Authors: Shuai Wang, Shihao Zhang, Jiaqi Wu, Zijian Tian, Wei Chen, Tongzhu Jin, Miaomiao Xue, Zehua Wang, Fei Richard Yu, Victor C. M. Leung
Abstract: Clear monitoring images are crucial for the safe operation of coal mine Internet of Video Things (IoVT) systems. However, low illumination and uneven brightness in underground environments significantly degrade image quality, posing challenges for enhancement methods that often rely on difficult-to-obtain paired reference images. Additionally, there is a trade-off between enhancement performance and computational efficiency on edge devices within IoVT systems.To address these issues, we propose a multimodal image enhancement method tailored for coal mine IoVT, utilizing an ISP-CNN fusion architecture optimized for uneven illumination. This two-stage strategy combines global enhancement with detail optimization, effectively improving image quality, especially in poorly lit areas. A CLIP-based multimodal iterative optimization allows for unsupervised training of the enhancement algorithm. By integrating traditional image signal processing (ISP) with convolutional neural networks (CNN), our approach reduces computational complexity while maintaining high performance, making it suitable for real-time deployment on edge devices.Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates uneven brightness and enhances key image quality metrics, with PSNR improvements of 2.9%-4.9%, SSIM by 4.3%-11.4%, and VIF by 4.9%-17.8% compared to seven state-of-the-art algorithms. Simulated coal mine monitoring scenarios validate our method's ability to balance performance and computational demands, facilitating real-time enhancement and supporting safer mining operations.
Authors: Daron Weekley, Jace Duckworth, Anastasiia Sukhanova, Ananya Jana
Abstract: Intraoral scans are widely used in digital dentistry for tasks such as dental restoration, treatment planning, and orthodontic procedures. These scans contain detailed topological information, but manual annotation of these scans remains a time-consuming task. Deep learning-based methods have been developed to automate tasks such as tooth segmentation. A typical intraoral scan contains over 200,000 mesh cells, making direct processing computationally expensive. Models are often trained on downsampled versions, typically with 10,000 or 16,000 cells. Previous studies suggest that downsampling may degrade segmentation accuracy, but the extent of this degradation remains unclear. Understanding the extent of degradation is crucial for deploying ML models on edge devices. This study evaluates the extent of performance degradation with decreasing resolution. We train a deep learning model (PointMLP) on intraoral scans decimated to 16K, 10K, 8K, 6K, 4K, and 2K mesh cells. Models trained at lower resolutions are tested on high-resolution scans to assess performance. Our goal is to identify a resolution that balances computational efficiency and segmentation accuracy.
Authors: Tiezheng Zhang, Qihang Yu, Alan Yuille, Ju He
Abstract: In this work, we present CoCal, an interpretable and consistent object parsing framework based on dictionary-based mask transformer. Designed around Contrastive Components and Logical Constraints, CoCal rethinks existing cluster-based mask transformer architectures used in segmentation; Specifically, CoCal utilizes a set of dictionary components, with each component being explicitly linked to a specific semantic class. To advance this concept, CoCal introduces a hierarchical formulation of dictionary components that aligns with the semantic hierarchy. This is achieved through the integration of both within-level contrastive components and cross-level logical constraints. Concretely, CoCal employs a component-wise contrastive algorithm at each semantic level, enabling the contrasting of dictionary components within the same class against those from different classes. Furthermore, CoCal addresses logical concerns by ensuring that the dictionary component representing a particular part is closer to its corresponding object component than to those of other objects through a cross-level contrastive learning objective. To further enhance our logical relation modeling, we implement a post-processing function inspired by the principle that a pixel assigned to a part should also be assigned to its corresponding object. With these innovations, CoCal establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on both PartImageNet and Pascal-Part-108, outperforming previous methods by a significant margin of 2.08% and 0.70% in part mIoU, respectively. Moreover, CoCal exhibits notable enhancements in object-level metrics across these benchmarks, highlighting its capacity to not only refine parsing at a finer level but also elevate the overall quality of object segmentation.
Authors: Hugues Turb\'e, Mina Bjelogrlic, Gianmarco Mengaldo, Christian Lovis
Abstract: Visual foundation models (VFMs) have become increasingly popular due to their state-of-the-art performance. However, interpretability remains crucial for critical applications. In this sense, self-explainable models (SEM) aim to provide interpretable classifiers that decompose predictions into a weighted sum of interpretable concepts. Despite their promise, recent studies have shown that these explanations often lack faithfulness. In this work, we combine VFMs with a novel prototypical architecture and specialized training objectives. By training only a lightweight head (approximately 1M parameters) on top of frozen VFMs, our approach (ProtoFM) offers an efficient and interpretable solution. Evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive classification performance while outperforming existing models across a range of interpretability metrics derived from the literature. Code is available at https://github.com/hturbe/proto-fm.
Authors: Hongkun Yu, Syed Jamal Safdar Gardezi, E. Jason Abel, Daniel Shapiro, Meghan G. Lubner, Joshua Warner, Matthew Smith, Giuseppe Toia, Lu Mao, Pallavi Tiwari, Andrew L. Wentland
Abstract: Purpose: This study aims to develop and validate a method for synthesizing 3D nephrographic phase images in CT urography (CTU) examinations using a diffusion model integrated with a Swin Transformer-based deep learning approach. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study was approved by the local Institutional Review Board. A dataset comprising 327 patients who underwent three-phase CTU (mean $\pm$ SD age, 63 $\pm$ 15 years; 174 males, 153 females) was curated for deep learning model development. The three phases for each patient were aligned with an affine registration algorithm. A custom deep learning model coined dsSNICT (diffusion model with a Swin transformer for synthetic nephrographic phase images in CT) was developed and implemented to synthesize the nephrographic images. Performance was assessed using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Fr\'{e}chet Video Distance (FVD). Qualitative evaluation by two fellowship-trained abdominal radiologists was performed. Results: The synthetic nephrographic images generated by our proposed approach achieved high PSNR (26.3 $\pm$ 4.4 dB), SSIM (0.84 $\pm$ 0.069), MAE (12.74 $\pm$ 5.22 HU), and FVD (1323). Two radiologists provided average scores of 3.5 for real images and 3.4 for synthetic images (P-value = 0.5) on a Likert scale of 1-5, indicating that our synthetic images closely resemble real images. Conclusion: The proposed approach effectively synthesizes high-quality 3D nephrographic phase images. This model can be used to reduce radiation dose in CTU by 33.3\% without compromising image quality, which thereby enhances the safety and diagnostic utility of CT urography.
Authors: Hoonhee Cho, Jae-young Kang, Youngho Kim, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Abstract: Detecting 3D objects in point clouds plays a crucial role in autonomous driving systems. Recently, advanced multi-modal methods incorporating camera information have achieved notable performance. For a safe and effective autonomous driving system, algorithms that excel not only in accuracy but also in speed and low latency are essential. However, existing algorithms fail to meet these requirements due to the latency and bandwidth limitations of fixed frame rate sensors, e.g., LiDAR and camera. To address this limitation, we introduce asynchronous event cameras into 3D object detection for the first time. We leverage their high temporal resolution and low bandwidth to enable high-speed 3D object detection. Our method enables detection even during inter-frame intervals when synchronized data is unavailable, by retrieving previous 3D information through the event camera. Furthermore, we introduce the first event-based 3D object detection dataset, DSEC-3DOD, which includes ground-truth 3D bounding boxes at 100 FPS, establishing the first benchmark for event-based 3D detectors. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/mickeykang16/Ev3DOD.
Authors: Jiazhen Pan, Che Liu, Junde Wu, Fenglin Liu, Jiayuan Zhu, Hongwei Bran Li, Chen Chen, Cheng Ouyang, Daniel Rueckert
Abstract: Reasoning is a critical frontier for advancing medical image analysis, where transparency and trustworthiness play a central role in both clinician trust and regulatory approval. Although Medical Visual Language Models (VLMs) show promise for radiological tasks, most existing VLMs merely produce final answers without revealing the underlying reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce MedVLM-R1, a medical VLM that explicitly generates natural language reasoning to enhance transparency and trustworthiness. Instead of relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which often suffers from overfitting to training distributions and fails to foster genuine reasoning, MedVLM-R1 employs a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes the model to discover human-interpretable reasoning paths without using any reasoning references. Despite limited training data (600 visual question answering samples) and model parameters (2B), MedVLM-R1 boosts accuracy from 55.11% to 78.22% across MRI, CT, and X-ray benchmarks, outperforming larger models trained on over a million samples. It also demonstrates robust domain generalization under out-of-distribution tasks. By unifying medical image analysis with explicit reasoning, MedVLM-R1 marks a pivotal step toward trustworthy and interpretable AI in clinical practice.
Authors: Kanglei Zhou, Zikai Hao, Liyuan Wang, Xiaohui Liang
Abstract: Virtual Reality Video Quality Assessment (VR-VQA) aims to evaluate the perceptual quality of 360-degree videos, which is crucial for ensuring a distortion-free user experience. Traditional VR-VQA methods trained on static datasets with limited distortion diversity struggle to balance correlation and precision. This becomes particularly critical when generalizing to diverse VR content and continually adapting to dynamic and evolving video distribution variations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach for assessing the perceptual quality of VR videos, Adaptive Score Alignment Learning (ASAL). ASAL integrates correlation loss with error loss to enhance alignment with human subjective ratings and precision in predicting perceptual quality. In particular, ASAL can naturally adapt to continually changing distributions through a feature space smoothing process that enhances generalization to unseen content. To further improve continual adaptation to dynamic VR environments, we extend ASAL with adaptive memory replay as a novel Continul Learning (CL) framework. Unlike traditional CL models, ASAL utilizes key frame extraction and feature adaptation to address the unique challenges of non-stationary variations with both the computation and storage restrictions of VR devices. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for VR-VQA and its CL counterpart, introducing new data splits and evaluation metrics. Our experiments demonstrate that ASAL outperforms recent strong baseline models, achieving overall correlation gains of up to 4.78\% in the static joint training setting and 12.19\% in the dynamic CL setting on various datasets. This validates the effectiveness of ASAL in addressing the inherent challenges of VR-VQA.Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhouKanglei/ASAL_CVQA.
Authors: Zikuan Li, Qiaoyun Wu, Jialin Zhang, Kaijun Zhang, Jun Wang
Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs), inspired by the spiking computation paradigm of the biological neural systems, have exhibited superior energy efficiency in 2D classification tasks over traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). However, the regression potential of SNNs has not been well explored, especially in 3D point cloud processing.In this paper, we propose noise-injected spiking graph convolutional networks to leverage the full regression potential of SNNs in 3D point cloud denoising. Specifically, we first emulate the noise-injected neuronal dynamics to build noise-injected spiking neurons. On this basis, we design noise-injected spiking graph convolution for promoting disturbance-aware spiking representation learning on 3D points. Starting from the spiking graph convolution, we build two SNN-based denoising networks. One is a purely spiking graph convolutional network, which achieves low accuracy loss compared with some ANN-based alternatives, while resulting in significantly reduced energy consumption on two benchmark datasets, PU-Net and PC-Net. The other is a hybrid architecture that combines ANN-based learning with a high performance-efficiency trade-off in just a few time steps. Our work lights up SNN's potential for 3D point cloud denoising, injecting new perspectives of exploring the deployment on neuromorphic chips while paving the way for developing energy-efficient 3D data acquisition devices.
Authors: Ju-Hyeon Nam, Sang-Chul Lee
Abstract: Generalizable medical image segmentation is essential for ensuring consistent performance across diverse unseen clinical settings. However, existing methods often overlook the capability to generalize effectively across arbitrary unseen modalities. In this paper, we introduce a novel Test-Time Modality Generalization (TTMG) framework, which comprises two core components: Modality-Aware Style Projection (MASP) and Modality-Sensitive Instance Whitening (MSIW), designed to enhance generalization in arbitrary unseen modality datasets. The MASP estimates the likelihood of a test instance belonging to each seen modality and maps it onto a distribution using modality-specific style bases, guiding its projection effectively. Furthermore, as high feature covariance hinders generalization to unseen modalities, the MSIW is applied during training to selectively suppress modality-sensitive information while retaining modality-invariant features. By integrating MASP and MSIW, the TTMG framework demonstrates robust generalization capabilities for medical image segmentation in unseen modalities a challenge that current methods have largely neglected. We evaluated TTMG alongside other domain generalization techniques across eleven datasets spanning four modalities (colonoscopy, ultrasound, dermoscopy, and radiology), consistently achieving superior segmentation performance across various modality combinations.
Authors: Chenhe Gu, Jindong Gu, Andong Hua, Yao Qin
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), built upon LLMs, have recently gained attention for their capabilities in image recognition and understanding. However, while MLLMs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, the transferability of these attacks across different models remains limited, especially under targeted attack setting. Existing methods primarily focus on vision-specific perturbations but struggle with the complex nature of vision-language modality alignment. In this work, we introduce the Dynamic Vision-Language Alignment (DynVLA) Attack, a novel approach that injects dynamic perturbations into the vision-language connector to enhance generalization across diverse vision-language alignment of different models. Our experimental results show that DynVLA significantly improves the transferability of adversarial examples across various MLLMs, including BLIP2, InstructBLIP, MiniGPT4, LLaVA, and closed-source models such as Gemini.
Authors: Shubhankar Borse, Kartikeya Bhardwaj, Mohammad Reza Karimi Dastjerdi, Hyojin Park, Shreya Kadambi, Shobitha Shivakumar, Prathamesh Mandke, Ankita Nayak, Harris Teague, Munawar Hayat, Fatih Porikli
Abstract: Diffusion models are increasingly popular for generative tasks, including personalized composition of subjects and styles. While diffusion models can generate user-specified subjects performing text-guided actions in custom styles, they require fine-tuning and are not feasible for personalization on mobile devices. Hence, tuning-free personalization methods such as IP-Adapters have progressively gained traction. However, for the composition of subjects and styles, these works are less flexible due to their reliance on ControlNet, or show content and style leakage artifacts. To tackle these, we present SubZero, a novel framework to generate any subject in any style, performing any action without the need for fine-tuning. We propose a novel set of constraints to enhance subject and style similarity, while reducing leakage. Additionally, we propose an orthogonalized temporal aggregation scheme in the cross-attention blocks of denoising model, effectively conditioning on a text prompt along with single subject and style images. We also propose a novel method to train customized content and style projectors to reduce content and style leakage. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed approach, while suitable for running on-edge, shows significant improvements over state-of-the-art works performing subject, style and action composition.
Authors: Tong Zhang, Shu Shen, C. L. Philip Chen
Abstract: Reliable multimodal learning in the presence of noisy data is a widely concerned issue, especially in safety-critical applications. Many reliable multimodal methods delve into addressing modality-specific or cross-modality noise. However, they fail to handle the coexistence of both types of noise efficiently. Moreover, the lack of comprehensive consideration for noise at both global and individual levels limits their reliability. To address these issues, a reliable multimodal classification method dubbed Multi-Level Inter-Class Confusing Information Removal Network (MICINet) is proposed. MICINet achieves the reliable removal of both types of noise by unifying them into the concept of Inter-class Confusing Information (\textit{ICI}) and eliminating it at both global and individual levels. Specifically, MICINet first reliably learns the global \textit{ICI} distribution through the proposed \textbf{\textit{Global \textbf{ICI} Learning Module}}. Then, it introduces the \textbf{\textit{Global-guided Sample ICI Learning module}} to efficiently remove global-level \textit{ICI} from sample features utilizing the learned global \textit{ICI} distribution. Subsequently, the \textbf{\textit{Sample-adaptive Cross-modality Information Compensation module}} is designed to remove individual-level \textit{ICI} from each sample reliably. This is achieved through interpretable cross-modality information compensation based on the complementary relationship between discriminative features and \textit{ICI} and the perception of the relative quality of modalities introduced by the relative discriminative power. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that MICINet outperforms other state-of-the-art reliable multimodal classification methods under various noise conditions.
Authors: Hu Gao, Depeng Dang
Abstract: Image deblurring aims to restore high-quality images by removing undesired degradation. Although existing methods have yielded promising results, they either overlook the varying degrees of degradation across different regions of the blurred image, or they approximate nonlinear function properties by stacking numerous nonlinear activation functions. In this paper, we propose a differential handling network (DHNet) to perform differential processing for different blur regions. Specifically, we design a Volterra block (VBlock) to integrate the nonlinear characteristics into the deblurring network, avoiding the previous operation of stacking the number of nonlinear activation functions to map complex input-output relationships. To enable the model to adaptively address varying degradation degrees in blurred regions, we devise the degradation degree recognition expert module (DDRE). This module initially incorporates prior knowledge from a well-trained model to estimate spatially variable blur information. Consequently, the router can map the learned degradation representation and allocate weights to experts according to both the degree of degradation and the size of the regions. Comprehensive experimental results show that DHNet effectively surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Authors: Kai Hu, Feng Gao, Xiaohan Nie, Peng Zhou, Son Tran, Tal Neiman, Lingyun Wang, Mubarak Shah, Raffay Hamid, Bing Yin, Trishul Chilimbi
Abstract: Recent advances in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (M-LLMs) show promising results in video reasoning. Popular Multi-Modal Large Language Model (M-LLM) frameworks usually apply naive uniform sampling to reduce the number of video frames that are fed into an M-LLM, particularly for long context videos. However, it could lose crucial context in certain periods of a video, so that the downstream M-LLM may not have sufficient visual information to answer a question. To attack this pain point, we propose a light-weight M-LLM -based frame selection method that adaptively select frames that are more relevant to users' queries. In order to train the proposed frame selector, we introduce two supervision signals (i) Spatial signal, where single frame importance score by prompting a M-LLM; (ii) Temporal signal, in which multiple frames selection by prompting Large Language Model (LLM) using the captions of all frame candidates. The selected frames are then digested by a frozen downstream video M-LLM for visual reasoning and question answering. Empirical results show that the proposed M-LLM video frame selector improves the performances various downstream video Large Language Model (video-LLM) across medium (ActivityNet, NExT-QA) and long (EgoSchema, LongVideoBench) context video question answering benchmarks.
Authors: Huayu Huang, Banglei Guan, Yang Shang, Qifeng Yu
Abstract: The motion measurement of point targets constitutes a fundamental problem in photogrammetry, with extensive applications across various engineering domains. Reconstructing a point's 3D motion just from the images captured by only a monocular camera is unfeasible without prior assumptions. Under limited observation conditions such as insufficient observations, long distance, and high observation error of platform, the least squares estimation faces the issue of ill-conditioning. This paper presents an algorithm for reconstructing 3D trajectories of moving points using a monocular camera. The motion of the points is represented through temporal polynomials. Ridge estimation is introduced to mitigate the issues of ill-conditioning caused by limited observation conditions. Then, an automatic algorithm for determining the order of the temporal polynomials is proposed. Furthermore, the definition of reconstructability for temporal polynomials is proposed to describe the reconstruction accuracy quantitatively. The simulated and real-world experimental results demonstrate the feasibility, accuracy, and efficiency of the proposed method.
Authors: Chen-Chen Zong, Sheng-Jun Huang
Abstract: Active learning (AL), which iteratively queries the most informative examples from a large pool of unlabeled candidates for model training, faces significant challenges in the presence of open-set classes. Existing methods either prioritize query examples likely to belong to known classes, indicating low epistemic uncertainty (EU), or focus on querying those with highly uncertain predictions, reflecting high aleatoric uncertainty (AU). However, they both yield suboptimal performance, as low EU corresponds to limited useful information, and closed-set AU metrics for unknown class examples are less meaningful. In this paper, we propose an Energy-based Active Open-set Annotation (EAOA) framework, which effectively integrates EU and AU to achieve superior performance. EAOA features a $(C+1)$-class detector and a target classifier, incorporating an energy-based EU measure and a margin-based energy loss designed for the detector, alongside an energy-based AU measure for the target classifier. Another crucial component is the target-driven adaptive sampling strategy. It first forms a smaller candidate set with low EU scores to ensure closed-set properties, making AU metrics meaningful. Subsequently, examples with high AU scores are queried to form the final query set, with the candidate set size adjusted adaptively. Extensive experiments show that EAOA achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high query precision and low training overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchenzong/EAOA.
Authors: Xin Ye, Burhaneddin Yaman, Sheng Cheng, Feng Tao, Abhirup Mallik, Liu Ren
Abstract: Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations play a crucial role in autonomous driving tasks. Despite recent advancements in BEV generation, inherent noise, stemming from sensor limitations and the learning process, remains largely unaddressed, resulting in suboptimal BEV representations that adversely impact the performance of downstream tasks. To address this, we propose BEVDiffuser, a novel diffusion model that effectively denoises BEV feature maps using the ground-truth object layout as guidance. BEVDiffuser can be operated in a plug-and-play manner during training time to enhance existing BEV models without requiring any architectural modifications. Extensive experiments on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate BEVDiffuser's exceptional denoising and generation capabilities, which enable significant enhancement to existing BEV models, as evidenced by notable improvements of 12.3\% in mAP and 10.1\% in NDS achieved for 3D object detection without introducing additional computational complexity. Moreover, substantial improvements in long-tail object detection and under challenging weather and lighting conditions further validate BEVDiffuser's effectiveness in denoising and enhancing BEV representations.
Authors: Yuan Bian, Min Liu, Yunqi Yi, Xueping Wang, Yaonan Wang
Abstract: Person re-identification (re-id) models are vital in security surveillance systems, requiring transferable adversarial attacks to explore the vulnerabilities of them. Recently, vision-language models (VLM) based attacks have shown superior transferability by attacking generalized image and textual features of VLM, but they lack comprehensive feature disruption due to the overemphasis on discriminative semantics in integral representation. In this paper, we introduce the Attribute-aware Prompt Attack (AP-Attack), a novel method that leverages VLM's image-text alignment capability to explicitly disrupt fine-grained semantic features of pedestrian images by destroying attribute-specific textual embeddings. To obtain personalized textual descriptions for individual attributes, textual inversion networks are designed to map pedestrian images to pseudo tokens that represent semantic embeddings, trained in the contrastive learning manner with images and a predefined prompt template that explicitly describes the pedestrian attributes. Inverted benign and adversarial fine-grained textual semantics facilitate attacker in effectively conducting thorough disruptions, enhancing the transferability of adversarial examples. Extensive experiments show that AP-Attack achieves state-of-the-art transferability, significantly outperforming previous methods by 22.9% on mean Drop Rate in cross-model&dataset attack scenarios.
Authors: Guangfeng Jiang, Jun Liu, Yongxuan Lv, Yuzhi Wu, Xianfei Li, Wenlong Liao, Tao He, Pai Peng
Abstract: Outdoor LiDAR point cloud 3D instance segmentation is a crucial task in autonomous driving. However, it requires laborious human efforts to annotate the point cloud for training a segmentation model. To address this challenge, we propose a YoCo framework, which generates 3D pseudo labels using minimal coarse click annotations in the bird's eye view plane. It is a significant challenge to produce high-quality pseudo labels from sparse annotations. Our YoCo framework first leverages vision foundation models combined with geometric constraints from point clouds to enhance pseudo label generation. Second, a temporal and spatial-based label updating module is designed to generate reliable updated labels. It leverages predictions from adjacent frames and utilizes the inherent density variation of point clouds (dense near, sparse far). Finally, to further improve label quality, an IoU-guided enhancement module is proposed, replacing pseudo labels with high-confidence and high-IoU predictions. Experiments on the Waymo dataset demonstrate YoCo's effectiveness and generality, achieving state-of-the-art performance among weakly supervised methods and surpassing fully supervised Cylinder3D. Additionally, the YoCo is suitable for various networks, achieving performance comparable to fully supervised methods with minimal fine-tuning using only 0.8% of the fully labeled data, significantly reducing annotation costs.
Authors: Yimin Zhu, Linlin Xu
Abstract: Although efficient extraction of discriminative spatial-spectral features is critical for hyperspectral images classification (HSIC), it is difficult to achieve these features due to factors such as the spatial-spectral heterogeneity and noise effect. This paper presents a Spatial-Spectral Diffusion Contrastive Representation Network (DiffCRN), based on denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) combined with contrastive learning (CL) for HSIC, with the following characteristics. First,to improve spatial-spectral feature representation, instead of adopting the UNets-like structure which is widely used for DDPM, we design a novel staged architecture with spatial self-attention denoising module (SSAD) and spectral group self-attention denoising module (SGSAD) in DiffCRN with improved efficiency for spectral-spatial feature learning. Second, to improve unsupervised feature learning efficiency, we design new DDPM model with logarithmic absolute error (LAE) loss and CL that improve the loss function effectiveness and increase the instance-level and inter-class discriminability. Third, to improve feature selection, we design a learnable approach based on pixel-level spectral angle mapping (SAM) for the selection of time steps in the proposed DDPM model in an adaptive and automatic manner. Last, to improve feature integration and classification, we design an Adaptive weighted addition modul (AWAM) and Cross time step Spectral-Spatial Fusion Module (CTSSFM) to fuse time-step-wise features and perform classification. Experiments conducted on widely used four HSI datasets demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed DiffCRN over the classical backbone models and state-of-the-art GAN, transformer models and other pretrained methods. The source code and pre-trained model will be made available publicly.
Authors: Yimin Zhu, Linlin Xu
Abstract: Although data augmentation is an effective method to address the imbalanced-small sample data (ISSD) problem in hyperspectral image classification (HSIC), most methodologies extend features in the latent space. Few, however, generate realistic and diverse samples using text information to balance the limited number of annotated samples. Recently, text-driven diffusion models have gained significant attention due to their remarkable ability to generate highly diverse images based on given text prompts in natural image synthesis. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel language-informed hyperspectral image synthesis method (Txt2HSI-LDM(VAE)) for addressing the ISSD problem of HSIC. First, for addressing the high-dimensional hyperspectral data, we use universal varitional autoencoeder (VAE) to map the hyperspectral into a low-dimensional latent space and get stable feature representation, which hugely reduce the inference parameter of diffusion model. Next, a semi-supervised diffusion model is designed for fully taking advantage of unlabeled data, beside, random polygon spatial clipping (RPSC) and uncertainty estimation of latent feature (LF-UE) are also used for simulating the varying degrees of mixing of training data. Then, VAE decodes HSI from latent space generated by diffusion model with the conditional language as input, contributing to more realistic and diverse samples. In our experiments, we fully evaluate the effectiveness of synthetic samples from aspect of statistical characteristic and data distribution in 2D-PCA space. Additionally, cross-attention map is visualized on the pixel-level to prove that our proposed model can capture the spatial layout of and geometry of the generated hyperspectral image depend on the visual-linguistic alignment.
Authors: Juntao Liang, Jun Hou, Weijun Zhang, Yong Wang
Abstract: Achieving both efficiency and strong discriminative ability in lightweight visual tracking is a challenge, especially on mobile and edge devices with limited computational resources. Conventional lightweight trackers often struggle with robustness under occlusion and interference, while deep trackers, when compressed to meet resource constraints, suffer from performance degradation. To address these issues, we introduce CFTrack, a lightweight tracker that integrates contrastive learning and feature matching to enhance discriminative feature representations. CFTrack dynamically assesses target similarity during prediction through a novel contrastive feature matching module optimized with an adaptive contrastive loss, thereby improving tracking accuracy. Extensive experiments on LaSOT, OTB100, and UAV123 show that CFTrack surpasses many state-of-the-art lightweight trackers, operating at 136 frames per second on the NVIDIA Jetson NX platform. Results on the HOOT dataset further demonstrate CFTrack's strong discriminative ability under heavy occlusion.
Authors: Jianning Chi, Zelan Li, Geng Lin, MingYang Sun, Xiaosheng Yu
Abstract: Weakly supervised segmentation methods can delineate thyroid nodules in ultrasound images efficiently using training data with coarse labels, but suffer from: 1) low-confidence pseudo-labels that follow topological priors, introducing significant label noise, and 2) low-rationality loss functions that rigidly compare segmentation with labels, ignoring discriminative information for nodules with diverse and complex shapes. To solve these issues, we clarify the objective and references for weakly supervised ultrasound image segmentation, presenting a framework with high-confidence pseudo-labels to represent topological and anatomical information and high-rationality losses to capture multi-level discriminative features. Specifically, we fuse geometric transformations of four-point annotations and MedSAM model results prompted by specific annotations to generate high-confidence box, foreground, and background labels. Our high-rationality learning strategy includes: 1) Alignment loss measuring spatial consistency between segmentation and box label, and topological continuity within the foreground label, guiding the network to perceive nodule location; 2) Contrastive loss pulling features from labeled foreground regions while pushing features from labeled foreground and background regions, guiding the network to learn nodule and background feature distribution; 3) Prototype correlation loss measuring consistency between correlation maps derived by comparing features with foreground and background prototypes, refining uncertain regions to accurate nodule edges. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the TN3K and DDTI datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/bluehenglee/MLI-MSC.
Authors: Shunkun Liang, Bin Li, Banglei Guan, Yang Shang, Xianwei Zhu, Qifeng Yu
Abstract: Vision-based pose estimation plays a crucial role in the autonomous navigation of flight platforms. However, the field of view and spatial resolution of the camera limit pose estimation accuracy. This paper designs a divergent multi-aperture imaging system (DMAIS), equivalent to a single imaging system to achieve simultaneous observation of a large field of view and high spatial resolution. The DMAIS overcomes traditional observation limitations, allowing accurate pose estimation for the flight platform. {Before conducting pose estimation, the DMAIS must be calibrated. To this end we propose a calibration method for DMAIS based on the 3D calibration field.} The calibration process determines the imaging parameters of the DMAIS, which allows us to model DMAIS as a generalized camera. Subsequently, a new algorithm for accurately determining the pose of flight platform is introduced. We transform the absolute pose estimation problem into a nonlinear minimization problem. New optimality conditions are established for solving this problem based on Lagrange multipliers. Finally, real calibration experiments show the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. Results from real flight experiments validate the system's ability to achieve centimeter-level positioning accuracy and arc-minute-level orientation accuracy.
Authors: Mingsi Wang, Shuaiyin Yao, Chang Yue, Lijie Zhang, Guozhu Meng
Abstract: Given the need to evaluate the robustness of face recognition (FR) models, many efforts have focused on adversarial patch attacks that mislead FR models by introducing localized perturbations. Impersonation attacks are a significant threat because adversarial perturbations allow attackers to disguise themselves as legitimate users. This can lead to severe consequences, including data breaches, system damage, and misuse of resources. However, research on such attacks in FR remains limited. Existing adversarial patch generation methods exhibit limited efficacy in impersonation attacks due to (1) the need for high attacker capabilities, (2) low attack success rates, and (3) excessive query requirements. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method SAP-DIFF that leverages diffusion models to generate adversarial patches via semantic perturbations in the latent space rather than direct pixel manipulation. We introduce an attention disruption mechanism to generate features unrelated to the original face, facilitating the creation of adversarial samples and a directional loss function to guide perturbations toward the target identity feature space, thereby enhancing attack effectiveness and efficiency. Extensive experiments on popular FR models and datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an average attack success rate improvement of 45.66% (all exceeding 40%), and a reduction in the number of queries by about 40% compared to the SOTA approach
Authors: Qijie Xu, Defang Chen, Jiawei Chen, Siwei Lyu, Can Wang
Abstract: The rise of diffusion models has significantly improved the fidelity and diversity of generated images. With numerous benefits, these advancements also introduce new risks. Diffusion models can be exploited to create high-quality Deepfake images, which poses challenges for image authenticity verification. In recent years, research on generalizable diffusion-generated image detection has grown rapidly. However, a comprehensive review of this topic is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we present a systematic survey of recent advances and classify them into two main categories: (1) data-driven detection and (2) feature-driven detection. Existing detection methods are further classified into six fine-grained categories based on their underlying principles. Finally, we identify several open challenges and envision some future directions, with the hope of inspiring more research work on this important topic. Reviewed works in this survey can be found at https://github.com/zju-pi/Awesome-Diffusion-generated-Image-Detection.
