GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Object-level Geometric Structure Preserving for Natural Image Stitching
Authors: Wenxiao Cai; Wankou Yang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: The topic of stitching images with globally natural structures holds paramount significance, with two main goals: pixel-level alignment and distortion prevention. The existing approaches exhibit the ability to align well, yet fall short in maintaining object structures. In this paper, we endeavour to safeguard the overall OBJect-level structures within images based on Global Similarity Prior (OBJ-GSP), on the basis of good alignment performance. Our approach leverages semantic segmentation models like the family of Segment Anything Model to extract the contours of any objects in a scene. Triangular meshes are employed in image transformation to protect the overall shapes of objects within images. The balance between alignment and distortion prevention is achieved by allowing the object meshes to strike a balance between similarity and projective transformation. We also demonstrate that object-level semantic information is necessary in low-altitude aerial image stitching. Additionally, we propose StitchBench, the largest image stitching benchmark with most diverse scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that OBJ-GSP outperforms existing methods in both pixel alignment and shape preservation.
Zero-shot Video Restoration and Enhancement Using Pre-Trained Image Diffusion Model
Authors: Cong Cao; Huanjing Yue; Xin Liu; Jingyu Yang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion-based zero-shot image restoration and enhancement models have achieved great success in various tasks of image restoration and enhancement. However, directly applying them to video restoration and enhancement results in severe temporal flickering artifacts. In this paper, we propose the first framework for zero-shot video restoration and enhancement based on the pre-trained image diffusion model. By replacing the spatial self-attention layer with the proposed short-long-range (SLR) temporal attention layer, the pre-trained image diffusion model can take advantage of the temporal correlation between frames. We further propose temporal consistency guidance, spatial-temporal noise sharing, and an early stopping sampling strategy to improve temporally consistent sampling. Our method is a plug-and-play module that can be inserted into any diffusion-based image restoration or enhancement methods to further improve their performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.
ObjVariantEnsemble: Advancing Point Cloud LLM Evaluation in Challenging Scenes with Subtly Distinguished Objects
Authors: Qihang Cao; Huangxun Chen
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: 3D scene understanding is an important task, and there has been a recent surge of research interest in aligning 3D representations of point clouds with text to empower embodied AI. However, due to the lack of comprehensive 3D benchmarks, the capabilities of 3D models in real-world scenes, particularly those that are challenging with subtly distinguished objects, remain insufficiently investigated. To facilitate a more thorough evaluation of 3D models' capabilities, we propose a scheme, ObjVariantEnsemble, to systematically introduce more scenes with specified object classes, colors, shapes, quantities, and spatial relationships to meet model evaluation needs. More importantly, we intentionally construct scenes with similar objects to a certain degree and design an LLM-VLM-cooperated annotator to capture key distinctions as annotations. The resultant benchmark can better challenge 3D models, reveal their shortcomings in understanding, and potentially aid in the further development of 3D models.
Deep Graph Online Hashing for Multi-Label Image Retrieval
Authors: Yuan Cao; Xiangru Chen; Zifan Liu; Wenzhe Jia; Fanlei Meng; Jie Gui
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Online hashing has attracted much research attention for large-scale image retrieval in a streaming way. The main challenge lies in keeping balance between high retrieval accuracy and low training time. Existing online hashing methods almost rely on shallow models rather than deep networks due to high training costs, because it is unacceptable to update hash functions on an order of hours. In addition, the multi-label supervision information is not fully utilized to guide the hash learning process and the affinity matrix is always fixed once constructed. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Graph Online Hashing (DGOH) method, which for the first time introduces inductive graph neural networks (GNNs) to realize deep online hashing with acceptable training costs on an order of seconds. Furthermore, we mine the multi-label information of the images by constructing a label network and learn label-wise weights dynamically to help to update the affinity matrix. In addition, we provide a strategy to obtain examples from the old data to solve the catastrophic forgetting problem. An integrated objective function is designed to train the entire architecture. Extensive experiments on two common benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves up to 13.3% accuracy gains over state-of-the-art baselines and shows competitive performance on training time.
