expressive Dynamic Human Image Animation

Authors: Di Chang, Hongyi Xu, You Xie, Yipeng Gao, Zhengfei Kuang, Shengqu Cai, Chenxu Zhang, Guoxian Song, Chao Wang, Yichun Shi, Zeyuan Chen, Shijie Zhou, Linjie Luo, Gordon Wetzstein, Mohammad Soleymani

Abstract: We introduce X-Dyna, a novel zero-shot, diffusion-based pipeline for animating a single human image using facial expressions and body movements derived from a driving video, that generates realistic, context-aware dynamics for both the subject and the surrounding environment. Building on prior approaches centered on human pose control, X-Dyna addresses key shortcomings causing the loss of dynamic details, enhancing the lifelike qualities of human video animations. At the core of our approach is the Dynamics-Adapter, a lightweight module that effectively integrates reference appearance context into the spatial attentions of the diffusion backbone while preserving the capacity of motion modules in synthesizing fluid and intricate dynamic details. Beyond body pose control, we connect a local control module with our model to capture identity-disentangled facial expressions, facilitating accurate expression transfer for enhanced realism in animated scenes. Together, these components form a unified framework capable of learning physical human motion and natural scene dynamics from a diverse blend of human and scene videos. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that X-Dyna outperforms state-of-the-art methods, creating highly lifelike and expressive animations. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/X-Dyna.

URLs: https://github.com/bytedance/X-Dyna.

new LWGANet: A Lightweight Group Attention Backbone for Remote Sensing Visual Tasks

Authors: Wei Lu, Si-Bao Chen, Chris H. Q. Ding, Jin Tang, Bin Luo

Abstract: Remote sensing (RS) visual tasks have gained significant academic and practical importance. However, they encounter numerous challenges that hinder effective feature extraction, including the detection and recognition of multiple objects exhibiting substantial variations in scale within a single image. While prior dual-branch or multi-branch architectural strategies have been effective in managing these object variances, they have concurrently resulted in considerable increases in computational demands and parameter counts. Consequently, these architectures are rendered less viable for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Contemporary lightweight backbone networks, designed primarily for natural images, frequently encounter difficulties in effectively extracting features from multi-scale objects, which compromises their efficacy in RS visual tasks. This article introduces LWGANet, a specialized lightweight backbone network tailored for RS visual tasks, incorporating a novel lightweight group attention (LWGA) module designed to address these specific challenges. LWGA module, tailored for RS imagery, adeptly harnesses redundant features to extract a wide range of spatial information, from local to global scales, without introducing additional complexity or computational overhead. This facilitates precise feature extraction across multiple scales within an efficient framework.LWGANet was rigorously evaluated across twelve datasets, which span four crucial RS visual tasks: scene classification, oriented object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. The results confirm LWGANet's widespread applicability and its ability to maintain an optimal balance between high performance and low complexity, achieving SOTA results across diverse datasets. LWGANet emerged as a novel solution for resource-limited scenarios requiring robust RS image processing capabilities.

new One-D-Piece: Image Tokenizer Meets Quality-Controllable Compression

Authors: Keita Miwa, Kento Sasaki, Hidehisa Arai, Tsubasa Takahashi, Yu Yamaguchi

Abstract: Current image tokenization methods require a large number of tokens to capture the information contained within images. Although the amount of information varies across images, most image tokenizers only support fixed-length tokenization, leading to inefficiency in token allocation. In this study, we introduce One-D-Piece, a discrete image tokenizer designed for variable-length tokenization, achieving quality-controllable mechanism. To enable variable compression rate, we introduce a simple but effective regularization mechanism named "Tail Token Drop" into discrete one-dimensional image tokenizers. This method encourages critical information to concentrate at the head of the token sequence, enabling support of variadic tokenization, while preserving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. We evaluate our tokenizer across multiple reconstruction quality metrics and find that it delivers significantly better perceptual quality than existing quality-controllable compression methods, including JPEG and WebP, at smaller byte sizes. Furthermore, we assess our tokenizer on various downstream computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation, confirming its adaptability to numerous applications compared to other variable-rate methods. Our approach demonstrates the versatility of variable-length discrete image tokenization, establishing a new paradigm in both compression efficiency and reconstruction performance. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of tail token drop via detailed analysis of tokenizers.

new FiLo++: Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Detection by Fused Fine-Grained Descriptions and Deformable Localization

Authors: Zhaopeng Gu, Bingke Zhu, Guibo Zhu, Yingying Chen, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang

Abstract: Anomaly detection methods typically require extensive normal samples from the target class for training, limiting their applicability in scenarios that require rapid adaptation, such as cold start. Zero-shot and few-shot anomaly detection do not require labeled samples from the target class in advance, making them a promising research direction. Existing zero-shot and few-shot approaches often leverage powerful multimodal models to detect and localize anomalies by comparing image-text similarity. However, their handcrafted generic descriptions fail to capture the diverse range of anomalies that may emerge in different objects, and simple patch-level image-text matching often struggles to localize anomalous regions of varying shapes and sizes. To address these issues, this paper proposes the FiLo++ method, which consists of two key components. The first component, Fused Fine-Grained Descriptions (FusDes), utilizes large language models to generate anomaly descriptions for each object category, combines both fixed and learnable prompt templates and applies a runtime prompt filtering method, producing more accurate and task-specific textual descriptions. The second component, Deformable Localization (DefLoc), integrates the vision foundation model Grounding DINO with position-enhanced text descriptions and a Multi-scale Deformable Cross-modal Interaction (MDCI) module, enabling accurate localization of anomalies with various shapes and sizes. In addition, we design a position-enhanced patch matching approach to improve few-shot anomaly detection performance. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that FiLo++ achieves significant performance improvements compared with existing methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FiLo.

URLs: https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FiLo.

new CLIP-PCQA: Exploring Subjective-Aligned Vision-Language Modeling for Point Cloud Quality Assessment

Authors: Yating Liu, Yujie Zhang, Ziyu Shan, Yiling Xu

Abstract: In recent years, No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment (NR-PCQA) research has achieved significant progress. However, existing methods mostly seek a direct mapping function from visual data to the Mean Opinion Score (MOS), which is contradictory to the mechanism of practical subjective evaluation. To address this, we propose a novel language-driven PCQA method named CLIP-PCQA. Considering that human beings prefer to describe visual quality using discrete quality descriptions (e.g., "excellent" and "poor") rather than specific scores, we adopt a retrieval-based mapping strategy to simulate the process of subjective assessment. More specifically, based on the philosophy of CLIP, we calculate the cosine similarity between the visual features and multiple textual features corresponding to different quality descriptions, in which process an effective contrastive loss and learnable prompts are introduced to enhance the feature extraction. Meanwhile, given the personal limitations and bias in subjective experiments, we further covert the feature similarities into probabilities and consider the Opinion Score Distribution (OSD) rather than a single MOS as the final target. Experimental results show that our CLIP-PCQA outperforms other State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) approaches.

new Robust Change Captioning in Remote Sensing: SECOND-CC Dataset and MModalCC Framework

Authors: Ali Can Karaca, M. Enes Ozelbas, Saadettin Berber, Orkhan Karimli, Turabi Yildirim, M. Fatih Amasyali

Abstract: Remote sensing change captioning (RSICC) aims to describe changes between bitemporal images in natural language. Existing methods often fail under challenges like illumination differences, viewpoint changes, blur effects, leading to inaccuracies, especially in no-change regions. Moreover, the images acquired at different spatial resolutions and have registration errors tend to affect the captions. To address these issues, we introduce SECOND-CC, a novel RSICC dataset featuring high-resolution RGB image pairs, semantic segmentation maps, and diverse real-world scenarios. SECOND-CC which contains 6,041 pairs of bitemporal RS images and 30,205 sentences describing the differences between images. Additionally, we propose MModalCC, a multimodal framework that integrates semantic and visual data using advanced attention mechanisms, including Cross-Modal Cross Attention (CMCA) and Multimodal Gated Cross Attention (MGCA). Detailed ablation studies and attention visualizations further demonstrate its effectiveness and ability to address RSICC challenges. Comprehensive experiments show that MModalCC outperforms state-of-the-art RSICC methods, including RSICCformer, Chg2Cap, and PSNet with +4.6% improvement on BLEU4 score and +9.6% improvement on CIDEr score. We will make our dataset and codebase publicly available to facilitate future research at https://github.com/ChangeCapsInRS/SecondCC

URLs: https://github.com/ChangeCapsInRS/SecondCC

new Few-shot Structure-Informed Machinery Part Segmentation with Foundation Models and Graph Neural Networks

Authors: Michael Schwingshackl, Fabio Francisco Oberweger, Markus Murschitz

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel approach to few-shot semantic segmentation for machinery with multiple parts that exhibit spatial and hierarchical relationships. Our method integrates the foundation models CLIPSeg and Segment Anything Model (SAM) with the interest point detector SuperPoint and a graph convolutional network (GCN) to accurately segment machinery parts. By providing 1 to 25 annotated samples, our model, evaluated on a purely synthetic dataset depicting a truck-mounted loading crane, achieves effective segmentation across various levels of detail. Training times are kept under five minutes on consumer GPUs. The model demonstrates robust generalization to real data, achieving a qualitative synthetic-to-real generalization with a $J\&F$ score of 92.2 on real data using 10 synthetic support samples. When benchmarked on the DAVIS 2017 dataset, it achieves a $J\&F$ score of 71.5 in semi-supervised video segmentation with three support samples. This method's fast training times and effective generalization to real data make it a valuable tool for autonomous systems interacting with machinery and infrastructure, and illustrate the potential of combined and orchestrated foundation models for few-shot segmentation tasks.

new Leveraging Confident Image Regions for Source-Free Domain-Adaptive Object Detection

Authors: Mohamed Lamine Mekhalfi, Davide Boscaini, Fabio Poiesi

Abstract: Source-free domain-adaptive object detection is an interesting but scarcely addressed topic. It aims at adapting a source-pretrained detector to a distinct target domain without resorting to source data during adaptation. So far, there is no data augmentation scheme tailored to source-free domain-adaptive object detection. To this end, this paper presents a novel data augmentation approach that cuts out target image regions where the detector is confident, augments them along with their respective pseudo-labels, and joins them into a challenging target image to adapt the detector. As the source data is out of reach during adaptation, we implement our approach within a teacher-student learning paradigm to ensure that the model does not collapse during the adaptation procedure. We evaluated our approach on three adaptation benchmarks of traffic scenes, scoring new state-of-the-art on two of them.

new Classifier Ensemble for Efficient Uncertainty Calibration of Deep Neural Networks for Image Classification

Authors: Michael Schulze, Nikolas Ebert, Laurenz Reichardt, Oliver Wasenm\"uller

Abstract: This paper investigates novel classifier ensemble techniques for uncertainty calibration applied to various deep neural networks for image classification. We evaluate both accuracy and calibration metrics, focusing on Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and Maximum Calibration Error (MCE). Our work compares different methods for building simple yet efficient classifier ensembles, including majority voting and several metamodel-based approaches. Our evaluation reveals that while state-of-the-art deep neural networks for image classification achieve high accuracy on standard datasets, they frequently suffer from significant calibration errors. Basic ensemble techniques like majority voting provide modest improvements, while metamodel-based ensembles consistently reduce ECE and MCE across all architectures. Notably, the largest of our compared metamodels demonstrate the most substantial calibration improvements, with minimal impact on accuracy. Moreover, classifier ensembles with metamodels outperform traditional model ensembles in calibration performance, while requiring significantly fewer parameters. In comparison to traditional post-hoc calibration methods, our approach removes the need for a separate calibration dataset. These findings underscore the potential of our proposed metamodel-based classifier ensembles as an efficient and effective approach to improving model calibration, thereby contributing to more reliable deep learning systems.

new landmarker: a Toolkit for Anatomical Landmark Localization in 2D/3D Images

Authors: Jef Jonkers, Luc Duchateau, Glenn Van Wallendael, Sofie Van Hoecke

Abstract: Anatomical landmark localization in 2D/3D images is a critical task in medical imaging. Although many general-purpose tools exist for landmark localization in classical computer vision tasks, such as pose estimation, they lack the specialized features and modularity necessary for anatomical landmark localization applications in the medical domain. Therefore, we introduce landmarker, a Python package built on PyTorch. The package provides a comprehensive, flexible toolkit for developing and evaluating landmark localization algorithms, supporting a range of methodologies, including static and adaptive heatmap regression. landmarker enhances the accuracy of landmark identification, streamlines research and development processes, and supports various image formats and preprocessing pipelines. Its modular design allows users to customize and extend the toolkit for specific datasets and applications, accelerating innovation in medical imaging. landmarker addresses a critical need for precision and customization in landmark localization tasks not adequately met by existing general-purpose pose estimation tools.

new DiffVSR: Enhancing Real-World Video Super-Resolution with Diffusion Models for Advanced Visual Quality and Temporal Consistency

Authors: Xiaohui Li, Yihao Liu, Shuo Cao, Ziyan Chen, Shaobin Zhuang, Xiangyu Chen, Yinan He, Yi Wang, Yu Qiao

Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in image generation and restoration, yet their application to video super-resolution faces significant challenges in maintaining both high fidelity and temporal consistency. We present DiffVSR, a diffusion-based framework for real-world video super-resolution that effectively addresses these challenges through key innovations. For intra-sequence coherence, we develop a multi-scale temporal attention module and temporal-enhanced VAE decoder that capture fine-grained motion details. To ensure inter-sequence stability, we introduce a noise rescheduling mechanism with an interweaved latent transition approach, which enhances temporal consistency without additional training overhead. We propose a progressive learning strategy that transitions from simple to complex degradations, enabling robust optimization despite limited high-quality video data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffVSR delivers superior results in both visual quality and temporal consistency, setting a new performance standard in real-world video super-resolution.

new Spatio-temporal Graph Learning on Adaptive Mined Key Frames for High-performance Multi-Object Tracking

Authors: Futian Wang, Fengxiang Liu, Xiao Wang

Abstract: In the realm of multi-object tracking, the challenge of accurately capturing the spatial and temporal relationships between objects in video sequences remains a significant hurdle. This is further complicated by frequent occurrences of mutual occlusions among objects, which can lead to tracking errors and reduced performance in existing methods. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a novel adaptive key frame mining strategy that addresses the limitations of current tracking approaches. Specifically, we introduce a Key Frame Extraction (KFE) module that leverages reinforcement learning to adaptively segment videos, thereby guiding the tracker to exploit the intrinsic logic of the video content. This approach allows us to capture structured spatial relationships between different objects as well as the temporal relationships of objects across frames. To tackle the issue of object occlusions, we have developed an Intra-Frame Feature Fusion (IFF) module. Unlike traditional graph-based methods that primarily focus on inter-frame feature fusion, our IFF module uses a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to facilitate information exchange between the target and surrounding objects within a frame. This innovation significantly enhances target distinguishability and mitigates tracking loss and appearance similarity due to occlusions. By combining the strengths of both long and short trajectories and considering the spatial relationships between objects, our proposed tracker achieves impressive results on the MOT17 dataset, i.e., 68.6 HOTA, 81.0 IDF1, 66.6 AssA, and 893 IDS, proving its effectiveness and accuracy.

new ACE: Anatomically Consistent Embeddings in Composition and Decomposition

Authors: Ziyu Zhou, Haozhe Luo, Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh Taher, Jiaxuan Pang, Xiaowei Ding, Michael Gotway, Jianming Liang

Abstract: Medical images acquired from standardized protocols show consistent macroscopic or microscopic anatomical structures, and these structures consist of composable/decomposable organs and tissues, but existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods do not appreciate such composable/decomposable structure attributes inherent to medical images. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel SSL approach called ACE to learn anatomically consistent embedding via composition and decomposition with two key branches: (1) global consistency, capturing discriminative macro-structures via extracting global features; (2) local consistency, learning fine-grained anatomical details from composable/decomposable patch features via corresponding matrix matching. Experimental results across 6 datasets 2 backbones, evaluated in few-shot learning, fine-tuning, and property analysis, show ACE's superior robustness, transferability, and clinical potential. The innovations of our ACE lie in grid-wise image cropping, leveraging the intrinsic properties of compositionality and decompositionality of medical images, bridging the semantic gap from high-level pathologies to low-level tissue anomalies, and providing a new SSL method for medical imaging.

new A Vision-Language Framework for Multispectral Scene Representation Using Language-Grounded Features

Authors: Enes Karanfil, Nevrez Imamoglu, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem

Abstract: Scene understanding in remote sensing often faces challenges in generating accurate representations for complex environments such as various land use areas or coastal regions, which may also include snow, clouds, or haze. To address this, we present a vision-language framework named Spectral LLaVA, which integrates multispectral data with vision-language alignment techniques to enhance scene representation and description. Using the BigEarthNet v2 dataset from Sentinel-2, we establish a baseline with RGB-based scene descriptions and further demonstrate substantial improvements through the incorporation of multispectral information. Our framework optimizes a lightweight linear projection layer for alignment while keeping the vision backbone of SpectralGPT frozen. Our experiments encompass scene classification using linear probing and language modeling for jointly performing scene classification and description generation. Our results highlight Spectral LLaVA's ability to produce detailed and accurate descriptions, particularly for scenarios where RGB data alone proves inadequate, while also enhancing classification performance by refining SpectralGPT features into semantically meaningful representations.

new Structure-guided Deep Multi-View Clustering

Authors: Jinrong Cui, Xiaohuang Wu, Haitao Zhang, Chongjie Dong, Jie Wen

Abstract: Deep multi-view clustering seeks to utilize the abundant information from multiple views to improve clustering performance. However, most of the existing clustering methods often neglect to fully mine multi-view structural information and fail to explore the distribution of multi-view data, limiting clustering performance. To address these limitations, we propose a structure-guided deep multi-view clustering model. Specifically, we introduce a positive sample selection strategy based on neighborhood relationships, coupled with a corresponding loss function. This strategy constructs multi-view nearest neighbor graphs to dynamically redefine positive sample pairs, enabling the mining of local structural information within multi-view data and enhancing the reliability of positive sample selection. Additionally, we introduce a Gaussian distribution model to uncover latent structural information and introduce a loss function to reduce discrepancies between view embeddings. These two strategies explore multi-view structural information and data distribution from different perspectives, enhancing consistency across views and increasing intra-cluster compactness. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our method, showing significant improvements in clustering performance on multiple benchmark datasets compared to state-of-the-art multi-view clustering approaches.

new CSHNet: A Novel Information Asymmetric Image Translation Method

Authors: Xi Yang, Haoyuan Shi, Zihan Wang, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao

Abstract: Despite advancements in cross-domain image translation, challenges persist in asymmetric tasks such as SAR-to-Optical and Sketch-to-Instance conversions, which involve transforming data from a less detailed domain into one with richer content. Traditional CNN-based methods are effective at capturing fine details but struggle with global structure, leading to unwanted merging of image regions. To address this, we propose the CNN-Swin Hybrid Network (CSHNet), which combines two key modules: Swin Embedded CNN (SEC) and CNN Embedded Swin (CES), forming the SEC-CES-Bottleneck (SCB). SEC leverages CNN's detailed feature extraction while integrating the Swin Transformer's structural bias. CES, in turn, preserves the Swin Transformer's global integrity, compensating for CNN's lack of focus on structure. Additionally, CSHNet includes two components designed to enhance cross-domain information retention: the Interactive Guided Connection (IGC), which enables dynamic information exchange between SEC and CES, and Adaptive Edge Perception Loss (AEPL), which maintains structural boundaries during translation. Experimental results show that CSHNet outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and performance metrics across scene-level and instance-level datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/XduShi/CSHNet.

URLs: https://github.com/XduShi/CSHNet.

new Adaptive Clustering for Efficient Phenotype Segmentation of UAV Hyperspectral Data

Authors: Ciem Cornelissen, Sam Leroux, Pieter Simoens

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) combined with Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) offer potential for environmental and agricultural applications by capturing detailed spectral information that enables the prediction of invisible features like biochemical leaf properties. However, the data-intensive nature of HSI poses challenges for remote devices, which have limited computational resources and storage. This paper introduces an Online Hyperspectral Simple Linear Iterative Clustering algorithm (OHSLIC) framework for real-time tree phenotype segmentation. OHSLIC reduces inherent noise and computational demands through adaptive incremental clustering and a lightweight neural network, which phenotypes trees using leaf contents such as chlorophyll, carotenoids, and anthocyanins. A hyperspectral dataset is created using a custom simulator that incorporates realistic leaf parameters, and light interactions. Results demonstrate that OHSLIC achieves superior regression accuracy and segmentation performance compared to pixel- or window-based methods while significantly reducing inference time. The method`s adaptive clustering enables dynamic trade-offs between computational efficiency and accuracy, paving the way for scalable edge-device deployment in HSI applications.

new Hypercone Assisted Contour Generation for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Authors: Annita Vapsi, Andr\'es Mu\~noz, Nancy Thomas, Keshav Ramani, Daniel Borrajo

Abstract: Recent advances in the field of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection have placed great emphasis on learning better representations suited to this task. While there are distance-based approaches, distributional awareness has seldom been exploited for better performance. We present HAC$_k$-OOD, a novel OOD detection method that makes no distributional assumption about the data, but automatically adapts to its distribution. Specifically, HAC$_k$-OOD constructs a set of hypercones by maximizing the angular distance to neighbors in a given data-point's vicinity to approximate the contour within which in-distribution (ID) data-points lie. Experimental results show state-of-the-art FPR@95 and AUROC performance on Near-OOD detection and on Far-OOD detection on the challenging CIFAR-100 benchmark without explicitly training for OOD performance.

new Disharmony: Forensics using Reverse Lighting Harmonization

Authors: Philip Wootaek Shin, Jack Sampson, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Andres Marquez, Mahantesh Halappanavar

Abstract: Content generation and manipulation approaches based on deep learning methods have seen significant advancements, leading to an increased need for techniques to detect whether an image has been generated or edited. Another area of research focuses on the insertion and harmonization of objects within images. In this study, we explore the potential of using harmonization data in conjunction with a segmentation model to enhance the detection of edited image regions. These edits can be either manually crafted or generated using deep learning methods. Our findings demonstrate that this approach can effectively identify such edits. Existing forensic models often overlook the detection of harmonized objects in relation to the background, but our proposed Disharmony Network addresses this gap. By utilizing an aggregated dataset of harmonization techniques, our model outperforms existing forensic networks in identifying harmonized objects integrated into their backgrounds, and shows potential for detecting various forms of edits, including virtual try-on tasks.

new MutualForce: Mutual-Aware Enhancement for 4D Radar-LiDAR 3D Object Detection

Authors: Xiangyuan Peng, Huawei Sun, Kay Bierzynski, Anton Fischbacher, Lorenzo Servadei, Robert Wille

Abstract: Radar and LiDAR have been widely used in autonomous driving as LiDAR provides rich structure information, and radar demonstrates high robustness under adverse weather. Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of fusing radar and LiDAR point clouds. However, challenges remain due to the modality misalignment and information loss during feature extractions. To address these issues, we propose a 4D radar-LiDAR framework to mutually enhance their representations. Initially, the indicative features from radar are utilized to guide both radar and LiDAR geometric feature learning. Subsequently, to mitigate their sparsity gap, the shape information from LiDAR is used to enrich radar BEV features. Extensive experiments on the View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset demonstrate our approach's superiority over existing methods, achieving the highest mAP of 71.76% across the entire area and 86.36\% within the driving corridor. Especially for cars, we improve the AP by 4.17% and 4.20% due to the strong indicative features and symmetric shapes.

new GSTAR: Gaussian Surface Tracking and Reconstruction

Authors: Chengwei Zheng, Lixin Xue, Juan Zarate, Jie Song

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting techniques have enabled efficient photo-realistic rendering of static scenes. Recent works have extended these approaches to support surface reconstruction and tracking. However, tracking dynamic surfaces with 3D Gaussians remains challenging due to complex topology changes, such as surfaces appearing, disappearing, or splitting. To address these challenges, we propose GSTAR, a novel method that achieves photo-realistic rendering, accurate surface reconstruction, and reliable 3D tracking for general dynamic scenes with changing topology. Given multi-view captures as input, GSTAR binds Gaussians to mesh faces to represent dynamic objects. For surfaces with consistent topology, GSTAR maintains the mesh topology and tracks the meshes using Gaussians. In regions where topology changes, GSTAR adaptively unbinds Gaussians from the mesh, enabling accurate registration and the generation of new surfaces based on these optimized Gaussians. Additionally, we introduce a surface-based scene flow method that provides robust initialization for tracking between frames. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively tracks and reconstructs dynamic surfaces, enabling a range of applications. Our project page with the code release is available at https://chengwei-zheng.github.io/GSTAR/.