URLs: https://github.com/zju-pi/Awesome-Diffusion-generated-Image-Detection.
Authors: Tao Huang, Yanxiang Ma, Shan You, Chang Xu
Abstract: Masked autoencoders (MAEs) represent a prominent self-supervised learning paradigm in computer vision. Despite their empirical success, the underlying mechanisms of MAEs remain insufficiently understood. Recent studies have attempted to elucidate the functioning of MAEs through contrastive learning and feature representation analysis, yet these approaches often provide only implicit insights. In this paper, we propose a new perspective for understanding MAEs by leveraging the information bottleneck principle in information theory. Our theoretical analyses reveal that optimizing the latent features to balance relevant and irrelevant information is key to improving MAE performance. Building upon our proofs, we introduce MI-MAE, a novel method that optimizes MAEs through mutual information maximization and minimization. By enhancing latent features to retain maximal relevant information between them and the output, and minimizing irrelevant information between them and the input, our approach achieves better performance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that MI-MAE significantly outperforms MAE models in tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Our findings validate the theoretical framework and highlight the practical advantages of applying the information bottleneck principle to MAEs, offering deeper insights for developing more powerful self-supervised learning models.
Authors: Di Liu, Teng Deng, Giljoo Nam, Yu Rong, Stanislav Pidhorskyi, Junxuan Li, Jason Saragih, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Chen Cao
Abstract: Photorealistic 3D head avatar reconstruction faces critical challenges in modeling dynamic face-hair interactions and achieving cross-identity generalization, particularly during expressions and head movements. We present LUCAS, a novel Universal Prior Model (UPM) for codec avatar modeling that disentangles face and hair through a layered representation. Unlike previous UPMs that treat hair as an integral part of the head, our approach separates the modeling of the hairless head and hair into distinct branches. LUCAS is the first to introduce a mesh-based UPM, facilitating real-time rendering on devices. Our layered representation also improves the anchor geometry for precise and visually appealing Gaussian renderings. Experimental results indicate that LUCAS outperforms existing single-mesh and Gaussian-based avatar models in both quantitative and qualitative assessments, including evaluations on held-out subjects in zero-shot driving scenarios. LUCAS demonstrates superior dynamic performance in managing head pose changes, expression transfer, and hairstyle variations, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art in 3D head avatar reconstruction.
Authors: Jiaxing Li, Lin Jiang, Zeqi Ma, Kaihang Jiang, Xiaozhao Fang, Jie Wen
Abstract: Deep online cross-modal hashing has gained much attention from researchers recently, as its promising applications with low storage requirement, fast retrieval efficiency and cross modality adaptive, etc. However, there still exists some technical hurdles that hinder its applications, e.g., 1) how to extract the coexistent semantic relevance of cross-modal data, 2) how to achieve competitive performance when handling the real time data streams, 3) how to transfer the knowledge learned from offline to online training in a lightweight manner. To address these problems, this paper proposes a lightweight contrastive distilled hashing (LCDH) for cross-modal retrieval, by innovatively bridging the offline and online cross-modal hashing by similarity matrix approximation in a knowledge distillation framework. Specifically, in the teacher network, LCDH first extracts the cross-modal features by the contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP), which are further fed into an attention module for representation enhancement after feature fusion. Then, the output of the attention module is fed into a FC layer to obtain hash codes for aligning the sizes of similarity matrices for online and offline training. In the student network, LCDH extracts the visual and textual features by lightweight models, and then the features are fed into a FC layer to generate binary codes. Finally, by approximating the similarity matrices, the performance of online hashing in the lightweight student network can be enhanced by the supervision of coexistent semantic relevance that is distilled from the teacher network. Experimental results on three widely used datasets demonstrate that LCDH outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Xingyu Qiu, Mengying Yang, Xinghua Ma, Fanding Li, Dong Liang, Gongning Luo, Wei Wang, Kuanquan Wang, Shuo Li
Abstract: In image generation, Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB)-based methods theoretically enhance the efficiency and quality compared to the diffusion models by finding the least costly path between two distributions. However, they are computationally expensive and time-consuming when applied to complex image data. The reason is that they focus on fitting globally optimal paths in high-dimensional spaces, directly generating images as next step on the path using complex networks through self-supervised training, which typically results in a gap with the global optimum. Meanwhile, most diffusion models are in the same path subspace generated by weights $f_A(t)$ and $f_B(t)$, as they follow the paradigm ($x_t = f_A(t)x_{Img} + f_B(t)\epsilon$). To address the limitations of SB-based methods, this paper proposes for the first time to find local Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridges (LDSB) in the diffusion path subspace, which strengthens the connection between the SB problem and diffusion models. Specifically, our method optimizes the diffusion paths using Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), which has the advantage of resistance to forgetting and continuous output. The experiment shows that our LDSB significantly improves the quality and efficiency of image generation using the same pre-trained denoising network and the KAN for optimising is only less than 0.1MB. The FID metric is reduced by \textbf{more than 15\%}, especially with a reduction of 48.50\% when NFE of DDIM is $5$ for the CelebA dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/Qiu-XY/LDSB.
Authors: Anthony Etim, Jakub Szefer
Abstract: Adversarial attacks on machine learning models often rely on small, imperceptible perturbations to mislead classifiers. Such strategy focuses on minimizing the visual perturbation for humans so they are not confused, and also maximizing the misclassification for machine learning algorithms. An orthogonal strategy for adversarial attacks is to create perturbations that are clearly visible but do not confuse humans, yet still maximize misclassification for machine learning algorithms. This work follows the later strategy, and demonstrates instance of it through the Snowball Adversarial Attack in the context of traffic sign recognition. The attack leverages the human brain's superior ability to recognize objects despite various occlusions, while machine learning algorithms are easily confused. The evaluation shows that the Snowball Adversarial Attack is robust across various images and is able to confuse state-of-the-art traffic sign recognition algorithm. The findings reveal that Snowball Adversarial Attack can significantly degrade model performance with minimal effort, raising important concerns about the vulnerabilities of deep neural networks and highlighting the necessity for improved defenses for image recognition machine learning models.
Authors: Jisoo Lee, Tamim Ahmed, Thanassis Rikakis, Pavan Turaga
Abstract: Rehabilitation is essential and critical for post-stroke patients, addressing both physical and cognitive aspects. Stroke predominantly affects older adults, with 75% of cases occurring in individuals aged 65 and older, underscoring the urgent need for tailored rehabilitation strategies in aging populations. Despite the critical role therapists play in evaluating rehabilitation progress and ensuring the effectiveness of treatment, current assessment methods can often be subjective, inconsistent, and time-consuming, leading to delays in adjusting therapy protocols. This study aims to address these challenges by providing a solution for consistent and timely analysis. Specifically, we perform temporal segmentation of video recordings to capture detailed activities during stroke patients' rehabilitation. The main application scenario motivating this study is the clinical assessment of daily tabletop object interactions, which are crucial for post-stroke physical rehabilitation. To achieve this, we present a framework that leverages the biomechanics of movement during therapy sessions. Our solution divides the process into two main tasks: 2D keypoint detection to track patients' physical movements, and 1D time-series temporal segmentation to analyze these movements over time. This dual approach enables automated labeling with only a limited set of real-world data, addressing the challenges of variability in patient movements and limited dataset availability. By tackling these issues, our method shows strong potential for practical deployment in physical therapy settings, enhancing the speed and accuracy of rehabilitation assessments.
Authors: Elkhan Ismayilzada, MD Khalequzzaman Chowdhury Sayem, Yihalem Yimolal Tiruneh, Mubarrat Tajoar Chowdhury, Muhammadjon Boboev, Seungryul Baek
Abstract: Significant advancements have been achieved in the realm of understanding poses and interactions of two hands manipulating an object. The emergence of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies has heightened the demand for real-time performance in these applications. However, current state-of-the-art models often exhibit promising results at the expense of substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we present a query-optimized real-time Transformer (QORT-Former), the first Transformer-based real-time framework for 3D pose estimation of two hands and an object. We first limit the number of queries and decoders to meet the efficiency requirement. Given limited number of queries and decoders, we propose to optimize queries which are taken as input to the Transformer decoder, to secure better accuracy: (1) we propose to divide queries into three types (a left hand query, a right hand query and an object query) and enhance query features (2) by using the contact information between hands and an object and (3) by using three-step update of enhanced image and query features with respect to one another. With proposed methods, we achieved real-time pose estimation performance using just 108 queries and 1 decoder (53.5 FPS on an RTX 3090TI GPU). Surpassing state-of-the-art results on the H2O dataset by 17.6% (left hand), 22.8% (right hand), and 27.2% (object), as well as on the FPHA dataset by 5.3% (right hand) and 10.4% (object), our method excels in accuracy. Additionally, it sets the state-of-the-art in interaction recognition, maintaining real-time efficiency with an off-the-shelf action recognition module.
Authors: Shuchang Zhou
Abstract: Prompt tuning has become a popular strategy for adapting Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to zero/few-shot visual recognition tasks. Some prompting techniques introduce prior knowledge due to its richness, but when learnable tokens are randomly initialized and disconnected from prior knowledge, they tend to overfit on seen classes and struggle with domain shifts for unseen ones. To address this issue, we propose the InPK model, which infuses class-specific prior knowledge into the learnable tokens during initialization, thus enabling the model to explicitly focus on class-relevant information. Furthermore, to mitigate the weakening of class information by multi-layer encoders, we continuously reinforce the interaction between learnable tokens and prior knowledge across multiple feature levels. This progressive interaction allows the learnable tokens to better capture the fine-grained differences and universal visual concepts within prior knowledge, enabling the model to extract more discriminative and generalized text features. Even for unseen classes, the learned interaction allows the model to capture their common representations and infer their appropriate positions within the existing semantic structure. Moreover, we introduce a learnable text-to-vision projection layer to accommodate the text adjustments, ensuring better alignment of visual-text semantics. Extensive experiments on 11 recognition datasets show that InPK significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multiple zero/few-shot image classification tasks.
Authors: Aayush Dhakal, Srikumar Sastry, Subash Khanal, Adeel Ahmad, Eric Xing, Nathan Jacobs
Abstract: The choice of representation for geographic location significantly impacts the accuracy of models for a broad range of geospatial tasks, including fine-grained species classification, population density estimation, and biome classification. Recent works like SatCLIP and GeoCLIP learn such representations by contrastively aligning geolocation with co-located images. While these methods work exceptionally well, in this paper, we posit that the current training strategies fail to fully capture the important visual features. We provide an information theoretic perspective on why the resulting embeddings from these methods discard crucial visual information that is important for many downstream tasks. To solve this problem, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented strategy called RANGE. We build our method on the intuition that the visual features of a location can be estimated by combining the visual features from multiple similar-looking locations. We evaluate our method across a wide variety of tasks. Our results show that RANGE outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models with significant margins in most tasks. We show gains of up to 13.1\% on classification tasks and 0.145 $R^2$ on regression tasks. All our code will be released on GitHub. Our models will be released on HuggingFace.
Authors: Keito Suzuki, Bang Du, Girish Krishnan, Kunyao Chen, Runfa Blark Li, Truong Nguyen
Abstract: 3D part segmentation is still an open problem in the field of 3D vision and AR/VR. Due to limited 3D labeled data, traditional supervised segmentation methods fall short in generalizing to unseen shapes and categories. Recently, the advancement in vision-language models' zero-shot abilities has brought a surge in open-world 3D segmentation methods. While these methods show promising results for 3D scenes or objects, they do not generalize well to 3D humans. In this paper, we present the first open-vocabulary segmentation method capable of handling 3D human. Our framework can segment the human category into desired fine-grained parts based on the textual prompt. We design a simple segmentation pipeline, leveraging SAM to generate multi-view proposals in 2D and proposing a novel HumanCLIP model to create unified embeddings for visual and textual inputs. Compared with existing pre-trained CLIP models, the HumanCLIP model yields more accurate embeddings for human-centric contents. We also design a simple-yet-effective MaskFusion module, which classifies and fuses multi-view features into 3D semantic masks without complex voting and grouping mechanisms. The design of decoupling mask proposals and text input also significantly boosts the efficiency of per-prompt inference. Experimental results on various 3D human datasets show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art open-vocabulary 3D segmentation methods by a large margin. In addition, we show that our method can be directly applied to various 3D representations including meshes, point clouds, and 3D Gaussian Splatting.
Authors: Lianping Yang, Peng Jiao, Jinshan Pan, Hegui Zhu, Su Guo
Abstract: In the process of performing image super-resolution processing, the processing of complex localized information can have a significant impact on the quality of the image generated. Fractal features can capture the rich details of both micro and macro texture structures in an image. Therefore, we propose a diffusion model-based super-resolution method incorporating fractal features of low-resolution images, named MFSR. MFSR leverages these fractal features as reinforcement conditions in the denoising process of the diffusion model to ensure accurate recovery of texture information. MFSR employs convolution as a soft assignment to approximate the fractal features of low-resolution images. This approach is also used to approximate the density feature maps of these images. By using soft assignment, the spatial layout of the image is described hierarchically, encoding the self-similarity properties of the image at different scales. Different processing methods are applied to various types of features to enrich the information acquired by the model. In addition, a sub-denoiser is integrated in the denoising U-Net to reduce the noise in the feature maps during the up-sampling process in order to improve the quality of the generated images. Experiments conducted on various face and natural image datasets demonstrate that MFSR can generate higher quality images.
Authors: Dongbo Shi, Shen Cao, Lubin Fan, Bojian Wu, Jinhui Guo, Renjie Chen, Ligang Liu, Jieping Ye
Abstract: While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has made significant progress in scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis, it still heavily relies on accurately pre-computed camera intrinsics and extrinsics, such as focal length and camera poses. In order to mitigate this dependency, the previous efforts have focused on optimizing 3DGS without the need for camera poses, yet camera intrinsics remain necessary. To further loose the requirement, we propose a joint optimization method to train 3DGS from an image collection without requiring either camera intrinsics or extrinsics. To achieve this goal, we introduce several key improvements during the joint training of 3DGS. We theoretically derive the gradient of the camera intrinsics, allowing the camera intrinsics to be optimized simultaneously during training. Moreover, we integrate global track information and select the Gaussian kernels associated with each track, which will be trained and automatically rescaled to an infinitesimally small size, closely approximating surface points, and focusing on enforcing multi-view consistency and minimizing reprojection errors, while the remaining kernels continue to serve their original roles. This hybrid training strategy nicely unifies the camera parameters estimation and 3DGS training. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both public and synthetic datasets.
Authors: Xiao Lin, Yuge Huang, Jianqing Xu, Yuxi Mi, Shuigeng Zhou, Shouhong Ding
Abstract: Face recognition (FR) stands as one of the most crucial applications in computer vision. The accuracy of FR models has significantly improved in recent years due to the availability of large-scale human face datasets. However, directly using these datasets can inevitably lead to privacy and legal problems. Generating synthetic data to train FR models is a feasible solution to circumvent these issues. While existing synthetic-based face recognition methods have made significant progress in generating identity-preserving images, they are severely plagued by context overfitting, resulting in a lack of intra-class diversity of generated images and poor face recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a framework to Unleash Inherent capability of the model to enhance intra-class diversity for synthetic face recognition, shortened as UIFace. Our framework first trains a diffusion model that can perform sampling conditioned on either identity contexts or a learnable empty context. The former generates identity-preserving images but lacks variations, while the latter exploits the model's intrinsic ability to synthesize intra-class-diversified images but with random identities. Then we adopt a novel two-stage sampling strategy during inference to fully leverage the strengths of both types of contexts, resulting in images that are diverse as well as identitypreserving. Moreover, an attention injection module is introduced to further augment the intra-class variations by utilizing attention maps from the empty context to guide the sampling process in ID-conditioned generation. Experiments show that our method significantly surpasses previous approaches with even less training data and half the size of synthetic dataset. The proposed UIFace even achieves comparable performance with FR models trained on real datasets when we further increase the number of synthetic identities.
Authors: Xin-yang Zhao, Jian Jin, Yang-yang Li, Yazhou Yao
Abstract: The Coarse-to-Fine Few-Shot (C2FS) task is designed to train models using only coarse labels, then leverages a limited number of subclass samples to achieve fine-grained recognition capabilities. This task presents two main challenges: coarse-grained supervised pre-training suppresses the extraction of critical fine-grained features for subcategory discrimination, and models suffer from overfitting due to biased distributions caused by limited fine-grained samples. In this paper, we propose the Twofold Debiasing (TFB) method, which addresses these challenges through detailed feature enhancement and distribution calibration. Specifically, we introduce a multi-layer feature fusion reconstruction module and an intermediate layer feature alignment module to combat the model's tendency to focus on simple predictive features directly related to coarse-grained supervision, while neglecting complex fine-grained level details. Furthermore, we mitigate the biased distributions learned by the fine-grained classifier using readily available coarse-grained sample embeddings enriched with fine-grained information. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results that surpass competitive methods.
Authors: Reza Abbasi, Ali Nazari, Aminreza Sefid, Mohammadali Banayeeanzade, Mohammad Hossein Rohban, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah
Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models have demonstrated remarkable performance in zero-shot classification tasks, yet their efficacy in handling complex multi-object scenarios remains challenging. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of CLIP's performance limitations in multi-object contexts through controlled experiments. We introduce two custom datasets, SimCO and CompCO, to evaluate CLIP's image and text encoders in various multi-object configurations. Our findings reveal significant biases in both encoders: the image encoder favors larger objects, while the text encoder prioritizes objects mentioned first in descriptions. We hypothesize these biases originate from CLIP's training process and provide evidence through analyses of the COCO dataset and CLIP's training progression. Additionally, we extend our investigation to Stable Diffusion models, revealing that biases in the CLIP text encoder significantly impact text-to-image generation tasks. Our experiments demonstrate how these biases affect CLIP's performance in image-caption matching and generation tasks, particularly when manipulating object sizes and their order in captions. This work contributes valuable insights into CLIP's behavior in complex visual environments and highlights areas for improvement in future vision-language models.
Authors: Reza Abbasi, Ali Nazari, Aminreza Sefid, Mohammadali Banayeeanzade, Mohammad Hossein Rohban, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah
Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models excel in zero-shot classification, yet face challenges in complex multi-object scenarios. This study offers a comprehensive analysis of CLIP's limitations in these contexts using a specialized dataset, ComCO, designed to evaluate CLIP's encoders in diverse multi-object scenarios. Our findings reveal significant biases: the text encoder prioritizes first-mentioned objects, and the image encoder favors larger objects. Through retrieval and classification tasks, we quantify these biases across multiple CLIP variants and trace their origins to CLIP's training process, supported by analyses of the LAION dataset and training progression. Our image-text matching experiments show substantial performance drops when object size or token order changes, underscoring CLIP's instability with rephrased but semantically similar captions. Extending this to longer captions and text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion, we demonstrate how prompt order influences object prominence in generated images. For more details and access to our dataset and analysis code, visit our project repository: https://clip-analysis.github.io.
Authors: Xiangyan Qu, Gaopeng Gou, Jiamin Zhuang, Jing Yu, Kun Song, Qihao Wang, Yili Li, Gang Xiong
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in image classification by training with large-scale paired image-text data. Their performances largely depend on the prompt quality. While recent methods show that visual descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs) enhance the generalization of VLMs, class-specific prompts may be inaccurate or lack discrimination due to the hallucination in LLMs. In this paper, we aim to find visually discriminative prompts for fine-grained categories with minimal supervision and no human-in-the-loop. An evolution-based algorithm is proposed to progressively optimize language prompts from task-specific templates to class-specific descriptions. Unlike optimizing templates, the search space shows an explosion in class-specific candidate prompts. This increases prompt generation costs, iterative times, and the overfitting problem. To this end, we first introduce several simple yet effective edit-based and evolution-based operations to generate diverse candidate prompts by one-time query of LLMs. Then, two sampling strategies are proposed to find a better initial search point and reduce traversed categories, saving iteration costs. Moreover, we apply a novel fitness score with entropy constraints to mitigate overfitting. In a challenging one-shot image classification setting, our method outperforms existing textual prompt-based methods and improves LLM-generated description methods across 13 datasets. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that our optimal prompts improve adapter-based methods and transfer effectively across different backbones.
Authors: Xiaofan Li, Xin Tan, Zhuo Chen, Zhizhong Zhang, Ruixin Zhang, Rizen Guo, Guanna Jiang, Yulong Chen, Yanyun Qu, Lizhuang Ma, Yuan Xie
Abstract: With the rise of generative models, there is a growing interest in unifying all tasks within a generative framework. Anomaly detection methods also fall into this scope and utilize diffusion models to generate or reconstruct normal samples when given arbitrary anomaly images. However, our study found that the diffusion model suffers from severe ``faithfulness hallucination'' and ``catastrophic forgetting'', which can't meet the unpredictable pattern increments. To mitigate the above problems, we propose a continual diffusion model that uses gradient projection to achieve stable continual learning. Gradient projection deploys a regularization on the model updating by modifying the gradient towards the direction protecting the learned knowledge. But as a double-edged sword, it also requires huge memory costs brought by the Markov process. Hence, we propose an iterative singular value decomposition method based on the transitive property of linear representation, which consumes tiny memory and incurs almost no performance loss. Finally, considering the risk of ``over-fitting'' to normal images of the diffusion model, we propose an anomaly-masked network to enhance the condition mechanism of the diffusion model. For continual anomaly detection, ours achieves first place in 17/18 settings on MVTec and VisA. Code is available at https://github.com/FuNz-0/One-for-More
Authors: Chunyang Cheng, Tianyang Xu, Zhenhua Feng, Xiaojun Wu, ZhangyongTang, Hui Li, Zeyang Zhang, Sara Atito, Muhammad Awais, Josef Kittler
Abstract: Advanced image fusion methods mostly prioritise high-level missions, where task interaction struggles with semantic gaps, requiring complex bridging mechanisms. In contrast, we propose to leverage low-level vision tasks from digital photography fusion, allowing for effective feature interaction through pixel-level supervision. This new paradigm provides strong guidance for unsupervised multimodal fusion without relying on abstract semantics, enhancing task-shared feature learning for broader applicability. Owning to the hybrid image features and enhanced universal representations, the proposed GIFNet supports diverse fusion tasks, achieving high performance across both seen and unseen scenarios with a single model. Uniquely, experimental results reveal that our framework also supports single-modality enhancement, offering superior flexibility for practical applications. Our code will be available at https://github.com/AWCXV/GIFNet.
Authors: Guanting Liu, Yi Wang, Xi Chen, Baoyu Du, Penglei Li, Yuan Wu, Zhice Fang
Abstract: Landslides are among the most common natural disasters globally, posing significant threats to human society. Deep learning (DL) has proven to be an effective method for rapidly generating landslide inventories in large-scale disaster areas. However, DL models rely heavily on high-quality labeled landslide data for strong feature extraction capabilities. And landslide detection using DL urgently needs a benchmark dataset to evaluate the generalization ability of the latest models. To solve the above problems, we construct a Large-scale Multi-source High-resolution Landslide Dataset (LMHLD) for Landslide Detection based on DL. LMHLD collects remote sensing images from five different satellite sensors across seven study areas worldwide: Wenchuan, China (2008); Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2011); Gorkha, Nepal (2015); Jiuzhaigou, China (2015); Taiwan, China (2018); Hokkaido, Japan (2018); Emilia-Romagna, Italy (2023). The dataset includes a total of 25,365 patches, with different patch sizes to accommodate different landslide scales. Additionally, a training module, LMHLDpart, is designed to accommodate landslide detection tasks at varying scales and to alleviate the issue of catastrophic forgetting in multi-task learning. Furthermore, the models trained by LMHLD is applied in other datasets to highlight the robustness of LMHLD. Five dataset quality evaluation experiments designed by using seven DL models from the U-Net family demonstrate that LMHLD has the potential to become a benchmark dataset for landslide detection. LMHLD is open access and can be accessed through the link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11424988. This dataset provides a strong foundation for DL models, accelerates the development of DL in landslide detection, and serves as a valuable resource for landslide prevention and mitigation efforts.
Authors: Nan An, Long Ma, Guangchao Han, Xin Fan, RIsheng Liu
Abstract: Deep learning-based low-light image enhancers have made significant progress in recent years, with a trend towards achieving satisfactory visual quality while gradually reducing the number of parameters and improving computational efficiency. In this work, we aim to delving into the limits of image enhancers both from visual quality and computational efficiency, while striving for both better performance and faster processing. To be concrete, by rethinking the task demands, we build an explicit connection, i.e., visual quality and computational efficiency are corresponding to model learning and structure design, respectively. Around this connection, we enlarge parameter space by introducing the re-parameterization for ample model learning of a pre-defined minimalist network (e.g., just one layer), to avoid falling into a local solution. To strengthen the structural representation, we define a hierarchical search scheme for discovering a task-oriented re-parameterized structure, which also provides powerful support for efficiency. Ultimately, this achieves efficient low-light image enhancement using only a single convolutional layer, while maintaining excellent visual quality. Experimental results show our sensible superiority both in quality and efficiency against recently-proposed methods. Especially, our running time on various platforms (e.g., CPU, GPU, NPU, DSP) consistently moves beyond the existing fastest scheme. The source code will be released at https://github.com/vis-opt-group/AR-LLIE.
Authors: Yuhao Li, Mirana Claire Angel, Salman Khan, Yu Zhu, Jinqiu Sun, Yanning Zhang, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract: Trajectory-based motion control has emerged as an intuitive and efficient approach for controllable video generation. However, the existing trajectory-based approaches are usually limited to only generating the motion trajectory of the controlled object and ignoring the dynamic interactions between the controlled object and its surroundings. To address this limitation, we propose a Chain-of-Thought-based motion controller for controllable video generation, named C-Drag. Instead of directly generating the motion of some objects, our C-Drag first performs object perception and then reasons the dynamic interactions between different objects according to the given motion control of the objects. Specifically, our method includes an object perception module and a Chain-of-Thought-based motion reasoning module. The object perception module employs visual language models to capture the position and category information of various objects within the image. The Chain-of-Thought-based motion reasoning module takes this information as input and conducts a stage-wise reasoning process to generate motion trajectories for each of the affected objects, which are subsequently fed to the diffusion model for video synthesis. Furthermore, we introduce a new video object interaction (VOI) dataset to evaluate the generation quality of motion controlled video generation methods. Our VOI dataset contains three typical types of interactions and provides the motion trajectories of objects that can be used for accurate performance evaluation. Experimental results show that C-Drag achieves promising performance across multiple metrics, excelling in object motion control. Our benchmark, codes, and models will be available at https://github.com/WesLee88524/C-Drag-Official-Repo.
Authors: Mingtao Guo, Guanyu Xing, Yanli Liu
Abstract: Relightable portrait animation aims to animate a static reference portrait to match the head movements and expressions of a driving video while adapting to user-specified or reference lighting conditions. Existing portrait animation methods fail to achieve relightable portraits because they do not separate and manipulate intrinsic (identity and appearance) and extrinsic (pose and lighting) features. In this paper, we present a Lighting Controllable Video Diffusion model (LCVD) for high-fidelity, relightable portrait animation. We address this limitation by distinguishing these feature types through dedicated subspaces within the feature space of a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model. Specifically, we employ the 3D mesh, pose, and lighting-rendered shading hints of the portrait to represent the extrinsic attributes, while the reference represents the intrinsic attributes. In the training phase, we employ a reference adapter to map the reference into the intrinsic feature subspace and a shading adapter to map the shading hints into the extrinsic feature subspace. By merging features from these subspaces, the model achieves nuanced control over lighting, pose, and expression in generated animations. Extensive evaluations show that LCVD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in lighting realism, image quality, and video consistency, setting a new benchmark in relightable portrait animation.
Authors: An Li, Zhe Zhu, Mingqiang Wei
Abstract: Existing point cloud completion methods, which typically depend on predefined synthetic training datasets, encounter significant challenges when applied to out-of-distribution, real-world scans. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a zero-shot completion framework, termed GenPC, designed to reconstruct high-quality real-world scans by leveraging explicit 3D generative priors. Our key insight is that recent feed-forward 3D generative models, trained on extensive internet-scale data, have demonstrated the ability to perform 3D generation from single-view images in a zero-shot setting. To harness this for completion, we first develop a Depth Prompting module that links partial point clouds with image-to-3D generative models by leveraging depth images as a stepping stone. To retain the original partial structure in the final results, we design the Geometric Preserving Fusion module that aligns the generated shape with input by adaptively adjusting its pose and scale. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks validate the superiority and generalizability of our approach, bringing us a step closer to robust real-world scan completion.
Authors: SeonHwa Kim, Jiwon Kim, Soobin Park, Donghoon Ahn, Jiwon Kang, Seungryong Kim, Kyong Hwan Jin, Eunju Cha
Abstract: Score distillation sampling (SDS) demonstrates a powerful capability for text-conditioned 2D image and 3D object generation by distilling the knowledge from learned score functions. However, SDS often suffers from blurriness caused by noisy gradients. When SDS meets the image editing, such degradations can be reduced by adjusting bias shifts using reference pairs, but the de-biasing techniques are still corrupted by erroneous gradients. To this end, we introduce Identity-preserving Distillation Sampling (IDS), which compensates for the gradient leading to undesired changes in the results. Based on the analysis that these errors come from the text-conditioned scores, a new regularization technique, called fixed-point iterative regularization (FPR), is proposed to modify the score itself, driving the preservation of the identity even including poses and structures. Thanks to a self-correction by FPR, the proposed method provides clear and unambiguous representations corresponding to the given prompts in image-to-image editing and editable neural radiance field (NeRF). The structural consistency between the source and the edited data is obviously maintained compared to other state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Dingkun Yan, Xinrui Wang, Zhuoru Li, Suguru Saito, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Jiaxian Guo
Abstract: Sketch colorization plays an important role in animation and digital illustration production tasks. However, existing methods still meet problems in that text-guided methods fail to provide accurate color and style reference, hint-guided methods still involve manual operation, and image-referenced methods are prone to cause artifacts. To address these limitations, we propose a diffusion-based framework inspired by real-world animation production workflows. Our approach leverages the sketch as the spatial guidance and an RGB image as the color reference, and separately extracts foreground and background from the reference image with spatial masks. Particularly, we introduce a split cross-attention mechanism with LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) modules. They are trained separately with foreground and background regions to control the corresponding embeddings for keys and values in cross-attention. This design allows the diffusion model to integrate information from foreground and background independently, preventing interference and eliminating the spatial artifacts. During inference, we design switchable inference modes for diverse use scenarios by changing modules activated in the framework. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, along with user studies, demonstrate our advantages over existing methods in generating high-qualigy artifact-free results with geometric mismatched references. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component. Codes are available at https://github.com/ tellurion-kanata/colorizeDiffusion.