Adaptive Guidance: Training-free Acceleration of Conditional Diffusion Models
Authors: Angela Castillo; Jonas Kohler; Juan C. Pérez; Juan Pablo Pérez; Albert Pumarola; Bernard Ghanem; Pablo Arbeláez; Ali Thabet
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive study on the role of Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) in text-conditioned diffusion models from the perspective of inference efficiency. In particular, we relax the default choice of applying CFG in all diffusion steps and instead propose to search for more efficient guidance policies. We formulate the discovery of such policies in the framework of differentiable neural architecture search. Our findings suggest that, as denoising progresses, the updates produced by CFG become increasingly aligned with simple conditional steps, which renders CFG's additional neural network evaluation redundant, especially in the second half of the denoising process. Building upon this insight, we propose "Adaptive Guidance" (AG), an efficient variant of CFG that adaptively omits network evaluations when the denoising process displays convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that AG preserves CFG's image quality while reducing computation by 25%. Thus, AG constitutes a plug-and-play alternative to Guidance Distillation, achieving 50% of the speed-ups of the latter, while being training-free and retaining the capacity to handle negative prompts. We conclude by uncovering further redundancies of CFG in the first half of the diffusion process, showing that entire neural network evaluations can be replaced by simple affine transformations of past score estimates.
Segment Any 3D Gaussians
Authors: Jiazhong Cen; Jiemin Fang; Chen Yang; Lingxi Xie; Xiaopeng Zhang; Wei Shen; Qi Tian
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: This paper presents SAGA (Segment Any 3D GAussians), a highly efficient 3D promptable segmentation method based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS). Given 2D visual prompts as input, SAGA can segment the corresponding 3D target represented by 3D Gaussians within 4 ms. This is achieved by attaching a scale-gated affinity feature to each 3D Gaussian to endow it a new property towards multi-granularity segmentation. Specifically, a scale-aware contrastive training strategy is proposed for the scale-gated affinity feature learning. It 1) distills the segmentation capability of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) from 2D masks into the affinity features and 2) employs a soft scale gate mechanism to deal with multi-granularity ambiguity in 3D segmentation through adjusting the magnitude of each feature channel according to a specified 3D physical scale. Evaluations demonstrate that SAGA achieves real-time multi-granularity segmentation with quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods. As one of the first methods addressing promptable segmentation in 3D-GS, the simplicity and effectiveness of SAGA pave the way for future advancements in this field.
Text2Relight: Creative Portrait Relighting with Text Guidance
Authors: Junuk Cha; Mengwei Ren; Krishna Kumar Singh; He Zhang; Yannick Hold-Geoffroy; Seunghyun Yoon; HyunJoon Jung; Jae Shin Yoon; Seungryul Baek
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: We present a lighting-aware image editing pipeline that, given a portrait image and a text prompt, performs single image relighting. Our model modifies the lighting and color of both the foreground and background to align with the provided text description. The unbounded nature in creativeness of a text allows us to describe the lighting of a scene with any sensory features including temperature, emotion, smell, time, and so on. However, the modeling of such mapping between the unbounded text and lighting is extremely challenging due to the lack of dataset where there exists no scalable data that provides large pairs of text and relighting, and therefore, current text-driven image editing models does not generalize to lighting-specific use cases. We overcome this problem by introducing a novel data synthesis pipeline: First, diverse and creative text prompts that describe the scenes with various lighting are automatically generated under a crafted hierarchy using a large language model (e.g., ChatGPT). A text-guided image generation model creates a lighting image that best matches the text. As a condition of the lighting images, we perform image-based relighting for both foreground and background using a single portrait image or a set of OLAT (One-Light-at-A-Time) images captured from lightstage system. Particularly for the background relighting, we represent the lighting image as a set of point lights and transfer them to other background images. A generative diffusion model learns the synthesized large-scale data with auxiliary task augmentation (e.g., portrait delighting and light positioning) to correlate the latent text and lighting distribution for text-guided portrait relighting. In our experiment, we demonstrate that our model outperforms existing text-guided image generation models, showing high-quality portrait relighting results with a strong generalization to unconstrained scenes.
KeyGS: A Keyframe-Centric Gaussian Splatting Method for Monocular Image Sequences
Authors: Keng-Wei Chang; Zi-Ming Wang; Shang-Hong Lai
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Reconstructing high-quality 3D models from sparse 2D images has garnered significant attention in computer vision. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has gained prominence due to its explicit representation with efficient training speed and real-time rendering capabilities. However, existing methods still heavily depend on accurate camera poses for reconstruction. Although some recent approaches attempt to train 3DGS models without the Structure-from-Motion (SfM) preprocessing from monocular video datasets, these methods suffer from prolonged training times, making them impractical for many applications.