URLs: https://chengwei-zheng.github.io/GSTAR/.

new HiMix: Reducing Computational Complexity in Large Vision-Language Models

Authors: Xuange Zhang, Dengjie Li, Bo Liu, Zenghao Bao, Yao Zhou, Baisong Yang, Zhongying Liu, Yujie Zhong, Zheng Zhao, Tongtong Yuan

Abstract: Benefiting from recent advancements in large language models and modality alignment techniques, existing Large Vision-Language Models(LVLMs) have achieved prominent performance across a wide range of scenarios. However, the excessive computational complexity limits the widespread use of these models in practical applications. We argue that one main bottleneck in computational complexity is caused by the involvement of redundant vision sequences in model computation. This is inspired by a reassessment of the efficiency of vision and language information transmission in the language decoder of LVLMs. Then, we propose a novel hierarchical vision-language interaction mechanism called Hierarchical Vision injection for Mixture Attention (HiMix). In HiMix, only the language sequence undergoes full forward propagation, while the vision sequence interacts with the language at specific stages within each language decoder layer. It is striking that our approach significantly reduces computational complexity with minimal performance loss. Specifically, HiMix achieves a 10x reduction in the computational cost of the language decoder across multiple LVLM models while maintaining comparable performance. This highlights the advantages of our method, and we hope our research brings new perspectives to the field of vision-language understanding. Project Page: https://xuange923.github.io/HiMix

URLs: https://xuange923.github.io/HiMix

new DiffStereo: High-Frequency Aware Diffusion Model for Stereo Image Restoration

Authors: Huiyun Cao, Yuan Shi, Bin Xia, Xiaoyu Jin, Wenming Yang

Abstract: Diffusion models (DMs) have achieved promising performance in image restoration but haven't been explored for stereo images. The application of DM in stereo image restoration is confronted with a series of challenges. The need to reconstruct two images exacerbates DM's computational cost. Additionally, existing latent DMs usually focus on semantic information and remove high-frequency details as redundancy during latent compression, which is precisely what matters for image restoration. To address the above problems, we propose a high-frequency aware diffusion model, DiffStereo for stereo image restoration as the first attempt at DM in this domain. Specifically, DiffStereo first learns latent high-frequency representations (LHFR) of HQ images. DM is then trained in the learned space to estimate LHFR for stereo images, which are fused into a transformer-based stereo image restoration network providing beneficial high-frequency information of corresponding HQ images. The resolution of LHFR is kept the same as input images, which preserves the inherent texture from distortion. And the compression in channels alleviates the computational burden of DM. Furthermore, we devise a position encoding scheme when integrating the LHFR into the restoration network, enabling distinctive guidance in different depths of the restoration network. Comprehensive experiments verify that by combining generative DM and transformer, DiffStereo achieves both higher reconstruction accuracy and better perceptual quality on stereo super-resolution, deblurring, and low-light enhancement compared with state-of-the-art methods.

new 3rd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2025: Challenge Results

Authors: Benjamin Kiefer, Lojze \v{Z}ust, Jon Muhovi\v{c}, Matej Kristan, Janez Per\v{s}, Matija Ter\v{s}ek, Uma Mudenagudi Chaitra Desai, Arnold Wiliem, Marten Kreis, Nikhil Akalwadi, Yitong Quan, Zhiqiang Zhong, Zhe Zhang, Sujie Liu, Xuran Chen, Yang Yang, Matej Fabijani\'c, Fausto Ferreira, Seongju Lee, Junseok Lee, Kyoobin Lee, Shanliang Yao, Runwei Guan, Xiaoyu Huang, Yi Ni, Himanshu Kumar, Yuan Feng, Yi-Ching Cheng, Tzu-Yu Lin, Chia-Ming Lee, Chih-Chung Hsu, Jannik Sheikh, Andreas Michel, Wolfgang Gross, Martin Weinmann, Josip \v{S}ari\'c, Yipeng Lin, Xiang Yang, Nan Jiang, Yutang Lu, Fei Feng, Ali Awad, Evan Lucas, Ashraf Saleem, Ching-Heng Cheng, Yu-Fan Lin, Tzu-Yu Lin, Chih-Chung Hsu

Abstract: The 3rd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2025 addresses maritime computer vision for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) and underwater. This report offers a comprehensive overview of the findings from the challenges. We provide both statistical and qualitative analyses, evaluating trends from over 700 submissions. All datasets, evaluation code, and the leaderboard are available to the public at https://macvi.org/workshop/macvi25.

URLs: https://macvi.org/workshop/macvi25.

new Zero-Shot Monocular Scene Flow Estimation in the Wild

Authors: Yiqing Liang, Abhishek Badki, Hang Su, James Tompkin, Orazio Gallo

Abstract: Large models have shown generalization across datasets for many low-level vision tasks, like depth estimation, but no such general models exist for scene flow. Even though scene flow has wide potential use, it is not used in practice because current predictive models do not generalize well. We identify three key challenges and propose solutions for each.First, we create a method that jointly estimates geometry and motion for accurate prediction. Second, we alleviate scene flow data scarcity with a data recipe that affords us 1M annotated training samples across diverse synthetic scenes. Third, we evaluate different parameterizations for scene flow prediction and adopt a natural and effective parameterization. Our resulting model outperforms existing methods as well as baselines built on large-scale models in terms of 3D end-point error, and shows zero-shot generalization to the casually captured videos from DAVIS and the robotic manipulation scenes from RoboTAP. Overall, our approach makes scene flow prediction more practical in-the-wild.

new FaceXBench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Face Understanding

Authors: Kartik Narayan, Vibashan VS, Vishal M. Patel

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive problem-solving abilities across a wide range of tasks and domains. However, their capacity for face understanding has not been systematically studied. To address this gap, we introduce FaceXBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs on complex face understanding tasks. FaceXBench includes 5,000 multimodal multiple-choice questions derived from 25 public datasets and a newly created dataset, FaceXAPI. These questions cover 14 tasks across 6 broad categories, assessing MLLMs' face understanding abilities in bias and fairness, face authentication, recognition, analysis, localization and tool retrieval. Using FaceXBench, we conduct an extensive evaluation of 26 open-source MLLMs alongside 2 proprietary models, revealing the unique challenges in complex face understanding tasks. We analyze the models across three evaluation settings: zero-shot, in-context task description, and chain-of-thought prompting. Our detailed analysis reveals that current MLLMs, including advanced models like GPT-4o, and GeminiPro 1.5, show significant room for improvement. We believe FaceXBench will be a crucial resource for developing MLLMs equipped to perform sophisticated face understanding. Code: https://github.com/Kartik-3004/facexbench

URLs: https://github.com/Kartik-3004/facexbench

cross Detection of Vascular Leukoencephalopathy in CT Images

Authors: Z. Cernekova, V. Sisik, F. Jafari

Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen a significant surge in popularity, particularly in its application to medicine. This study explores AI's role in diagnosing leukoencephalopathy, a small vessel disease of the brain, and a leading cause of vascular dementia and hemorrhagic strokes. We utilized a dataset of approximately 1200 patients with axial brain CT scans to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for binary disease classification. Addressing the challenge of varying scan dimensions due to different patient physiologies, we processed the data to a uniform size and applied three preprocessing methods to improve model accuracy. We compared four neural network architectures: ResNet50, ResNet50 3D, ConvNext, and Densenet. The ConvNext model achieved the highest accuracy of 98.5% without any preprocessing, outperforming models with 3D convolutions. To gain insights into model decision-making, we implemented Grad-CAM heatmaps, which highlighted the focus areas of the models on the scans. Our results demonstrate that AI, particularly the ConvNext architecture, can significantly enhance diagnostic accuracy for leukoencephalopathy. This study underscores AI's potential in advancing diagnostic methodologies for brain diseases and highlights the effectiveness of CNNs in medical imaging applications.

cross SLIM: Sim-to-Real Legged Instructive Manipulation via Long-Horizon Visuomotor Learning

Authors: Haichao Zhang, Haonan Yu, Le Zhao, Andrew Choi, Qinxun Bai, Yiqing Yang, Wei Xu

Abstract: We present a low-cost quadruped manipulation system that solves long-horizon real-world tasks, trained by reinforcement learning purely in simulation. The system comprises 1) a hierarchical design of a high-level policy for visual-mobile manipulation following instructions, and a low-level policy for quadruped movement and limb-control, 2) a progressive policy expansion approach for solving the long-horizon task together with a teacher-student framework for efficient high-level training of the high-level visuomotor policy, and 3) a suite of techniques for minimizing sim-to-real gaps. With budget-friendly but limited reliability and performance hardware, and just one wrist-mounted RGB camera, the entire system fully trained in simulation achieves high success rates for long horizon tasks involving search, move, grasp, and drop-into, with fluid sim-to-real transfer in a wide variety of indoor and outdoor scenes and lighting conditions.Extensive real-world evaluations show that on the long horizon mobile manipulation tasks, our system achieves good performance when transferred to real both in terms of task success rate and execution efficiency. Finally, we discuss the necessity of our sim-to-real techniques for legged mobile manipulation, and show their ablation performance.

cross ForestProtector: An IoT Architecture Integrating Machine Vision and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Wildfire Monitoring

Authors: Kenneth Bonilla-Ormachea, Horacio Cuizaga, Edwin Salcedo, Sebastian Castro, Sergio Fernandez-Testa, Misael Mamani

Abstract: Early detection of forest fires is crucial to minimizing the environmental and socioeconomic damage they cause. Indeed, a fire's duration directly correlates with the difficulty and cost of extinguishing it. For instance, a fire burning for 1 minute might require 1 liter of water to extinguish, while a 2-minute fire could demand 100 liters, and a 10-minute fire might necessitate 1,000 liters. On the other hand, existing fire detection systems based on novel technologies (e.g., remote sensing, PTZ cameras, UAVs) are often expensive and require human intervention, making continuous monitoring of large areas impractical. To address this challenge, this work proposes a low-cost forest fire detection system that utilizes a central gateway device with computer vision capabilities to monitor a 360{\deg} field of view for smoke at long distances. A deep reinforcement learning agent enhances surveillance by dynamically controlling the camera's orientation, leveraging real-time sensor data (smoke levels, ambient temperature, and humidity) from distributed IoT devices. This approach enables automated wildfire monitoring across expansive areas while reducing false positives.

cross Physics-informed DeepCT: Sinogram Wavelet Decomposition Meets Masked Diffusion

Authors: Zekun Zhou, Tan Liu, Bing Yu, Yanru Gong, Liu Shi, Qiegen Liu

Abstract: Diffusion model shows remarkable potential on sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) reconstruction. However, when a network is trained on a limited sample space, its generalization capability may be constrained, which degrades performance on unfamiliar data. For image generation tasks, this can lead to issues such as blurry details and inconsistencies between regions. To alleviate this problem, we propose a Sinogram-based Wavelet random decomposition And Random mask diffusion Model (SWARM) for SVCT reconstruction. Specifically, introducing a random mask strategy in the sinogram effectively expands the limited training sample space. This enables the model to learn a broader range of data distributions, enhancing its understanding and generalization of data uncertainty. In addition, applying a random training strategy to the high-frequency components of the sinogram wavelet enhances feature representation and improves the ability to capture details in different frequency bands, thereby improving performance and robustness. Two-stage iterative reconstruction method is adopted to ensure the global consistency of the reconstructed image while refining its details. Experimental results demonstrate that SWARM outperforms competing approaches in both quantitative and qualitative performance across various datasets.

cross Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI): from inherent explainability to large language models

Authors: Fuseini Mumuni, Alhassan Mumuni

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has continued to achieve tremendous success in recent times. However, the decision logic of these frameworks is often not transparent, making it difficult for stakeholders to understand, interpret or explain their behavior. This limitation hinders trust in machine learning systems and causes a general reluctance towards their adoption in practical applications, particularly in mission-critical domains like healthcare and autonomous driving. Explainable AI (XAI) techniques facilitate the explainability or interpretability of machine learning models, enabling users to discern the basis of the decision and possibly avert undesirable behavior. This comprehensive survey details the advancements of explainable AI methods, from inherently interpretable models to modern approaches for achieving interpretability of various black box models, including large language models (LLMs). Additionally, we review explainable AI techniques that leverage LLM and vision-language model (VLM) frameworks to automate or improve the explainability of other machine learning models. The use of LLM and VLM as interpretability methods particularly enables high-level, semantically meaningful explanations of model decisions and behavior. Throughout the paper, we highlight the scientific principles, strengths and weaknesses of state-of-the-art methods and outline different areas of improvement. Where appropriate, we also present qualitative and quantitative comparison results of various methods to show how they compare. Finally, we discuss the key challenges of XAI and directions for future research.

cross SpatialCoT: Advancing Spatial Reasoning through Coordinate Alignment and Chain-of-Thought for Embodied Task Planning

Authors: Yuecheng Liu, Dafeng Chi, Shiguang Wu, Zhanguang Zhang, Yaochen Hu, Lingfeng Zhang, Yingxue Zhang, Shuang Wu, Tongtong Cao, Guowei Huang, Guangjian Tian, Xingyue Quan, Jianye Hao, Yuzheng Zhuang

Abstract: Spatial reasoning is an essential problem in embodied AI research. Efforts to enhance spatial reasoning abilities through supplementary spatial data and fine-tuning have proven limited and ineffective when addressing complex embodied tasks, largely due to their dependence on language-based outputs. While some approaches have introduced a point-based action space to mitigate this issue, they fall short in managing more intricate tasks within complex environments. This deficiency arises from their failure to fully exploit the inherent thinking and reasoning capabilities that are fundamental strengths of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach named SpatialCoT, specifically designed to bolster the spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Our approach comprises two stages: spatial coordinate bi-directional alignment, which aligns vision-language inputs with spatial coordinates, and chain-of-thought spatial grounding, which harnesses the reasoning capabilities of language models for advanced spatial reasoning. We evaluate SpatialCoT on challenging navigation and manipulation tasks, both in simulation and real-world settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in both tasks.

cross Universal Actions for Enhanced Embodied Foundation Models

Authors: Jinliang Zheng, Jianxiong Li, Dongxiu Liu, Yinan Zheng, Zhihao Wang, Zhonghong Ou, Yu Liu, Jingjing Liu, Ya-Qin Zhang, Xianyuan Zhan