URLs: https://github.com/
Authors: Chenhao Ding, Xinyuan Gao, Songlin Dong, Yuhang He, Qiang Wang, Xiang Song, Alex Kot, Yihong Gong
Abstract: With the development of visual-language models (VLM) in downstream task applications, test-time adaptation methods based on VLM have attracted increasing attention for their ability to address changes distribution in test-time. Although prior approaches have achieved some progress, they typically either demand substantial computational resources or are constrained by the limitations of the original feature space, rendering them less effective for test-time adaptation tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free feature space rotation with basis transformation for test-time adaptation. By leveraging the inherent distinctions among classes, we reconstruct the original feature space and map it to a new representation, thereby enhancing the clarity of class differences and providing more effective guidance for the model during testing. Additionally, to better capture relevant information from various classes, we maintain a dynamic queue to store representative samples. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of both performance and efficiency.
Authors: Thibaut Loiseau, Guillaume Bourmaud
Abstract: Camera pose estimation is crucial for many computer vision applications, yet existing benchmarks offer limited insight into method limitations across different geometric challenges. We introduce RUBIK, a novel benchmark that systematically evaluates image matching methods across well-defined geometric difficulty levels. Using three complementary criteria - overlap, scale ratio, and viewpoint angle - we organize 16.5K image pairs from nuScenes into 33 difficulty levels. Our comprehensive evaluation of 14 methods reveals that while recent detector-free approaches achieve the best performance (>47% success rate), they come with significant computational overhead compared to detector-based methods (150-600ms vs. 40-70ms). Even the best performing method succeeds on only 54.8% of the pairs, highlighting substantial room for improvement, particularly in challenging scenarios combining low overlap, large scale differences, and extreme viewpoint changes. Benchmark will be made publicly available.
Authors: Ke Niu, Haiyang Yu, Mengyang Zhao, Teng Fu, Siyang Yi, Wei Lu, Bin Li, Xuelin Qian, Xiangyang Xue
Abstract: Person re-identification (Re-ID) is a critical task in human-centric intelligent systems, enabling consistent identification of individuals across different camera views using multi-modal query information. Recent studies have successfully integrated LVLMs with person Re-ID, yielding promising results. However, existing LVLM-based methods face several limitations. They rely on extracting textual embeddings from fixed templates, which are used either as intermediate features for image representation or for prompt tuning in domain-specific tasks. Furthermore, they are unable to adopt the VQA inference format, significantly restricting their broader applicability. In this paper, we propose a novel, versatile, one-for-all person Re-ID framework, ChatReID. Our approach introduces a Hierarchical Progressive Tuning (HPT) strategy, which ensures fine-grained identity-level retrieval by progressively refining the model's ability to distinguish pedestrian identities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms SOTA methods across ten benchmarks in four different Re-ID settings, offering enhanced flexibility and user-friendliness. ChatReID provides a scalable, practical solution for real-world person Re-ID applications, enabling effective multi-modal interaction and fine-grained identity discrimination.
Authors: Quanxing Zha, Xin Liu, Shu-Juan Peng, Yiu-ming Cheung, Xing Xu, Nannan Wang
Abstract: Can we accurately identify the true correspondences from multimodal datasets containing mismatched data pairs? Existing methods primarily emphasize the similarity matching between the representations of objects across modalities, potentially neglecting the crucial relation consistency within modalities that are particularly important for distinguishing the true and false correspondences. Such an omission often runs the risk of misidentifying negatives as positives, thus leading to unanticipated performance degradation. To address this problem, we propose a general Relation Consistency learning framework, namely ReCon, to accurately discriminate the true correspondences among the multimodal data and thus effectively mitigate the adverse impact caused by mismatches. Specifically, ReCon leverages a novel relation consistency learning to ensure the dual-alignment, respectively of, the cross-modal relation consistency between different modalities and the intra-modal relation consistency within modalities. Thanks to such dual constrains on relations, ReCon significantly enhances its effectiveness for true correspondence discrimination and therefore reliably filters out the mismatched pairs to mitigate the risks of wrong supervisions. Extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmark datasets, including Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and Conceptual Captions, are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of ReCon compared with other SOTAs. The code is available at: https://github.com/qxzha/ReCon.
Authors: Chao Wang, Luning Zhang, Zheng Wang, Yang Zhou
Abstract: Combining multiple perceptual inputs and performing combinatorial reasoning in complex scenarios is a sophisticated cognitive function in humans. With advancements in multi-modal large language models, recent benchmarks tend to evaluate visual understanding across multiple images. However, they often overlook the necessity of combinatorial reasoning across multiple perceptual information. To explore the ability of advanced models to integrate multiple perceptual inputs for combinatorial reasoning in complex scenarios, we introduce two benchmarks: Clue-Visual Question Answering (CVQA), with three task types to assess visual comprehension and synthesis, and Clue of Password-Visual Question Answering (CPVQA), with two task types focused on accurate interpretation and application of visual data. For our benchmarks, we present three plug-and-play approaches: utilizing model input for reasoning, enhancing reasoning through minimum margin decoding with randomness generation, and retrieving semantically relevant visual information for effective data integration. The combined results reveal current models' poor performance on combinatorial reasoning benchmarks, even the state-of-the-art (SOTA) closed-source model achieves only 33.04% accuracy on CVQA, and drops to 7.38% on CPVQA. Notably, our approach improves the performance of models on combinatorial reasoning, with a 22.17% boost on CVQA and 9.40% on CPVQA over the SOTA closed-source model, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing combinatorial reasoning with multiple perceptual inputs in complex scenarios. The code will be publicly available.
Authors: Hongbing Zhang
Abstract: Low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) has attracted significant attention in fields such as computer vision and pattern recognition. Among the various techniques employed in LRTC, non-convex relaxation methods have been widely studied for their effectiveness in handling tensor singular values, which are crucial for accurate tensor recovery. However, the minimax concave penalty (MCP) function, a commonly used non-convex relaxation, exhibits a critical limitation: it effectively preserves large singular values but inadequately processes small ones. To address this issue, a novel minimax $p$-th order concave penalty (MPCP) function is proposed. Building on this advancement, a tensor $p$-th order $\tau$ norm is proposed as a non-convex relaxation for tensor rank estimation, thereby establishing an MPCP-based LRTC model. Furthermore, theoretical guarantees of convergence are provided for the proposed method. Experimental results on multiple real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both visual quality and quantitative metrics.
Authors: Lang Huang, Qiyu Wu, Zhongtao Miao, Toshihiko Yamasaki
Abstract: Information retrieval is indispensable for today's Internet applications, yet traditional semantic matching techniques often fall short in capturing the fine-grained cross-modal interactions required for complex queries. Although late-fusion two-tower architectures attempt to bridge this gap by independently encoding visual and textual data before merging them at a high level, they frequently overlook the subtle interplay essential for comprehensive understanding. In this work, we rigorously assess these limitations and introduce a unified retrieval framework that fuses visual and textual cues from the ground up, enabling early cross-modal interactions for enhancing context interpretation. Through a two-stage training process--comprising post-training adaptation followed by instruction tuning--we adapt MLLMs as retrievers using a simple one-tower architecture. Our approach outperforms conventional methods across diverse retrieval scenarios, particularly when processing complex multi-modal inputs. Notably, the joint fusion encoder yields greater improvements on tasks that require modality fusion compared to those that do not, underscoring the transformative potential of early integration strategies and pointing toward a promising direction for contextually aware and effective information retrieval.
Authors: Hongseok Oh, Wonseok Hwang
Abstract: Recently, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) show remarkable performance across various domains. However, these models suffer from object hallucination. This study revisits the previous claim that the primary cause of such hallucination lies in the limited representational capacity of the vision encoder. Our analysis reveals that the capacity of the vision encoder itself is already enough for detecting object hallucination. Based on this insight, we propose a Fine-grained CLIPScore (F-CLIPScore), a simple yet effective evaluation metric that enhances object-level granularity by incorporating text embeddings at the noun phrase level. Evaluations on the OHD-Caps benchmark show that F-CLIPScore significantly outperforms conventional CLIPScore in accuracy by a large margin of 39.6% without additional training. We further validate F-CLIPScore by showing that LVLM trained with the data filtered using F-CLIPScore exhibits reduced hallucination.
Authors: Xuyang Wei, Chunlin Tian, Li Li
Abstract: Effective instruction fine-tuning on diverse image-text datasets is crucial for developing a versatile Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), where dataset composition dictates the model's adaptability across multimodal tasks. However, complex datasets often contain inherent conflicts -- stemming from modality-specific optimization objectives -- and latent commonalities that enable cross-task transfer, which most existing approaches handle separately. To bridge this gap, we introduce AsymLoRA, a parameter-efficient tuning framework that unifies knowledge modularization and cross-modal coordination via asymmetric LoRA: task-specific low-rank projections (matrix B) that preserve distinct adaptation pathways for conflicting objectives, and a shared projection (matrix A) that consolidates cross-modal commonalities. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that AsymLoRA consistently surpasses both vanilla LoRA, which captures only commonalities, and LoRA-MoE, which focuses solely on conflicts, achieving superior model performance and system efficiency across diverse benchmarks.\href{Code}{https://github.com/Clin0212/HydraLoRA/blob/main/MLLM-HydraLoRA/README.md}.
URLs: https://github.com/Clin0212/HydraLoRA/blob/main/MLLM-HydraLoRA/README.md
Authors: Yejun Zhang, Shuzhe Wang, Juho Kannala
Abstract: Visual localization involves estimating the 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) camera pose within a known scene. A critical step in this process is identifying pixel-to-point correspondences between 2D query images and 3D models. Most advanced approaches currently rely on extensive visual descriptors to establish these correspondences, facing challenges in storage, privacy issues and model maintenance. Direct 2D-3D keypoint matching without visual descriptors is becoming popular as it can overcome those challenges. However, existing descriptor-free methods suffer from low accuracy or heavy computation. Addressing this gap, this paper introduces the Angle-Annular Graph Neural Network (A2-GNN), a simple approach that efficiently learns robust geometric structural representations with annular feature extraction. Specifically, this approach clusters neighbors and embeds each group's distance information and angle as supplementary information to capture local structures. Evaluation on matching and visual localization datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with low computational overhead among visual description-free methods. Our code will be released on https://github.com/YejunZhang/a2-gnn.
Authors: Hengshuo Chu, Xiang Deng, Xiaoyang Chen, Yinchuan Li, Jianye Hao, Liqiang Nie
Abstract: 3D Affordance detection is a challenging problem with broad applications on various robotic tasks. Existing methods typically formulate the detection paradigm as a label-based semantic segmentation task. This paradigm relies on predefined labels and lacks the ability to comprehend complex natural language, resulting in limited generalization in open-world scene. To address these limitations, we reformulate the traditional affordance detection paradigm into \textit{Instruction Reasoning Affordance Segmentation} (IRAS) task. This task is designed to output a affordance mask region given a query reasoning text, which avoids fixed categories of input labels. We accordingly propose the \textit{3D-AffordanceLLM} (3D-ADLLM), a framework designed for reasoning affordance detection in 3D open-scene. Specifically, 3D-ADLLM introduces large language models (LLMs) to 3D affordance perception with a custom-designed decoder for generating affordance masks, thus achieving open-world reasoning affordance detection. In addition, given the scarcity of 3D affordance datasets for training large models, we seek to extract knowledge from general segmentation data and transfer it to affordance detection. Thus, we propose a multi-stage training strategy that begins with a novel pre-training task, i.e., \textit{Referring Object Part Segmentation}~(ROPS). This stage is designed to equip the model with general recognition and segmentation capabilities at the object-part level. Then followed by fine-tuning with the IRAS task, 3D-ADLLM obtains the reasoning ability for affordance detection. In summary, 3D-ADLLM leverages the rich world knowledge and human-object interaction reasoning ability of LLMs, achieving approximately an 8\% improvement in mIoU on open-vocabulary affordance detection tasks.
Authors: Kang Liu, Zhuoqi Ma, Xiaolu Kang, Yunan Li, Kun Xie, Zhicheng Jiao, Qiguang Miao
Abstract: Automated radiology report generation offers an effective solution to alleviate radiologists' workload. However, most existing methods focus primarily on single or fixed-view images to model current disease conditions, which limits diagnostic accuracy and overlooks disease progression. Although some approaches utilize longitudinal data to track disease progression, they still rely on single images to analyze current visits. To address these issues, we propose enhanced contrastive learning with Multi-view Longitudinal data to facilitate chest X-ray Report Generation, named MLRG. Specifically, we introduce a multi-view longitudinal contrastive learning method that integrates spatial information from current multi-view images and temporal information from longitudinal data. This method also utilizes the inherent spatiotemporal information of radiology reports to supervise the pre-training of visual and textual representations. Subsequently, we present a tokenized absence encoding technique to flexibly handle missing patient-specific prior knowledge, allowing the model to produce more accurate radiology reports based on available prior knowledge. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-CXR, MIMIC-ABN, and Two-view CXR datasets demonstrate that our MLRG outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 2.3% BLEU-4 improvement on MIMIC-CXR, a 5.5% F1 score improvement on MIMIC-ABN, and a 2.7% F1 RadGraph improvement on Two-view CXR.
Authors: Zijie Zhou, Zhangshuo Qi, Luqi Cheng, Guangming Xiong
Abstract: Robust and accurate localization is critical for autonomous driving. Traditional GNSS-based localization methods suffer from signal occlusion and multipath effects in urban environments. Meanwhile, methods relying on high-definition (HD) maps are constrained by the high costs associated with the construction and maintenance of HD maps. Standard-definition (SD) maps-based methods, on the other hand, often exhibit unsatisfactory performance or poor generalization ability due to overfitting. To address these challenges, we propose SegLocNet, a multimodal GNSS-free localization network that achieves precise localization using bird's-eye-view (BEV) semantic segmentation. SegLocNet employs a BEV segmentation network to generate semantic maps from multiple sensor inputs, followed by an exhaustive matching process to estimate the vehicle's ego pose. This approach avoids the limitations of regression-based pose estimation and maintains high interpretability and generalization. By introducing a unified map representation, our method can be applied to both HD and SD maps without any modifications to the network architecture, thereby balancing localization accuracy and area coverage. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Argoverse datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods, and that our method can accurately estimate the ego pose in urban environments without relying on GNSS, while maintaining strong generalization ability. Our code and pre-trained model will be released publicly.
Authors: Meng Lou, Yizhou Yu
Abstract: In the human vision system, top-down attention plays a crucial role in perception, wherein the brain initially performs an overall but rough scene analysis to extract salient cues (i.e., overview first), followed by a finer-grained examination to make more accurate judgments (i.e., look closely next). However, recent efforts in ConvNet designs primarily focused on increasing kernel size to obtain a larger receptive field without considering this crucial biomimetic mechanism to further improve performance. To this end, we propose a novel pure ConvNet vision backbone, termed OverLoCK, which is carefully devised from both the architecture and mixer perspectives. Specifically, we introduce a biomimetic Deep-stage Decomposition Strategy (DDS) that fuses semantically meaningful context representations into middle and deep layers by providing dynamic top-down context guidance at both feature and kernel weight levels. To fully unleash the power of top-down context guidance, we further propose a novel \textbf{Cont}ext-\textbf{Mix}ing Dynamic Convolution (ContMix) that effectively models long-range dependencies while preserving inherent local inductive biases even when the input resolution increases. These properties are absent in previous convolutions. With the support from both DDS and ContMix, our OverLoCK exhibits notable performance improvement over existing methods. For instance, OverLoCK-T achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 84.2\%, significantly surpassing ConvNeXt-B while only using around one-third of the FLOPs/parameters. On object detection with Cascade Mask R-CNN, our OverLoCK-S surpasses MogaNet-B by a significant 1\% in AP$^b$. On semantic segmentation with UperNet, our OverLoCK-T remarkably improves UniRepLKNet-T by 1.7\% in mIoU. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LMMMEng/OverLoCK.
Authors: Mingjie Wu, Chenggui Yang, Huihua Wang, Chen Xue, Yibo Wang, Haoyu Wang, Yansong Wang, Can Peng, Yuqi Han, Ruoyu Li, Lijun Yun, Zaiqing Chen, Songfan Shi, Luhao Fang, Shuyi Wan, Tingfeng Li, Shuangyao Liu, Haotian Feng
Abstract: The UAV technology is gradually maturing and can provide extremely powerful support for smart agriculture and precise monitoring. Currently, there is no dataset related to green walnuts in the field of agricultural computer vision. Thus, in order to promote the algorithm design in the field of agricultural computer vision, we used UAV to collect remote-sensing data from 8 walnut sample plots. Considering that green walnuts are subject to various lighting conditions and occlusion, we constructed a large-scale dataset with a higher-granularity of target features - WalnutData. This dataset contains a total of 30,240 images and 706,208 instances, and there are 4 target categories: being illuminated by frontal light and unoccluded (A1), being backlit and unoccluded (A2), being illuminated by frontal light and occluded (B1), and being backlit and occluded (B2). Subsequently, we evaluated many mainstream algorithms on WalnutData and used these evaluation results as the baseline standard. The dataset and all evaluation results can be obtained at https://github.com/1wuming/WalnutData.
Authors: Xuzheng Yang, Junzhuo Liu, Peng Wang, Guoqing Wang, Yang Yang, Heng Tao Shen
Abstract: Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is a foundational cross-modal task that evaluates the interplay of language understanding, image comprehension, and language-to-image grounding. To advance this field, we introduce a new REC dataset with two key features. First, it is designed with controllable difficulty levels, requiring fine-grained reasoning across object categories, attributes, and relationships. Second, it incorporates negative text and images generated through fine-grained editing, explicitly testing a model's ability to reject non-existent targets, an often-overlooked yet critical challenge in existing datasets. To address fine-grained compositional REC, we propose novel methods based on a Specialist-MLLM collaboration framework, leveraging the complementary strengths of them: Specialist Models handle simpler tasks efficiently, while MLLMs are better suited for complex reasoning. Based on this synergy, we introduce two collaborative strategies. The first, Slow-Fast Adaptation (SFA), employs a routing mechanism to adaptively delegate simple tasks to Specialist Models and complex tasks to MLLMs. Additionally, common error patterns in both models are mitigated through a target-refocus strategy. The second, Candidate Region Selection (CRS), generates multiple bounding box candidates based on Specialist Model and uses the advanced reasoning capabilities of MLLMs to identify the correct target. Extensive experiments on our dataset and other challenging compositional benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approaches. The SFA strategy achieves a trade-off between localization accuracy and efficiency, and the CRS strategy greatly boosts the performance of both Specialist Models and MLLMs. We aim for this work to offer valuable insights into solving complex real-world tasks by strategically combining existing tools for maximum effectiveness, rather than reinventing them.
Authors: Ziang Guo, Konstantin Gubernatorov, Selamawit Asfaw, Zakhar Yagudin, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Abstract: In autonomous driving, dynamic environment and corner cases pose significant challenges to the robustness of ego vehicle's decision-making. To address these challenges, commencing with the representation of state-action mapping in the end-to-end autonomous driving paradigm, we introduce a novel pipeline, VDT-Auto. Leveraging the advancement of the state understanding of Visual Language Model (VLM), incorporating with diffusion Transformer-based action generation, our VDT-Auto parses the environment geometrically and contextually for the conditioning of the diffusion process. Geometrically, we use a bird's-eye view (BEV) encoder to extract feature grids from the surrounding images. Contextually, the structured output of our fine-tuned VLM is processed into textual embeddings and noisy paths. During our diffusion process, the added noise for the forward process is sampled from the noisy path output of the fine-tuned VLM, while the extracted BEV feature grids and embedded texts condition the reverse process of our diffusion Transformers. Our VDT-Auto achieved 0.52m on average L2 errors and 21% on average collision rate in the nuScenes open-loop planning evaluation. Moreover, the real-world demonstration exhibited prominent generalizability of our VDT-Auto. The code and dataset will be released after acceptance.
Authors: Luigi Piccinelli, Christos Sakaridis, Yung-Hsu Yang, Mattia Segu, Siyuan Li, Wim Abbeloos, Luc Van Gool
Abstract: Accurate monocular metric depth estimation (MMDE) is crucial to solving downstream tasks in 3D perception and modeling. However, the remarkable accuracy of recent MMDE methods is confined to their training domains. These methods fail to generalize to unseen domains even in the presence of moderate domain gaps, which hinders their practical applicability. We propose a new model, UniDepthV2, capable of reconstructing metric 3D scenes from solely single images across domains. Departing from the existing MMDE paradigm, UniDepthV2 directly predicts metric 3D points from the input image at inference time without any additional information, striving for a universal and flexible MMDE solution. In particular, UniDepthV2 implements a self-promptable camera module predicting a dense camera representation to condition depth features. Our model exploits a pseudo-spherical output representation, which disentangles the camera and depth representations. In addition, we propose a geometric invariance loss that promotes the invariance of camera-prompted depth features. UniDepthV2 improves its predecessor UniDepth model via a new edge-guided loss which enhances the localization and sharpness of edges in the metric depth outputs, a revisited, simplified and more efficient architectural design, and an additional uncertainty-level output which enables downstream tasks requiring confidence. Thorough evaluations on ten depth datasets in a zero-shot regime consistently demonstrate the superior performance and generalization of UniDepthV2. Code and models are available at https://github.com/lpiccinelli-eth/UniDepth
Authors: Mengjie Xu, Yitao Zhu, Haotian Jiang, Jiaming Li, Zhenrong Shen, Sheng Wang, Haolin Huang, Xinyu Wang, Qing Yang, Han Zhang, Qian Wang
Abstract: Multi-view object tracking (MVOT) offers promising solutions to challenges such as occlusion and target loss, which are common in traditional single-view tracking. However, progress has been limited by the lack of comprehensive multi-view datasets and effective cross-view integration methods. To overcome these limitations, we compiled a Multi-View object Tracking (MVTrack) dataset of 234K high-quality annotated frames featuring 27 distinct objects across various scenes. In conjunction with this dataset, we introduce a novel MVOT method, Multi-View Integration Tracker (MITracker), to efficiently integrate multi-view object features and provide stable tracking outcomes. MITracker can track any object in video frames of arbitrary length from arbitrary viewpoints. The key advancements of our method over traditional single-view approaches come from two aspects: (1) MITracker transforms 2D image features into a 3D feature volume and compresses it into a bird's eye view (BEV) plane, facilitating inter-view information fusion; (2) we propose an attention mechanism that leverages geometric information from fused 3D feature volume to refine the tracking results at each view. MITracker outperforms existing methods on the MVTrack and GMTD datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The code and the new dataset will be available at https://mii-laboratory.github.io/MITracker/.
Authors: Jeripothula Prudviraj, Vikram Jamwal
Abstract: Understanding the stroke-based evolution of visual artworks is useful for advancing artwork learning, appreciation, and interactive display. While the stroke sequence of renowned artworks remains largely unknown, formulating this sequence for near-natural image drawing processes can significantly enhance our understanding of artistic techniques. This paper introduces a novel method for approximating artwork stroke evolution through a proximity-based clustering mechanism. We first convert pixel images into vector images via parametric curves and then explore the clustering approach to determine the sequence order of extracted strokes. Our proposed algorithm demonstrates the potential to infer stroke sequences in unknown artworks. We evaluate the performance of our method using WikiArt data and qualitatively demonstrate the plausible stroke sequences. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach to handle a wide variety of input image types such as line art, face sketches, paintings, and photographic images. By exploring stroke extraction and sequence construction, we aim to improve our understanding of the intricacies of the art development techniques and the step-by-step reconstruction process behind visual artworks, thereby enriching our understanding of the creative journey from the initial sketch to the final artwork.
Authors: QingYuan Jiang, Longfei Huang, Yang Yang
Abstract: Although multimodal learning~(MML) has garnered remarkable progress, the existence of modality imbalance hinders multimodal learning from achieving its expected superiority over unimodal models in practice. To overcome this issue, mainstream multimodal learning methods have placed greater emphasis on balancing the learning process. However, these approaches do not explicitly enhance the classification ability of weaker modalities, leading to limited performance promotion. By designing a sustained boosting algorithm, we propose a novel multimodal learning approach to dynamically balance the classification ability of weak and strong modalities. Concretely, we first propose a sustained boosting algorithm in multimodal learning by simultaneously optimizing the classification and residual errors using a designed configurable classifier module. Then, we propose an adaptive classifier assignment strategy to dynamically facilitate the classification performance of weak modality. To this end, the classification ability of strong and weak modalities is expected to be balanced, thereby mitigating the imbalance issue. Empirical experiments on widely used datasets reveal the superiority of our method through comparison with various state-of-the-art~(SoTA) multimodal learning baselines.
Authors: Lin Zhang, Yi Tian, Wanru Xu, Yi Jin, Yaping Huang
Abstract: The complex application scenarios have raised critical requirements for precise and generalizable gaze estimation methods. Recently, the pre-trained CLIP has achieved remarkable performance on various vision tasks, but its potentials have not been fully exploited in gaze estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel CLIP-driven Dual Feature Enhancing Network (CLIP-DFENet), which boosts gaze estimation performance with the help of CLIP under a novel `main-side' collaborative enhancing strategy. Accordingly, a Language-driven Differential Module (LDM) is designed on the basis of the CLIP's text encoder to reveal the semantic difference of gaze. This module could empower our Core Feature Extractor with the capability of characterizing the gaze-related semantic information. Moreover, a Vision-driven Fusion Module (VFM) is introduced to strengthen the generalized and valuable components of visual embeddings obtained via CLIP's image encoder, and utilizes them to further improve the generalization of the features captured by Core Feature Extractor. Finally, a robust Double-head Gaze Regressor is adopted to map the enhanced features to gaze directions. Extensive experimental results on four challenging datasets over within-domain and cross-domain tasks demonstrate the discriminability and generalizability of our CLIP-DFENet.
Authors: Thomas Norrenbrock, Timo Kaiser, Sovan Biswas, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Bodo Rosenhahn
Abstract: Understanding the classifications of deep neural networks, e.g. used in safety-critical situations, is becoming increasingly important. While recent models can locally explain a single decision, to provide a faithful global explanation about an accurate model's general behavior is a more challenging open task. Towards that goal, we introduce the Quadratic Programming Enhanced Model (QPM), which learns globally interpretable class representations. QPM represents every class with a binary assignment of very few, typically 5, features, that are also assigned to other classes, ensuring easily comparable contrastive class representations. This compact binary assignment is found using discrete optimization based on predefined similarity measures and interpretability constraints. The resulting optimal assignment is used to fine-tune the diverse features, so that each of them becomes the shared general concept between the assigned classes. Extensive evaluations show that QPM delivers unprecedented global interpretability across small and large-scale datasets while setting the state of the art for the accuracy of interpretable models.
Authors: Itay Benou, Tammy Riklin-Raviv
Abstract: Modern deep neural networks have now reached human-level performance across a variety of tasks. However, unlike humans they lack the ability to explain their decisions by showing where and telling what concepts guided them. In this work, we present a unified framework for transforming any vision neural network into a spatially and conceptually interpretable model. We introduce a spatially-aware concept bottleneck layer that projects "black-box" features of pre-trained backbone models into interpretable concept maps, without requiring human labels. By training a classification layer over this bottleneck, we obtain a self-explaining model that articulates which concepts most influenced its prediction, along with heatmaps that ground them in the input image. Accordingly, we name this method "Spatially-Aware and Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Model" (SALF-CBM). Our results show that the proposed SALF-CBM: (1) Outperforms non-spatial CBM methods, as well as the original backbone, on a variety of classification tasks; (2) Produces high-quality spatial explanations, outperforming widely used heatmap-based methods on a zero-shot segmentation task; (3) Facilitates model exploration and debugging, enabling users to query specific image regions and refine the model's decisions by locally editing its concept maps.
Authors: Arthur Pignet, John Klein, Genevieve Robin, Antoine Olivier
Abstract: Deploying digital pathology models across medical centers is challenging due to distribution shifts. Recent advances in domain generalization improve model transferability in terms of aggregated performance measured by the Area Under Curve (AUC). However, clinical regulations often require to control the transferability of other metrics, such as prescribed sensitivity levels. We introduce a novel approach to control the sensitivity of whole slide image (WSI) classification models, based on optimal transport and Multiple Instance Learning (MIL). Validated across multiple cohorts and tasks, our method enables robust sensitivity control with only a handful of calibration samples, providing a practical solution for reliable deployment of computational pathology systems.
Authors: Jiageng Zhong, Ming Li, Armin Gruen, Konrad Schindler, Xuan Liao, Qinghua Guo
Abstract: Corals serve as the foundational habitat-building organisms within reef ecosystems, constructing extensive structures that extend over vast distances. However, their inherent fragility and vulnerability to various threats render them susceptible to significant damage and destruction. The application of advanced 3D reconstruction technologies for high-quality modeling is crucial for preserving them. These technologies help scientists to accurately document and monitor the state of coral reefs, including their structure, species distribution and changes over time. Photogrammetry-based approaches stand out among existing solutions, especially with recent advancements in underwater videography, photogrammetric computer vision, and machine learning. Despite continuous progress in image-based 3D reconstruction techniques, there remains a lack of systematic reviews and comprehensive evaluations of cutting-edge solutions specifically applied to underwater coral reef images. The emerging advanced methods may have difficulty coping with underwater imaging environments, complex coral structures, and computational resource constraints. They need to be reviewed and evaluated to bridge the gap between many cutting-edge technical studies and practical applications. This paper focuses on the two critical stages of these approaches: camera pose estimation and dense surface reconstruction. We systematically review and summarize classical and emerging methods, conducting comprehensive evaluations through real-world and simulated datasets. Based on our findings, we offer reference recommendations and discuss the development potential and challenges of existing approaches in depth. This work equips scientists and managers with a technical foundation and practical guidance for processing underwater coral reef images for 3D reconstruction....