In this paper, we present an efficient framework that operates without any depth or matching model. Our approach initially uses SfM to quickly obtain rough camera poses within seconds, and then refines these poses by leveraging the dense representation in 3DGS. This framework effectively addresses the issue of long training times. Additionally, we integrate the densification process with joint refinement and propose a coarse-to-fine frequency-aware densification to reconstruct different levels of details. This approach prevents camera pose estimation from being trapped in local minima or drifting due to high-frequency signals. Our method significantly reduces training time from hours to minutes while achieving more accurate novel view synthesis and camera pose estimation compared to previous methods.
WaterDiffusion: Learning a Prior-involved Unrolling Diffusion for Joint Underwater Saliency Detection and Visual Restoration
Authors: Laibin Chang; Yunke Wang; Longxiang Deng; Bo Du; Chang Xu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Underwater salient object detection (USOD) plays a pivotal role in various vision-based marine exploration tasks. However, existing USOD techniques face the dilemma of object mislocalization and imprecise boundaries due to the complex underwater environment. The quality degradation of raw underwater images (caused by selective absorption and medium scattering) makes it challenging to perform instance detection directly. One conceivable approach involves initially removing visual disturbances through underwater image enhancement (UIE), followed by saliency detection. However, this two-stage approach neglects the potential positive impact of the restoration procedure on saliency detection due to it executes in a cascade. Based on this insight, we propose a generalized prior-involved diffusion model, called WaterDiffusion for collaborative underwater saliency detection and visual restoration. Specifically, we first propose a revised self-attention joint diffusion, which embeds dynamic saliency masks into the diffusive network as latent features. By extending the underwater degradation prior into the multi-scale decoder, we innovatively exploit optical transmission maps to aid in localizing underwater salient objects. Then, we further design a gate-guided binary indicator to select either normalized or raw channels for improving feature generalization. Finally, the Half-quadratic Splitting is introduced into the unfolding sampling to refine saliency masks iteratively. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of WaterDiffusion over state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
RFL: Simplifying Chemical Structure Recognition with Ring-Free Language
Authors: Qikai Chang; Mingjun Chen; Changpeng Pi; Pengfei Hu; Zhenrong Zhang; Jiefeng Ma; Jun Du; Baocai Yin; Jinshui Hu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: The primary objective of Optical Chemical Structure Recognition is to identify chemical structure images into corresponding markup sequences. However, the complex two-dimensional structures of molecules, particularly those with rings and multiple branches, present significant challenges for current end-to-end methods to learn one-dimensional markup directly. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Ring-Free Language (RFL), which utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy to describe chemical structures in a hierarchical form. RFL allows complex molecular structures to be decomposed into multiple parts, ensuring both uniqueness and conciseness while enhancing readability. This approach significantly reduces the learning difficulty for recognition models. Leveraging RFL, we propose a universal Molecular Skeleton Decoder (MSD), which comprises a skeleton generation module that progressively predicts the molecular skeleton and individual rings, along with a branch classification module for predicting branch information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RFL and MSD can be applied to various mainstream methods, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in both printed and handwritten scenarios.
Motion-Zero: A Zero-Shot Trajectory Control Framework of Moving Object for Diffusion-Based Video Generation
Authors: Changgu Chen; Junwei Shu; Gaoqi He; Changbo Wang; Yang Li
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Recent large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have demonstrated a powerful generative ability to produce high-quality videos from detailed text descriptions. However, exerting control over the motion of objects in videos generated by any video diffusion model remains
a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot moving object trajectory control framework, Motion-Zero, to enable arbitrary single-object-trajectory control for the text-to-video diffusion model.  To this end, an initial noise prior module is designed to provide a position-based prior to improve the stability of the appearance of the moving object and the accuracy of position. In addition, based on the attention map of the U-Net, spatial constraints are directly applied to the denoising process of diffusion models, which further ensures the positional consistency of moving objects during the inference. Furthermore, temporal consistency is guaranteed with a proposed shift temporal attention mechanism. Our method can be flexibly applied to various state-of-the-art video diffusion models without any training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate our proposed method can control the motion trajectories of arbitrary objects while preserving the original ability to generate high-quality videos.