Abstract: Training on diverse, internet-scale data is a key factor in the success of recent large foundation models. Yet, using the same recipe for building embodied agents has faced noticeable difficulties. Despite the availability of many crowd-sourced embodied datasets, their action spaces often exhibit significant heterogeneity due to distinct physical embodiment and control interfaces for different robots, causing substantial challenges in developing embodied foundation models using cross-domain data. In this paper, we introduce UniAct, a new embodied foundation modeling framework operating in a tokenized Universal Action Space. Our learned universal actions capture the generic atomic behaviors across diverse robots by exploiting their shared structural features, and enable enhanced cross-domain data utilization and cross-embodiment generalizations by eliminating the notorious heterogeneity. The universal actions can be efficiently translated back to heterogeneous actionable commands by simply adding embodiment-specific details, from which fast adaptation to new robots becomes simple and straightforward. Our 0.5B instantiation of UniAct outperforms 14X larger SOTA embodied foundation models in extensive evaluations on various real-world and simulation robots, showcasing exceptional cross-embodiment control and adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of adopting universal actions. Project page: https://github.com/2toinf/UniAct

URLs: https://github.com/2toinf/UniAct

cross FECT: Classification of Breast Cancer Pathological Images Based on Fusion Features

Authors: Jiacheng Hao, Yiqing Liu, Siqi Zeng, Yonghong He

Abstract: Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers among women globally, with early diagnosis and precise classification being crucial. With the advancement of deep learning and computer vision, the automatic classification of breast tissue pathological images has emerged as a research focus. Existing methods typically rely on singular cell or tissue features and lack design considerations for morphological characteristics of challenging-to-classify categories, resulting in suboptimal classification performance. To address these problems, we proposes a novel breast cancer tissue classification model that Fused features of Edges, Cells, and Tissues (FECT), employing the ResMTUNet and an attention-based aggregator to extract and aggregate these features. Extensive testing on the BRACS dataset demonstrates that our model surpasses current advanced methods in terms of classification accuracy and F1 scores. Moreover, due to its feature fusion that aligns with the diagnostic approach of pathologists, our model exhibits interpretability and holds promise for significant roles in future clinical applications.

cross Robust Egoistic Rigid Body Localization

Authors: Niclas F\"uhrling, Giuseppe Thadeu Freitas de Abreu, David Gonz\'alez G., Osvaldo Gonsa

Abstract: We consider a robust and self-reliant (or "egoistic") variation of the rigid body localization (RBL) problem, in which a primary rigid body seeks to estimate the pose (i.e., location and orientation) of another rigid body (or "target"), relative to its own, without the assistance of external infrastructure, without prior knowledge of the shape of the target, and taking into account the possibility that the available observations are incomplete. Three complementary contributions are then offered for such a scenario. The first is a method to estimate the translation vector between the center point of both rigid bodies, which unlike existing techniques does not require that both objects have the same shape or even the same number of landmark points. This technique is shown to significantly outperform the state-of-the-art (SotA) under complete information, but to be sensitive to data erasures, even when enhanced by matrix completion methods. The second contribution, designed to offer improved performance in the presence of incomplete information, offers a robust alternative to the latter, at the expense of a slight relative loss under complete information. Finally, the third contribution is a scheme for the estimation of the rotation matrix describing the relative orientation of the target rigid body with respect to the primary. Comparisons of the proposed schemes and SotA techniques demonstrate the advantage of the contributed methods in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) performance under fully complete information and incomplete conditions.

cross New Fashion Products Performance Forecasting: A Survey on Evolutions, Models and Emerging Trends

Authors: Andrea Avogaro, Luigi Capogrosso, Andrea Toaiari, Franco Fummi, Marco Cristani

Abstract: The fast fashion industry's insatiable demand for new styles and rapid production cycles has led to a significant environmental burden. Overproduction, excessive waste, and harmful chemicals have contributed to the negative environmental impact of the industry. To mitigate these issues, a paradigm shift that prioritizes sustainability and efficiency is urgently needed. Integrating learning-based predictive analytics into the fashion industry represents a significant opportunity to address environmental challenges and drive sustainable practices. By forecasting fashion trends and optimizing production, brands can reduce their ecological footprint while remaining competitive in a rapidly changing market. However, one of the key challenges in forecasting fashion sales is the dynamic nature of consumer preferences. Fashion is acyclical, with trends constantly evolving and resurfacing. In addition, cultural changes and unexpected events can disrupt established patterns. This problem is also known as New Fashion Products Performance Forecasting (NFPPF), and it has recently gained more and more interest in the global research landscape. Given its multidisciplinary nature, the field of NFPPF has been approached from many different angles. This comprehensive survey wishes to provide an up-to-date overview that focuses on learning-based NFPPF strategies. The survey is based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodological flow, allowing for a systematic and complete literature review. In particular, we propose the first taxonomy that covers the learning panorama for NFPPF, examining in detail the different methodologies used to increase the amount of multimodal information, as well as the state-of-the-art available datasets. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future directions.

replace NeuManifold: Neural Watertight Manifold Reconstruction with Efficient and High-Quality Rendering Support

Authors: Xinyue Wei, Fanbo Xiang, Sai Bi, Anpei Chen, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Zexiang Xu, Hao Su

Abstract: We present a method for generating high-quality watertight manifold meshes from multi-view input images. Existing volumetric rendering methods are robust in optimization but tend to generate noisy meshes with poor topology. Differentiable rasterization-based methods can generate high-quality meshes but are sensitive to initialization. Our method combines the benefits of both worlds; we take the geometry initialization obtained from neural volumetric fields, and further optimize the geometry as well as a compact neural texture representation with differentiable rasterizers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method can generate accurate mesh reconstructions with faithful appearance that are comparable to previous volume rendering methods while being an order of magnitude faster in rendering. We also show that our generated mesh and neural texture reconstruction is compatible with existing graphics pipelines and enables downstream 3D applications such as simulation. Project page: https://sarahweiii.github.io/neumanifold/

URLs: https://sarahweiii.github.io/neumanifold/

replace Model Synthesis for Zero-Shot Model Attribution

Authors: Tianyun Yang, Juan Cao, Danding Wang, Chang Xu

Abstract: Nowadays, generative models are shaping various fields such as art, design, and human-computer interaction, yet accompanied by challenges related to copyright infringement and content management. In response, existing research seeks to identify the unique fingerprints on the images they generate, which can be leveraged to attribute the generated images to their source models. Existing methods, however, are constrained to identifying models within a static set included in the classifier training, failing to adapt to newly emerged unseen models dynamically. To bridge this gap, we aim to develop a generalized model fingerprint extractor capable of zero-shot attribution, effectively attributes unseen models without exposure during training. Central to our method is a model synthesis technique, which generates numerous synthetic models mimicking the fingerprint patterns of real-world generative models. The design of the synthesis technique is motivated by observations on how the basic generative model's architecture building blocks and parameters influence fingerprint patterns, and it is validated through two designed metrics that examine synthetic models' fidelity and diversity. Our experiments demonstrate that this fingerprint extractor, trained solely on synthetic models, achieves impressive zero-shot generalization on a wide range of real-world generative models, improving model identification and verification accuracy on unseen models by over 40% and 15%, respectively, compared to existing approaches.

replace Expression Prompt Collaboration Transformer for Universal Referring Video Object Segmentation

Authors: Jiajun Chen, Jiacheng Lin, Guojin Zhong, Haolong Fu, Ke Nai, Kailun Yang, Zhiyong Li

Abstract: Audio-guided Video Object Segmentation (A-VOS) and Referring Video Object Segmentation (R-VOS) are two highly related tasks that both aim to segment specific objects from video sequences according to expression prompts. However, due to the challenges of modeling representations for different modalities, existing methods struggle to strike a balance between interaction flexibility and localization precision. In this paper, we address this problem from two perspectives: the alignment of audio and text and the deep interaction among audio, text, and visual modalities. First, we propose a universal architecture, the Expression Prompt Collaboration Transformer, herein EPCFormer. Next, we propose an Expression Alignment (EA) mechanism for audio and text. The proposed EPCFormer exploits the fact that audio and text prompts referring to the same objects are semantically equivalent by using contrastive learning for both types of expressions. Then, to facilitate deep interactions among audio, text, and visual modalities, we introduce an Expression-Visual Attention (EVA) module. The knowledge of video object segmentation in terms of the expression prompts can seamlessly transfer between the two tasks by deeply exploring complementary cues between text and audio. Experiments on well-recognized benchmarks demonstrate that our EPCFormer attains state-of-the-art results on both tasks. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lab206/EPCFormer.

URLs: https://github.com/lab206/EPCFormer.

replace Myriad: Large Multimodal Model by Applying Vision Experts for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Authors: Yuanze Li, Haolin Wang, Shihao Yuan, Ming Liu, Debin Zhao, Yiwen Guo, Chen Xu, Guangming Shi, Wangmeng Zuo

Abstract: Due to the training configuration, traditional industrial anomaly detection (IAD) methods have to train a specific model for each deployment scenario, which is insufficient to meet the requirements of modern design and manufacturing. On the contrary, large multimodal models~(LMMs) have shown eminent generalization ability on various vision tasks, and their perception and comprehension capabilities imply the potential of applying LMMs on IAD tasks. However, we observe that even though the LMMs have abundant knowledge about industrial anomaly detection in the textual domain, the LMMs are unable to leverage the knowledge due to the modality gap between textual and visual domains. To stimulate the relevant knowledge in LMMs and adapt the LMMs towards anomaly detection tasks, we introduce existing IAD methods as vision experts and present a novel large multimodal model applying vision experts for industrial anomaly detection~(abbreviated to {Myriad}). Specifically, we utilize the anomaly map generated by the vision experts as guidance for LMMs, such that the vision model is guided to pay more attention to anomalous regions. Then, the visual features are modulated via an adapter to fit the anomaly detection tasks, which are fed into the language model together with the vision expert guidance and human instructions to generate the final outputs. Extensive experiments are applied on MVTec-AD, VisA, and PCB Bank benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method not only performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods, but also inherits the flexibility and instruction-following ability of LMMs in the field of IAD. Source code and pre-trained models are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/tzjtatata/Myriad}.

URLs: https://github.com/tzjtatata/Myriad

replace A Survey on Deep Learning for Polyp Segmentation: Techniques, Challenges and Future Trends

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

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

URLs: https://github.com/taozh2017/Awesome-Polyp-Segmentation.

replace Generate E-commerce Product Background by Integrating Category Commonality and Personalized Style

Authors: Haohan Wang, Wei Feng, Yaoyu Li, Zheng Zhang, Jingjing Lv, Junjie Shen, Zhangang Lin, Jingping Shao

Abstract: The state-of-the-art methods for e-commerce product background generation suffer from the inefficiency of designing product-wise prompts when scaling up the production, as well as the ineffectiveness of describing fine-grained styles when customizing personalized backgrounds for some specific brands. To address these obstacles, we integrate the category commonality and personalized style into diffusion models. Concretely, we propose a Category-Wise Generator to enable large-scale background generation with only one model for the first time. A unique identifier in the prompt is assigned to each category, whose attention is located on the background by a mask-guided cross attention layer to learn the category-wise style. Furthermore, for products with specific and fine-grained requirements in layout, elements, etc, a Personality-Wise Generator is devised to learn such personalized style directly from a reference image to resolve textual ambiguities, and is trained in a self-supervised manner for more efficient training data usage. To advance research in this field, the first large-scale e-commerce product background generation dataset BG60k is constructed, which covers more than 60k product images from over 2k categories. Experiments demonstrate that our method could generate high-quality backgrounds for different categories, and maintain the personalized background style of reference images. BG60k will be available at \url{https://github.com/Whileherham/BG60k}.