Authors: Yifan Jia, Xingda Yu, Zhengyang Ji, Songning Lai, Yutao Yue
Abstract: Immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining plays a significant role in the evaluation of diseases such as breast cancer. The H&E-to-IHC transformation based on generative models provides a simple and cost-effective method for obtaining IHC images. Although previous models can perform digital coloring well, they still suffer from (i) coloring only through the pixel features that are not prominent in HE, which is easy to cause information loss in the coloring process; (ii) The lack of pixel-perfect H&E-IHC groundtruth pairs poses a challenge to the classical L1 loss.To address the above challenges, we propose an adaptive information enhanced coloring framework based on feature extractors. We first propose the VMFE module to effectively extract the color information features using multi-scale feature extraction and wavelet transform convolution, while combining the shared decoder for feature fusion. The high-performance dual feature extractor of H&E-IHC is trained by contrastive learning, which can effectively perform feature alignment of HE-IHC in high latitude space. At the same time, the trained feature encoder is used to enhance the features and adaptively adjust the loss in the HE section staining process to solve the problems related to unclear and asymmetric information. We have tested on different datasets and achieved excellent performance.Our code is available at https://github.com/babyinsunshine/CEFF
Authors: Yating Yu, Congqi Cao, Yifan Zhang, Yanning Zhang
Abstract: Leveraging the effective visual-text alignment and static generalizability from CLIP, recent video learners adopt CLIP initialization with further regularization or recombination for generalization in open-vocabulary action recognition in-context. However, due to the static bias of CLIP, such video learners tend to overfit on shortcut static features, thereby compromising their generalizability, especially to novel out-of-context actions. To address this issue, we introduce Open-MeDe, a novel Meta-optimization framework with static Debiasing for Open-vocabulary action recognition. From a fresh perspective of generalization, Open-MeDe adopts a meta-learning approach to improve known-to-open generalizing and image-to-video debiasing in a cost-effective manner. Specifically, Open-MeDe introduces a cross-batch meta-optimization scheme that explicitly encourages video learners to quickly generalize to arbitrary subsequent data via virtual evaluation, steering a smoother optimization landscape. In effect, the free of CLIP regularization during optimization implicitly mitigates the inherent static bias of the video meta-learner. We further apply self-ensemble over the optimization trajectory to obtain generic optimal parameters that can achieve robust generalization to both in-context and out-of-context novel data. Extensive evaluations show that Open-MeDe not only surpasses state-of-the-art regularization methods tailored for in-context open-vocabulary action recognition but also substantially excels in out-of-context scenarios.
Authors: Liang Chen, Shuai Bai, Wenhao Chai, Weichu Xie, Haozhe Zhao, Leon Vinci, Junyang Lin, Baobao Chang
Abstract: The field of advanced text-to-image generation is witnessing the emergence of unified frameworks that integrate powerful text encoders, such as CLIP and T5, with Diffusion Transformer backbones. Although there have been efforts to control output images with additional conditions, like canny and depth map, a comprehensive framework for arbitrary text-image interleaved control is still lacking. This gap is especially evident when attempting to merge concepts or visual elements from multiple images in the generation process. To mitigate the gap, we conducted preliminary experiments showing that large multimodal models (LMMs) offer an effective shared representation space, where image and text can be well-aligned to serve as a condition for external diffusion models. Based on this discovery, we propose Dream Engine, an efficient and unified framework designed for arbitrary text-image interleaved control in image generation models. Building on powerful text-to-image models like SD3.5, we replace the original text-only encoders by incorporating versatile multimodal information encoders such as QwenVL. Our approach utilizes a two-stage training paradigm, consisting of joint text-image alignment and multimodal interleaved instruction tuning. Our experiments demonstrate that this training method is effective, achieving a 0.69 overall score on the GenEval benchmark, and matching the performance of state-of-the-art text-to-image models like SD3.5 and FLUX.
Authors: Lu Sang, Zehranaz Canfes, Dongliang Cao, Riccardo Marin, Florian Bernard, Daniel Cremers
Abstract: Generating realistic intermediate shapes between non-rigidly deformed shapes is a challenging task in computer vision, especially with unstructured data (e.g., point clouds) where temporal consistency across frames is lacking, and topologies are changing. Most interpolation methods are designed for structured data (i.e., meshes) and do not apply to real-world point clouds. In contrast, our approach, 4Deform, leverages neural implicit representation (NIR) to enable free topology changing shape deformation. Unlike previous mesh-based methods that learn vertex-based deformation fields, our method learns a continuous velocity field in Euclidean space. Thus, it is suitable for less structured data such as point clouds. Additionally, our method does not require intermediate-shape supervision during training; instead, we incorporate physical and geometrical constraints to regularize the velocity field. We reconstruct intermediate surfaces using a modified level-set equation, directly linking our NIR with the velocity field. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms previous NIR approaches across various scenarios (e.g., noisy, partial, topology-changing, non-isometric shapes) and, for the first time, enables new applications like 4D Kinect sequence upsampling and real-world high-resolution mesh deformation.
Authors: Luis Marquez-Carpintero, Sergio Suescun-Ferrandiz, Carolina Lorenzo \'Alvarez, Jorge Fernandez-Herrero, Diego Viejo, Rosabel Roig-Vila, Miguel Cazorla
Abstract: In this paper, a novel dataset is introduced, designed to assess student attention within in-person classroom settings. This dataset encompasses RGB camera data, featuring multiple cameras per student to capture both posture and facial expressions, in addition to smartwatch sensor data for each individual. This dataset allows machine learning algorithms to be trained to predict attention and correlate it with emotion. A comprehensive suite of attention and emotion labels for each student is provided, generated through self-reporting as well as evaluations by four different experts. Our dataset uniquely combines facial and environmental camera data, smartwatch metrics, and includes underrepresented ethnicities in similar datasets, all within in-the-wild, in-person settings, making it the most comprehensive dataset of its kind currently available. The dataset presented offers an extensive and diverse collection of data pertaining to student interactions across different educational contexts, augmented with additional metadata from other tools. This initiative addresses existing deficiencies by offering a valuable resource for the analysis of student attention and emotion in face-to-face lessons.
Authors: Tobias Kirschstein, Javier Romero, Artem Sevastopolsky, Matthias Nie{\ss}ner, Shunsuke Saito
Abstract: Traditionally, creating photo-realistic 3D head avatars requires a studio-level multi-view capture setup and expensive optimization during test-time, limiting the use of digital human doubles to the VFX industry or offline renderings. To address this shortcoming, we present Avat3r, which regresses a high-quality and animatable 3D head avatar from just a few input images, vastly reducing compute requirements during inference. More specifically, we make Large Reconstruction Models animatable and learn a powerful prior over 3D human heads from a large multi-view video dataset. For better 3D head reconstructions, we employ position maps from DUSt3R and generalized feature maps from the human foundation model Sapiens. To animate the 3D head, our key discovery is that simple cross-attention to an expression code is already sufficient. Finally, we increase robustness by feeding input images with different expressions to our model during training, enabling the reconstruction of 3D head avatars from inconsistent inputs, e.g., an imperfect phone capture with accidental movement, or frames from a monocular video. We compare Avat3r with current state-of-the-art methods for few-input and single-input scenarios, and find that our method has a competitive advantage in both tasks. Finally, we demonstrate the wide applicability of our proposed model, creating 3D head avatars from images of different sources, smartphone captures, single images, and even out-of-domain inputs like antique busts. Project website: https://tobias-kirschstein.github.io/avat3r/
Authors: Mingqiang Han, Chunlin Yi
Abstract: To maximize palm oil yield and quality, it is essential to harvest palm fruit at the optimal maturity stage. This project aims to develop an automated computer vision system capable of accurately classifying palm fruit images into five ripeness levels. We employ deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to classify palm fruit images based on their maturity stage. A shallow CNN serves as the baseline model, while transfer learning and fine-tuning are applied to pre-trained ResNet50 and InceptionV3 architectures. The study utilizes a publicly available dataset of over 8,000 images with significant variations, which is split into 80\% for training and 20\% for testing. The proposed deep CNN models achieve test accuracies exceeding 85\% in classifying palm fruit maturity stages. This research highlights the potential of deep learning for automating palm fruit ripeness assessment, which can contribute to optimizing harvesting decisions and improving palm oil production efficiency.
Authors: Yang Zhou, Xu Gao, Zichong Chen, Hui Huang
Abstract: Recent advances in generative diffusion models have shown a notable inherent understanding of image style and semantics. In this paper, we leverage the self-attention features from pretrained diffusion networks to transfer the visual characteristics from a reference to generated images. Unlike previous work that uses these features as plug-and-play attributes, we propose a novel attention distillation loss calculated between the ideal and current stylization results, based on which we optimize the synthesized image via backpropagation in latent space. Next, we propose an improved Classifier Guidance that integrates attention distillation loss into the denoising sampling process, further accelerating the synthesis and enabling a broad range of image generation applications. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the extraordinary performance of our approach in transferring the examples' style, appearance, and texture to new images in synthesis. Code is available at https://github.com/xugao97/AttentionDistillation.
Authors: Pierre Vuillecard, Jean-Marc Odobez
Abstract: Accurate 3D gaze estimation in unconstrained real-world environments remains a significant challenge due to variations in appearance, head pose, occlusion, and the limited availability of in-the-wild 3D gaze datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel Self-Training Weakly-Supervised Gaze Estimation framework (ST-WSGE). This two-stage learning framework leverages diverse 2D gaze datasets, such as gaze-following data, which offer rich variations in appearances, natural scenes, and gaze distributions, and proposes an approach to generate 3D pseudo-labels and enhance model generalization. Furthermore, traditional modality-specific models, designed separately for images or videos, limit the effective use of available training data. To overcome this, we propose the Gaze Transformer (GaT), a modality-agnostic architecture capable of simultaneously learning static and dynamic gaze information from both image and video datasets. By combining 3D video datasets with 2D gaze target labels from gaze following tasks, our approach achieves the following key contributions: (i) Significant state-of-the-art improvements in within-domain and cross-domain generalization on unconstrained benchmarks like Gaze360 and GFIE, with notable cross-modal gains in video gaze estimation; (ii) Superior cross-domain performance on datasets such as MPIIFaceGaze and Gaze360 compared to frontal face methods. Code and pre-trained models will be released to the community.
Authors: Yancheng Cai, Fei Yin, Dounia Hammou, Rafal Mantiuk
Abstract: Computer vision foundation models, such as DINO or OpenCLIP, are trained in a self-supervised manner on large image datasets. Analogously, substantial evidence suggests that the human visual system (HVS) is influenced by the statistical distribution of colors and patterns in the natural world, characteristics also present in the training data of foundation models. The question we address in this paper is whether foundation models trained on natural images mimic some of the low-level characteristics of the human visual system, such as contrast detection, contrast masking, and contrast constancy. Specifically, we designed a protocol comprising nine test types to evaluate the image encoders of 45 foundation and generative models. Our results indicate that some foundation models (e.g., DINO, DINOv2, and OpenCLIP), share some of the characteristics of human vision, but other models show little resemblance. Foundation models tend to show smaller sensitivity to low contrast and rather irregular responses to contrast across frequencies. The foundation models show the best agreement with human data in terms of contrast masking. Our findings suggest that human vision and computer vision may take both similar and different paths when learning to interpret images of the real world. Overall, while differences remain, foundation models trained on vision tasks start to align with low-level human vision, with DINOv2 showing the closest resemblance.
Authors: Rongzhen Zhao, Vivienne Wang, Juho Kannala, Joni Pajarinen
Abstract: Decomposing visual scenes into objects, as humans do, facilitates modeling object relations and dynamics. Object-Centric Learning (OCL) achieves this by aggregating image or video feature maps into object-level feature vectors, known as \textit{slots}. OCL's self-supervision via reconstructing the input from slots struggles with complex textures, thus many methods employ Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to extract feature maps with better objectness. However, using VFMs merely as feature extractors does not fully unlock their potential. We propose Vector-Quantized VFMs for OCL (VQ-VFM-OCL, or VVO), where VFM features are extracted to facilitate object-level information aggregation and further quantized to strengthen supervision in reconstruction. Our VVO unifies OCL representatives into a concise architecture. Experiments demonstrate that VVO not only outperforms mainstream methods on object discovery tasks but also benefits downstream tasks like visual prediction and reasoning. The source code is available in the supplement.
Authors: Qingsen Yan, Yixu Feng, Cheng Zhang, Guansong Pang, Kangbiao Shi, Peng Wu, Wei Dong, Jinqiu Sun, Yanning Zhang
Abstract: Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) is a crucial computer vision task that aims to restore detailed visual information from corrupted low-light images. Many existing LLIE methods are based on standard RGB (sRGB) space, which often produce color bias and brightness artifacts due to inherent high color sensitivity in sRGB. While converting the images using Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV) color space helps resolve the brightness issue, it introduces significant red and black noise artifacts. To address this issue, we propose a new color space for LLIE, namely Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI), defined by polarized HS maps and learnable intensity. The former enforces small distances for red coordinates to remove the red artifacts, while the latter compresses the low-light regions to remove the black artifacts. To fully leverage the chromatic and intensity information, a novel Color and Intensity Decoupling Network (CIDNet) is further introduced to learn accurate photometric mapping function under different lighting conditions in the HVI space. Comprehensive results from benchmark and ablation experiments show that the proposed HVI color space with CIDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 10 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Fediory/HVI-CIDNet.
Authors: Palawat Busaranuvong, Emmanuel Agu, Reza Saadati Fard, Deepak Kumar, Shefalika Gautam, Bengisu Tulu, Diane Strong
Abstract: Infections in Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs) can cause severe complications, including tissue death and limb amputation, highlighting the need for accurate, timely diagnosis. Previous machine learning methods have focused on identifying infections by analyzing wound images alone, without utilizing additional metadata such as medical notes. In this study, we aim to improve infection detection by introducing Synthetic Caption Augmented Retrieval for Wound Infection Detection (SCARWID), a novel deep learning framework that leverages synthetic textual descriptions to augment DFU images. SCARWID consists of two components: (1) Wound-BLIP, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) fine-tuned on GPT-4o-generated descriptions to synthesize consistent captions from images; and (2) an Image-Text Fusion module that uses cross-attention to extract cross-modal embeddings from an image and its corresponding Wound-BLIP caption. Infection status is determined by retrieving the top-k similar items from a labeled support set. To enhance the diversity of training data, we utilized a latent diffusion model to generate additional wound images. As a result, SCARWID outperformed state-of-the-art models, achieving average sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 0.85, 0.78, and 0.81, respectively, for wound infection classification. Displaying the generated captions alongside the wound images and infection detection results enhances interpretability and trust, enabling nurses to align SCARWID outputs with their medical knowledge. This is particularly valuable when wound notes are unavailable or when assisting novice nurses who may find it difficult to identify visual attributes of wound infection.
Authors: Kyle Stein, Arash Mahyari, Guillermo Francia, Eman El-Sheikh
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in learning joint representations of visual and textual data, making them powerful tools for tasks such as Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL). CZSL requires models to generalize to novel combinations of visual primitives-such as attributes and objects-that were not explicitly encountered during training. Recent works in prompting for CZSL have focused on modifying inputs for the text encoder, often using static prompts that do not change across varying visual contexts. However, these approaches struggle to fully capture varying visual contexts, as they focus on text adaptation rather than leveraging visual features for compositional reasoning. To address this, we propose Visual Adaptive Prompting System (VAPS) that leverages a learnable visual prompt repository and similarity-based retrieval mechanism within the framework of VLMs to bridge the gap between semantic and visual features. Our method introduces a dynamic visual prompt repository mechanism that selects the most relevant attribute and object prompts based on the visual features of the image. Our proposed system includes a visual prompt adapter that encourages the model to learn a more generalizable embedding space. Experiments on three CZSL benchmarks, across both closed and open-world scenarios, demonstrate state-of-the-art results.
Authors: Jinghao Feng, Qiaoyu Zheng, Chaoyi Wu, Ziheng Zhao, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
Abstract: Agentic AI systems have gained significant attention for their ability to autonomously perform complex tasks. However, their reliance on well-prepared tools limits their applicability in the medical domain, which requires to train specialized models. In this paper, we make three contributions: (i) We present M3Builder, a novel multi-agent system designed to automate machine learning (ML) in medical imaging. At its core, M3Builder employs four specialized agents that collaborate to tackle complex, multi-step medical ML workflows, from automated data processing and environment configuration to self-contained auto debugging and model training. These agents operate within a medical imaging ML workspace, a structured environment designed to provide agents with free-text descriptions of datasets, training codes, and interaction tools, enabling seamless communication and task execution. (ii) To evaluate progress in automated medical imaging ML, we propose M3Bench, a benchmark comprising four general tasks on 14 training datasets, across five anatomies and three imaging modalities, covering both 2D and 3D data. (iii) We experiment with seven state-of-the-art large language models serving as agent cores for our system, such as Claude series, GPT-4o, and DeepSeek-V3. Compared to existing ML agentic designs, M3Builder shows superior performance on completing ML tasks in medical imaging, achieving a 94.29% success rate using Claude-3.7-Sonnet as the agent core, showing huge potential towards fully automated machine learning in medical imaging.
Authors: Lingyu Du, Yupei Liu, Jinyuan Jia, Guohao Lan
Abstract: Gaze estimation models are widely used in applications such as driver attention monitoring and human-computer interaction. While many methods for gaze estimation exist, they rely heavily on data-hungry deep learning to achieve high performance. This reliance often forces practitioners to harvest training data from unverified public datasets, outsource model training, or rely on pre-trained models. However, such practices expose gaze estimation models to backdoor attacks. In such attacks, adversaries inject backdoor triggers by poisoning the training data, creating a backdoor vulnerability: the model performs normally with benign inputs, but produces manipulated gaze directions when a specific trigger is present. This compromises the security of many gaze-based applications, such as causing the model to fail in tracking the driver's attention. To date, there is no defense that addresses backdoor attacks on gaze estimation models. In response, we introduce SecureGaze, the first solution designed to protect gaze estimation models from such attacks. Unlike classification models, defending gaze estimation poses unique challenges due to its continuous output space and globally activated backdoor behavior. By identifying distinctive characteristics of backdoored gaze estimation models, we develop a novel and effective approach to reverse-engineer the trigger function for reliable backdoor detection. Extensive evaluations in both digital and physical worlds demonstrate that SecureGaze effectively counters a range of backdoor attacks and outperforms seven state-of-the-art defenses adapted from classification models.
Authors: Xiuli Bi, Jianfei Yuan, Bo Liu, Yong Zhang, Xiaodong Cun, Chi-Man Pun, Bin Xiao
Abstract: We present Mobius, a novel method to generate seamlessly looping videos from text descriptions directly without any user annotations, thereby creating new visual materials for the multi-media presentation. Our method repurposes the pre-trained video latent diffusion model for generating looping videos from text prompts without any training. During inference, we first construct a latent cycle by connecting the starting and ending noise of the videos. Given that the temporal consistency can be maintained by the context of the video diffusion model, we perform multi-frame latent denoising by gradually shifting the first-frame latent to the end in each step. As a result, the denoising context varies in each step while maintaining consistency throughout the inference process. Moreover, the latent cycle in our method can be of any length. This extends our latent-shifting approach to generate seamless looping videos beyond the scope of the video diffusion model's context. Unlike previous cinemagraphs, the proposed method does not require an image as appearance, which will restrict the motions of the generated results. Instead, our method can produce more dynamic motion and better visual quality. We conduct multiple experiments and comparisons to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating its efficacy in different scenarios. All the code will be made available.
Authors: Siyu Jiao, Gengwei Zhang, Yinlong Qian, Jiancheng Huang, Yao Zhao, Humphrey Shi, Lin Ma, Yunchao Wei, Zequn Jie
Abstract: This work challenges the residual prediction paradigm in visual autoregressive modeling and presents FlexVAR, a new Flexible Visual AutoRegressive image generation paradigm. FlexVAR facilitates autoregressive learning with ground-truth prediction, enabling each step to independently produce plausible images. This simple, intuitive approach swiftly learns visual distributions and makes the generation process more flexible and adaptable. Trained solely on low-resolution images ($\leq$ 256px), FlexVAR can: (1) Generate images of various resolutions and aspect ratios, even exceeding the resolution of the training images. (2) Support various image-to-image tasks, including image refinement, in/out-painting, and image expansion. (3) Adapt to various autoregressive steps, allowing for faster inference with fewer steps or enhancing image quality with more steps. Our 1.0B model outperforms its VAR counterpart on the ImageNet 256$\times$256 benchmark. Moreover, when zero-shot transfer the image generation process with 13 steps, the performance further improves to 2.08 FID, outperforming state-of-the-art autoregressive models AiM/VAR by 0.25/0.28 FID and popular diffusion models LDM/DiT by 1.52/0.19 FID, respectively. When transferring our 1.0B model to the ImageNet 512$\times$512 benchmark in a zero-shot manner, FlexVAR achieves competitive results compared to the VAR 2.3B model, which is a fully supervised model trained at 512$\times$512 resolution.
Authors: Mohamed Abdelsamad, Michael Ulrich, Claudius Gl\"aser, Abhinav Valada
Abstract: Masked autoencoders (MAE) have shown tremendous potential for self-supervised learning (SSL) in vision and beyond. However, point clouds from LiDARs used in automated driving are particularly challenging for MAEs since large areas of the 3D volume are empty. Consequently, existing work suffers from leaking occupancy information into the decoder and has significant computational complexity, thereby limiting the SSL pre-training to only 2D bird's eye view encoders in practice. In this work, we propose the novel neighborhood occupancy MAE (NOMAE) that overcomes the aforementioned challenges by employing masked occupancy reconstruction only in the neighborhood of non-masked voxels. We incorporate voxel masking and occupancy reconstruction at multiple scales with our proposed hierarchical mask generation technique to capture features of objects of different sizes in the point cloud. NOMAEs are extremely flexible and can be directly employed for SSL in existing 3D architectures. We perform extensive evaluations on the nuScenes and Waymo Open datasets for the downstream perception tasks of semantic segmentation and 3D object detection, comparing with both discriminative and generative SSL methods. The results demonstrate that NOMAE sets the new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks for multiple point cloud perception tasks.
Authors: Chuofan Ma, Yi Jiang, Junfeng Wu, Jihan Yang, Xin Yu, Zehuan Yuan, Bingyue Peng, Xiaojuan Qi
Abstract: The representation disparity between visual generation and understanding imposes a critical gap in integrating these capabilities into a single framework. To bridge this gap, we introduce UniTok, a discrete visual tokenizer that encodes fine-grained details for generation while also capturing high-level semantics for understanding. Despite recent studies have shown that these objectives could induce loss conflicts in training, we reveal that the underlying bottleneck stems from limited representational capacity of discrete tokens. We address this by introducing multi-codebook quantization, which divides vector quantization with several independent sub-codebooks to expand the latent feature space, while avoiding training instability caused by overlarge codebooks. Our method significantly raises the upper limit of unified discrete tokenizers to match or even surpass domain-specific continuous tokenizers. For instance, UniTok achieves a remarkable rFID of 0.38 (versus 0.87 for SD-VAE) and a zero-shot accuracy of 78.6% (versus 76.2% for CLIP) on ImageNet. Our code is available at https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniTok.
Authors: Xuangeng Chu, Nabarun Goswami, Ziteng Cui, Hanqin Wang, Tatsuya Harada
Abstract: Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate realistic lip movements and facial expressions for 3D head models from arbitrary audio clips. Although existing diffusion-based methods are capable of producing natural motions, their slow generation speed limits their application potential. In this paper, we introduce a novel autoregressive model that achieves real-time generation of highly synchronized lip movements and realistic head poses and eye blinks by learning a mapping from speech to a multi-scale motion codebook. Furthermore, our model can adapt to unseen speaking styles using sample motion sequences, enabling the creation of 3D talking avatars with unique personal styles beyond the identities seen during training. Extensive evaluations and user studies demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in lip synchronization accuracy and perceived quality.
Authors: Shuming Liu, Chen Zhao, Fatimah Zohra, Mattia Soldan, Alejandro Pardo, Mengmeng Xu, Lama Alssum, Merey Ramazanova, Juan Le\'on Alc\'azar, Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Carlos Hinojosa, Bernard Ghanem
Abstract: Temporal action detection (TAD) is a fundamental video understanding task that aims to identify human actions and localize their temporal boundaries in videos. Although this field has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, further progress and real-world applications are impeded by the absence of a standardized framework. Currently, different methods are compared under different implementation settings, evaluation protocols, etc., making it difficult to assess the real effectiveness of a specific technique. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{OpenTAD}, a unified TAD framework consolidating 16 different TAD methods and 9 standard datasets into a modular codebase. In OpenTAD, minimal effort is required to replace one module with a different design, train a feature-based TAD model in end-to-end mode, or switch between the two. OpenTAD also facilitates straightforward benchmarking across various datasets and enables fair and in-depth comparisons among different methods. With OpenTAD, we comprehensively study how innovations in different network components affect detection performance and identify the most effective design choices through extensive experiments. This study has led to a new state-of-the-art TAD method built upon existing techniques for each component. We have made our code and models available at https://github.com/sming256/OpenTAD.
Authors: Zhi Cen, Huaijin Pi, Sida Peng, Qing Shuai, Yujun Shen, Hujun Bao, Xiaowei Zhou, Ruizhen Hu
Abstract: This paper addresses the task of generating two-character online interactions. Previously, two main settings existed for two-character interaction generation: (1) generating one's motions based on the counterpart's complete motion sequence, and (2) jointly generating two-character motions based on specific conditions. We argue that these settings fail to model the process of real-life two-character interactions, where humans will react to their counterparts in real time and act as independent individuals. In contrast, we propose an online reaction policy, called Ready-to-React, to generate the next character pose based on past observed motions. Each character has its own reaction policy as its "brain", enabling them to interact like real humans in a streaming manner. Our policy is implemented by incorporating a diffusion head into an auto-regressive model, which can dynamically respond to the counterpart's motions while effectively mitigating the error accumulation throughout the generation process. We conduct comprehensive experiments using the challenging boxing task. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines and can generate extended motion sequences. Additionally, we show that our approach can be controlled by sparse signals, making it well-suited for VR and other online interactive environments.
Authors: Hanyang Kong, Xingyi Yang, Xinchao Wang
Abstract: Rendering dynamic scenes from monocular videos is a crucial yet challenging task. The recent deformable Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a robust solution to represent real-world dynamic scenes. However, it often leads to heavily redundant Gaussians, attempting to fit every training view at various time steps, leading to slower rendering speeds. Additionally, the attributes of Gaussians in static areas are time-invariant, making it unnecessary to model every Gaussian, which can cause jittering in static regions. In practice, the primary bottleneck in rendering speed for dynamic scenes is the number of Gaussians. In response, we introduce Efficient Dynamic Gaussian Splatting (EDGS), which represents dynamic scenes via sparse time-variant attribute modeling. Our approach formulates dynamic scenes using a sparse anchor-grid representation, with the motion flow of dense Gaussians calculated via a classical kernel representation. Furthermore, we propose an unsupervised strategy to efficiently filter out anchors corresponding to static areas. Only anchors associated with deformable objects are input into MLPs to query time-variant attributes. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our EDGS significantly improves the rendering speed with superior rendering quality compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Jiahe Li, Jiawei Zhang, Xiao Bai, Jin Zheng, Jun Zhou, Lin Gu
Abstract: Despite exhibiting impressive performance in synthesizing lifelike personalized 3D talking heads, prevailing methods based on radiance fields suffer from high demands for training data and time for each new identity. This paper introduces InsTaG, a 3D talking head synthesis framework that allows a fast learning of realistic personalized 3D talking head from few training data. Built upon a lightweight 3DGS person-specific synthesizer with universal motion priors, InsTaG achieves high-quality and fast adaptation while preserving high-level personalization and efficiency. As preparation, we first propose an Identity-Free Pre-training strategy that enables the pre-training of the person-specific model and encourages the collection of universal motion priors from long-video data corpus. To fully exploit the universal motion priors to learn an unseen new identity, we then present a Motion-Aligned Adaptation strategy to adaptively align the target head to the pre-trained field, and constrain a robust dynamic head structure under few training data. Experiments demonstrate our outstanding performance and efficiency under various data scenarios to render high-quality personalized talking heads.
Authors: Sucheng Ren, Qihang Yu, Ju He, Xiaohui Shen, Alan Yuille, Liang-Chieh Chen
Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) modeling, known for its next-token prediction paradigm, underpins state-of-the-art language and visual generative models. Traditionally, a ``token'' is treated as the smallest prediction unit, often a discrete symbol in language or a quantized patch in vision. However, the optimal token definition for 2D image structures remains an open question. Moreover, AR models suffer from exposure bias, where teacher forcing during training leads to error accumulation at inference. In this paper, we propose xAR, a generalized AR framework that extends the notion of a token to an entity X, which can represent an individual patch token, a cell (a $k\times k$ grouping of neighboring patches), a subsample (a non-local grouping of distant patches), a scale (coarse-to-fine resolution), or even a whole image. Additionally, we reformulate discrete token classification as \textbf{continuous entity regression}, leveraging flow-matching methods at each AR step. This approach conditions training on noisy entities instead of ground truth tokens, leading to Noisy Context Learning, which effectively alleviates exposure bias. As a result, xAR offers two key advantages: (1) it enables flexible prediction units that capture different contextual granularity and spatial structures, and (2) it mitigates exposure bias by avoiding reliance on teacher forcing. On ImageNet-256 generation benchmark, our base model, xAR-B (172M), outperforms DiT-XL/SiT-XL (675M) while achieving 20$\times$ faster inference. Meanwhile, xAR-H sets a new state-of-the-art with an FID of 1.24, running 2.2$\times$ faster than the previous best-performing model without relying on vision foundation modules (\eg, DINOv2) or advanced guidance interval sampling.
Authors: Ang Cao, Sergio Arnaud, Oleksandr Maksymets, Jianing Yang, Ayush Jain, Sriram Yenamandra, Ada Martin, Vincent-Pierre Berges, Paul McVay, Ruslan Partsey, Aravind Rajeswaran, Franziska Meier, Justin Johnson, Jeong Joon Park, Alexander Sax
Abstract: Our approach to training 3D vision-language understanding models is to train a feedforward model that makes predictions in 3D, but never requires 3D labels and is supervised only in 2D, using 2D losses and differentiable rendering. The approach is new for vision-language understanding. By treating the reconstruction as a ``latent variable'', we can render the outputs without placing unnecessary constraints on the network architecture (e.g. can be used with decoder-only models). For training, only need images and camera pose, and 2D labels. We show that we can even remove the need for 2D labels by using pseudo-labels from pretrained 2D models. We demonstrate this to pretrain a network, and we finetune it for 3D vision-language understanding tasks. We show this approach outperforms baselines/sota for 3D vision-language grounding, and also outperforms other 3D pretraining techniques. Project page: https://liftgs.github.io.
Authors: Sirui Xu, Hung Yu Ling, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
Abstract: Achieving realistic simulations of humans interacting with a wide range of objects has long been a fundamental goal. Extending physics-based motion imitation to complex human-object interactions (HOIs) is challenging due to intricate human-object coupling, variability in object geometries, and artifacts in motion capture data, such as inaccurate contacts and limited hand detail. We introduce InterMimic, a framework that enables a single policy to robustly learn from hours of imperfect MoCap data covering diverse full-body interactions with dynamic and varied objects. Our key insight is to employ a curriculum strategy -- perfect first, then scale up. We first train subject-specific teacher policies to mimic, retarget, and refine motion capture data. Next, we distill these teachers into a student policy, with the teachers acting as online experts providing direct supervision, as well as high-quality references. Notably, we incorporate RL fine-tuning on the student policy to surpass mere demonstration replication and achieve higher-quality solutions. Our experiments demonstrate that InterMimic produces realistic and diverse interactions across multiple HOI datasets. The learned policy generalizes in a zero-shot manner and seamlessly integrates with kinematic generators, elevating the framework from mere imitation to generative modeling of complex human-object interactions.
Authors: Mengtian Li, Shengxiang Yao, Chen Kai, Zhifeng Xie, Keyu Chen, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract: Recent advancements in Gaussian-based human body reconstruction have achieved notable success in creating animatable avatars. However, there are ongoing challenges to fully exploit the SMPL model's prior knowledge and enhance the visual fidelity of these models to achieve more refined avatar reconstructions. In this paper, we introduce AniGaussian which addresses the above issues with two insights. First, we propose an innovative pose guided deformation strategy that effectively constrains the dynamic Gaussian avatar with SMPL pose guidance, ensuring that the reconstructed model not only captures the detailed surface nuances but also maintains anatomical correctness across a wide range of motions. Second, we tackle the expressiveness limitations of Gaussian models in representing dynamic human bodies. We incorporate rigid-based priors from previous works to enhance the dynamic transform capabilities of the Gaussian model. Furthermore, we introduce a split-with-scale strategy that significantly improves geometry quality. The ablative study experiment demonstrates the effectiveness of our innovative model design. Through extensive comparisons with existing methods, AniGaussian demonstrates superior performance in both qualitative result and quantitative metrics.
Authors: Or Abramovich, Hadas Pizem, Jonathan Fhima, Eran Berkowitz, Ben Gofrit, Meishar Meisel, Meital Baskin, Jan Van Eijgen, Ingeborg Stalmans, Eytan Z. Blumenthal, Joachim A. Behar
Abstract: Glaucomatous optic neuropathy (GON) is a prevalent ocular disease that can lead to irreversible vision loss if not detected early and treated. The traditional diagnostic approach for GON involves a set of ophthalmic examinations, which are time-consuming and require a visit to an ophthalmologist. Recent deep learning models for automating GON detection from digital fundus images (DFI) have shown promise but often suffer from limited generalizability across different ethnicities, disease groups and examination settings. To address these limitations, we introduce GONet, a robust deep learning model developed using seven independent datasets, including over 119,000 DFIs with gold-standard annotations and from patients of diverse geographic backgrounds. GONet consists of a DINOv2 pre-trained self-supervised vision transformers fine-tuned using a multisource domain strategy. GONet demonstrated high out-of-distribution generalizability, with an AUC of 0.85-0.99 in target domains. GONet performance was similar or superior to state-of-the-art works and was significantly superior to the cup-to-disc ratio, by up to 21.6%. GONet is available at [URL provided on publication]. We also contribute a new dataset consisting of 768 DFI with GON labels as open access.
Authors: Harsh Gupta, Yuchen Mo, Shengmiao Jin, Wenzhen Yuan
Abstract: High-resolution tactile sensors have become critical for embodied perception and robotic manipulation. However, a key challenge in the field is the lack of transferability between sensors due to design and manufacturing variations, which result in significant differences in tactile signals. This limitation hinders the ability to transfer models or knowledge learned from one sensor to another. To address this, we introduce a novel method for extracting Sensor-Invariant Tactile Representations (SITR), enabling zero-shot transfer across optical tactile sensors. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based architecture trained on a diverse dataset of simulated sensor designs, allowing it to generalize to new sensors in the real world with minimal calibration. Experimental results demonstrate the method's effectiveness across various tactile sensing applications, facilitating data and model transferability for future advancements in the field.
Authors: Xiongfei Su, Tianyi Zhu, Lina Liu, Zheng Chen, Yulun Zhang, Siyuan Li, Juntian Ye, Feihu Xu, Xin Yuan
Abstract: The domain of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging is advancing rapidly, offering the capability to reveal occluded scenes that are not directly visible. However, contemporary NLOS systems face several significant challenges: (1) The computational and storage requirements are profound due to the inherent three-dimensional grid data structure, which restricts practical application. (2) The simultaneous reconstruction of albedo and depth information requires a delicate balance using hyperparameters in the loss function, rendering the concurrent reconstruction of texture and depth information difficult. This paper introduces the innovative methodology, \xnet, which integrates an albedo-focused reconstruction branch dedicated to albedo information recovery and a depth-focused reconstruction branch that extracts geometrical structure, to overcome these obstacles. The dual-branch framework segregates content delivery to the respective reconstructions, thereby enhancing the quality of the retrieved data. To our knowledge, we are the first to employ the GNN as a fundamental component to transform dense NLOS grid data into sparse structural features for efficient reconstruction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method attains the highest level of performance among existing methods across synthetic and real data. https://github.com/Nicholassu/DG-NLOS.
Authors: Junji Lin, Yi Zhang, Yunyue Pan, Yuli Chen, Chengchang Pan, Honggang Qi
Abstract: Detection and classification of pulmonary nodules is a challenge in medical image analysis due to the variety of shapes and sizes of nodules and their high concealment. Despite the success of traditional deep learning methods in image classification, deep networks still struggle to perfectly capture subtle changes in lung nodule detection. Therefore, we propose a residual multi-task network (Res-MTNet) model, which combines multi-task learning and residual learning, and improves feature representation ability by sharing feature extraction layer and introducing residual connections. Multi-task learning enables the model to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, while the residual module solves the problem of disappearing gradients, ensuring stable training of deeper networks and facilitating information sharing between tasks. Res-MTNet enhances the robustness and accuracy of the model, providing a more reliable lung nodule analysis tool for clinical medicine and telemedicine.
Authors: Guanzhou Ke, Shengfeng He, Xiao Li Wang, Bo Wang, Guoqing Chao, Yuanyang Zhang, Yi Xie, HeXing Su
Abstract: Previous successful approaches to missing modality completion rely on carefully designed fusion techniques and extensive pre-training on complete data, which can limit their generalizability in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios. In this study, we pose a new challenge: can we develop a missing modality completion model that is both resource-efficient and robust to OOD generalization? To address this, we present a training-free framework for missing modality completion that leverages large multimodal models (LMMs). Our approach, termed the "Knowledge Bridger", is modality-agnostic and integrates generation and ranking of missing modalities. By defining domain-specific priors, our method automatically extracts structured information from available modalities to construct knowledge graphs. These extracted graphs connect the missing modality generation and ranking modules through the LMM, resulting in high-quality imputations of missing modalities. Experimental results across both general and medical domains show that our approach consistently outperforms competing methods, including in OOD generalization. Additionally, our knowledge-driven generation and ranking techniques demonstrate superiority over variants that directly employ LMMs for generation and ranking, offering insights that may be valuable for applications in other domains.
Authors: Yuxuan Yan, Na Lu, Difei Mei, Ruofan Yan, Youtian Du
Abstract: Traditional clustering methods typically focus on either cluster-wise global clustering or point-wise local clustering to reveal the intrinsic structures in unlabeled data. Global clustering optimizes an objective function to explore the relationships between clusters, but this approach may inevitably lead to coarse partition. In contrast, local clustering heuristically groups data based on detailed point relationships, but it tends to be less coherence and efficient. To bridge the gap between these two concepts and utilize the strengths of both, we propose Graph Probability Aggregation Clustering (GPAC), a graph-based fuzzy clustering algorithm. GPAC unifies the global clustering objective function with a local clustering constraint. The entire GPAC framework is formulated as a multi-constrained optimization problem, which can be solved using the Lagrangian method. Through the optimization process, the probability of a sample belonging to a specific cluster is iteratively calculated by aggregating information from neighboring samples within the graph. We incorporate a hard assignment variable into the objective function to further improve the convergence and stability of optimization. Furthermore, to efficiently handle large-scale datasets, we introduce an acceleration program that reduces the computational complexity from quadratic to linear, ensuring scalability. Extensive experiments conducted on synthetic, real-world, and deep learning datasets demonstrate that GPAC not only exceeds existing state-of-the-art methods in clustering performance but also excels in computational efficiency, making it a powerful tool for complex clustering challenges.
Authors: Dongkun Zhang, Jiaming Liang, Ke Guo, Sha Lu, Qi Wang, Rong Xiong, Zhenwei Miao, Yue Wang
Abstract: Trajectory planning is vital for autonomous driving, ensuring safe and efficient navigation in complex environments. While recent learning-based methods, particularly reinforcement learning (RL), have shown promise in specific scenarios, RL planners struggle with training inefficiencies and managing large-scale, real-world driving scenarios. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{CarPlanner}, a \textbf{C}onsistent \textbf{a}uto-\textbf{r}egressive \textbf{Planner} that uses RL to generate multi-modal trajectories. The auto-regressive structure enables efficient large-scale RL training, while the incorporation of consistency ensures stable policy learning by maintaining coherent temporal consistency across time steps. Moreover, CarPlanner employs a generation-selection framework with an expert-guided reward function and an invariant-view module, simplifying RL training and enhancing policy performance. Extensive analysis demonstrates that our proposed RL framework effectively addresses the challenges of training efficiency and performance enhancement, positioning CarPlanner as a promising solution for trajectory planning in autonomous driving. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that the RL-based planner can surpass both IL- and rule-based state-of-the-arts (SOTAs) on the challenging large-scale real-world dataset nuPlan. Our proposed CarPlanner surpasses RL-, IL-, and rule-based SOTA approaches within this demanding dataset.
Authors: Benedikt Tscheschner, Eduardo Veas, Marc Masana
Abstract: Incremental Learning scenarios do not always represent real-world inference use-cases, which tend to have less strict task boundaries, and exhibit repetition of common classes and concepts in their continual data stream. To better represent these use-cases, new scenarios with partial repetition and mixing of tasks are proposed, where the repetition patterns are innate to the scenario and unknown to the strategy. We investigate how exemplar-free incremental learning strategies are affected by data repetition, and we adapt a series of state-of-the-art approaches to analyse and fairly compare them under both settings. Further, we also propose a novel method (Horde), able to dynamically adjust an ensemble of self-reliant feature extractors, and align them by exploiting class repetition. Our proposed exemplar-free method achieves competitive results in the classic scenario without repetition, and state-of-the-art performance in the one with repetition.
Authors: Fan Yang, Dongsheng Luo, Wenrui Chen, Jiacheng Lin, Junjie Cai, Kailun Yang, Zhiyong Li, Yaonan Wang
Abstract: Functional dexterous grasping requires precise hand-object interaction, going beyond simple gripping. Existing affordance-based methods primarily predict coarse interaction regions and cannot directly constrain the grasping posture, leading to a disconnection between visual perception and manipulation. To address this issue, we propose a multi-keypoint affordance representation for functional dexterous grasping, which directly encodes task-driven grasp configurations by localizing functional contact points. Our method introduces Contact-guided Multi-Keypoint Affordance (CMKA), leveraging human grasping experience images for weak supervision combined with Large Vision Models for fine affordance feature extraction, achieving generalization while avoiding manual keypoint annotations. Additionally, we present a Keypoint-based Grasp matrix Transformation (KGT) method, ensuring spatial consistency between hand keypoints and object contact points, thus providing a direct link between visual perception and dexterous grasping actions. Experiments on public real-world FAH datasets, IsaacGym simulation, and challenging robotic tasks demonstrate that our method significantly improves affordance localization accuracy, grasp consistency, and generalization to unseen tools and tasks, bridging the gap between visual affordance learning and dexterous robotic manipulation. The source code and demo videos will be publicly available at https://github.com/PopeyePxx/MKA.
Authors: Gilles Van De Vyver, Aksel Try Lenz, Erik Smistad, Sindre Hellum Olaisen, Bj{\o}rnar Grenne, Espen Holte, H{\aa}avard Dalen, Lasse L{\o}vstakken
Abstract: One of the main challenges in current research on segmentation in cardiac ultrasound is the lack of large and varied labeled datasets and the differences in annotation conventions between datasets. This makes it difficult to design robust segmentation models that generalize well to external datasets. This work utilizes diffusion models to create generative augmentations that can significantly improve diversity of the dataset and thus the generalisability of segmentation models without the need for more annotated data. The augmentations are applied in addition to regular augmentations. A visual test survey showed that experts cannot clearly distinguish between real and fully generated images. Using the proposed generative augmentations, segmentation robustness was increased when training on an internal dataset and testing on an external dataset with an improvement of over 20 millimeters in Hausdorff distance. Additionally, the limits of agreement for automatic ejection fraction estimation improved by up to 20% of absolute ejection fraction value on out of distribution cases. These improvements come exclusively from the increased variation of the training data using the generative augmentations, without modifying the underlying machine learning model. The augmentation tool is available as an open source Python library at https://github.com/GillesVanDeVyver/EchoGAINS.
Authors: Prasun Dutta, Koustab Ghosh, Rajat K. De
Abstract: The most popular technique to train a neural network is backpropagation. Recently, the Forward-Forward technique has also been introduced for certain learning tasks. However, in real life, human learning does not follow any of these techniques exclusively. The way a human learns is basically a combination of forward learning, backward propagation and cooperation. Humans start learning a new concept by themselves and try to refine their understanding hierarchically during which they might come across several doubts. The most common approach to doubt solving is a discussion with peers, which can be called cooperation. Cooperation/discussion/knowledge sharing among peers is one of the most important steps of learning that humans follow. However, there might still be a few doubts even after the discussion. Then the difference between the understanding of the concept and the original literature is identified and minimized over several revisions. Inspired by this, the paper introduces Forward-Cooperation-Backward (FCB) learning in a deep neural network framework mimicking the human nature of learning a new concept. A novel deep neural network architecture, called Multi Encoding Uni Decoding neural network model, has been designed which learns using the notion of FCB. A special lateral synaptic connection has also been introduced to realize cooperation. The models have been justified in terms of their performance in dimension reduction on four popular datasets. The ability to preserve the granular properties of data in low-rank embedding has been tested to justify the quality of dimension reduction. For downstream analyses, classification has also been performed. An experimental study on convergence analysis has been performed to establish the efficacy of the FCB learning strategy.
Authors: Sotiris Anagnostidis, Gregor Bachmann, Yeongmin Kim, Jonas Kohler, Markos Georgopoulos, Artsiom Sanakoyeu, Yuming Du, Albert Pumarola, Ali Thabet, Edgar Sch\"onfeld
Abstract: Despite their remarkable performance, modern Diffusion Transformers are hindered by substantial resource requirements during inference, stemming from the fixed and large amount of compute needed for each denoising step. In this work, we revisit the conventional static paradigm that allocates a fixed compute budget per denoising iteration and propose a dynamic strategy instead. Our simple and sample-efficient framework enables pre-trained DiT models to be converted into \emph{flexible} ones -- dubbed FlexiDiT -- allowing them to process inputs at varying compute budgets. We demonstrate how a single \emph{flexible} model can generate images without any drop in quality, while reducing the required FLOPs by more than $40$\% compared to their static counterparts, for both class-conditioned and text-conditioned image generation. Our method is general and agnostic to input and conditioning modalities. We show how our approach can be readily extended for video generation, where FlexiDiT models generate samples with up to $75$\% less compute without compromising performance.
Authors: Yichi Zhang, Zhihao Duan, Yuning Huang, Fengqing Zhu
Abstract: Learned image compression (LIC) using deep learning architectures has seen significant advancements, yet standard rate-distortion (R-D) optimization often encounters imbalanced updates due to diverse gradients of the rate and distortion objectives. This imbalance can lead to suboptimal optimization, where one objective dominates, thereby reducing overall compression efficiency. To address this challenge, we reformulate R-D optimization as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem and introduce two balanced R-D optimization strategies that adaptively adjust gradient updates to achieve more equitable improvements in both rate and distortion. The first proposed strategy utilizes a coarse-to-fine gradient descent approach along standard R-D optimization trajectories, making it particularly suitable for training LIC models from scratch. The second proposed strategy analytically addresses the reformulated optimization as a quadratic programming problem with an equality constraint, which is ideal for fine-tuning existing models. Experimental results demonstrate that both proposed methods enhance the R-D performance of LIC models, achieving around a 2\% BD-Rate reduction with acceptable additional training cost, leading to a more balanced and efficient optimization process. The code will be made publicly available.
Authors: Toon Vandendriessche, Mathieu De Coster, Annelies Lejon, Joni Dambre
Abstract: Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) is crucial for scalable sign language technology, yet language-specific approaches limit current models. To address this, we propose a one-shot learning approach that generalises across languages and evolving vocabularies. Our method involves pretraining a model to embed signs based on essential features and using a dense vector search for rapid, accurate recognition of unseen signs. We achieve state-of-the-art results, including 50.8% one-shot MRR on a large dictionary containing 10,235 unique signs from a different language than the training set. Our approach is robust across languages and support sets, offering a scalable, adaptable solution for ISLR. Co-created with the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) community, this method aligns with real-world needs, and advances scalable sign language recognition.
Authors: Wei Yang, Yiran Zhu, Jiayu Shen, Yuhan Tang, Chengchang Pan, Hui He, Yan Su, Honggang Qi
Abstract: Diabetic Macular Edema (DME), a prevalent complication among diabetic patients, constitutes a major cause of visual impairment and blindness. Although deep learning has achieved remarkable progress in medical image analysis, traditional DME diagnosis still relies on extensive annotated data and subjective ophthalmologist assessments, limiting practical applications. To address this, we present RURANET++, an unsupervised learning-based automated DME diagnostic system. This framework incorporates an optimized U-Net architecture with embedded Spatial and Channel Squeeze & Excitation (SCSE) attention mechanisms to enhance lesion feature extraction. During feature processing, a pre-trained GoogLeNet model extracts deep features from retinal images, followed by PCA-based dimensionality reduction to 50 dimensions for computational efficiency. Notably, we introduce a novel clustering algorithm employing multi-projection heads to explicitly control cluster diversity while dynamically adjusting similarity thresholds, thereby optimizing intra-class consistency and inter-class discrimination. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance across multiple metrics, achieving maximum accuracy (0.8411), precision (0.8593), recall (0.8411), and F1-score (0.8390), with exceptional clustering quality. This work provides an efficient unsupervised solution for DME diagnosis with significant clinical implications.
Authors: Benjamin Gutteridge, Matthew Thomas Jackson, Toni Kukurin, Xiaowen Dong
Abstract: Handwritten text recognition (HTR) remains a challenging task, particularly for multi-page documents where pages share common formatting and contextual features. While modern optical character recognition (OCR) engines are proficient with printed text, their performance on handwriting is limited, often requiring costly labeled data for fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore the use of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) for transcribing multi-page handwritten documents in a zero-shot setting. We investigate various configurations of commercial OCR engines and MLLMs, utilizing the latter both as end-to-end transcribers and as post-processors, with and without image components. We propose a novel method, '+first page', which enhances MLLM transcription by providing the OCR output of the entire document along with just the first page image. This approach leverages shared document features without incurring the high cost of processing all images. Experiments on a multi-page version of the IAM Handwriting Database demonstrate that '+first page' improves transcription accuracy, balances cost with performance, and even enhances results on out-of-sample text by extrapolating formatting and OCR error patterns from a single page.
Authors: Tamir Shor, Moti Freiman, Chaim Baskin, Alex Bronstein
Abstract: Cardiac T1 mapping provides critical quantitative insights into myocardial tissue composition, enabling the assessment of pathologies such as fibrosis, inflammation, and edema. However, the inherently dynamic nature of the heart imposes strict limits on acquisition times, making high-resolution T1 mapping a persistent challenge. Compressed sensing (CS) approaches have reduced scan durations by undersampling k-space and reconstructing images from partial data, and recent studies show that jointly optimizing the undersampling patterns with the reconstruction network can substantially improve performance. Still, most current T1 mapping pipelines rely on static, hand-crafted masks that do not exploit the full acceleration and accuracy potential. In this work, we introduce T1-PILOT: an end-to-end method that explicitly incorporates the T1 signal relaxation model into the sampling-reconstruction framework to guide the learning of non-Cartesian trajectories, crossframe alignment, and T1 decay estimation. Through extensive experiments on the CMRxRecon dataset, T1-PILOT significantly outperforms several baseline strategies (including learned single-mask and fixed radial or golden-angle sampling schemes), achieving higher T1 map fidelity at greater acceleration factors. In particular, we observe consistent gains in PSNR and VIF relative to existing methods, along with marked improvements in delineating finer myocardial structures. Our results highlight that optimizing sampling trajectories in tandem with the physical relaxation model leads to both enhanced quantitative accuracy and reduced acquisition times. Code for reproducing all results will be made publicly available upon publication.
Authors: Edo Kadosh, Nir Goren, Or Patashnik, Daniel Garibi, Daniel Cohen-Or
Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models offer powerful image editing capabilities. To edit real images, many methods rely on the inversion of the image into Gaussian noise. A common approach to invert an image is to gradually add noise to the image, where the noise is determined by reversing the sampling equation. This process has an inherent tradeoff between reconstruction and editability, limiting the editing of challenging images such as highly-detailed ones. Recognizing the reliance of text-to-image models inversion on a text condition, this work explores the importance of the condition choice. We show that a condition that precisely aligns with the input image significantly improves the inversion quality. Based on our findings, we introduce Tight Inversion, an inversion method that utilizes the most possible precise condition -- the input image itself. This tight condition narrows the distribution of the model's output and enhances both reconstruction and editability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach when combined with existing inversion methods through extensive experiments, evaluating the reconstruction accuracy as well as the integration with various editing methods.
Authors: Susmit Agrawal, Deepika Vemuri, Sri Siddarth Chakaravarthy P, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian
Abstract: Concept-based methods have emerged as a promising direction to develop interpretable neural networks in standard supervised settings. However, most works that study them in incremental settings assume either a static concept set across all experiences or assume that each experience relies on a distinct set of concepts. In this work, we study concept-based models in a more realistic, dynamic setting where new classes may rely on older concepts in addition to introducing new concepts themselves. We show that concepts and classes form a complex web of relationships, which is susceptible to degradation and needs to be preserved and augmented across experiences. We introduce new metrics to show that existing concept-based models cannot preserve these relationships even when trained using methods to prevent catastrophic forgetting, since they cannot handle forgetting at concept, class, and concept-class relationship levels simultaneously. To address these issues, we propose a novel method - MuCIL - that uses multimodal concepts to perform classification without increasing the number of trainable parameters across experiences. The multimodal concepts are aligned to concepts provided in natural language, making them interpretable by design. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our approach obtains state-of-the-art classification performance compared to other concept-based models, achieving over 2$\times$ the classification performance in some cases. We also study the ability of our model to perform interventions on concepts, and show that it can localize visual concepts in input images, providing post-hoc interpretations.
Authors: Toru Lin, Kartik Sachdev, Linxi Fan, Jitendra Malik, Yuke Zhu
Abstract: Reinforcement learning has delivered promising results in achieving human- or even superhuman-level capabilities across diverse problem domains, but success in dexterous robot manipulation remains limited. This work investigates the key challenges in applying reinforcement learning to solve a collection of contact-rich manipulation tasks on a humanoid embodiment. We introduce novel techniques to overcome the identified challenges with empirical validation. Our main contributions include an automated real-to-sim tuning module that brings the simulated environment closer to the real world, a generalized reward design scheme that simplifies reward engineering for long-horizon contact-rich manipulation tasks, a divide-and-conquer distillation process that improves the sample efficiency of hard-exploration problems while maintaining sim-to-real performance, and a mixture of sparse and dense object representations to bridge the sim-to-real perception gap. We show promising results on three humanoid dexterous manipulation tasks, with ablation studies on each technique. Our work presents a successful approach to learning humanoid dexterous manipulation using sim-to-real reinforcement learning, achieving robust generalization and high performance without the need for human demonstration.
Authors: Haojin Liao, Xiaolin Song, Sicheng Zhao, Shanghang Zhang, Xiangyu Yue, Xingxu Yao, Yueming Zhang, Tengfei Xing, Pengfei Xu, Qiang Wang
Abstract: The Visual Domain Adaptation (VisDA) 2021 Challenge calls for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods that can deal with both input distribution shift and label set variance between the source and target domains. In this report, we introduce a universal domain adaptation (UniDA) method by aggregating several popular feature extraction and domain adaptation schemes. First, we utilize VOLO, a Transformer-based architecture with state-of-the-art performance in several visual tasks, as the backbone to extract effective feature representations. Second, we modify the open-set classifier of OVANet to recognize the unknown class with competitive accuracy and robustness. As shown in the leaderboard, our proposed UniDA method ranks the 3rd place with 48.49% ACC and 70.8% AUROC in the VisDA 2021 Challenge.
Authors: Hengyuan Ma, Xiatian Zhu, Jianfeng Feng, Li Zhang
Abstract: Score-based generative models (SGMs) have recently emerged as a promising class of generative models. However, a fundamental limitation is that their sampling process is slow due to a need for many (e.g., 2000) iterations of sequential computations. An intuitive acceleration method is to reduce the sampling iterations which however causes severe performance degradation. We assault this problem to the ill-conditioned issues of the Langevin dynamics and reverse diffusion in the sampling process. Under this insight, we propose a novel preconditioned diffusion sampling (PDS) method that leverages matrix preconditioning to alleviate the aforementioned problem. PDS alters the sampling process of a vanilla SGM at marginal extra computation cost and without model retraining. Theoretically, we prove that PDS preserves the output distribution of the SGM, with no risk of inducing systematical bias to the original sampling process. We further theoretically reveal a relation between the parameter of PDS and the sampling iterations, easing the parameter estimation under varying sampling iterations. Extensive experiments on various image datasets with a variety of resolutions and diversity validate that our PDS consistently accelerates off-the-shelf SGMs whilst maintaining the synthesis quality. In particular, PDS can accelerate by up to 28x on more challenging high-resolution (1024x1024) image generation. Compared with the latest generative models (e.g., CLD-SGM and Analytic-DDIM), PDS can achieve the best sampling quality on CIFAR-10 at an FID score of 1.99. Our code is publicly available to foster any further research https://github.com/fudan-zvg/PDS.
Authors: Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Xiaoqiang Zhou, Ran He
Abstract: Recent advancements in vision backbones have significantly improved their performance by simultaneously modeling images' local and global contexts. However, the bidirectional interaction between these two contexts has not been well explored and exploited, which is important in the human visual system. This paper proposes a Fully Adaptive Self-Attention (FASA) mechanism for vision transformer to model the local and global information as well as the bidirectional interaction between them in context-aware ways. Specifically, FASA employs self-modulated convolutions to adaptively extract local representation while utilizing self-attention in down-sampled space to extract global representation. Subsequently, it conducts a bidirectional adaptation process between local and global representation to model their interaction. In addition, we introduce a fine-grained downsampling strategy to enhance the down-sampled self-attention mechanism for finer-grained global perception capability. Based on FASA, we develop a family of lightweight vision backbones, Fully Adaptive Transformer (FAT) family. Extensive experiments on multiple vision tasks demonstrate that FAT achieves impressive performance. Notably, FAT accomplishes a 77.6% accuracy on ImageNet-1K using only 4.5M parameters and 0.7G FLOPs, which surpasses the most advanced ConvNets and Transformers with similar model size and computational costs. Moreover, our model exhibits faster speed on modern GPU compared to other models. Code will be available at https://github.com/qhfan/FAT.
Authors: Ning Ding, Yehui Tang, Zhongqian Fu, Chao Xu, Kai Han, Yunhe Wang
Abstract: The upsurge in pre-trained large models started by ChatGPT has swept across the entire deep learning community. Such powerful models demonstrate advanced generative ability and multimodal understanding capability, which quickly set new state of the arts on a variety of benchmarks. The pre-trained LLM usually plays the role as a universal AI model that can conduct various tasks like article analysis and image comprehension. However, due to the prohibitively high memory and computational cost of implementing such a large model, the conventional models (such as CNN and ViT) are still essential for many visual perception tasks. In this paper, we propose to enhance the representation ability of ordinary vision models on perception tasks (e.g. image classification) by taking advantage of the off-the-shelf large pre-trained models. We present a new learning framework, dubbed GPT4Image, where the knowledge of the large pre-trained models are extracted to help CNNs and ViTs learn better representations and achieve higher performance. Firstly, we curate a high quality description set by prompting a multimodal LLM to generate descriptions for training images. Then, these detailed descriptions are fed into a pre-trained encoder to extract text embeddings that encodes the rich semantics of images. During training, text embeddings will serve as extra supervising signal and be aligned with image representations learned by vision models. The alignment process helps vision models achieve better performance with the aid of pre-trained LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on various visual perception tasks for heterogeneous model architectures.
Authors: Seunghyeok Back, Sangbeom Lee, Kangmin Kim, Joosoon Lee, Sungho Shin, Jemo Maeng, Kyoobin Lee
Abstract: Accurate and efficient segmentation of unknown objects in unstructured environments is essential for robotic manipulation. Unknown Object Instance Segmentation (UOIS), which aims to identify all objects in unknown categories and backgrounds, has become a key capability for various robotic tasks. However, existing methods struggle with over-segmentation and under-segmentation, leading to failures in manipulation tasks such as grasping. To address these challenges, we propose QuBER (Quadruple Boundary Error Refinement), a novel error-informed refinement approach for high-quality UOIS. QuBER first estimates quadruple boundary errors-true positive, true negative, false positive, and false negative pixels-at the instance boundaries of the initial segmentation. It then refines the segmentation using an error-guided fusion mechanism, effectively correcting both fine-grained and instance-level segmentation errors. Extensive evaluations on three public benchmarks demonstrate that QuBER outperforms state-of-the-art methods and consistently improves various UOIS methods while maintaining a fast inference time of less than 0.1 seconds. Furthermore, we show that QuBER improves the success rate of grasping target objects in cluttered environments. Code and supplementary materials are available at https://sites.google.com/view/uois-quber.
Authors: Palaash Agrawal, Haidi Azaman, Cheston Tan
Abstract: Understanding relations between objects is crucial for understanding the semantics of a visual scene. It is also an essential step in order to bridge visual and language models. However, current state-of-the-art computer vision models still lack the ability to perform spatial reasoning well. Existing datasets mostly cover a relatively small number of spatial relations, all of which are static relations that do not intrinsically involve motion. In this paper, we propose the Spatial and Temporal Understanding of Prepositions Dataset (STUPD) -- a large-scale video dataset for understanding static and dynamic spatial relationships derived from prepositions of the English language. The dataset contains 150K visual depictions (videos and images), consisting of 30 distinct spatial prepositional senses, in the form of object interaction simulations generated synthetically using Unity3D. In addition to spatial relations, we also propose 50K visual depictions across 10 temporal relations, consisting of videos depicting event/time-point interactions. To our knowledge, no dataset exists that represents temporal relations through visual settings. In this dataset, we also provide 3D information about object interactions such as frame-wise coordinates, and descriptions of the objects used. The goal of this synthetic dataset is to help models perform better in visual relationship detection in real-world settings. We demonstrate an increase in the performance of various models over 2 real-world datasets (ImageNet-VidVRD and Spatial Senses) when pretrained on the STUPD dataset, in comparison to other pretraining datasets.
Authors: Xinghao Chen, Siwei Li, Yijing Yang, Yunhe Wang
Abstract: Transformer and its variants have shown great potential for various vision tasks in recent years, including image classification, object detection and segmentation. Meanwhile, recent studies also reveal that with proper architecture design, convolutional networks (ConvNets) also achieve competitive performance with transformers. However, no prior methods have explored to utilize pure convolution to build a Transformer-style Decoder module, which is essential for Encoder-Decoder architecture like Detection Transformer (DETR). To this end, in this paper we explore whether we could build query-based detection and segmentation framework with ConvNets instead of sophisticated transformer architecture. We propose a novel mechanism dubbed InterConv to perform interaction between object queries and image features via convolutional layers. Equipped with the proposed InterConv, we build Detection ConvNet (DECO), which is composed of a backbone and convolutional encoder-decoder architecture. We compare the proposed DECO against prior detectors on the challenging COCO benchmark. Despite its simplicity, our DECO achieves competitive performance in terms of detection accuracy and running speed. Specifically, with the ResNet-18 and ResNet-50 backbone, our DECO achieves $40.5\%$ and $47.8\%$ AP with $66$ and $34$ FPS, respectively. The proposed method is also evaluated on the segment anything task, demonstrating similar performance and higher efficiency. We hope the proposed method brings another perspective for designing architectures for vision tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/DECO and https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/DECO.