URLs: https://github.com/Whileherham/BG60k

replace Isolated Diffusion: Optimizing Multi-Concept Text-to-Image Generation Training-Freely with Isolated Diffusion Guidance

Authors: Jingyuan Zhu, Huimin Ma, Jiansheng Chen, Jian Yuan

Abstract: Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have achieved great success in synthesizing high-quality and diverse images given target text prompts. Despite the revolutionary image generation ability, current state-of-the-art models still struggle to deal with multi-concept generation accurately in many cases. This phenomenon is known as ``concept bleeding" and displays as the unexpected overlapping or merging of various concepts. This paper presents a general approach for text-to-image diffusion models to address the mutual interference between different subjects and their attachments in complex scenes, pursuing better text-image consistency. The core idea is to isolate the synthesizing processes of different concepts. We propose to bind each attachment to corresponding subjects separately with split text prompts. Besides, we introduce a revision method to fix the concept bleeding problem in multi-subject synthesis. We first depend on pre-trained object detection and segmentation models to obtain the layouts of subjects. Then we isolate and resynthesize each subject individually with corresponding text prompts to avoid mutual interference. Overall, we achieve a training-free strategy, named Isolated Diffusion, to optimize multi-concept text-to-image synthesis. It is compatible with the latest Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) and prior Stable Diffusion (SD) models. We compare our approach with alternative methods using a variety of multi-concept text prompts and demonstrate its effectiveness with clear advantages in text-image consistency and user study.

replace FireANTs: Adaptive Riemannian Optimization for Multi-Scale Diffeomorphic Matching

Authors: Rohit Jena, Pratik Chaudhari, James C. Gee

Abstract: The paper proposes FireANTs, the first multi-scale Adaptive Riemannian Optimization algorithm for dense diffeomorphic image matching. One of the most critical and understudied aspects of diffeomorphic image matching algorithms are its highly ill-conditioned nature. We quantitatively capture the extent of ill-conditioning in a typical MRI matching task, motivating the need for an adaptive optimization algorithm for diffeomorphic matching. To this end, FireANTs generalizes the concept of momentum and adaptive estimates of the Hessian to mitigate this ill-conditioning in the non-Euclidean space of diffeomorphisms. Unlike common non-Euclidean manifolds, we also formalize considerations for multi-scale optimization of diffeomorphisms. Our rigorous mathematical results and operational contributions lead to a state-of-the-art dense matching algorithm that can be applied to generic image data with remarkable accuracy and robustness. We demonstrate consistent improvements in image matching performance across a spectrum of community-standard medical and biological correspondence matching challenges spanning a wide variety of image modalities, anatomies, resolutions, acquisition protocols, and preprocessing pipelines. This improvement is supplemented by from 300x up to 3200x speedup over existing state-of-the-art algorithms. For the first time, we perform diffeomorphic matching of sub-micron mouse cortex volumes at native resolution. Our fast implementation also enables hyperparameter studies that were intractable with existing correspondence matching algorithms.

replace WaveDH: Wavelet Sub-bands Guided ConvNet for Efficient Image Dehazing

Authors: Seongmin Hwang, Daeyoung Han, Cheolkon Jung, Moongu Jeon

Abstract: The surge in interest regarding image dehazing has led to notable advancements in deep learning-based single image dehazing approaches, exhibiting impressive performance in recent studies. Despite these strides, many existing methods fall short in meeting the efficiency demands of practical applications. In this paper, we introduce WaveDH, a novel and compact ConvNet designed to address this efficiency gap in image dehazing. Our WaveDH leverages wavelet sub-bands for guided up-and-downsampling and frequency-aware feature refinement. The key idea lies in utilizing wavelet decomposition to extract low-and-high frequency components from feature levels, allowing for faster processing while upholding high-quality reconstruction. The downsampling block employs a novel squeeze-and-attention scheme to optimize the feature downsampling process in a structurally compact manner through wavelet domain learning, preserving discriminative features while discarding noise components. In our upsampling block, we introduce a dual-upsample and fusion mechanism to enhance high-frequency component awareness, aiding in the reconstruction of high-frequency details. Departing from conventional dehazing methods that treat low-and-high frequency components equally, our feature refinement block strategically processes features with a frequency-aware approach. By employing a coarse-to-fine methodology, it not only refines the details at frequency levels but also significantly optimizes computational costs. The refinement is performed in a maximum 8x downsampled feature space, striking a favorable efficiency-vs-accuracy trade-off. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, WaveDH, outperforms many state-of-the-art methods on several image dehazing benchmarks with significantly reduced computational costs. Our code is available at https://github.com/AwesomeHwang/WaveDH.

URLs: https://github.com/AwesomeHwang/WaveDH.

replace SARATR-X: Towards Building A Foundation Model for SAR Target Recognition

Authors: Weijie Li, Wei Yang, Yuenan Hou, Li Liu, Yongxiang Liu, Xiang Li

Abstract: Despite the remarkable progress in synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR ATR), recent efforts have concentrated on detecting and classifying a specific category, e.g., vehicles, ships, airplanes, or buildings. One of the fundamental limitations of the top-performing SAR ATR methods is that the learning paradigm is supervised, task-specific, limited-category, closed-world learning, which depends on massive amounts of accurately annotated samples that are expensively labeled by expert SAR analysts and have limited generalization capability and scalability. In this work, we make the first attempt towards building a foundation model for SAR ATR, termed SARATR-X. SARATR-X learns generalizable representations via self-supervised learning (SSL) and provides a cornerstone for label-efficient model adaptation to generic SAR target detection and classification tasks. Specifically, SARATR-X is trained on 0.18 M unlabelled SAR target samples, which are curated by combining contemporary benchmarks and constitute the largest publicly available dataset till now. Considering the characteristics of SAR images, a backbone tailored for SAR ATR is carefully designed, and a two-step SSL method endowed with multi-scale gradient features was applied to ensure the feature diversity and model scalability of SARATR-X. The capabilities of SARATR-X are evaluated on classification under few-shot and robustness settings and detection across various categories and scenes, and impressive performance is achieved, often competitive with or even superior to prior fully supervised, semi-supervised, or self-supervised algorithms. Our SARATR-X and the curated dataset are released at https://github.com/waterdisappear/SARATR-X to foster research into foundation models for SAR image interpretation.

URLs: https://github.com/waterdisappear/SARATR-X

replace IOR: Inversed Objects Replay for Incremental Object Detection

Authors: Zijia An, Boyu Diao, Libo Huang, Ruiqi Liu, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu

Abstract: Existing Incremental Object Detection (IOD) methods partially alleviate catastrophic forgetting when incrementally detecting new objects in real-world scenarios. However, many of these methods rely on the assumption that unlabeled old-class objects may co-occur with labeled new-class objects in the incremental data. When unlabeled old-class objects are absent, the performance of existing methods tends to degrade. The absence can be mitigated by generating old-class samples, but it incurs high costs. This paper argues that previous generation-based IOD suffers from redundancy, both in the use of generative models, which require additional training and storage, and in the overproduction of generated samples, many of which do not contribute significantly to performance improvements. To eliminate the redundancy, we propose Inversed Objects Replay (IOR). Specifically, we generate old-class samples by inversing the original detectors, thus eliminating the necessity of training and storing additional generative models. We propose augmented replay to reuse the objects in generated samples, reducing redundant generations. Moreover, we propose high-value knowledge distillation focusing on the positions of old-class objects overwhelmed by the background, which transfers the knowledge to the incremental detector. Extensive experiments conducted on MS COCO 2017 demonstrate that our method can efficiently improve detection performance in IOD scenarios with the absence of old-class objects.

replace Continuous Urban Change Detection from Satellite Image Time Series with Temporal Feature Refinement and Multi-Task Integration

Authors: Sebastian Hafner, Heng Fang, Hossein Azizpour, Yifang Ban

Abstract: Urbanization advances at unprecedented rates, resulting in negative effects on the environment and human well-being. Remote sensing has the potential to mitigate these effects by supporting sustainable development strategies with accurate information on urban growth. Deep learning-based methods have achieved promising urban change detection results from optical satellite image pairs using convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), transformers, and a multi-task learning setup. However, transformers have not been leveraged for urban change detection with multi-temporal data, i.e., >2 images, and multi-task learning methods lack integration approaches that combine change and segmentation outputs. To fill this research gap, we propose a continuous urban change detection method that identifies changes in each consecutive image pair of a satellite image time series (SITS). Specifically, we propose a temporal feature refinement (TFR) module that utilizes self-attention to improve ConvNet-based multi-temporal building representations. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task integration (MTI) module that utilizes Markov networks to find an optimal building map time series based on segmentation and dense change outputs. The proposed method effectively identifies urban changes based on high-resolution SITS acquired by the PlanetScope constellation (F1 score 0.551) and Gaofen-2 (F1 score 0.440). Moreover, our experiments on two challenging datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to bi-temporal and multi-temporal urban change detection and segmentation methods.

replace Driving in the Occupancy World: Vision-Centric 4D Occupancy Forecasting and Planning via World Models for Autonomous Driving

Authors: Yu Yang, Jianbiao Mei, Yukai Ma, Siliang Du, Wenqing Chen, Yijie Qian, Yuxiang Feng, Yong Liu

Abstract: World models envision potential future states based on various ego actions. They embed extensive knowledge about the driving environment, facilitating safe and scalable autonomous driving. Most existing methods primarily focus on either data generation or the pretraining paradigms of world models. Unlike the aforementioned prior works, we propose Drive-OccWorld, which adapts a vision-centric 4D forecasting world model to end-to-end planning for autonomous driving. Specifically, we first introduce a semantic and motion-conditional normalization in the memory module, which accumulates semantic and dynamic information from historical BEV embeddings. These BEV features are then conveyed to the world decoder for future occupancy and flow forecasting, considering both geometry and spatiotemporal modeling. Additionally, we propose injecting flexible action conditions, such as velocity, steering angle, trajectory, and commands, into the world model to enable controllable generation and facilitate a broader range of downstream applications. Furthermore, we explore integrating the generative capabilities of the 4D world model with end-to-end planning, enabling continuous forecasting of future states and the selection of optimal trajectories using an occupancy-based cost function. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the nuScenes, nuScenes-Occupancy, and Lyft-Level5 datasets illustrate that our method can generate plausible and controllable 4D occupancy, paving the way for advancements in driving world generation and end-to-end planning. Project page: https://drive-occworld.github.io/

URLs: https://drive-occworld.github.io/

replace AgRegNet: A Deep Regression Network for Flower and Fruit Density Estimation, Localization, and Counting in Orchards

Authors: Uddhav Bhattarai, Santosh Bhusal, Qin Zhang, Manoj Karkee

Abstract: One of the major challenges for the agricultural industry today is the uncertainty in manual labor availability and the associated cost. Automated flower and fruit density estimation, localization, and counting could help streamline harvesting, yield estimation, and crop-load management strategies such as flower and fruitlet thinning. This article proposes a deep regression-based network, AgRegNet, to estimate density, count, and location of flower and fruit in tree fruit canopies without explicit object detection or polygon annotation. Inspired by popular U-Net architecture, AgRegNet is a U-shaped network with an encoder-to-decoder skip connection and modified ConvNeXt-T as an encoder feature extractor. AgRegNet can be trained based on information from point annotation and leverages segmentation information and attention modules (spatial and channel) to highlight relevant flower and fruit features while suppressing non-relevant background features. Experimental evaluation in apple flower and fruit canopy images under an unstructured orchard environment showed that AgRegNet achieved promising accuracy as measured by Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), percentage Mean Absolute Error (pMAE) and mean Average Precision (mAP) to estimate flower and fruit density, count, and centroid location, respectively. Specifically, the SSIM, pMAE, and mAP values for flower images were 0.938, 13.7%, and 0.81, respectively. For fruit images, the corresponding values were 0.910, 5.6%, and 0.93. Since the proposed approach relies on information from point annotation, it is suitable for sparsely and densely located objects. This simplified technique will be highly applicable for growers to accurately estimate yields and decide on optimal chemical and mechanical flower thinning practices.

replace Empowering Large Language Model for Continual Video Question Answering with Collaborative Prompting

Authors: Chen Cai, Zheng Wang, Jianjun Gao, Wenyang Liu, Ye Lu, Runzhong Zhang, Kim-Hui Yap

Abstract: In recent years, the rapid increase in online video content has underscored the limitations of static Video Question Answering (VideoQA) models trained on fixed datasets, as they struggle to adapt to new questions or tasks posed by newly available content. In this paper, we explore the novel challenge of VideoQA within a continual learning framework, and empirically identify a critical issue: fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) for a sequence of tasks often results in catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we propose Collaborative Prompting (ColPro), which integrates specific question constraint prompting, knowledge acquisition prompting, and visual temporal awareness prompting. These prompts aim to capture textual question context, visual content, and video temporal dynamics in VideoQA, a perspective underexplored in prior research. Experimental results on the NExT-QA and DramaQA datasets show that ColPro achieves superior performance compared to existing approaches, achieving 55.14\% accuracy on NExT-QA and 71.24\% accuracy on DramaQA, highlighting its practical relevance and effectiveness.

replace IncSAR: A Dual Fusion Incremental Learning Framework for SAR Target Recognition

Authors: George Karantaidis, Athanasios Pantsios, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, Symeon Papadopoulos

Abstract: Deep learning techniques have achieved significant success in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target recognition using predefined datasets in static scenarios. However, real-world applications demand that models incrementally learn new information without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. The challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where models lose past knowledge when adapting to new tasks, remains a critical issue. In this paper, we introduce IncSAR, an incremental learning framework designed to tackle catastrophic forgetting in SAR target recognition. IncSAR combines the power of a Vision Transformer (ViT) and a custom-designed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in a dual-branch architecture, integrated via a late-fusion strategy. Additionally, we explore the use of TinyViT to reduce computational complexity and propose an attention mechanism to dynamically enhance feature representation. To mitigate the speckle noise inherent in SAR images, we employ a denoising module based on a neural network approximation of Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA), leveraging a simple neural network for efficient noise reduction in SAR imagery. Moreover, a random projection layer improves the linear separability of features, and a variant of Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) decorrelates extracted class prototypes for better generalization. Extensive experiments on the MSTAR, SAR-AIRcraft-1.0, and OpenSARShip benchmark datasets demonstrate that IncSAR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 99.63\% average accuracy and a 0.33\% performance drop, representing an 89\% improvement in retention compared to existing techniques. The source code is available at https://github.com/geokarant/IncSAR.