URLs: https://github.com/xinghaochen/DECO, https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/DECO.
Authors: Fangqiang Ding, Yunzhou Zhu, Xiangyu Wen, Gaowen Liu, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu
Abstract: Designing egocentric 3D hand pose estimation systems that can perform reliably in complex, real-world scenarios is crucial for downstream applications. Previous approaches using RGB or NIR imagery struggle in challenging conditions: RGB methods are susceptible to lighting variations and obstructions like handwear, while NIR techniques can be disrupted by sunlight or interference from other NIR-equipped devices. To address these limitations, we present ThermoHands, the first benchmark focused on thermal image-based egocentric 3D hand pose estimation, demonstrating the potential of thermal imaging to achieve robust performance under these conditions. The benchmark includes a multi-view and multi-spectral dataset collected from 28 subjects performing hand-object and hand-virtual interactions under diverse scenarios, accurately annotated with 3D hand poses through an automated process. We introduce a new baseline method, TherFormer, utilizing dual transformer modules for effective egocentric 3D hand pose estimation in thermal imagery. Our experimental results highlight TherFormer's leading performance and affirm thermal imaging's effectiveness in enabling robust 3D hand pose estimation in adverse conditions.
Authors: Hou-I Liu, Christine Wu, Jen-Hao Cheng, Wenhao Chai, Shian-Yun Wang, Gaowen Liu, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Hong-Han Shuai, Wen-Huang Cheng
Abstract: Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) holds noteworthy promise for autonomous driving applications owing to the cost-effectiveness and rich visual context of monocular camera sensors. However, depth ambiguity poses a significant challenge, as it requires extracting precise 3D scene geometry from a single image, resulting in suboptimal performance when transferring knowledge from a LiDAR-based teacher model to a camera-based student model. To address this issue, we introduce {\em Monocular Teaching Assistant Knowledge Distillation (MonoTAKD)} to enhance 3D perception in Mono3D. Our approach presents a robust camera-based teaching assistant model that effectively bridges the representation gap between different modalities for teacher and student models, addressing the challenge of inaccurate depth estimation. By defining 3D spatial cues as residual features that capture the differences between the teacher and the teaching assistant models, we leverage these cues into the student model, improving its 3D perception capabilities. Experimental results show that our MonoTAKD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI3D dataset. Additionally, we evaluate the performance on nuScenes and KITTI raw datasets to demonstrate the generalization of our model to multi-view 3D and unsupervised data settings. Our code will be available at https://github.com/hoiliu-0801/MonoTAKD.
Authors: Rohan Sarkar, Avinash Kak
Abstract: We add one more invariance - the state invariance - to the more commonly used other invariances for learning object representations for recognition and retrieval. By state invariance, we mean robust with respect to changes in the structural form of the objects, such as when an umbrella is folded, or when an item of clothing is tossed on the floor. In this work, we present a novel dataset, ObjectsWithStateChange, which captures state and pose variations in the object images recorded from arbitrary viewpoints. We believe that this dataset will facilitate research in fine-grained object recognition and retrieval of 3D objects that are capable of state changes. The goal of such research would be to train models capable of learning discriminative object embeddings that remain invariant to state changes while also staying invariant to transformations induced by changes in viewpoint, pose, illumination, etc. A major challenge in this regard is that instances of different objects (both within and across different categories) under various state changes may share similar visual characteristics and therefore may be close to one another in the learned embedding space, which would make it more difficult to discriminate between them. To address this, we propose a curriculum learning strategy that progressively selects object pairs with smaller inter-object distances in the learned embedding space during the training phase. This approach gradually samples harder-to-distinguish examples of visually similar objects, both within and across different categories. Our ablation related to the role played by curriculum learning indicates an improvement in object recognition accuracy of 7.9% and retrieval mAP of 9.2% over the state-of-the-art on our new dataset, as well as three other challenging multi-view datasets such as ModelNet40, ObjectPI, and FG3D.
Authors: Guangyao Zhai, Evin P{\i}nar \"Ornek, Dave Zhenyu Chen, Ruotong Liao, Yan Di, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari, Benjamin Busam
Abstract: We present EchoScene, an interactive and controllable generative model that generates 3D indoor scenes on scene graphs. EchoScene leverages a dual-branch diffusion model that dynamically adapts to scene graphs. Existing methods struggle to handle scene graphs due to varying numbers of nodes, multiple edge combinations, and manipulator-induced node-edge operations. EchoScene overcomes this by associating each node with a denoising process and enables collaborative information exchange, enhancing controllable and consistent generation aware of global constraints. This is achieved through an information echo scheme in both shape and layout branches. At every denoising step, all processes share their denoising data with an information exchange unit that combines these updates using graph convolution. The scheme ensures that the denoising processes are influenced by a holistic understanding of the scene graph, facilitating the generation of globally coherent scenes. The resulting scenes can be manipulated during inference by editing the input scene graph and sampling the noise in the diffusion model. Extensive experiments validate our approach, which maintains scene controllability and surpasses previous methods in generation fidelity. Moreover, the generated scenes are of high quality and thus directly compatible with off-the-shelf texture generation. Code and trained models are open-sourced.
Authors: Jiuming Liu, Jinru Han, Lihao Liu, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero, Chaokang Jiang, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
Abstract: Point cloud videos can faithfully capture real-world spatial geometries and temporal dynamics, which are essential for enabling intelligent agents to understand the dynamically changing world. However, designing an effective 4D backbone remains challenging, mainly due to the irregular and unordered distribution of points and temporal inconsistencies across frames. Also, recent transformer-based 4D backbones commonly suffer from large computational costs due to their quadratic complexity, particularly for long video sequences. To address these challenges, we propose a novel point cloud video understanding backbone purely based on the State Space Models (SSMs). Specifically, we first disentangle space and time in 4D video sequences and then establish the spatio-temporal correlation with our designed Mamba blocks. The Intra-frame Spatial Mamba module is developed to encode locally similar geometric structures within a certain temporal stride. Subsequently, locally correlated tokens are delivered to the Inter-frame Temporal Mamba module, which integrates long-term point features across the entire video with linear complexity. Our proposed Mamba4d achieves competitive performance on the MSR-Action3D action recognition (+10.4% accuracy), HOI4D action segmentation (+0.7 F1 Score), and Synthia4D semantic segmentation (+0.19 mIoU) datasets. Especially, for long video sequences, our method has a significant efficiency improvement with 87.5% GPU memory reduction and 5.36 times speed-up. Codes will be released at https://github.com/IRMVLab/Mamba4D.
Authors: Yi Xu, Yun Fu
Abstract: Understanding multi-agent movement is critical across various fields. The conventional approaches typically focus on separate tasks such as trajectory prediction, imputation, or spatial-temporal recovery. Considering the unique formulation and constraint of each task, most existing methods are tailored for only one, limiting the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, which is a common requirement in real-world scenarios. Another limitation is that widely used public datasets mainly focus on pedestrian movements with casual, loosely connected patterns, where interactions between individuals are not always present, especially at a long distance, making them less representative of more structured environments. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Unified Trajectory Generation model, UniTraj, that processes arbitrary trajectories as masked inputs, adaptable to diverse scenarios in the domain of sports games. Specifically, we introduce a Ghost Spatial Masking (GSM) module, embedded within a Transformer encoder, for spatial feature extraction. We further extend recent State Space Models (SSMs), known as the Mamba model, into a Bidirectional Temporal Mamba (BTM) to better capture temporal dependencies. Additionally, we incorporate a Bidirectional Temporal Scaled (BTS) module to thoroughly scan trajectories while preserving temporal missing relationships. Furthermore, we curate and benchmark three practical sports datasets, Basketball-U, Football-U, and Soccer-U, for evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our model. We hope that our work can advance the understanding of human movement in real-world applications, particularly in sports. Our datasets, code, and model weights are available here https://github.com/colorfulfuture/UniTraj-pytorch.
Authors: Yingwen Wu, Ruiji Yu, Xinwen Cheng, Zhengbao He, Xiaolin Huang
Abstract: In the open world, detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data, whose labels are disjoint with those of in-distribution (ID) samples, is important for reliable deep neural networks (DNNs). To achieve better detection performance, one type of approach proposes to fine-tune the model with auxiliary OOD datasets to amplify the difference between ID and OOD data through a separation loss defined on model outputs. However, none of these studies consider enlarging the feature disparity, which should be more effective compared to outputs. The main difficulty lies in the diversity of OOD samples, which makes it hard to describe their feature distribution, let alone design losses to separate them from ID features. In this paper, we neatly fence off the problem based on an aggregation property of ID features named Neural Collapse (NC). NC means that the penultimate features of ID samples within a class are nearly identical to the last layer weight of the corresponding class. Based on this property, we propose a simple but effective loss called Separation Loss, which binds the features of OOD data in a subspace orthogonal to the principal subspace of ID features formed by NC. In this way, the features of ID and OOD samples are separated by different dimensions. By optimizing the feature separation loss rather than purely enlarging output differences, our detection achieves SOTA performance on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks without any additional data augmentation or sampling, demonstrating the importance of feature separation in OOD detection. Code is available at https://github.com/Wuyingwen/Pursuing-Feature-Separation-for-OOD-Detection.
URLs: https://github.com/Wuyingwen/Pursuing-Feature-Separation-for-OOD-Detection.
Authors: Haozhe Xie, Zhaoxi Chen, Fangzhou Hong, Ziwei Liu
Abstract: 3D city generation with NeRF-based methods shows promising generation results but is computationally inefficient. Recently 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has emerged as a highly efficient alternative for object-level 3D generation. However, adapting 3D-GS from finite-scale 3D objects and humans to infinite-scale 3D cities is non-trivial. Unbounded 3D city generation entails significant storage overhead (out-of-memory issues), arising from the need to expand points to billions, often demanding hundreds of Gigabytes of VRAM for a city scene spanning 10km^2. In this paper, we propose GaussianCity, a generative Gaussian Splatting framework dedicated to efficiently synthesizing unbounded 3D cities with a single feed-forward pass. Our key insights are two-fold: 1) Compact 3D Scene Representation: We introduce BEV-Point as a highly compact intermediate representation, ensuring that the growth in VRAM usage for unbounded scenes remains constant, thus enabling unbounded city generation. 2) Spatial-aware Gaussian Attribute Decoder: We present spatial-aware BEV-Point decoder to produce 3D Gaussian attributes, which leverages Point Serializer to integrate the structural and contextual characteristics of BEV points. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GaussianCity achieves state-of-the-art results in both drone-view and street-view 3D city generation. Notably, compared to CityDreamer, GaussianCity exhibits superior performance with a speedup of 60 times (10.72 FPS v.s. 0.18 FPS).
Authors: Xuannan Liu, Zekun Li, Peipei Li, Huaibo Huang, Shuhan Xia, Xing Cui, Linzhi Huang, Weihong Deng, Zhaofeng He
Abstract: Current multimodal misinformation detection (MMD) methods often assume a single source and type of forgery for each sample, which is insufficient for real-world scenarios where multiple forgery sources coexist. The lack of a benchmark for mixed-source misinformation has hindered progress in this field. To address this, we introduce MMFakeBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for mixed-source MMD. MMFakeBench includes 3 critical sources: textual veracity distortion, visual veracity distortion, and cross-modal consistency distortion, along with 12 sub-categories of misinformation forgery types. We further conduct an extensive evaluation of 6 prevalent detection methods and 15 Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on MMFakeBench under a zero-shot setting. The results indicate that current methods struggle under this challenging and realistic mixed-source MMD setting. Additionally, we propose MMD-Agent, a novel approach to integrate the reasoning, action, and tool-use capabilities of LVLM agents, significantly enhancing accuracy and generalization. We believe this study will catalyze future research into more realistic mixed-source multimodal misinformation and provide a fair evaluation of misinformation detection methods.
Authors: Yongting Zhang, Lu Chen, Guodong Zheng, Yifeng Gao, Rui Zheng, Jinlan Fu, Zhenfei Yin, Senjie Jin, Yu Qiao, Xuanjing Huang, Feng Zhao, Tao Gui, Jing Shao
Abstract: The emergence of Vision Language Models (VLMs) has brought unprecedented advances in understanding multimodal information. The combination of textual and visual semantics in VLMs is highly complex and diverse, making the safety alignment of these models challenging. Furthermore, due to the limited study on the safety alignment of VLMs, there is a lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets. To address these limitations, we propose a Safety Preference Alignment dataset for Vision Language Models named SPA-VL. In terms of breadth, SPA-VL covers 6 harmfulness domains, 13 categories, and 53 subcategories, and contains 100,788 samples of the quadruple (question, image, chosen response, rejected response). In terms of depth, the responses are collected from 12 open-source (e.g., QwenVL) and closed-source (e.g., Gemini) VLMs to ensure diversity. The construction of preference data is fully automated, and the experimental results indicate that models trained with alignment techniques on the SPA-VL dataset exhibit substantial improvements in harmlessness and helpfulness while maintaining core capabilities. SPA-VL, as a large-scale, high-quality, and diverse dataset, represents a significant milestone in ensuring that VLMs achieve both harmlessness and helpfulness.
Authors: Yuxin Dai, Qi Wang, Jingsen Zhu, Dianbing Xi, Yuchi Huo, Chen Qian, Ying He
Abstract: We present MIRReS, a novel two-stage inverse rendering framework that jointly reconstructs and optimizes the explicit geometry, material, and lighting from multi-view images. Unlike previous methods that rely on implicit irradiance fields or simplified path tracing algorithms, our method extracts an explicit geometry (triangular mesh) in stage one, and introduces a more realistic physically-based inverse rendering model that utilizes multi-bounce path tracing and Monte Carlo integration. By leveraging multi-bounce path tracing, our method effectively estimates indirect illumination, including self-shadowing and internal reflections, which improves the intrinsic decomposition of shape, material, and lighting. Moreover, we incorporate reservoir sampling into our framework to address the noise in Monte Carlo integration, enhancing convergence and facilitating gradient-based optimization with low sample counts. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluation of several scenarios, especially in challenging scenarios with complex shadows, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on decomposition results. Additionally, our optimized explicit geometry enables applications such as scene editing, relighting, and material editing with modern graphics engines or CAD software. The source code is available at https://brabbitdousha.github.io/MIRReS/
Authors: Jinsheng Huang, Liang Chen, Taian Guo, Fu Zeng, Yusheng Zhao, Bohan Wu, Ye Yuan, Haozhe Zhao, Zhihui Guo, Yichi Zhang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Luchen Liu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Ming Zhang
Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, often assessed through multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that include an image, a question, and several options. However, many benchmarks used for such evaluations suffer from systematic biases. Remarkably, Large Language Models (LLMs) without any visual perception capabilities achieve non-trivial performance, undermining the credibility of these evaluations. To address this issue while maintaining the efficiency of MCQ evaluations, we propose MMEvalPro, a benchmark designed to avoid Type-I errors through a trilogy evaluation pipeline and more rigorous metrics. For each original question from existing benchmarks, human annotators augment it by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process. MMEvalPro comprises $2,138$ question triplets, totaling $6,414$ distinct questions. Two-thirds of these questions are manually labeled by human experts, while the rest are sourced from existing benchmarks (MMMU, ScienceQA, and MathVista). Compared with the existing benchmarks, our experiments with the latest LLMs and LMMs demonstrate that MMEvalPro is more challenging (the best LMM lags behind human performance by $31.73\%$, compared to an average gap of $8.03\%$ in previous benchmarks) and more trustworthy (the best LLM trails the best LMM by $23.09\%$, whereas the gap for previous benchmarks is just $14.64\%$). Our in-depth analysis explains the reason for the large performance gap and justifies the trustworthiness of evaluation, underscoring its significant potential for advancing future research.
Authors: Tianling Liu, Hongying Liu, Fanhua Shang, Lequan Yu, Tong Han, Liang Wan
Abstract: Multimodal MRIs play a crucial role in clinical diagnosis and treatment. Feature disentanglement (FD)-based methods, aiming at learning superior feature representations for multimodal data analysis, have achieved significant success in multimodal learning (MML). Typically, existing FD-based methods separate multimodal data into modality-shared and modality-specific features, and employ concatenation or attention mechanisms to integrate these features. However, our preliminary experiments indicate that these methods could lead to a loss of shared information among subsets of modalities when the inputs contain more than two modalities, and such information is critical for prediction accuracy. Furthermore, these methods do not adequately interpret the relationships between the decoupled features at the fusion stage. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Complete Feature Disentanglement (CFD) strategy that recovers the lost information during feature decoupling. Specifically, the CFD strategy not only identifies modality-shared and modality-specific features, but also decouples shared features among subsets of multimodal inputs, termed as modality-partial-shared features. We further introduce a new Dynamic Mixture-of-Experts Fusion (DMF) module that dynamically integrates these decoupled features, by explicitly learning the local-global relationships among the features. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through classification tasks on three multimodal MRI datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art MML methods with obvious margins, showcasing its superior performance.
Authors: Yu-Guan Hsieh, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Shih-Ying Yeh, Louis B\'ethune, Hadi Pour Ansari, Pavan Kumar Anasosalu Vasu, Chun-Liang Li, Ranjay Krishna, Oncel Tuzel, Marco Cuturi
Abstract: Humans describe complex scenes with compositionality, using simple text descriptions enriched with links and relationships. While vision-language research has aimed to develop models with compositional understanding capabilities, this is not reflected yet in existing datasets which, for the most part, still use plain text to describe images. In this work, we propose a new annotation strategy, graph-based captioning (GBC) that describes an image using a labeled graph structure, with nodes of various types. The nodes in GBC are created through a two-stage process: first, identifying and describing entity nodes; second, linking these nodes by highlighting \textit{compositions} and \textit{relations} among them. Since \textit{all} GBC nodes hold plain text descriptions, GBC retains the flexibility found in natural language, but can also encode hierarchical information in its edges. We demonstrate that GBC can be produced automatically, using off-the-shelf multimodal LLMs and object detection models, by building a new dataset GBC10M that gathers GBC annotations for about 10M images of the CC12M dataset. Through CLIP training on GBC10M, we show that leveraging GBC nodes' annotations -- particularly those in composition and relation nodes -- significantly boosts the model's performance across various benchmarks compared to when other annotations are used. To further explore the opportunities provided by GBC, we also investigate the use of GBC as middleware for text-to-image generation, and show the extra benefits of incorporating the graph structure in this task. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/apple/ml-gbc and https://huggingface.co/graph-based-captions.
URLs: https://github.com/apple/ml-gbc, https://huggingface.co/graph-based-captions.
Authors: Kazi Sajeed Mehrab, M. Maruf, Arka Daw, Abhilash Neog, Harish Babu Manogaran, Mridul Khurana, Zhenyang Feng, Bahadir Altintas, Yasin Bakis, Elizabeth G Campolongo, Matthew J Thompson, Xiaojun Wang, Hilmar Lapp, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Paula Mabee, Henry Bart, Wei-Lun Chao, Wasila M Dahdul, Anuj Karpatne
Abstract: We introduce Fish-Visual Trait Analysis (Fish-Vista), the first organismal image dataset designed for the analysis of visual traits of aquatic species directly from images using problem formulations in computer vision. Fish-Vista contains 69,126 annotated images spanning 4,154 fish species, curated and organized to serve three downstream tasks of species classification, trait identification, and trait segmentation. Our work makes two key contributions. First, we perform a fully reproducible data processing pipeline to process images sourced from various museum collections. We annotate these images with carefully curated labels from biological databases and manual annotations to create an AI-ready dataset of visual traits, contributing to the advancement of AI in biodiversity science. Second, our proposed downstream tasks offer fertile grounds for novel computer vision research in addressing a variety of challenges such as long-tailed distributions, out-of-distribution generalization, learning with weak labels, explainable AI, and segmenting small objects. We benchmark the performance of several existing methods for our proposed tasks to expose future research opportunities in AI for biodiversity science problems involving visual traits.
Authors: Tz-Ying Wu, Kyle Min, Subarna Tripathi, Nuno Vasconcelos
Abstract: Video understanding typically requires fine-tuning the large backbone when adapting to new domains. In this paper, we leverage the egocentric video foundation models (Ego-VFMs) based on video-language pre-training and propose a parameter-efficient adaptation for egocentric video tasks, namely Ego-VPA. It employs a local sparse approximation for each video frame/text feature using the basis prompts, and the selected basis prompts are used to synthesize video/text prompts. Since the basis prompts are shared across frames and modalities, it models context fusion and cross-modal transfer in an efficient fashion. Experiments show that Ego-VPA excels in lightweight adaptation (with only 0.84% learnable parameters), largely improving over baselines and reaching the performance of full fine-tuning.
Authors: Sihan Yang, Xuande Mi, Jiadong Feng, Haixia Bi, Hai Zhang, Jian Sun
Abstract: Large foundation models, known for their strong zero-shot generalization capabilities, can be applied to a wide range of downstream tasks. However, developing foundation models for medical image segmentation poses a significant challenge due to the domain gap between natural and medical images. While fine-tuning techniques based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have been explored, they primarily focus on scaling up data or refining inference strategies without incorporating domain-specific architectural designs, limiting their zero-shot performance. To optimize segmentation performance under standard inference settings and provide a strong baseline for future research, we introduce SyncSAM, which employs a synchronized dual-branch encoder that integrates convolution and Transformer features in a synchronized manner to enhance medical image encoding, and a multi-scale dual-branch decoder to preserve image details. SyncSAM is trained on two of the largest medical image segmentation datasets, SA-Med2D-20M and IMed-361M, resulting in a series of pre-trained models for universal medical image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that SyncSAM not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on test sets but also exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen datasets. The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/Hhankyangg/SyncSAM.
Authors: Zhiqiang Wu, Yingjie Liu, Hanlin Dong, Xuan Tang, Jian Yang, Bo Jin, Mingsong Chen, Xian Wei
Abstract: Group Equivariant Convolution (GConv) empowers models to explore underlying symmetry in data, improving performance. However, real-world scenarios often deviate from ideal symmetric systems caused by physical permutation, characterized by non-trivial actions of a symmetry group, resulting in asymmetries that affect the outputs, a phenomenon known as Symmetry Breaking. Traditional GConv-based methods are constrained by rigid operational rules within group space, assuming data remains strictly symmetry after limited group transformations. This limitation makes it difficult to adapt to Symmetry-Breaking and non-rigid transformations. Motivated by this, we mainly focus on a common scenario: Rotational Symmetry-Breaking. By relaxing strict group transformations within Strict Rotation-Equivariant group $\mathbf{C}_n$, we redefine a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant group $\mathbf{R}_n$ and introduce a novel Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant GConv (R2GConv) with only a minimal increase of $4n$ parameters compared to GConv. Based on R2GConv, we propose a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant Network (R2Net) as the backbone and develop a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant Object Detector (R2Det) for 2D object detection. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed R2GConv in natural image classification, and R2Det achieves excellent performance in 2D object detection with improved generalization capabilities and robustness. The code is available in \texttt{https://github.com/wuer5/r2det}.
Authors: Xuanlei Zhao, Xiaolong Jin, Kai Wang, Yang You
Abstract: We present Pyramid Attention Broadcast (PAB), a real-time, high quality and training-free approach for DiT-based video generation. Our method is founded on the observation that attention difference in the diffusion process exhibits a U-shaped pattern, indicating significant redundancy. We mitigate this by broadcasting attention outputs to subsequent steps in a pyramid style. It applies different broadcast strategies to each attention based on their variance for best efficiency. We further introduce broadcast sequence parallel for more efficient distributed inference. PAB demonstrates up to 10.5x speedup across three models compared to baselines, achieving real-time generation for up to 720p videos. We anticipate that our simple yet effective method will serve as a robust baseline and facilitate future research and application for video generation.
Authors: Taesung Kwon, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Recently, diffusion model-based inverse problem solvers (DIS) have emerged as state-of-the-art approaches for addressing inverse problems, including image super-resolution, deblurring, inpainting, etc. However, their application to video inverse problems arising from spatio-temporal degradation remains largely unexplored due to the challenges in training video diffusion models. To address this issue, here we introduce an innovative video inverse solver that leverages only image diffusion models. Specifically, by drawing inspiration from the success of the recent decomposed diffusion sampler (DDS), our method treats the time dimension of a video as the batch dimension of image diffusion models and solves spatio-temporal optimization problems within denoised spatio-temporal batches derived from each image diffusion model. Moreover, we introduce a batch-consistent diffusion sampling strategy that encourages consistency across batches by synchronizing the stochastic noise components in image diffusion models. Our approach synergistically combines batch-consistent sampling with simultaneous optimization of denoised spatio-temporal batches at each reverse diffusion step, resulting in a novel and efficient diffusion sampling strategy for video inverse problems. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively addresses various spatio-temporal degradations in video inverse problems, achieving state-of-the-art reconstructions. Project page: https://svi-diffusion.github.io/
Authors: Zuyan Liu, Yuhao Dong, Ziwei Liu, Winston Hu, Jiwen Lu, Yongming Rao
Abstract: Visual data comes in various forms, ranging from small icons of just a few pixels to long videos spanning hours. Existing multi-modal LLMs usually standardize these diverse visual inputs to a fixed resolution for visual encoders and yield similar numbers of tokens for LLMs. This approach is non-optimal for multimodal understanding and inefficient for processing inputs with long and short visual contents. To solve the problem, we propose Oryx, a unified multimodal architecture for the spatial-temporal understanding of images, videos, and multi-view 3D scenes. Oryx offers an on-demand solution to seamlessly and efficiently process visual inputs with arbitrary spatial sizes and temporal lengths through two core innovations: 1) a pre-trained OryxViT model that can encode images at any resolution into LLM-friendly visual representations; 2) a dynamic compressor module that supports 1x to 16x compression on visual tokens by request. These design features enable Oryx to accommodate extremely long visual contexts, such as videos, with lower resolution and high compression while maintaining high recognition precision for tasks like document understanding with native resolution and no compression. Beyond the architectural improvements, enhanced data curation and specialized training on long-context retrieval and spatial-aware data help Oryx achieve strong capabilities in image, video, and 3D multimodal understanding simultaneously. Our work is open-sourced at https://github.com/Oryx-mllm/Oryx.
Authors: Weifeng Lin, Xinyu Wei, Renrui Zhang, Le Zhuo, Shitian Zhao, Siyuan Huang, Huan Teng, Junlin Xie, Yu Qiao, Peng Gao, Hongsheng Li
Abstract: This paper presents a versatile image-to-image visual assistant, PixWizard, designed for image generation, manipulation, and translation based on free-from language instructions. To this end, we tackle a variety of vision tasks into a unified image-text-to-image generation framework and curate an Omni Pixel-to-Pixel Instruction-Tuning Dataset. By constructing detailed instruction templates in natural language, we comprehensively include a large set of diverse vision tasks such as text-to-image generation, image restoration, image grounding, dense image prediction, image editing, controllable generation, inpainting/outpainting, and more. Furthermore, we adopt Diffusion Transformers (DiT) as our foundation model and extend its capabilities with a flexible any resolution mechanism, enabling the model to dynamically process images based on the aspect ratio of the input, closely aligning with human perceptual processes. The model also incorporates structure-aware and semantic-aware guidance to facilitate effective fusion of information from the input image. Our experiments demonstrate that PixWizard not only shows impressive generative and understanding abilities for images with diverse resolutions but also exhibits promising generalization capabilities with unseen tasks and human instructions. The code and related resources are available at https://github.com/AFeng-x/PixWizard
Authors: Junchen Yu, Si-Yuan Cao, Runmin Zhang, Chenghao Zhang, Zhu Yu, Shujie Chen, Bailin Yang, Hui-liang Shen
Abstract: We propose a novel unsupervised cross-modal homography estimation learning framework, named Split Supervised Homography estimation Network (SSHNet). SSHNet redefines the unsupervised cross-modal homography estimation into two supervised sub-problems, each addressed by its specialized network: a homography estimation network and a modality transfer network. To realize stable training, we introduce an effective split optimization strategy to train each network separately within its respective sub-problem. We also formulate an extra homography feature space supervision to enhance feature consistency, further boosting the estimation accuracy. Moreover, we employ a simple yet effective distillation training technique to reduce model parameters and improve cross-domain generalization ability while maintaining comparable performance. The training stability of SSHNet enables its cooperation with various homography estimation architectures. Experiments reveal that the SSHNet using IHN as homography estimation network, namely SSHNet-IHN, outperforms previous unsupervised approaches by a significant margin. Even compared to supervised approaches MHN and LocalTrans, SSHNet-IHN achieves 47.4% and 85.8% mean average corner errors (MACEs) reduction on the challenging OPT-SAR dataset.
Authors: Ayesha Ishaq, Mohamed El Amine Boudjoghra, Jean Lahoud, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan, Hisham Cholakkal, Rao Muhammad Anwer
Abstract: 3D multi-object tracking plays a critical role in autonomous driving by enabling the real-time monitoring and prediction of multiple objects' movements. Traditional 3D tracking systems are typically constrained by predefined object categories, limiting their adaptability to novel, unseen objects in dynamic environments. To address this limitation, we introduce open-vocabulary 3D tracking, which extends the scope of 3D tracking to include objects beyond predefined categories. We formulate the problem of open-vocabulary 3D tracking and introduce dataset splits designed to represent various open-vocabulary scenarios. We propose a novel approach that integrates open-vocabulary capabilities into a 3D tracking framework, allowing for generalization to unseen object classes. Our method effectively reduces the performance gap between tracking known and novel objects through strategic adaptation. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness and adaptability of our method in diverse outdoor driving scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to address open-vocabulary 3D tracking, presenting a significant advancement for autonomous systems in real-world settings. Code, trained models, and dataset splits are available publicly.
Authors: Po-Hung Yeh, Kuang-Huei Lee, Jun-Cheng Chen
Abstract: Aligning diffusion models with user preferences has been a key challenge. Existing methods for aligning diffusion models either require retraining or are limited to differentiable reward functions. To address these limitations, we propose a stochastic optimization approach, dubbed Demon, to guide the denoising process at inference time without backpropagation through reward functions or model retraining. Our approach works by controlling noise distribution in denoising steps to concentrate density on regions corresponding to high rewards through stochastic optimization. We provide comprehensive theoretical and empirical evidence to support and validate our approach, including experiments that use non-differentiable sources of rewards such as Visual-Language Model (VLM) APIs and human judgements. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed approach is the first inference-time, backpropagation-free preference alignment method for diffusion models. Our method can be easily integrated with existing diffusion models without further training. Our experiments show that the proposed approach significantly improves the average aesthetics scores for text-to-image generation. Implementation is available at https://github.com/aiiu-lab/DemonSampling.