URLs: https://github.com/geokarant/IncSAR.

replace ESVO2: Direct Visual-Inertial Odometry with Stereo Event Cameras

Authors: Junkai Niu, Sheng Zhong, Xiuyuan Lu, Shaojie Shen, Guillermo Gallego, Yi Zhou

Abstract: Event-based visual odometry is a specific branch of visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques, which aims at solving tracking and mapping subproblems (typically in parallel), by exploiting the special working principles of neuromorphic (i.e., event-based) cameras. Due to the motion-dependent nature of event data, explicit data association (i.e., feature matching) under large-baseline view-point changes is difficult to establish, making direct methods a more rational choice. However, state-of-the-art direct methods are limited by the high computational complexity of the mapping sub-problem and the degeneracy of camera pose tracking in certain degrees of freedom (DoF) in rotation. In this paper, we tackle these issues by building an event-based stereo visual-inertial odometry system on top of a direct pipeline. Specifically, to speed up the mapping operation, we propose an efficient strategy for sampling contour points according to the local dynamics of events. The mapping performance is also improved in terms of structure completeness and local smoothness by merging the temporal stereo and static stereo results. To circumvent the degeneracy of camera pose tracking in recovering the pitch and yaw components of general 6-DoF motion, we introduce IMU measurements as motion priors via pre-integration. To this end, a compact back-end is proposed for continuously updating the IMU bias and predicting the linear velocity, enabling an accurate motion prediction for camera pose tracking. The resulting system scales well with modern high-resolution event cameras and leads to better global positioning accuracy in large-scale outdoor environments. Extensive evaluations on five publicly available datasets featuring different resolutions and scenarios justify the superior performance of the proposed system against five state-of-the-art methods.

replace Deep Compression Autoencoder for Efficient High-Resolution Diffusion Models

Authors: Junyu Chen, Han Cai, Junsong Chen, Enze Xie, Shang Yang, Haotian Tang, Muyang Li, Yao Lu, Song Han

Abstract: We present Deep Compression Autoencoder (DC-AE), a new family of autoencoder models for accelerating high-resolution diffusion models. Existing autoencoder models have demonstrated impressive results at a moderate spatial compression ratio (e.g., 8x), but fail to maintain satisfactory reconstruction accuracy for high spatial compression ratios (e.g., 64x). We address this challenge by introducing two key techniques: (1) Residual Autoencoding, where we design our models to learn residuals based on the space-to-channel transformed features to alleviate the optimization difficulty of high spatial-compression autoencoders; (2) Decoupled High-Resolution Adaptation, an efficient decoupled three-phases training strategy for mitigating the generalization penalty of high spatial-compression autoencoders. With these designs, we improve the autoencoder's spatial compression ratio up to 128 while maintaining the reconstruction quality. Applying our DC-AE to latent diffusion models, we achieve significant speedup without accuracy drop. For example, on ImageNet 512x512, our DC-AE provides 19.1x inference speedup and 17.9x training speedup on H100 GPU for UViT-H while achieving a better FID, compared with the widely used SD-VAE-f8 autoencoder. Our code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/efficientvit.

URLs: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/efficientvit.

replace OPCap:Object-aware Prompting Captioning

Authors: Feiyang Huang

Abstract: In the field of image captioning, the phenomenon where missing or nonexistent objects are used to explain an image is referred to as object bias (or hallucination). To mitigate this issue, we propose a target-aware prompting strategy. This method first extracts object labels and their spatial information from the image using an object detector. Then, an attribute predictor further refines the semantic features of the objects. These refined features are subsequently integrated and fed into the decoder, enhancing the model's understanding of the image context. Experimental results on the COCO and nocaps datasets demonstrate that OPCap effectively mitigates hallucination and significantly improves the quality of generated captions.

replace MoRe: Class Patch Attention Needs Regularization for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Authors: Zhiwei Yang, Yucong Meng, Kexue Fu, Shuo Wang, Zhijian Song

Abstract: Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) with image-level labels typically uses Class Activation Maps (CAM) to achieve dense predictions. Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT) has provided an alternative to generate localization maps from class-patch attention. However, due to insufficient constraints on modeling such attention, we observe that the Localization Attention Maps (LAM) often struggle with the artifact issue, i.e., patch regions with minimal semantic relevance are falsely activated by class tokens. In this work, we propose MoRe to address this issue and further explore the potential of LAM. Our findings suggest that imposing additional regularization on class-patch attention is necessary. To this end, we first view the attention as a novel directed graph and propose the Graph Category Representation module to implicitly regularize the interaction among class-patch entities. It ensures that class tokens dynamically condense the related patch information and suppress unrelated artifacts at a graph level. Second, motivated by the observation that CAM from classification weights maintains smooth localization of objects, we devise the Localization-informed Regularization module to explicitly regularize the class-patch attention. It directly mines the token relations from CAM and further supervises the consistency between class and patch tokens in a learnable manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO, validating that MoRe effectively addresses the artifact issue and achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing recent single-stage and even multi-stage methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zwyang6/MoRe.

URLs: https://github.com/zwyang6/MoRe.

replace Mamba2D: A Natively Multi-Dimensional State-Space Model for Vision Tasks

Authors: Enis Baty, Alejandro Hern\'andez D\'iaz, Chris Bridges, Rebecca Davidson, Steve Eckersley, Simon Hadfield

Abstract: State-Space Models (SSMs) have recently emerged as a powerful and efficient alternative to the long-standing transformer architecture. However, existing SSM conceptualizations retain deeply rooted biases from their roots in natural language processing. This constrains their ability to appropriately model the spatially-dependent characteristics of visual inputs. In this paper, we address these limitations by re-deriving modern selective state-space techniques, starting from a natively multidimensional formulation. Currently, prior works attempt to apply natively 1D SSMs to 2D data (i.e. images) by relying on arbitrary combinations of 1D scan directions to capture spatial dependencies. In contrast, Mamba2D improves upon this with a single 2D scan direction that factors in both dimensions of the input natively, effectively modelling spatial dependencies when constructing hidden states. Mamba2D shows comparable performance to prior adaptations of SSMs for vision tasks, on standard image classification evaluations with the ImageNet-1K dataset. Source code is available at https://github.com/cocoalex00/Mamba2D.

URLs: https://github.com/cocoalex00/Mamba2D.

replace MVTamperBench: Evaluating Robustness of Vision-Language Models

Authors: Amit Agarwal, Srikant Panda, Angeline Charles, Bhargava Kumar, Hitesh Patel, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Taki Hasan Rafi, Tejaswini Kumar, Dong-Kyu Chae

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have driven major advances in video understanding, yet their vulnerability to adversarial tampering and manipulations remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce MVTamperBench, a benchmark that systematically evaluates MLLM robustness against five prevalent tampering techniques: rotation, masking, substitution, repetition, and dropping. Built from 3.4K original videos-expanded to over 17K tampered clips spanning 19 video tasks. MVTamperBench challenges models to detect manipulations in spatial and temporal coherence. We evaluate 45 recent MLLMs from 15+ model families, revealing substantial variability in resilience across tampering types and showing that larger parameter counts do not necessarily guarantee robustness. MVTamperBench sets a new benchmark for developing tamper-resilient MLLM in safety-critical applications, including detecting clickbait, preventing harmful content distribution, and enforcing policies on media platforms. We release all code and data to foster open research in trustworthy video understanding. Code: https://amitbcp.github.io/MVTamperBench/ Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Srikant86/MVTamperBench

URLs: https://amitbcp.github.io/MVTamperBench/, https://huggingface.co/datasets/Srikant86/MVTamperBench

replace MetaNeRV: Meta Neural Representations for Videos with Spatial-Temporal Guidance

Authors: Jialong Guo, Ke liu, Jiangchao Yao, Zhihua Wang, Jiajun Bu, Haishuai Wang

Abstract: Neural Representations for Videos (NeRV) has emerged as a promising implicit neural representation (INR) approach for video analysis, which represents videos as neural networks with frame indexes as inputs. However, NeRV-based methods are time-consuming when adapting to a large number of diverse videos, as each video requires a separate NeRV model to be trained from scratch. In addition, NeRV-based methods spatially require generating a high-dimension signal (i.e., an entire image) from the input of a low-dimension timestamp, and a video typically consists of tens of frames temporally that have a minor change between adjacent frames. To improve the efficiency of video representation, we propose Meta Neural Representations for Videos, named MetaNeRV, a novel framework for fast NeRV representation for unseen videos. MetaNeRV leverages a meta-learning framework to learn an optimal parameter initialization, which serves as a good starting point for adapting to new videos. To address the unique spatial and temporal characteristics of video modality, we further introduce spatial-temporal guidance to improve the representation capabilities of MetaNeRV. Specifically, the spatial guidance with a multi-resolution loss aims to capture the information from different resolution stages, and the temporal guidance with an effective progressive learning strategy could gradually refine the number of fitted frames during the meta-learning process. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of MetaNeRV for video representations and video compression.

replace Learnable Scaled Gradient Descent for Guaranteed Robust Tensor PCA

Authors: Lanlan Feng, Ce Zhu, Yipeng Liu, Saiprasad Ravishankar, Longxiu Huang

Abstract: Robust tensor principal component analysis (RTPCA) aims to separate the low-rank and sparse components from multi-dimensional data, making it an essential technique in the signal processing and computer vision fields. Recently emerging tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) has gained considerable attention for its ability to better capture the low-rank structure of tensors compared to traditional matrix SVD. However, existing methods often rely on the computationally expensive tensor nuclear norm (TNN), which limits their scalability for real-world tensors. To address this issue, we explore an efficient scaled gradient descent (SGD) approach within the t-SVD framework for the first time, and propose the RTPCA-SGD method. Theoretically, we rigorously establish the recovery guarantees of RTPCA-SGD under mild assumptions, demonstrating that with appropriate parameter selection, it achieves linear convergence to the true low-rank tensor at a constant rate, independent of the condition number. To enhance its practical applicability, we further propose a learnable self-supervised deep unfolding model, which enables effective parameter learning. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods while maintaining competitive computational efficiency, especially consuming less time than RTPCA-TNN.

replace TakuNet: an Energy-Efficient CNN for Real-Time Inference on Embedded UAV systems in Emergency Response Scenarios

Authors: Daniel Rossi, Guido Borghi, Roberto Vezzani

Abstract: Designing efficient neural networks for embedded devices is a critical challenge, particularly in applications requiring real-time performance, such as aerial imaging with drones and UAVs for emergency responses. In this work, we introduce TakuNet, a novel light-weight architecture which employs techniques such as depth-wise convolutions and an early downsampling stem to reduce computational complexity while maintaining high accuracy. It leverages dense connections for fast convergence during training and uses 16-bit floating-point precision for optimization on embedded hardware accelerators. Experimental evaluation on two public datasets shows that TakuNet achieves near-state-of-the-art accuracy in classifying aerial images of emergency situations, despite its minimal parameter count. Real-world tests on embedded devices, namely Jetson Orin Nano and Raspberry Pi, confirm TakuNet's efficiency, achieving more than 650 fps on the 15W Jetson board, making it suitable for real-time AI processing on resource-constrained platforms and advancing the applicability of drones in emergency scenarios. The code and implementation details are publicly released.

replace SuperNeRF-GAN: A Universal 3D-Consistent Super-Resolution Framework for Efficient and Enhanced 3D-Aware Image Synthesis

Authors: Peng Zheng, Linzhi Huang, Yizhou Yu, Yi Chang, Yilin Wang, Rui Ma

Abstract: Neural volume rendering techniques, such as NeRF, have revolutionized 3D-aware image synthesis by enabling the generation of images of a single scene or object from various camera poses. However, the high computational cost of NeRF presents challenges for synthesizing high-resolution (HR) images. Most existing methods address this issue by leveraging 2D super-resolution, which compromise 3D-consistency. Other methods propose radiance manifolds or two-stage generation to achieve 3D-consistent HR synthesis, yet they are limited to specific synthesis tasks, reducing their universality. To tackle these challenges, we propose SuperNeRF-GAN, a universal framework for 3D-consistent super-resolution. A key highlight of SuperNeRF-GAN is its seamless integration with NeRF-based 3D-aware image synthesis methods and it can simultaneously enhance the resolution of generated images while preserving 3D-consistency and reducing computational cost. Specifically, given a pre-trained generator capable of producing a NeRF representation such as tri-plane, we first perform volume rendering to obtain a low-resolution image with corresponding depth and normal map. Then, we employ a NeRF Super-Resolution module which learns a network to obtain a high-resolution NeRF. Next, we propose a novel Depth-Guided Rendering process which contains three simple yet effective steps, including the construction of a boundary-correct multi-depth map through depth aggregation, a normal-guided depth super-resolution and a depth-guided NeRF rendering. Experimental results demonstrate the superior efficiency, 3D-consistency, and quality of our approach. Additionally, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our proposed components.

replace MECD+: Unlocking Event-Level Causal Graph Discovery for Video Reasoning

Authors: Tieyuan Chen, Huabin Liu, Yi Wang, Yihang Chen, Tianyao He, Chaofan Gan, Huanyu He, Weiyao Lin