Authors: Jiazi Bu, Pengyang Ling, Pan Zhang, Tong Wu, Xiaoyi Dong, Yuhang Zang, Yuhang Cao, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang
Abstract: The text-to-video (T2V) generation models, offering convenient visual creation, have recently garnered increasing attention. Despite their substantial potential, the generated videos may present artifacts, including structural implausibility, temporal inconsistency, and a lack of motion, often resulting in near-static video. In this work, we have identified a correlation between the disparity of temporal attention maps across different blocks and the occurrence of temporal inconsistencies. Additionally, we have observed that the energy contained within the temporal attention maps is directly related to the magnitude of motion amplitude in the generated videos. Based on these observations, we present ByTheWay, a training-free method to improve the quality of text-to-video generation without introducing additional parameters, augmenting memory or sampling time. Specifically, ByTheWay is composed of two principal components: 1) Temporal Self-Guidance improves the structural plausibility and temporal consistency of generated videos by reducing the disparity between the temporal attention maps across various decoder blocks. 2) Fourier-based Motion Enhancement enhances the magnitude and richness of motion by amplifying the energy of the map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ByTheWay significantly improves the quality of text-to-video generation with negligible additional cost.
Authors: Yang Zhou, Hao Shao, Letian Wang, Steven L. Waslander, Hongsheng Li, Yu Liu
Abstract: Predicting the future motion of surrounding agents is essential for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to operate safely in dynamic, human-robot-mixed environments. However, the scarcity of large-scale driving datasets has hindered the development of robust and generalizable motion prediction models, limiting their ability to capture complex interactions and road geometries. Inspired by recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), self-supervised learning (SSL) has gained significant attention in the motion prediction community for learning rich and transferable scene representations. Nonetheless, existing pre-training methods for motion prediction have largely focused on specific model architectures and single dataset, limiting their scalability and generalizability. To address these challenges, we propose SmartPretrain, a general and scalable SSL framework for motion prediction that is both model-agnostic and dataset-agnostic. Our approach integrates contrastive and reconstructive SSL, leveraging the strengths of both generative and discriminative paradigms to effectively represent spatiotemporal evolution and interactions without imposing architectural constraints. Additionally, SmartPretrain employs a dataset-agnostic scenario sampling strategy that integrates multiple datasets, enhancing data volume, diversity, and robustness. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that SmartPretrain consistently improves the performance of state-of-the-art prediction models across datasets, data splits and main metrics. For instance, SmartPretrain significantly reduces the MissRate of Forecast-MAE by 10.6%. These results highlight SmartPretrain's effectiveness as a unified, scalable solution for motion prediction, breaking free from the limitations of the small-data regime. Codes are available at https://github.com/youngzhou1999/SmartPretrain
Authors: Long Xing, Qidong Huang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiajie Lu, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Yuhang Cao, Conghui He, Jiaqi Wang, Feng Wu, Dahua Lin
Abstract: In large vision-language models (LVLMs), images serve as inputs that carry a wealth of information. As the idiom "A picture is worth a thousand words" implies, representing a single image in current LVLMs can require hundreds or even thousands of tokens. This results in significant computational costs, which grow quadratically as input image resolution increases, thereby severely impacting the efficiency of both training and inference. Previous approaches have attempted to reduce the number of image tokens either before or within the early layers of LVLMs. However, these strategies inevitably result in the loss of crucial image information, ultimately diminishing model performance. To address this challenge, we conduct an empirical study revealing that all visual tokens are necessary for LVLMs in the shallow layers, and token redundancy progressively increases in the deeper layers of the model. To this end, we propose PyramidDrop, a visual redundancy reduction strategy for LVLMs to boost their efficiency in both training and inference with neglectable performance loss. Specifically, we partition the LVLM into several stages and drop part of the image tokens at the end of each stage with a pre-defined ratio, creating pyramid-like visual tokens across model layers. The dropping is based on a lightweight similarity calculation with a negligible time overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PyramidDrop can achieve a 40% training time and 55% inference FLOPs acceleration of LLaVA-NeXT with comparable performance. Besides, the PyramidDrop could also serve as a plug-and-play strategy for inference acceleration without training, with better performance and lower inference cost than counterparts. Code is available at https://github.com/Cooperx521/PyramidDrop.
Authors: Zhengqiang Zhang, Ruihuang Li, Lei Zhang
Abstract: While image generation with diffusion models has achieved a great success, generating images of higher resolution than the training size remains a challenging task due to the high computational cost. Current methods typically perform the entire sampling process at full resolution and process all frequency components simultaneously, contradicting with the inherent coarse-to-fine nature of latent diffusion models and wasting computations on processing premature high-frequency details at early diffusion stages. To address this issue, we introduce an efficient $\textbf{Fre}$quency-aware $\textbf{Ca}$scaded $\textbf{S}$ampling framework, $\textbf{FreCaS}$ in short, for higher-resolution image generation. FreCaS decomposes the sampling process into cascaded stages with gradually increased resolutions, progressively expanding frequency bands and refining the corresponding details. We propose an innovative frequency-aware classifier-free guidance (FA-CFG) strategy to assign different guidance strengths for different frequency components, directing the diffusion model to add new details in the expanded frequency domain of each stage. Additionally, we fuse the cross-attention maps of previous and current stages to avoid synthesizing unfaithful layouts. Experiments demonstrate that FreCaS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in image quality and generation speed. In particular, FreCaS is about 2.86$\times$ and 6.07$\times$ faster than ScaleCrafter and DemoFusion in generating a 2048$\times$2048 image using a pre-trained SDXL model and achieves an FID$_b$ improvement of 11.6 and 3.7, respectively. FreCaS can be easily extended to more complex models such as SD3. The source code of FreCaS can be found at https://github.com/xtudbxk/FreCaS.
Authors: Ji Guo, Wenbo Jiang, Rui Zhang, Guoming Lu, Hongwei Li
Abstract: Recently, various types of Text-to-Image (T2I) models have emerged (such as DALL-E and Stable Diffusion), and showing their advantages in different aspects. Therefore, some third-party service platforms collect different model interfaces and provide cheaper API services and more flexibility in T2I model selections. However, this also raises a new security concern: Are these third-party services truly offering the models they claim? To answer this question, we first define the concept of T2I model verification, which aims to determine whether a black-box target model is identical to a given white-box reference T2I model. After that, we propose VerifyPrompt, which performs T2I model verification through a special designed verify prompt. Intuitionally, the verify prompt is an adversarial prompt for the target model without transferability for other models. It makes the target model generate a specific image while making other models produce entirely different images. Specifically, VerifyPrompt utilizes the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) to optimize the cosine similarity of a prompt's text encoding, generating verify prompts. Finally, by computing the CLIP-text similarity scores between the prompts the generated images, VerifyPrompt can determine whether the target model aligns with the reference model. Experimental results demonstrate that VerifyPrompt consistently achieves over 90\% accuracy across various T2I models, confirming its effectiveness in practical model platforms (such as Hugging Face).
Authors: Rafa{\l} Karczewski, Markus Heinonen, Vikas Garg
Abstract: We investigate what kind of images lie in the high-density regions of diffusion models. We introduce a theoretical mode-tracking process capable of pinpointing the exact mode of the denoising distribution, and we propose a practical high-density sampler that consistently generates images of higher likelihood than usual samplers. Our empirical findings reveal the existence of significantly higher likelihood samples that typical samplers do not produce, often manifesting as cartoon-like drawings or blurry images depending on the noise level. Curiously, these patterns emerge in datasets devoid of such examples. We also present a novel approach to track sample likelihoods in diffusion SDEs, which remarkably incurs no additional computational cost.
Authors: Ming Li, Jike Zhong, Tianle Chen, Yuxiang Lai, Konstantinos Psounis
Abstract: Recent studies on large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated promising skills in various domains including science and mathematics. However, their capability in more challenging and real-world related scenarios like engineering has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we propose EEE-Bench, a multimodal benchmark aimed at assessing LMMs' capabilities in solving practical engineering tasks, using electrical and electronics engineering (EEE) as the testbed. Our benchmark consists of 2860 carefully curated problems spanning 10 essential subdomains such as analog circuits, control systems, etc. Compared to benchmarks in other domains, engineering problems are intrinsically 1) more visually complex and versatile and 2) less deterministic in solutions. Successful solutions to these problems often demand more-than-usual rigorous integration of visual and textual information as models need to understand intricate images like abstract circuits and system diagrams while taking professional instructions, making them excellent candidates for LMM evaluations. Alongside EEE-Bench, we provide extensive quantitative evaluations and fine-grained analysis of 17 widely-used open and closed-sourced LLMs and LMMs. Our results demonstrate notable deficiencies of current foundation models in EEE, with an average performance ranging from 19.48% to 46.78%. Finally, we reveal and explore a critical shortcoming in LMMs which we term laziness: the tendency to take shortcuts by relying on the text while overlooking the visual context when reasoning for technical image problems. In summary, we believe EEE-Bench not only reveals some noteworthy limitations of LMMs but also provides a valuable resource for advancing research on their application in practical engineering tasks, driving future improvements in their capability to handle complex, real-world scenarios.
Authors: Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Ran He
Abstract: The Softmax attention mechanism in Transformer models is notoriously computationally expensive, particularly due to its quadratic complexity, posing significant challenges in vision applications. In contrast, linear attention provides a far more efficient solution by reducing the complexity to linear levels. However, compared to Softmax attention, linear attention often experiences significant performance degradation. Our experiments indicate that this performance drop is due to the low-rank nature of linear attention's feature map, which hinders its ability to adequately model complex spatial information. In this paper, to break the low-rank dilemma of linear attention, we conduct rank analysis from two perspectives: the KV buffer and the output features. Consequently, we introduce Rank-Augmented Linear Attention (RALA), which rivals the performance of Softmax attention while maintaining linear complexity and high efficiency. Based on RALA, we construct the Rank-Augmented Vision Linear Transformer (RAVLT). Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAVLT achieves excellent performance across various vision tasks. Specifically, without using any additional labels, data, or supervision during training, RAVLT achieves an 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k with only 26M parameters and 4.6G FLOPs. This result significantly surpasses previous linear attention mechanisms, fully illustrating the potential of RALA. Code will be available at https://github.com/qhfan/RALA.
Authors: Shitong Shao, Zikai Zhou, Tian Ye, Lichen Bai, Zhiqiang Xu, Zeke Xie
Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models (DMs) develop at an unprecedented pace, supported by thorough theoretical exploration and empirical analysis. Unfortunately, the discrepancy between DMs and autoregressive models (ARMs) complicates the path toward achieving the goal of unified vision and language generation. Recently, the masked generative Transformer (MGT) serves as a promising intermediary between DM and ARM by predicting randomly masked image tokens (i.e., masked image modeling), combining the efficiency of DM with the discrete token nature of ARM. However, we find that the comprehensive analyses regarding the inference for MGT are virtually non-existent, and thus we aim to present positive design choices to fill this gap. We propose and redesign a set of enhanced inference techniques tailored for MGT, providing a detailed analysis of their performance. Additionally, we explore several DM-based approaches aimed at accelerating the sampling process on MGT. Extensive experiments and empirical analyses on the recent SOTA MGT, such as MaskGIT and Meissonic lead to concrete and effective design choices, and these design choices can be merged to achieve further performance gains. For instance, in terms of enhanced inference, we achieve winning rates of approximately 70% compared to vanilla sampling on HPS v2 with Meissonic-1024x1024.
Authors: Xinyu Zhang, Lingling Zhang, Yanrui Wu, Muye Huang, Wenjun Wu, Bo Li, Shaowei Wang, Jun Liu
Abstract: Visual Question Generation (VQG) has gained significant attention due to its potential in educational applications. However, VQG researches mainly focus on natural images, neglecting diagrams in educational materials used to assess students' conceptual understanding. To address this gap, we introduce DiagramQG, a dataset containing 8,372 diagrams and 19,475 questions across various subjects. DiagramQG introduces concept and target text constraints, guiding the model to generate concept-focused questions for educational purposes. Meanwhile, we present the Hierarchical Knowledge Integration framework for Diagram Question Generation (HKI-DQG) as a strong baseline. This framework obtains multi-scale patches of diagrams and acquires knowledge using a visual language model with frozen parameters. It then integrates knowledge, text constraints and patches to generate concept-focused questions. We evaluate the performance of existing VQG models, open-source and closed-source vision-language models, and HKI-DQG on the DiagramQG dataset. Our HKI-DQG outperform existing methods, demonstrating that it serves as a strong baseline. Furthermore, we apply HKI-DQG to four other VQG datasets of natural images, namely VQG-COCO, K-VQG, OK-VQA and A-OKVQA, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The dataset and code are available at https://dxzxy12138.github.io/diagramqg-home.
Authors: Jingyu Lin, Jiaqi Gu, Lubin Fan, Bojian Wu, Yujing Lou, Renjie Chen, Ligang Liu, Jieping Ye
Abstract: Generating high-quality novel view renderings of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) in scenes featuring transient objects is challenging. We propose a novel hybrid representation, termed as HybridGS, using 2D Gaussians for transient objects per image and maintaining traditional 3D Gaussians for the whole static scenes. Note that, the 3DGS itself is better suited for modeling static scenes that assume multi-view consistency, but the transient objects appear occasionally and do not adhere to the assumption, thus we model them as planar objects from a single view, represented with 2D Gaussians. Our novel representation decomposes the scene from the perspective of fundamental viewpoint consistency, making it more reasonable. Additionally, we present a novel multi-view regulated supervision method for 3DGS that leverages information from co-visible regions, further enhancing the distinctions between the transients and statics. Then, we propose a straightforward yet effective multi-stage training strategy to ensure robust training and high-quality view synthesis across various settings. Experiments on benchmark datasets show our state-of-the-art performance of novel view synthesis in both indoor and outdoor scenes, even in the presence of distracting elements.
Authors: Haitian Zhang, Xiangyuan Wang, Chang Xu, Xinya Wang, Fang Xu, Huai Yu, Lei Yu, Wen Yang
Abstract: Fusing Events and RGB images for object detection leverages the robustness of Event cameras in adverse environments and the rich semantic information provided by RGB cameras. However, two critical mismatches: low-latency Events \textit{vs.}~high-latency RGB frames; temporally sparse labels in training \textit{vs.}~continuous flow in inference, significantly hinder the high-frequency fusion-based object detection. To address these challenges, we propose the \textbf{F}requency-\textbf{A}daptive Low-Latency \textbf{O}bject \textbf{D}etector (FAOD). FAOD aligns low-frequency RGB frames with high-frequency Events through an Align Module, which reinforces cross-modal style and spatial proximity to address the Event-RGB Mismatch. We further propose a training strategy, Time Shift, which enforces the module to align the prediction from temporally shifted Event-RGB pairs and their original representation, that is, consistent with Event-aligned annotations. This strategy enables the network to use high-frequency Event data as the primary reference while treating low-frequency RGB images as supplementary information, retaining the low-latency nature of the Event stream toward high-frequency detection. Furthermore, we observe that these corrected Event-RGB pairs demonstrate better generalization from low training frequency to higher inference frequencies compared to using Event data alone. Extensive experiments on the PKU-DAVIS-SOD and DSEC-Detection datasets demonstrate that our FAOD achieves SOTA performance. Specifically, in the PKU-DAVIS-SOD Dataset, FAOD achieves 9.8 points improvement in terms of the mAP in fully paired Event-RGB data with only a quarter of the parameters compared to SODFormer, and even maintains robust performance (only a 3 points drop in mAP) under 80$\times$ Event-RGB frequency mismatch.
Authors: Junfeng Wu, Yi Jiang, Chuofan Ma, Yuliang Liu, Hengshuang Zhao, Zehuan Yuan, Song Bai, Xiang Bai
Abstract: We present Liquid, an auto-regressive generation paradigm that seamlessly integrates visual comprehension and generation by tokenizing images into discrete codes and learning these code embeddings alongside text tokens within a shared feature space for both vision and language. Unlike previous multimodal large language model (MLLM), Liquid achieves this integration using a single large language model (LLM), eliminating the need for external pretrained visual embeddings such as CLIP. For the first time, Liquid uncovers a scaling law that performance drop unavoidably brought by the unified training of visual and language tasks diminishes as the model size increases. Furthermore, the unified token space enables visual generation and comprehension tasks to mutually enhance each other, effectively removing the typical interference seen in earlier models. We show that existing LLMs can serve as strong foundations for Liquid, saving 100x in training costs while outperforming Chameleon in multimodal capabilities and maintaining language performance comparable to mainstream LLMs like LLAMA2. Liquid also outperforms models like SD v2.1 and SD-XL (FID of 5.47 on MJHQ-30K), excelling in both vision-language and text-only tasks. This work demonstrates that LLMs such as Qwen2.5 and GEMMA2 are powerful multimodal generators, offering a scalable solution for enhancing both vision-language understanding and generation. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/FoundationVision/Liquid.
Authors: Dongxu Wei, Zhiqi Li, Peidong Liu
Abstract: Prior works employing pixel-based Gaussian representation have demonstrated efficacy in feed-forward sparse-view reconstruction. However, such representation necessitates cross-view overlap for accurate depth estimation, and is challenged by object occlusions and frustum truncations. As a result, these methods require scene-centric data acquisition to maintain cross-view overlap and complete scene visibility to circumvent occlusions and truncations, which limits their applicability to scene-centric reconstruction. In contrast, in autonomous driving scenarios, a more practical paradigm is ego-centric reconstruction, which is characterized by minimal cross-view overlap and frequent occlusions and truncations. The limitations of pixel-based representation thus hinder the utility of prior works in this task. In light of this, this paper conducts an in-depth analysis of different representations, and introduces Omni-Gaussian representation with tailored network design to complement their strengths and mitigate their drawbacks. Experiments show that our method significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods, pixelSplat and MVSplat, in ego-centric reconstruction, and achieves comparable performance to prior works in scene-centric reconstruction.
Authors: Beilin Chu, Xuan Xu, Xin Wang, Yufei Zhang, Weike You, Linna Zhou
Abstract: The rapid advancement of diffusion models has significantly improved high-quality image generation, making generated content increasingly challenging to distinguish from real images and raising concerns about potential misuse. In this paper, we observe that diffusion models struggle to accurately reconstruct mid-band frequency information in real images, suggesting the limitation could serve as a cue for detecting diffusion model generated images. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel method called Frequency-guided Reconstruction Error (FIRE), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to investigate the influence of frequency decomposition on reconstruction error. FIRE assesses the variation in reconstruction error before and after the frequency decomposition, offering a robust method for identifying diffusion model generated images. Extensive experiments show that FIRE generalizes effectively to unseen diffusion models and maintains robustness against diverse perturbations.
Authors: Jungho Kim, Changwon Kang, Dongyoung Lee, Sehwan Choi, Jun Won Choi
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce ProtoOcc, a novel 3D occupancy prediction model designed to predict the occupancy states and semantic classes of 3D voxels through a deep semantic understanding of scenes. ProtoOcc consists of two main components: the Dual Branch Encoder (DBE) and the Prototype Query Decoder (PQD). The DBE produces a new 3D voxel representation by combining 3D voxel and BEV representations across multiple scales through a dual branch structure. This design enhances both performance and computational efficiency by providing a large receptive field for the BEV representation while maintaining a smaller receptive field for the voxel representation. The PQD introduces Prototype Queries to accelerate the decoding process. Scene-Adaptive Prototypes are derived from the 3D voxel features of input sample, while Scene-Agnostic Prototypes are computed by applying Scene-Adaptive Prototypes to an Exponential Moving Average during the training phase. By using these prototype-based queries for decoding, we can directly predict 3D occupancy in a single step, eliminating the need for iterative Transformer decoding. Additionally, we propose the Robust Prototype Learning, which injects noise into prototype generation process and trains the model to denoise during the training phase. ProtoOcc achieves state-of-the-art performance with 45.02% mIoU on the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark. For single-frame method, it reaches 39.56% mIoU with an inference speed of 12.83 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 3090. Our code can be found at https://github.com/SPA-junghokim/ProtoOcc.
Authors: Jingyu Zhang, Yilei Wang, Lang Qian, Peng Sun, Zengwen Li, Sudong Jiang, Maolin Liu, Liang Song
Abstract: As a potential application of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, multi-agent collaborative perception has achieved significant success in 3D object detection. While these methods have demonstrated impressive results on standard benchmarks, the robustness of such approaches in the face of complex real-world environments requires additional verification. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of collaborative perception methods in the presence of natural corruptions typical of real-world environments. Furthermore, we propose DSRC, a robustness-enhanced collaborative perception method aiming to learn Density-insensitive and Semantic-aware collaborative Representation against Corruptions. DSRC consists of two key designs: i) a semantic-guided sparse-to-dense distillation framework, which constructs multi-view dense objects painted by ground truth bounding boxes to effectively learn density-insensitive and semantic-aware collaborative representation; ii) a feature-to-point cloud reconstruction approach to better fuse critical collaborative representation across agents. To thoroughly evaluate DSRC, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world and simulated datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms SOTA collaborative perception methods in both clean and corrupted conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/Terry9a/DSRC.
Authors: Saman Motamed, Laura Culp, Kevin Swersky, Priyank Jaini, Robert Geirhos
Abstract: AI video generation is undergoing a revolution, with quality and realism advancing rapidly. These advances have led to a passionate scientific debate: Do video models learn "world models" that discover laws of physics -- or, alternatively, are they merely sophisticated pixel predictors that achieve visual realism without understanding the physical principles of reality? We address this question by developing Physics-IQ, a comprehensive benchmark dataset that can only be solved by acquiring a deep understanding of various physical principles, like fluid dynamics, optics, solid mechanics, magnetism and thermodynamics. We find that across a range of current models (Sora, Runway, Pika, Lumiere, Stable Video Diffusion, and VideoPoet), physical understanding is severely limited, and unrelated to visual realism. At the same time, some test cases can already be successfully solved. This indicates that acquiring certain physical principles from observation alone may be possible, but significant challenges remain. While we expect rapid advances ahead, our work demonstrates that visual realism does not imply physical understanding. Our project page is at https://physics-iq.github.io; code at https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-IQ-benchmark.
URLs: https://physics-iq.github.io;, https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-IQ-benchmark.
Authors: Jiangchuan Wei, Shiyue Yan, Wenfeng Lin, Boyuan Liu, Renjie Chen, Mingyu Guo
Abstract: Recent advancements in video generation have significantly impacted various downstream applications, particularly in identity-preserving video generation (IPT2V). However, existing methods struggle with "copy-paste" artifacts and low similarity issues, primarily due to their reliance on low-level facial image information. This dependence can result in rigid facial appearances and artifacts reflecting irrelevant details. To address these challenges, we propose EchoVideo, which employs two key strategies: (1) an Identity Image-Text Fusion Module (IITF) that integrates high-level semantic features from text, capturing clean facial identity representations while discarding occlusions, poses, and lighting variations to avoid the introduction of artifacts; (2) a two-stage training strategy, incorporating a stochastic method in the second phase to randomly utilize shallow facial information. The objective is to balance the enhancements in fidelity provided by shallow features while mitigating excessive reliance on them. This strategy encourages the model to utilize high-level features during training, ultimately fostering a more robust representation of facial identities. EchoVideo effectively preserves facial identities and maintains full-body integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it achieves excellent results in generating high-quality, controllability and fidelity videos.
Authors: Junyeob Baek, Yi-Fu Wu, Gautam Singh, Sungjin Ahn
Abstract: Humans have an innate ability to decompose their perceptions of the world into objects and their attributes, such as colors, shapes, and movement patterns. This cognitive process enables us to imagine novel futures by recombining familiar concepts. However, replicating this ability in artificial intelligence systems has proven challenging, particularly when it comes to modeling videos into compositional concepts and generating unseen, recomposed futures without relying on auxiliary data, such as text, masks, or bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose Dreamweaver, a neural architecture designed to discover hierarchical and compositional representations from raw videos and generate compositional future simulations. Our approach leverages a novel Recurrent Block-Slot Unit (RBSU) to decompose videos into their constituent objects and attributes. In addition, Dreamweaver uses a multi-future-frame prediction objective to capture disentangled representations for dynamic concepts more effectively as well as static concepts. In experiments, we demonstrate our model outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines for world modeling when evaluated under the DCI framework across multiple datasets. Furthermore, we show how the modularized concept representations of our model enable compositional imagination, allowing the generation of novel videos by recombining attributes from previously seen objects. cun-bjy.github.io/dreamweaver-website
Authors: Qianxi Mi, Pengcheng Yuan, Chunlei Ma, Jiedan Chen, Mingzhe Yao
Abstract: Tea flowers play a crucial role in taxonomic research and hybrid breeding for the tea plant. Tea flowering consumes the plant's nutrients, and flower thinning can regulate carbon-nitrogen metabolism, enhancing the yield and quality of young shoots. As traditional methods of observing tea flower traits are labor-intensive and inaccurate, we propose an effective framework for tea flowering quantifying. In this study, a highly representative and diverse dataset was constructed by collecting flower images from 29 tea accessions. Based on this dataset, the TflosYOLO model was built on the YOLOv5 architecture and enhanced with the Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) network, which is the first model to offer a viable solution for detecting tea flowers and predicting flower quantities. The TflosYOLO model achieved an mAP50 of 0.874, outperforming YOLOv5, YOLOv7 and YOLOv8. Furthermore, this model was tested on 34 datasets encompassing 26 tea accessions, five flowering stages, various lighting conditions, and pruned/unpruned plants, demonstrating high generalization and robustness. The correlation coefficient ($ R^2 $) between the predicted and actual flower counts was 0.974. Additionally, the TFSC (Tea Flowering Stage Classification) model - a novel Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was designed for automatic classification of the flowering stages. TFSC achieved an accuracy of 0.899. Dynamic analysis of flowering across 29 tea accessions in 2023 and 2024 was conducted, revealed significant variability in flower quantity and dynamics, with genetically similar accessions showing more consistent flowering patterns. This framework provides a solution for quantifying tea flowering, and can serve as a reference for precision horticulture.
Authors: Pengyi Li, Irina Abdullaeva, Alexander Gambashidze, Andrey Kuznetsov, Ivan Oseledets
Abstract: Modern Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) often rely on uniform frame sampling for video understanding, but this approach frequently fails to capture critical information due to frame redundancy and variations in video content. We propose MaxInfo, a training-free method based on the maximum volume principle, which selects and retains the most representative frames from the input video. By maximizing the geometric volume formed by selected embeddings, MaxInfo ensures that the chosen frames cover the most informative regions of the embedding space, effectively reducing redundancy while preserving diversity. This method enhances the quality of input representations and improves long video comprehension performance across benchmarks. For instance, MaxInfo achieves a 3.28% improvement on LongVideoBench and a 6.4% improvement on EgoSchema for LLaVA-Video-7B. It also achieves a 3.47% improvement for LLaVA-Video-72B. The approach is simple to implement and works with existing VLLMs without the need for additional training, making it a practical and effective alternative to traditional uniform sampling methods.
Authors: Ping Liu, Jiawei Du
Abstract: Dataset distillation, which condenses large-scale datasets into compact synthetic representations, has emerged as a critical solution for training modern deep learning models efficiently. While prior surveys focus on developments before 2023, this work comprehensively reviews recent advances, emphasizing scalability to large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-21K. We categorize progress into a few key methodologies: trajectory matching, gradient matching, distribution matching, scalable generative approaches, and decoupling optimization mechanisms. As a comprehensive examination of recent dataset distillation advances, this survey highlights breakthrough innovations: the SRe2L framework for efficient and effective condensation, soft label strategies that significantly enhance model accuracy, and lossless distillation techniques that maximize compression while maintaining performance. Beyond these methodological advancements, we address critical challenges, including robustness against adversarial and backdoor attacks, effective handling of non-IID data distributions. Additionally, we explore emerging applications in video and audio processing, multi-modal learning, medical imaging, and scientific computing, highlighting its domain versatility. By offering extensive performance comparisons and actionable research directions, this survey equips researchers and practitioners with practical insights to advance efficient and generalizable dataset distillation, paving the way for future innovations.
Authors: Yangguang Li, Zi-Xin Zou, Zexiang Liu, Dehu Wang, Yuan Liang, Zhipeng Yu, Xingchao Liu, Yuan-Chen Guo, Ding Liang, Wanli Ouyang, Yan-Pei Cao
Abstract: Recent advancements in diffusion techniques have propelled image and video generation to unprecedented levels of quality, significantly accelerating the deployment and application of generative AI. However, 3D shape generation technology has so far lagged behind, constrained by limitations in 3D data scale, complexity of 3D data processing, and insufficient exploration of advanced techniques in the 3D domain. Current approaches to 3D shape generation face substantial challenges in terms of output quality, generalization capability, and alignment with input conditions. We present TripoSG, a new streamlined shape diffusion paradigm capable of generating high-fidelity 3D meshes with precise correspondence to input images. Specifically, we propose: 1) A large-scale rectified flow transformer for 3D shape generation, achieving state-of-the-art fidelity through training on extensive, high-quality data. 2) A hybrid supervised training strategy combining SDF, normal, and eikonal losses for 3D VAE, achieving high-quality 3D reconstruction performance. 3) A data processing pipeline to generate 2 million high-quality 3D samples, highlighting the crucial rules for data quality and quantity in training 3D generative models. Through comprehensive experiments, we have validated the effectiveness of each component in our new framework. The seamless integration of these parts has enabled TripoSG to achieve state-of-the-art performance in 3D shape generation. The resulting 3D shapes exhibit enhanced detail due to high-resolution capabilities and demonstrate exceptional fidelity to input images. Moreover, TripoSG demonstrates improved versatility in generating 3D models from diverse image styles and contents, showcasing strong generalization capabilities. To foster progress and innovation in the field of 3D generation, we will make our model publicly available.
Authors: Yang Luo, Xuanlei Zhao, Mengzhao Chen, Kaipeng Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Kai Wang, Zhangyang Wang, Yang You
Abstract: DiT-based video generation has achieved remarkable results, but research into enhancing existing models remains relatively unexplored. In this work, we introduce a training-free approach to enhance the coherence and quality of DiT-based generated videos, named Enhance-A-Video. The core idea is enhancing the cross-frame correlations based on non-diagonal temporal attention distributions. Thanks to its simple design, our approach can be easily applied to most DiT-based video generation frameworks without any retraining or fine-tuning. Across various DiT-based video generation models, our approach demonstrates promising improvements in both temporal consistency and visual quality. We hope this research can inspire future explorations in video generation enhancement.
Authors: Peng-Fei Zhang, Guangdong Bai, Zi Huang
Abstract: Current adversarial attacks for evaluating the robustness of vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models in multi-modal tasks suffer from limited transferability, where attacks crafted for a specific model often struggle to generalize effectively across different models, limiting their utility in assessing robustness more broadly. This is mainly attributed to the over-reliance on model-specific features and regions, particularly in the image modality. In this paper, we propose an elegant yet highly effective method termed Meticulous Adversarial Attack (MAA) to fully exploit model-independent characteristics and vulnerabilities of individual samples, achieving enhanced generalizability and reduced model dependence. MAA emphasizes fine-grained optimization of adversarial images by developing a novel resizing and sliding crop (RScrop) technique, incorporating a multi-granularity similarity disruption (MGSD) strategy. Extensive experiments across diverse VLP models, multiple benchmark datasets, and a variety of downstream tasks demonstrate that MAA significantly enhances the effectiveness and transferability of adversarial attacks. A large cohort of performance studies is conducted to generate insights into the effectiveness of various model configurations, guiding future advancements in this domain.