Abstract: Video causal reasoning aims to achieve a high-level understanding of videos from a causal perspective. However, it exhibits limitations in its scope, primarily executed in a question-answering paradigm and focusing on brief video segments containing isolated events and basic causal relations, lacking comprehensive and structured causality analysis for videos with multiple interconnected events. To fill this gap, we introduce a new task and dataset, Multi-Event Causal Discovery (MECD). It aims to uncover the causal relations between events distributed chronologically across long videos. Given visual segments and textual descriptions of events, MECD identifies the causal associations between these events to derive a comprehensive and structured event-level video causal graph explaining why and how the result event occurred. To address the challenges of MECD, we devise a novel framework inspired by the Granger Causality method, incorporating an efficient mask-based event prediction model to perform an Event Granger Test. It estimates causality by comparing the predicted result event when premise events are masked versus unmasked. Furthermore, we integrate causal inference techniques such as front-door adjustment and counterfactual inference to mitigate challenges in MECD like causality confounding and illusory causality. Additionally, context chain reasoning is introduced to conduct more robust and generalized reasoning. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework in reasoning complete causal relations, outperforming GPT-4o and VideoChat2 by 5.77% and 2.70%, respectively. Further experiments demonstrate that causal relation graphs can also contribute to downstream video understanding tasks such as video question answering and video event prediction.

replace Tarsier2: Advancing Large Vision-Language Models from Detailed Video Description to Comprehensive Video Understanding

Authors: Liping Yuan, Jiawei Wang, Haomiao Sun, Yuchen Zhang, Yuan Lin

Abstract: We introduce Tarsier2, a state-of-the-art large vision-language model (LVLM) designed for generating detailed and accurate video descriptions, while also exhibiting superior general video understanding capabilities. Tarsier2 achieves significant advancements through three key upgrades: (1) Scaling pre-training data from 11M to 40M video-text pairs, enriching both volume and diversity; (2) Performing fine-grained temporal alignment during supervised fine-tuning; (3) Using model-based sampling to automatically construct preference data and applying DPO training for optimization. Extensive experiments show that Tarsier2-7B consistently outperforms leading proprietary models, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, in detailed video description tasks. On the DREAM-1K benchmark, Tarsier2-7B improves F1 by 2.8\% over GPT-4o and 5.8\% over Gemini-1.5-Pro. In human side-by-side evaluations, Tarsier2-7B shows a +8.6\% performance advantage over GPT-4o and +24.9\% over Gemini-1.5-Pro. Tarsier2-7B also sets new state-of-the-art results across 15 public benchmarks, spanning tasks such as video question-answering, video grounding, hallucination test, and embodied question-answering, demonstrating its versatility as a robust generalist vision-language model.

replace LayerAnimate: Layer-specific Control for Animation

Authors: Yuxue Yang, Lue Fan, Zuzeng Lin, Feng Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang

Abstract: Animated video separates foreground and background elements into layers, with distinct processes for sketching, refining, coloring, and in-betweening. Existing video generation methods typically treat animation as a monolithic data domain, lacking fine-grained control over individual layers. In this paper, we introduce LayerAnimate, a novel architectural approach that enhances fine-grained control over individual animation layers within a video diffusion model, allowing users to independently manipulate foreground and background elements in distinct layers. To address the challenge of limited layer-specific data, we propose a data curation pipeline that features automated element segmentation, motion-state hierarchical merging, and motion coherence refinement. Through quantitative and qualitative comparisons, and user study, we demonstrate that LayerAnimate outperforms current methods in terms of animation quality, control precision, and usability, making it an ideal tool for both professional animators and amateur enthusiasts. This framework opens up new possibilities for layer-specific animation applications and creative flexibility. Our code is available at https://layeranimate.github.io.

URLs: https://layeranimate.github.io.

replace Instruction-Guided Fusion of Multi-Layer Visual Features in Large Vision-Language Models

Authors: Xu Li, Yi Zheng, Haotian Chen, Xiaolei Chen, Yuxuan Liang, Chenghang Lai, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of multimodal tasks by integrating pre-trained vision encoders and large language models. However, current LVLMs primarily rely on visual features extracted from the final layers of the vision encoder, overlooking the complementary information available in shallower layers. While recent approaches have explored the use of multilayer visual features in LVLMs, they tend to be task-agnostic and fail to examine the dependencies of hierarchical visual features on specific tasks. To address these gaps, we systematically investigate the contributions of visual features from different encoder layers using 18 benchmarks spanning 6 task categories. Our findings reveal that multilayer features provide complementary strengths with varying task dependencies, and uniform fusion leads to suboptimal performance. Building on these insights, we propose the instruction-guided vision aggregator, a module that dynamically integrates multi-layer visual features based on textual instructions, without increasing the number of visual tokens. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Additionally, an in-depth analysis of the aggregator's behavior highlights the dominance of mid-to-high-level features in semantic-rich tasks and the critical role of low-level features in fine-grained perception.

replace Text-guided Synthetic Geometric Augmentation for Zero-shot 3D Understanding

Authors: Kohei Torimi, Ryosuke Yamada, Daichi Otsuka, Kensho Hara, Yuki M. Asano, Hirokatsu Kataoka, Yoshimitsu Aoki

Abstract: Zero-shot recognition models require extensive training data for generalization. However, in zero-shot 3D classification, collecting 3D data and captions is costly and laborintensive, posing a significant barrier compared to 2D vision. Recent advances in generative models have achieved unprecedented realism in synthetic data production, and recent research shows the potential for using generated data as training data. Here, naturally raising the question: Can synthetic 3D data generated by generative models be used as expanding limited 3D datasets? In response, we present a synthetic 3D dataset expansion method, Textguided Geometric Augmentation (TeGA). TeGA is tailored for language-image-3D pretraining, which achieves SoTA in zero-shot 3D classification, and uses a generative textto-3D model to enhance and extend limited 3D datasets. Specifically, we automatically generate text-guided synthetic 3D data and introduce a consistency filtering strategy to discard noisy samples where semantics and geometric shapes do not match with text. In the experiment to double the original dataset size using TeGA, our approach demonstrates improvements over the baselines, achieving zeroshot performance gains of 3.0% on Objaverse-LVIS, 4.6% on ScanObjectNN, and 8.7% on ModelNet40. These results demonstrate that TeGA effectively bridges the 3D data gap, enabling robust zero-shot 3D classification even with limited real training data and paving the way for zero-shot 3D vision application.

replace-cross Keep It Accurate and Robust: An Enhanced Nuclei Analysis Framework

Authors: Wenhua Zhang, Sen Yang, Meiwei Luo, Chuan He, Yuchen Li, Jun Zhang, Xiyue Wang, Fang Wang

Abstract: Accurate segmentation and classification of nuclei in histology images is critical but challenging due to nuclei heterogeneity, staining variations, and tissue complexity. Existing methods often struggle with limited dataset variability, with patches extracted from similar whole slide images (WSI), making models prone to falling into local optima. Here we propose a new framework to address this limitation and enable robust nuclear analysis. Our method leverages dual-level ensemble modeling to overcome issues stemming from limited dataset variation. Intra-ensembling applies diverse transformations to individual samples, while inter-ensembling combines networks of different scales. We also introduce enhancements to the HoVer-Net architecture, including updated encoders, nested dense decoding and model regularization strategy. We achieve state-of-the-art results on public benchmarks, including 1st place for nuclear composition prediction and 3rd place for segmentation/classification in the 2022 Colon Nuclei Identification and Counting (CoNIC) Challenge. This success validates our approach for accurate histological nuclei analysis. Extensive experiments and ablation studies provide insights into optimal network design choices and training techniques. In conclusion, this work proposes an improved framework advancing the state-of-the-art in nuclei analysis. We release our code and models (https://github.com/WinnieLaugh/CONIC_Pathology_AI) to serve as a toolkit for the community.

URLs: https://github.com/WinnieLaugh/CONIC_Pathology_AI)

replace-cross Text-guided Image Restoration and Semantic Enhancement for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval

Authors: Delong Liu, Haiwen Li, Zhicheng Zhao, Yuan Dong

Abstract: The goal of Text-to-Image Person Retrieval (TIPR) is to retrieve specific person images according to the given textual descriptions. A primary challenge in this task is bridging the substantial representational gap between visual and textual modalities. The prevailing methods map texts and images into unified embedding space for matching, while the intricate semantic correspondences between texts and images are still not effectively constructed. To address this issue, we propose a novel TIPR framework to build fine-grained interactions and alignment between person images and the corresponding texts. Specifically, via fine-tuning the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, a visual-textual dual encoder is firstly constructed, to preliminarily align the image and text features. Secondly, a Text-guided Image Restoration (TIR) auxiliary task is proposed to map abstract textual entities to specific image regions, improving the alignment between local textual and visual embeddings. Additionally, a cross-modal triplet loss is presented to handle hard samples, and further enhance the model's discriminability for minor differences. Moreover, a pruning-based text data augmentation approach is proposed to enhance focus on essential elements in descriptions, thereby avoiding excessive model attention to less significant information. The experimental results show our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three popular benchmark datasets, and the code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Delong-liu-bupt/SEN.

URLs: https://github.com/Delong-liu-bupt/SEN.

replace-cross Multi-stage Deep Learning Artifact Reduction for Pallel-beam Computed Tomography

Authors: Jiayang Shi, Daniel M. Pelt, K. Joost Batenburg

Abstract: Computed Tomography (CT) using synchrotron radiation is a powerful technique that, compared to lab-CT techniques, boosts high spatial and temporal resolution while also providing access to a range of contrast-formation mechanisms. The acquired projection data is typically processed by a computational pipeline composed of multiple stages. Artifacts introduced during data acquisition can propagate through the pipeline, and degrade image quality in the reconstructed images. Recently, deep learning has shown significant promise in enhancing image quality for images representing scientific data. This success has driven increasing adoption of deep learning techniques in CT imaging. Various approaches have been proposed to incorporate deep learning into computational pipelines, but each has limitations in addressing artifacts effectively and efficiently in synchrotron CT, either in properly addressing the specific artifacts, or in computational efficiency. Recognizing these challenges, we introduce a novel method that incorporates separate deep learning models at each stage of the tomography pipeline-projection, sinogram, and reconstruction-to address specific artifacts locally in a data-driven way. Our approach includes bypass connections that feed both the outputs from previous stages and raw data to subsequent stages, minimizing the risk of error propagation. Extensive evaluations on both simulated and real-world datasets illustrate that our approach effectively reduces artifacts and outperforms comparison methods.

replace-cross Harnessing small projectors and multiple views for efficient vision pretraining

Authors: Kumar Krishna Agrawal, Arna Ghosh, Shagun Sodhani, Adam Oberman, Blake Richards

Abstract: Recent progress in self-supervised (SSL) visual representation learning has led to the development of several different proposed frameworks that rely on augmentations of images but use different loss functions. However, there are few theoretically grounded principles to guide practice, so practical implementation of each SSL framework requires several heuristics to achieve competitive performance. In this work, we build on recent analytical results to design practical recommendations for competitive and efficient SSL that are grounded in theory. Specifically, recent theory tells us that existing SSL frameworks are minimizing the same idealized loss, which is to learn features that best match the data similarity kernel defined by the augmentations used. We show how this idealized loss can be reformulated to a functionally equivalent loss that is more efficient to compute. We study the implicit bias of using gradient descent to minimize our reformulated loss function and find that using a stronger orthogonalization constraint with a reduced projector dimensionality should yield good representations. Furthermore, the theory tells us that approximating the reformulated loss should be improved by increasing the number of augmentations, and as such using multiple augmentations should lead to improved convergence. We empirically verify our findings on CIFAR, STL and Imagenet datasets, wherein we demonstrate an improved linear readout performance when training a ResNet-backbone using our theoretically grounded recommendations. Remarkably, we also demonstrate that by leveraging these insights, we can reduce the pretraining dataset size by up to 2$\times$ while maintaining downstream accuracy simply by using more data augmentations. Taken together, our work provides theoretically grounded recommendations that can be used to improve SSL convergence and efficiency.

replace-cross TraceFL: Interpretability-Driven Debugging in Federated Learning via Neuron Provenance

Authors: Waris Gill (Virginia Tech), Ali Anwar (University of Minnesota Twin Cities), Muhammad Ali Gulzar (Virginia Tech)

Abstract: In Federated Learning, clients train models on local data and send updates to a central server, which aggregates them into a global model using a fusion algorithm. This collaborative yet privacy-preserving training comes at a cost. FL developers face significant challenges in attributing global model predictions to specific clients. Localizing responsible clients is a crucial step towards (a) excluding clients primarily responsible for incorrect predictions and (b) encouraging clients who contributed high-quality models to continue participating in the future. Existing ML debugging approaches are inherently inapplicable as they are designed for single-model, centralized training. We introduce TraceFL, a fine-grained neuron provenance capturing mechanism that identifies clients responsible for a global model's prediction by tracking the flow of information from individual clients to the global model. Since inference on different inputs activates a different set of neurons of the global model, TraceFL dynamically quantifies the significance of the global model's neurons in a given prediction, identifying the most crucial neurons in the global model. It then maps them to the corresponding neurons in every participating client to determine each client's contribution, ultimately localizing the responsible client. We evaluate TraceFL on six datasets, including two real-world medical imaging datasets and four neural networks, including advanced models such as GPT. TraceFL achieves 99% accuracy in localizing the responsible client in FL tasks spanning both image and text classification tasks. At a time when state-of-the-artML debugging approaches are mostly domain-specific (e.g., image classification only), TraceFL is the first technique to enable highly accurate automated reasoning across a wide range of FL applications.

replace-cross Bridging Diversity and Uncertainty in Active learning with Self-Supervised Pre-Training

Authors: Paul Doucet, Benjamin Estermann, Till Aczel, Roger Wattenhofer

Abstract: This study addresses the integration of diversity-based and uncertainty-based sampling strategies in active learning, particularly within the context of self-supervised pre-trained models. We introduce a straightforward heuristic called TCM that mitigates the cold start problem while maintaining strong performance across various data levels. By initially applying TypiClust for diversity sampling and subsequently transitioning to uncertainty sampling with Margin, our approach effectively combines the strengths of both strategies. Our experiments demonstrate that TCM consistently outperforms existing methods across various datasets in both low and high data regimes.

replace-cross Mitigating analytical variability in fMRI results with style transfer

Authors: Elodie Germani (EMPENN, LACODAM), Camille Maumet (EMPENN), Elisa Fromont (LACODAM)

Abstract: We propose a novel approach to improve the reproducibility of neuroimaging results by converting statistic maps across different functional MRI pipelines. We make the assumption that pipelines used to compute fMRI statistic maps can be considered as a style component and we propose to use different generative models, among which, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Diffusion Models (DM) to convert statistic maps across different pipelines. We explore the performance of multiple GAN frameworks, and design a new DM framework for unsupervised multi-domain styletransfer. We constrain the generation of 3D fMRI statistic maps using the latent space of an auxiliary classifier that distinguishes statistic maps from different pipelines and extend traditional sampling techniques used in DM to improve the transition performance. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods aresuccessful: pipelines can indeed be transferred as a style component, providing animportant source of data augmentation for future medical studies.

replace-cross Elucidating the Design Space of Dataset Condensation

Authors: Shitong Shao, Zikai Zhou, Huanran Chen, Zhiqiang Shen

Abstract: Dataset condensation, a concept within data-centric learning, efficiently transfers critical attributes from an original dataset to a synthetic version, maintaining both diversity and realism. This approach significantly improves model training efficiency and is adaptable across multiple application areas. Previous methods in dataset condensation have faced challenges: some incur high computational costs which limit scalability to larger datasets (e.g., MTT, DREAM, and TESLA), while others are restricted to less optimal design spaces, which could hinder potential improvements, especially in smaller datasets (e.g., SRe2L, G-VBSM, and RDED). To address these limitations, we propose a comprehensive design framework that includes specific, effective strategies like implementing soft category-aware matching and adjusting the learning rate schedule. These strategies are grounded in empirical evidence and theoretical backing. Our resulting approach, Elucidate Dataset Condensation (EDC), establishes a benchmark for both small and large-scale dataset condensation. In our testing, EDC achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, reaching 48.6% on ImageNet-1k with a ResNet-18 model at an IPC of 10, which corresponds to a compression ratio of 0.78%. This performance exceeds those of SRe2L, G-VBSM, and RDED by margins of 27.3%, 17.2%, and 6.6%, respectively.

replace-cross BILTS: A Bi-Invariant Similarity Measure for Robust Object Trajectory Recognition under Reference Frame Variations

Authors: Arno Verduyn, Erwin Aertbeli\"en, Glenn Maes, Joris De Schutter, Maxim Vochten

Abstract: When similar object motions are performed in diverse contexts but are meant to be recognized under a single classification, these contextual variations act as disturbances that negatively affect accurate motion recognition. In this paper, we focus on contextual variations caused by reference frame variations. To robustly deal with these variations, similarity measures have been introduced that compare object motion trajectories in a context-invariant manner. However, most are highly sensitive to noise near singularities, where the measure is not uniquely defined, and lack bi-invariance (invariance to both world and body frame variations). To address these issues, we propose the novel \textit{Bi-Invariant Local Trajectory-Shape Similarity} (BILTS) measure. Compared to other measures, the BILTS measure uniquely offers bi-invariance, boundedness, and third-order shape identity. Aimed at practical implementations, we devised a discretized and regularized version of the BILTS measure which shows exceptional robustness to singularities. This is demonstrated through rigorous recognition experiments using multiple datasets. On average, BILTS attained the highest recognition ratio and least sensitivity to contextual variations compared to other invariant object motion similarity measures. We believe that the BILTS measure is a valuable tool for recognizing motions performed in diverse contexts and has potential in other applications, including the recognition, segmentation, and adaptation of both motion and force trajectories.

replace-cross Epicardium Prompt-guided Real-time Cardiac Ultrasound Frame-to-volume Registration

Authors: Long Lei, Jun Zhou, Jialun Pei, Baoliang Zhao, Yueming Jin, Yuen-Chun Jeremy Teoh, Jing Qin, Pheng-Ann Heng

Abstract: A comprehensive guidance view for cardiac interventional surgery can be provided by the real-time fusion of the intraoperative 2D images and preoperative 3D volume based on the ultrasound frame-to-volume registration. However, cardiac ultrasound images are characterized by a low signal-to-noise ratio and small differences between adjacent frames, coupled with significant dimension variations between 2D frames and 3D volumes to be registered, resulting in real-time and accurate cardiac ultrasound frame-to-volume registration being a very challenging task. This paper introduces a lightweight end-to-end Cardiac Ultrasound frame-to-volume Registration network, termed CU-Reg. Specifically, the proposed model leverages epicardium prompt-guided anatomical clues to reinforce the interaction of 2D sparse and 3D dense features, followed by a voxel-wise local-global aggregation of enhanced features, thereby boosting the cross-dimensional matching effectiveness of low-quality ultrasound modalities. We further embed an inter-frame discriminative regularization term within the hybrid supervised learning to increase the distinction between adjacent slices in the same ultrasound volume to ensure registration stability. Experimental results on the reprocessed CAMUS dataset demonstrate that our CU-Reg surpasses existing methods in terms of registration accuracy and efficiency, meeting the guidance requirements of clinical cardiac interventional surgery.

replace-cross Challenge Summary U-MedSAM: Uncertainty-aware MedSAM for Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Xin Wang, Xiaoyu Liu, Peng Huang, Pu Huang, Shu Hu, Hongtu Zhu

Abstract: Medical Image Foundation Models have proven to be powerful tools for mask prediction across various datasets. However, accurately assessing the uncertainty of their predictions remains a significant challenge. To address this, we propose a new model, U-MedSAM, which integrates the MedSAM model with an uncertainty-aware loss function and the Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SharpMin) optimizer. The uncertainty-aware loss function automatically combines region-based, distribution-based, and pixel-based loss designs to enhance segmentation accuracy and robustness. SharpMin improves generalization by finding flat minima in the loss landscape, thereby reducing overfitting. Our method was evaluated in the CVPR24 MedSAM on Laptop challenge, where U-MedSAM demonstrated promising performance.

replace-cross DX2CT: Diffusion Model for 3D CT Reconstruction from Bi or Mono-planar 2D X-ray(s)

Authors: Yun Su Jeong, Hye Bin Yoo, Il Yong Chun

Abstract: Computational tomography (CT) provides high-resolution medical imaging, but it can expose patients to high radiation. X-ray scanners have low radiation exposure, but their resolutions are low. This paper proposes a new conditional diffusion model, DX2CT, that reconstructs three-dimensional (3D) CT volumes from bi or mono-planar X-ray image(s). Proposed DX2CT consists of two key components: 1) modulating feature maps extracted from two-dimensional (2D) X-ray(s) with 3D positions of CT volume using a new transformer and 2) effectively using the modulated 3D position-aware feature maps as conditions of DX2CT. In particular, the proposed transformer can provide conditions with rich information of a target CT slice to the conditional diffusion model, enabling high-quality CT reconstruction. Our experiments with the bi or mono-planar X-ray(s) benchmark datasets show that proposed DX2CT outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Our codes and model will be available at: https://www.github.com/intyeger/DX2CT.

URLs: https://www.github.com/intyeger/DX2CT.

replace-cross Deep Plug-and-Play HIO Approach for Phase Retrieval

Authors: Cagatay Isil, Figen S. Oktem

Abstract: In the phase retrieval problem, the aim is the recovery of an unknown image from intensity-only measurements such as Fourier intensity. Although there are several solution approaches, solving this problem is challenging due to its nonlinear and ill-posed nature. Recently, learning-based approaches have emerged as powerful alternatives to the analytical methods for several inverse problems. In the context of phase retrieval, a novel plug-and-play approach that exploits learning-based prior and efficient update steps has been presented at the Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging topical meeting, with demonstrated state-of-the-art performance. The key idea was to incorporate learning-based prior to the Gerchberg-Saxton type algorithms through plug-and-play regularization. In this paper, we present the mathematical development of the method including the derivation of its analytical update steps based on half-quadratic splitting and comparatively evaluate its performance through extensive simulations on a large test dataset. The results show the effectiveness of the method in terms of both image quality, computational efficiency, and robustness to initialization and noise.

replace-cross VLSBench: Unveiling Visual Leakage in Multimodal Safety

Authors: Xuhao Hu, Dongrui Liu, Hao Li, Xuanjing Huang, Jing Shao

Abstract: Safety concerns of Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gradually become an important problem in various applications. Surprisingly, previous works indicate a counter-intuitive phenomenon that using textual unlearning to align MLLMs achieves comparable safety performances with MLLMs trained with image-text pairs. To explain such a counter-intuitive phenomenon, we discover a visual safety information leakage (VSIL) problem in existing multimodal safety benchmarks, i.e., the potentially risky and sensitive content in the image has been revealed in the textual query. In this way, MLLMs can easily refuse these sensitive text-image queries according to textual queries. However, image-text pairs without VSIL are common in real-world scenarios and are overlooked by existing multimodal safety benchmarks. To this end, we construct multimodal visual leakless safety benchmark (VLSBench) preventing visual safety leakage from image to textual query with 2.4k image-text pairs. Experimental results indicate that VLSBench poses a significant challenge to both open-source and close-source MLLMs, including LLaVA, Qwen2-VL, Llama3.2-Vision, and GPT-4o. This study demonstrates that textual alignment is enough for multimodal safety scenarios with VSIL, while multimodal alignment is a more promising solution for multimodal safety scenarios without VSIL. Please see our code and data at: https://hxhcreate.github.io/vlsbench.github.io/

URLs: https://hxhcreate.github.io/vlsbench.github.io/

replace-cross Accelerating lensed quasars discovery and modeling with physics-informed variational autoencoders

Authors: Irham T. Andika, Stefan Schuldt, Sherry H. Suyu, Satadru Bag, Raoul Ca\~nameras, Alejandra Melo, Claudio Grillo, James H. H. Chan

Abstract: Strongly lensed quasars provide valuable insights into the rate of cosmic expansion, the distribution of dark matter in foreground deflectors, and the characteristics of quasar hosts. However, detecting them in astronomical images is difficult due to the prevalence of non-lensing objects. To address this challenge, we developed a generative deep learning model called VariLens, built upon a physics-informed variational autoencoder. This model seamlessly integrates three essential modules: image reconstruction, object classification, and lens modeling, offering a fast and comprehensive approach to strong lens analysis. VariLens is capable of rapidly determining both (1) the probability that an object is a lens system and (2) key parameters of a singular isothermal ellipsoid (SIE) mass model -- including the Einstein radius ($\theta_\mathrm{E}$), lens center, and ellipticity -- in just milliseconds using a single CPU. A direct comparison of VariLens estimates with traditional lens modeling for 20 known lensed quasars within the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) footprint shows good agreement, with both results consistent within $2\sigma$ for systems with $\theta_\mathrm{E}<3$ arcsecs. To identify new lensed quasar candidates, we begin with an initial sample of approximately 80 million sources, combining HSC data with multiwavelength information from various surveys. After applying a photometric preselection aimed at locating $z>1.5$ sources, the number of candidates is reduced to 710,966. Subsequently, VariLens highlights 13,831 sources, each showing a high likelihood of being a lens. A visual assessment of these objects results in 42 promising candidates that await spectroscopic confirmation. These results underscore the potential of automated deep learning pipelines to efficiently detect and model strong lenses in large datasets.

replace-cross Mesh2SLAM in VR: A Fast Geometry-Based SLAM Framework for Rapid Prototyping in Virtual Reality Applications

Authors: Carlos Augusto Pinheiro de Sousa, Heiko Hamann, Oliver Deussen

Abstract: SLAM is a foundational technique with broad applications in robotics and AR/VR. SLAM simulations evaluate new concepts, but testing on resource-constrained devices, such as VR HMDs, faces challenges: high computational cost and restricted sensor data access. This work proposes a sparse framework using mesh geometry projections as features, which improves efficiency and circumvents direct sensor data access, advancing SLAM research as we demonstrate in VR and through numerical evaluation.