Authors: Duc Kieu, Kien Do, Toan Nguyen, Dang Nguyen, Thin Nguyen
Abstract: Diffusion bridges have shown potential in paired image-to-image (I2I) translation tasks. However, existing methods are limited by their unidirectional nature, requiring separate models for forward and reverse translations. This not only doubles the computational cost but also restricts their practicality. In this work, we introduce the Bidirectional Diffusion Bridge Model (BDBM), a scalable approach that facilitates bidirectional translation between two coupled distributions using a single network. BDBM leverages the Chapman-Kolmogorov Equation for bridges, enabling it to model data distribution shifts across timesteps in both forward and backward directions by exploiting the interchangeability of the initial and target timesteps within this framework. Notably, when the marginal distribution given endpoints is Gaussian, BDBM's transition kernels in both directions possess analytical forms, allowing for efficient learning with a single network. We demonstrate the connection between BDBM and existing bridge methods, such as Doob's h-transform and variational approaches, and highlight its advantages. Extensive experiments on high-resolution I2I translation tasks demonstrate that BDBM not only enables bidirectional translation with minimal additional cost but also outperforms state-of-the-art bridge models. Our source code is available at [https://github.com/kvmduc/BDBM||https://github.com/kvmduc/BDBM].
URLs: https://github.com/kvmduc/BDBM, https://github.com/kvmduc/BDBM].
Authors: Yichi Zhang, Le Xue, Wenbo Zhang, Lanlan Li, Yuchen Liu, Chen Jiang, Yuan Cheng, Yuan Qi
Abstract: Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging plays a crucial role in modern medical diagnostics by revealing the metabolic processes within a patient's body, which is essential for quantification of therapy response and monitoring treatment progress. However, the segmentation of PET images presents unique challenges due to their lower contrast and less distinct boundaries compared to other structural medical modalities. Recent developments in segmentation foundation models have shown superior versatility across diverse natural image segmentation tasks. Despite the efforts of medical adaptations, these works primarily focus on structural medical images with detailed physiological structural information and exhibit poor generalization ability when adapted to molecular PET imaging. In this paper, we collect and construct PETS-5k, the largest PET segmentation dataset to date, comprising 5,731 three-dimensional whole-body PET images and encompassing over 1.3M 2D images. Based on the established dataset, we develop SegAnyPET, a modality-specific 3D foundation model for universal promptable segmentation from PET images. To issue the challenge of discrepant annotation quality of PET images, we adopt a cross prompting confident learning (CPCL) strategy with an uncertainty-guided self-rectification process to robustly learn segmentation from high-quality labeled data and low-quality noisy labeled data. Experimental results demonstrate that SegAnyPET can correctly segment seen and unseen targets using only one or a few prompt points, outperforming state-of-the-art foundation models and task-specific fully supervised models with higher accuracy and strong generalization ability for universal segmentation. As the first foundation model for PET images, we believe that SegAnyPET will advance the applications to various downstream tasks for molecular imaging.
Authors: Haoyuan Li, Yanpeng Zhou, Tao Tang, Jifei Song, Yihan Zeng, Michael Kampffmeyer, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract: Recent advancements in multi-modal 3D pre-training methods have shown promising efficacy in learning joint representations of text, images, and point clouds. However, adopting point clouds as 3D representation fails to fully capture the intricacies of the 3D world and exhibits a noticeable gap between the discrete points and the dense 2D pixels of images. To tackle this issue, we propose UniGS, integrating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into multi-modal pre-training to enhance the 3D representation. We first rely on the 3DGS representation to model the 3D world as a collection of 3D Gaussians with color and opacity, incorporating all the information of the 3D scene while establishing a strong connection with 2D images. Then, to achieve Language-Image-3D pertaining, UniGS starts with a pre-trained vision-language model to establish a shared visual and textual space through extensive real-world image-text pairs. Subsequently, UniGS employs a 3D encoder to align the optimized 3DGS with the Language-Image representations to learn unified multi-modal representations. To facilitate the extraction of global explicit 3D features by the 3D encoder and achieve better cross-modal alignment, we additionally introduce a novel Gaussian-Aware Guidance module that guides the learning of fine-grained representations of the 3D domain. Through extensive experiments across the Objaverse, ABO, MVImgNet and SUN RGBD datasets with zero-shot classification, text-driven retrieval and open-world understanding tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of UniGS in learning a more general and stronger aligned multi-modal representation. Specifically, UniGS achieves leading results across different 3D tasks with remarkable improvements over previous SOTA, Uni3D, including on zero-shot classification (+9.36%), text-driven retrieval (+4.3%) and open-world understanding (+7.92%).
Authors: Zhenyu Wang, Heng Song
Abstract: The identification of artwork is crucial in areas like cultural heritage protection, art market analysis, and historical research. With the advancement of deep learning, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformer models have become key tools for image classification. While CNNs excel in local feature extraction, they struggle with global context, and Transformers are strong in capturing global dependencies but weak in fine-grained local details. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a fusion model combining CNNs and Transformers for artwork identification. The model first extracts local features using CNNs, then captures global context with a Transformer, followed by a feature fusion mechanism to enhance classification accuracy. Experiments on Chinese and oil painting datasets show the fusion model outperforms individual CNN and Transformer models, improving classification accuracy by 9.7% and 7.1%, respectively, and increasing F1 scores by 0.06 and 0.05. The results demonstrate the model's effectiveness and potential for future improvements, such as multimodal integration and architecture optimization.
Authors: Zhaoyi Liu, Huan Zhang
Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) vision encoders learn high-quality image representations and thus have become a vital part of developing vision modality of large vision language models (LVLMs). Due to the high cost of training such encoders, pre-trained encoders are widely shared and deployed into many LVLMs, which are security-critical or bear societal significance. Under this practical scenario, we reveal a new backdoor threat that significant visual hallucinations can be induced into these LVLMs by merely compromising vision encoders. Because of the sharing and reuse of these encoders, many downstream LVLMs may inherit backdoor behaviors from encoders, leading to widespread backdoors. In this work, we propose BadVision, the first method to exploit this vulnerability in SSL vision encoders for LVLMs with novel trigger optimization and backdoor learning techniques. We evaluate BadVision on two types of SSL encoders and LVLMs across eight benchmarks. We show that BadVision effectively drives the LVLMs to attacker-chosen hallucination with over 99% attack success rate, causing a 77.6% relative visual understanding error while maintaining the stealthiness. SoTA backdoor detection methods cannot detect our attack effectively.
Authors: Alexander Groshev, Anastasiia Iashchenko, Pavel Paramonov, Denis Dimitrov, Andrey Kuznetsov
Abstract: While the task of face swapping has recently gained attention in the research community, a related problem of head swapping remains largely unexplored. In addition to skin color transfer, head swap poses extra challenges, such as the need to preserve structural information of the whole head during synthesis and inpaint gaps between swapped head and background. In this paper, we address these concerns with GHOST 2.0, which consists of two problem-specific modules. First, we introduce enhanced Aligner model for head reenactment, which preserves identity information at multiple scales and is robust to extreme pose variations. Secondly, we use a Blender module that seamlessly integrates the reenacted head into the target background by transferring skin color and inpainting mismatched regions. Both modules outperform the baselines on the corresponding tasks, allowing to achieve state of the art results in head swapping. We also tackle complex cases, such as large difference in hair styles of source and target. Code is available at https://github.com/ai-forever/ghost-2.0
Authors: Tianle Yang, Luyao Chang, Jiadong Yan, Juntao Li, Zhi Wang, Ke Zhang
Abstract: As industrial products become abundant and sophisticated, visual industrial defect detection receives much attention, including two-dimensional and three-dimensional visual feature modeling. Traditional methods use statistical analysis, abnormal data synthesis modeling, and generation-based models to separate product defect features and complete defect detection. Recently, the emergence of foundation models has brought visual and textual semantic prior knowledge. Many methods are based on foundation models (FM) to improve the accuracy of detection, but at the same time, increase model complexity and slow down inference speed. Some FM-based methods have begun to explore lightweight modeling ways, which have gradually attracted attention and deserve to be systematically analyzed. In this paper, we conduct a systematic survey with comparisons and discussions of foundation model methods from different aspects and briefly review non-foundation model (NFM) methods recently published. Furthermore, we discuss the differences between FM and NFM methods from training objectives, model structure and scale, model performance, and potential directions for future exploration. Through comparison, we find FM methods are more suitable for few-shot and zero-shot learning, which are more in line with actual industrial application scenarios and worthy of in-depth research.
Authors: Qihang Peng, Henry Zheng, Gao Huang
Abstract: Embodied intelligence requires agents to interact with 3D environments in real time based on language instructions. A foundational task in this domain is ego-centric 3D visual grounding. However, the point clouds rendered from RGB-D images retain a large amount of redundant background data and inherent noise, both of which can interfere with the manifold structure of the target regions. Existing point cloud enhancement methods often require a tedious process to improve the manifold, which is not suitable for real-time tasks. We propose Proxy Transformation suitable for multimodal task to efficiently improve the point cloud manifold. Our method first leverages Deformable Point Clustering to identify the point cloud sub-manifolds in target regions. Then, we propose a Proxy Attention module that utilizes multimodal proxies to guide point cloud transformation. Built upon Proxy Attention, we design a submanifold transformation generation module where textual information globally guides translation vectors for different submanifolds, optimizing relative spatial relationships of target regions. Simultaneously, image information guides linear transformations within each submanifold, refining the local point cloud manifold of target regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Proxy Transformation significantly outperforms all existing methods, achieving an impressive improvement of 7.49% on easy targets and 4.60% on hard targets, while reducing the computational overhead of attention blocks by 40.6%. These results establish a new SOTA in ego-centric 3D visual grounding, showcasing the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.
Authors: Ruben T. Lucassen, Tijn van de Luijtgaarden, Sander P. J. Moonemans, Gerben E. Breimer, Willeke A. M. Blokx, Mitko Veta
Abstract: Vision-language models in pathology enable multimodal case retrieval and automated report generation. Many of the models developed so far, however, have been trained on pathology reports that include information which cannot be inferred from paired whole slide images (e.g., patient history), potentially leading to hallucinated sentences in generated reports. To this end, we investigate how the selection of information from pathology reports for vision-language modeling affects the quality of the multimodal representations and generated reports. More concretely, we compare a model trained on full reports against a model trained on preprocessed reports that only include sentences describing the cell and tissue appearances based on the H&E-stained slides. For the experiments, we built upon the BLIP-2 framework and used a cutaneous melanocytic lesion dataset of 42,433 H&E-stained whole slide images and 19,636 corresponding pathology reports. Model performance was assessed using image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval, as well as qualitative evaluation of the generated reports by an expert pathologist. Our results demonstrate that text preprocessing prevents hallucination in report generation. Despite the improvement in the quality of the generated reports, training the vision-language model on full reports showed better cross-modal retrieval performance.
Authors: Ruben T. Lucassen, Sander P. J. Moonemans, Tijn van de Luijtgaarden, Gerben E. Breimer, Willeke A. M. Blokx, Mitko Veta
Abstract: Millions of melanocytic skin lesions are examined by pathologists each year, the majority of which concern common nevi (i.e., ordinary moles). While most of these lesions can be diagnosed in seconds, writing the corresponding pathology report is much more time-consuming. Automating part of the report writing could, therefore, alleviate the increasing workload of pathologists. In this work, we develop a vision-language model specifically for the pathology domain of cutaneous melanocytic lesions. The model follows the Contrastive Captioner framework and was trained and evaluated using a melanocytic lesion dataset of 42,512 H&E-stained whole slide images and 19,645 corresponding pathology reports. Our results show that the quality scores of model-generated reports were on par with pathologist-written reports for common nevi, assessed by an expert pathologist in a reader study. While report generation revealed to be more difficult for rare melanocytic lesion subtypes, the cross-modal retrieval performance for these cases was considerably better.
Authors: Qinpeng Cui, Xinyi Zhang, Qiqi Bao, Qingmin Liao
Abstract: Sampling from Diffusion Models can alternatively be seen as solving differential equations, where there is a challenge in balancing speed and image visual quality. ODE-based samplers offer rapid sampling time but reach a performance limit, whereas SDE-based samplers achieve superior quality, albeit with longer iterations. In this work, we formulate the sampling process as an Extended Reverse-Time SDE (ER SDE), unifying prior explorations into ODEs and SDEs. Theoretically, leveraging the semi-linear structure of ER SDE solutions, we offer exact solutions and approximate solutions for VP SDE and VE SDE, respectively. Based on the approximate solution space of the ER SDE, referred to as one-step prediction errors, we yield mathematical insights elucidating the rapid sampling capability of ODE solvers and the high-quality sampling ability of SDE solvers. Additionally, we unveil that VP SDE solvers stand on par with their VE SDE counterparts. Based on these findings, leveraging the dual advantages of ODE solvers and SDE solvers, we devise efficient high-quality samplers, namely ER-SDE-Solvers. Experimental results demonstrate that ER-SDE-Solvers achieve state-of-the-art performance across all stochastic samplers while maintaining efficiency of deterministic samplers. Specifically, on the ImageNet $128\times128$ dataset, ER-SDE-Solvers obtain 8.33 FID in only 20 function evaluations. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/QinpengCui/ER-SDE-Solver}{https://github.com/QinpengCui/ER-SDE-Solver}
URLs: https://github.com/QinpengCui/ER-SDE-Solver, https://github.com/QinpengCui/ER-SDE-Solver
Authors: Sisipho Hamlomo, Marcellin Atemkeng, Yusuf Brima, Chuneeta Nunhokee, Jeremy Baxter
Abstract: The large volume and complexity of medical imaging datasets are bottlenecks for storage, transmission, and processing. To tackle these challenges, the application of low-rank matrix approximation (LRMA) and its derivative, local LRMA (LLRMA) has demonstrated potential. A detailed analysis of the literature identifies LRMA and LLRMA methods applied to various imaging modalities, and the challenges and limitations associated with existing LRMA and LLRMA methods are addressed. We note a significant shift towards a preference for LLRMA in the medical imaging field since 2015, demonstrating its potential and effectiveness in capturing complex structures in medical data compared to LRMA. Acknowledging the limitations of shallow similarity methods used with LLRMA, we suggest advanced semantic image segmentation for similarity measure, explaining in detail how it can be used to measure similar patches and its feasibility. We note that LRMA and LLRMA are mainly applied to unstructured medical data, and we propose extending their application to different medical data types, including structured and semi-structured. This paper also discusses how LRMA and LLRMA can be applied to regular data with missing entries and the impact of inaccuracies in predicting missing values and their effects. We discuss the impact of patch size and propose the use of random search (RS) to determine the optimal patch size. To enhance feasibility, a hybrid approach using Bayesian optimization and RS is proposed, which could improve the application of LRMA and LLRMA in medical imaging.
Authors: Quentin Jodelet, Xin Liu, Yin Jun Phua, Tsuyoshi Murata
Abstract: Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning is a highly challenging setting where replay memory is unavailable. Methods relying on frozen feature extractors have drawn attention recently in this setting due to their impressive performances and lower computational costs. However, those methods are highly dependent on the data used to train the feature extractor and may struggle when an insufficient amount of classes are available during the first incremental step. To overcome this limitation, we propose to use a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model in order to generate synthetic images of future classes and use them to train the feature extractor. Experiments on the standard benchmarks CIFAR100 and ImageNet-Subset demonstrate that our proposed method can be used to improve state-of-the-art methods for exemplar-free class incremental learning, especially in the most difficult settings where the first incremental step only contains few classes. Moreover, we show that using synthetic samples of future classes achieves higher performance than using real data from different classes, paving the way for better and less costly pre-training methods for incremental learning.
Authors: Aastha Acharya, Caleb Lee, Marissa D'Alonzo, Jared Shamwell, Nisar R. Ahmed, Rebecca Russell
Abstract: Deep learning offers promising new ways to accurately model aleatoric uncertainty in robotic state estimation systems, particularly when the uncertainty distributions do not conform to traditional assumptions of being fixed and Gaussian. In this study, we formulate and evaluate three fundamental deep learning approaches for conditional probability density modeling to quantify non-Gaussian aleatoric uncertainty: parametric, discretized, and generative modeling. We systematically compare the respective strengths and weaknesses of these three methods on simulated non-Gaussian densities as well as on real-world terrain-relative navigation data. Our results show that these deep learning methods can accurately capture complex uncertainty patterns, highlighting their potential for improving the reliability and robustness of estimation systems.
Authors: Guangyi Zhang, Hanlei Li, Yunlong Cai, Qiyu Hu, Guanding Yu, Runmin Zhang
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce an innovative hierarchical joint source-channel coding (HJSCC) framework for image transmission, utilizing a hierarchical variational autoencoder (VAE). Our approach leverages a combination of bottom-up and top-down paths at the transmitter to autoregressively generate multiple hierarchical representations of the original image. These representations are then directly mapped to channel symbols for transmission by the JSCC encoder. We extend this framework to scenarios with a feedback link, modeling transmission over a noisy channel as a probabilistic sampling process and deriving a novel generative formulation for JSCC with feedback. Compared with existing approaches, our proposed HJSCC provides enhanced adaptability by dynamically adjusting transmission bandwidth, encoding these representations into varying amounts of channel symbols. Extensive experiments on images of varying resolutions demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms existing baselines in rate-distortion performance and maintains robustness against channel noise. The source code will be made available upon acceptance.
Authors: Barak Gahtan, Robert J. Shahla, Alex M. Bronstein, Reuven Cohen
Abstract: The increasing adoption of the QUIC transport protocol has transformed encrypted web traffic, necessitating new methodologies for network analysis. However, existing datasets lack the scope, metadata, and decryption capabilities required for robust benchmarking in encrypted traffic research. We introduce VisQUIC, a large-scale dataset of 100,000 labeled QUIC traces from over 44,000 websites, collected over four months. Unlike prior datasets, VisQUIC provides SSL keys for controlled decryption, supports multiple QUIC implementations (Chromium QUIC, Facebooks mvfst, Cloudflares quiche), and introduces a novel image-based representation that enables machine learning-driven encrypted traffic analysis. The dataset includes standardized benchmarking tools, ensuring reproducibility. To demonstrate VisQUICs utility, we present a benchmarking task for estimating HTTP/3 responses in encrypted QUIC traffic, achieving 97% accuracy using only observable packet features. By publicly releasing VisQUIC, we provide an open foundation for advancing encrypted traffic analysis, QUIC security research, and network monitoring.
Authors: Hao Yan, Chaozhuo Li, Jun Yin, Zhigang Yu, Weihao Han, Mingzheng Li, Zhengxin Zeng, Hao Sun, Senzhang Wang
Abstract: Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications, encompassing extensive knowledge through multimodal attributes attached to nodes (e.g., texts and images) and topological structure representing node interactions. Despite its potential to advance diverse research fields like social networks and e-commerce, MAG representation learning (MAGRL) remains underexplored due to the lack of standardized datasets and evaluation frameworks. In this paper, we first propose MAGB, a comprehensive MAG benchmark dataset, featuring curated graphs from various domains with both textual and visual attributes. Based on MAGB dataset, we further systematically evaluate two mainstream MAGRL paradigms: $\textit{GNN-as-Predictor}$, which integrates multimodal attributes via Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and $\textit{VLM-as-Predictor}$, which harnesses Vision Language Models (VLMs) for zero-shot reasoning. Extensive experiments on MAGB reveal following critical insights: $\textit{(i)}$ Modality significances fluctuate drastically with specific domain characteristics. $\textit{(ii)}$ Multimodal embeddings can elevate the performance ceiling of GNNs. However, intrinsic biases among modalities may impede effective training, particularly in low-data scenarios. $\textit{(iii)}$ VLMs are highly effective at generating multimodal embeddings that alleviate the imbalance between textual and visual attributes. These discoveries, which illuminate the synergy between multimodal attributes and graph topologies, contribute to reliable benchmarks, paving the way for future MAG research. The MAGB dataset and evaluation pipeline are publicly available at https://github.com/sktsherlock/MAGB.
Authors: Thao Do, Dinh Phu Tran, An Vo, Daeyoung Kim
Abstract: Extracting fine-grained OCR text from aged documents in diacritic languages remains challenging due to unexpected artifacts, time-induced degradation, and lack of datasets. While standalone spell correction approaches have been proposed, they show limited performance for historical documents due to numerous possible OCR error combinations and differences between modern and classical corpus distributions. We propose a method utilizing available content-focused ebooks as a reference base to correct imperfect OCR-generated text, supported by large language models. This technique generates high-precision pseudo-page-to-page labels for diacritic languages, where small strokes pose significant challenges in historical conditions. The pipeline eliminates various types of noise from aged documents and addresses issues such as missing characters, words, and disordered sequences. Our post-processing method, which generated a large OCR dataset of classical Vietnamese books, achieved a mean grading score of 8.72 on a 10-point scale. This outperformed the state-of-the-art transformer-based Vietnamese spell correction model, which scored 7.03 when evaluated on a sampled subset of the dataset. We also trained a baseline OCR model to assess and compare it with well-known engines. Experimental results demonstrate the strength of our baseline model compared to widely used open-source solutions. The resulting dataset will be released publicly to support future studies.
Authors: Jingyi Zhou, Senlin Luo, Haofan Chen
Abstract: Text emotion detection constitutes a crucial foundation for advancing artificial intelligence from basic comprehension to the exploration of emotional reasoning. Most existing emotion detection datasets rely on manual annotations, which are associated with high costs, substantial subjectivity, and severe label imbalances. This is particularly evident in the inadequate annotation of micro-emotions and the absence of emotional intensity representation, which fail to capture the rich emotions embedded in sentences and adversely affect the quality of downstream task completion. By proposing an all-labels and training-set label regression method, we map label values to energy intensity levels, thereby fully leveraging the learning capabilities of machine models and the interdependencies among labels to uncover multiple emotions within samples. This led to the establishment of the Emotion Quantization Network (EQN) framework for micro-emotion detection and annotation. Using five commonly employed sentiment datasets, we conducted comparative experiments with various models, validating the broad applicability of our framework within NLP machine learning models. Based on the EQN framework, emotion detection and annotation are conducted on the GoEmotions dataset. A comprehensive comparison with the results from Google literature demonstrates that the EQN framework possesses a high capability for automatic detection and annotation of micro-emotions. The EQN framework is the first to achieve automatic micro-emotion annotation with energy-level scores, providing strong support for further emotion detection analysis and the quantitative research of emotion computing.
Authors: Tianxing Chen, Yao Mu, Zhixuan Liang, Zanxin Chen, Shijia Peng, Qiangyu Chen, Mingkun Xu, Ruizhen Hu, Hongyuan Zhang, Xuelong Li, Ping Luo
Abstract: Recent advances in imitation learning for 3D robotic manipulation have shown promising results with diffusion-based policies. However, achieving human-level dexterity requires seamless integration of geometric precision and semantic understanding. We present G3Flow, a novel framework that constructs real-time semantic flow, a dynamic, object-centric 3D semantic representation by leveraging foundation models. Our approach uniquely combines 3D generative models for digital twin creation, vision foundation models for semantic feature extraction, and robust pose tracking for continuous semantic flow updates. This integration enables complete semantic understanding even under occlusions while eliminating manual annotation requirements. By incorporating semantic flow into diffusion policies, we demonstrate significant improvements in both terminal-constrained manipulation and cross-object generalization. Extensive experiments across five simulation tasks show that G3Flow consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving up to 68.3% and 50.1% average success rates on terminal-constrained manipulation and cross-object generalization tasks respectively. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of G3Flow in enhancing real-time dynamic semantic feature understanding for robotic manipulation policies.
Authors: Alexis Fox, Samarth Swarup, Abhijin Adiga
Abstract: Considering the difficulty of interpreting generative model output, there is significant current research focused on determining meaningful evaluation metrics. Several recent approaches utilize "precision" and "recall," borrowed from the classification domain, to individually quantify the output fidelity (realism) and output diversity (representation of the real data variation), respectively. With the increase in metric proposals, there is a need for a unifying perspective, allowing for easier comparison and clearer explanation of their benefits and drawbacks. To this end, we unify a class of kth-nearest-neighbors (kNN)-based metrics under an information-theoretic lens using approaches from kNN density estimation. Additionally, we propose a tri-dimensional metric composed of Precision Cross-Entropy (PCE), Recall Cross-Entropy (RCE), and Recall Entropy (RE), which separately measure fidelity and two distinct aspects of diversity, inter- and intra-class. Our domain-agnostic metric, derived from the information-theoretic concepts of entropy and cross-entropy, can be dissected for both sample- and mode-level analysis. Our detailed experimental results demonstrate the sensitivity of our metric components to their respective qualities and reveal undesirable behaviors of other metrics.
Authors: Du Chen, Liyi Chen, Zhengqiang Zhang, Lei Zhang
Abstract: Implicit Neural Representation (INR) has been successfully employed for Arbitrary-scale Super-Resolution (ASR). However, INR-based models need to query the multi-layer perceptron module numerous times and render a pixel in each query, resulting in insufficient representation capability and computational efficiency. Recently, Gaussian Splatting (GS) has shown its advantages over INR in both visual quality and rendering speed in 3D tasks, which motivates us to explore whether GS can be employed for the ASR task. However, directly applying GS to ASR is exceptionally challenging because the original GS is an optimization-based method through overfitting each single scene, while in ASR we aim to learn a single model that can generalize to different images and scaling factors. We overcome these challenges by developing two novel techniques. Firstly, to generalize GS for ASR, we elaborately design an architecture to predict the corresponding image-conditioned Gaussians of the input low-resolution image in a feed-forward manner. Each Gaussian can fit the shape and direction of an area of complex textures, showing powerful representation capability. Secondly, we implement an efficient differentiable 2D GPU/CUDA-based scale-aware rasterization to render super-resolved images by sampling discrete RGB values from the predicted continuous Gaussians. Via end-to-end training, our optimized network, namely GSASR, can perform ASR for any image and unseen scaling factors. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code and models will be released.
Authors: Shadab Ahamed, Simon Ghyselincks, Pablo Chang Huang Arias, Julian Kloiber, Yasin Ranjbar, Jingrong Tang, Niloufar Zakariaei, Eldad Haber
Abstract: Magnetic data inversion is an important tool in geophysics, used to infer subsurface magnetic susceptibility distributions from surface magnetic field measurements. This inverse problem is inherently ill-posed, characterized by non-unique solutions, depth ambiguity, and sensitivity to noise. Traditional inversion approaches rely on predefined regularization techniques to stabilize solutions, limiting their adaptability to complex or diverse geological scenarios. In this study, we propose an approach that integrates variable dictionary learning and scale-space methods to address these challenges. Our method employs learned dictionaries, allowing for adaptive representation of complex subsurface features that are difficult to capture with predefined bases. Additionally, we extend classical variational inversion by incorporating multi-scale representations through a scale-space framework, enabling the progressive introduction of structural detail while mitigating overfitting. We implement both fixed and dynamic dictionary learning techniques, with the latter introducing iteration-dependent dictionaries for enhanced flexibility. Using a synthetic dataset to simulate geological scenarios, we demonstrate significant improvements in reconstruction accuracy and robustness compared to conventional variational and dictionary-based methods. Our results highlight the potential of learned dictionaries, especially when coupled with scale-space dynamics, to improve model recovery and noise handling. These findings underscore the promise of our data-driven approach for advance magnetic data inversion and its applications in geophysical exploration, environmental assessment, and mineral prospecting. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ahxmeds/magnetic-inversion-dictionary.git.
URLs: https://github.com/ahxmeds/magnetic-inversion-dictionary.git.
Authors: Linxiao Gong, Hao Yang, Gaoyun Fang, Bobo Ju, Juncen Guo, Xiaoguang Zhu, Xiping Hu, Yan Wang, Peng Sun, Azzedine Boukerche
Abstract: The explosive growth of video data has driven the development of distributed video analytics in cloud-edge-terminal collaborative (CETC) systems, enabling efficient video processing, real-time inference, and privacy-preserving analysis. Among multiple advantages, CETC systems can distribute video processing tasks and enable adaptive analytics across cloud, edge, and terminal devices, leading to breakthroughs in video surveillance, autonomous driving, and smart cities. In this survey, we first analyze fundamental architectural components, including hierarchical, distributed, and hybrid frameworks, alongside edge computing platforms and resource management mechanisms. Building upon these foundations, edge-centric approaches emphasize on-device processing, edge-assisted offloading, and edge intelligence, while cloud-centric methods leverage powerful computational capabilities for complex video understanding and model training. Our investigation also covers hybrid video analytics incorporating adaptive task offloading and resource-aware scheduling techniques that optimize performance across the entire system. Beyond conventional approaches, recent advances in large language models and multimodal integration reveal both opportunities and challenges in platform scalability, data protection, and system reliability. Future directions also encompass explainable systems, efficient processing mechanisms, and advanced video analytics, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in this dynamic field.
Authors: Wangyu Wu, Siqi Song, Xianglin Qiu, Xiaowei Huang, Fei Ma, Jimin Xiao
Abstract: Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) aims to predict future user interactions based on historical interactions across multiple domains. The key challenge in CDSR is effectively capturing cross-domain user preferences by fully leveraging both intra-sequence and inter-sequence item interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Image Fusion for Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (IFCDSR), which incorporates item image information to better capture visual preferences. Our approach integrates a frozen CLIP model to generate image embeddings, enriching original item embeddings with visual data from both intra-sequence and inter-sequence interactions. Additionally, we employ a multiple attention layer to capture cross-domain interests, enabling joint learning of single-domain and cross-domain user preferences. To validate the effectiveness of IFCDSR, we re-partitioned four e-commerce datasets and conducted extensive experiments. Results demonstrate that IFCDSR significantly outperforms existing methods.
Authors: Luis Lara, Lucia Eve Berger, Rajesh Raju
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic strained healthcare resources and prompted discussion about how machine learning can alleviate physician burdens and contribute to diagnosis. Chest x-rays (CXRs) are used for diagnosis of COVID-19, but few studies predict the severity of a patient's condition from CXRs. In this study, we produce a large COVID severity dataset by merging three sources and investigate the efficacy of transfer learning using ImageNet- and CXR-pretrained models and vision transformers (ViTs) in both severity regression and classification tasks. A pretrained DenseNet161 model performed the best on the three class severity prediction problem, reaching 80% accuracy overall and 77.3%, 83.9%, and 70% on mild, moderate and severe cases, respectively. The ViT had the best regression results, with a mean absolute error of 0.5676 compared to radiologist-predicted severity scores. The project's source code is publicly available.
Authors: Yuhan Tang, Yudian Wang, Weizhen Li, Ye Yue, Chengchang Pan, Honggang Qi
Abstract: Fundus image quality is crucial for diagnosing eye diseases, but real-world conditions often result in blurred or unreadable images, increasing diagnostic uncertainty. To address these challenges, this study proposes RetinaRegen, a hybrid model for retinal image restoration that integrates a readability classifi-cation model, a Diffusion Model, and a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Ex-periments on the SynFundus-1M dataset show that the proposed method achieves a PSNR of 27.4521, an SSIM of 0.9556, and an LPIPS of 0.1911 for the readability labels of the optic disc (RO) region. These results demonstrate superior performance in restoring key regions, offering an effective solution to enhance fundus image quality and support clinical diagnosis.