Sharpening Neural Implicit Functions with Frequency Consolidation Priors
Authors: Chao Chen; Yu-Shen Liu; Zhizhong Han
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) are vital implicit representations to represent high fidelity 3D surfaces. Current methods mainly leverage a neural network to learn an SDF from various supervisions including signed distances, 3D point clouds, or multi-view images. However, due to various reasons including the bias of neural network on low frequency content, 3D unaware sampling, sparsity in point clouds, or low resolutions of images, neural implicit representations still struggle to represent geometries with high frequency components like sharp structures, especially for the ones learned from images or point clouds. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a method to sharpen a low frequency SDF observation by recovering its high frequency components, pursuing a sharper and more complete surface. Our key idea is to learn a mapping from a low frequency observation to a full frequency coverage in a data-driven manner, leading to a prior knowledge of shape consolidation in the frequency domain, dubbed frequency consolidation priors. To better generalize a learned prior to unseen shapes, we introduce to represent frequency components as embeddings and disentangle the embedding of the low frequency component from the embedding of the full frequency component. This disentanglement allows the prior to generalize on an unseen low frequency observation by simply recovering its full frequency embedding through a test-time self-reconstruction. Our evaluations under widely used benchmarks or real scenes show that our method can recover high frequency component and produce more accurate surfaces than the latest methods.
MaskPrompt: Open-Vocabulary Affordance Segmentation with Object Shape Mask Prompts
Authors: Dongpan Chen; Dehui Kong; Jinghua Li; Baocai Yin
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Affordance refers to the interactable functional properties of an object, and affordance segmentation aims to pixel-level segment the object functional parts in a given image, which is crucial for various interactive vision tasks. Existing methods address the affordance segmentation problem by utilizing only image features, they can hardly solve the problems of interference between adjacent object pixels in complex scenes, and inability to generalize to the open-world. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel open-vocabulary affordance segmentation task and a benchmark dataset, and propose an approach with object shape mask prompts. The mask is used as prior for different granularity visual feature enhancement and fine-grained text prompt embedding. Specifically, we first propose a mask prompt generation module, which generates refined object shape masks, as well as text prompts for mask-focused regions. Based on the masks, we propose a mask prompt feature enhancement module. It uses masks to encode instance features, and then aggregates them with global features to enhance the visual feature representation. The enhanced visual features are combined with text prompts of different granularity to generate class-agnostic affordance mask proposals. We finally classify these proposals in a proposed affordance prediction module. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations compared with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance on a proposed benchmark dataset. Our approach is also competitive on other open-vocabulary part segmentation datasets.
Skeleton-based Action Recognition with Non-linear Dependency Modeling and Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion
Authors: Haipeng Chen; Yuheng Yang; Yingda Lyu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Human skeleton-based action recognition has long been an indispensable aspect of artificial intelligence. Current state-of-the-art methods tend to consider only the dependencies between connected skeletal joints, limiting their ability to capture non-linear dependencies between physically distant joints. Moreover, most existing approaches distinguish action classes by estimating the probability density of motion representations, yet the high-dimensional nature of human motions invokes inherent difficulties in accomplishing such measurements. In this paper, we seek to tackle these challenges from two directions: (1) We propose a novel dependency refinement approach that explicitly models dependencies between any pair of joints, effectively transcending the limitations imposed by joint distance. (2) We further propose a framework that utilizes the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion to differentiate action classes without being affected by data dimensionality, and mathematically derive learning objectives guaranteeing precise recognition. Empirically, our approach sets the state-of-the-art performance on NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and Northwestern-UCLA datasets.
Causal-Inspired Multitask Learning for Video-Based Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Haipeng Chen; Sifan Wu; Zhigang Wang; Yifang Yin; Yingying Jiao; Yingda Lyu; Zhenguang Liu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Video-based human pose estimation has long been a fundamental yet challenging problem in computer vision. Previous studies focus on spatio-temporal modeling through the enhancement of architecture design and optimization strategies. However, they overlook the causal relationships in the joints, leading to models that may be overly tailored and thus estimate poorly to challenging scenes. Therefore, adequate causal reasoning capability, coupled with good interpretability of model, are both indispensable and prerequisite for achieving reliable results. In this paper, we pioneer a causal perspective on pose estimation and introduce a causal-inspired multitask learning framework, consisting of two stages. In the first stage, we try to endow the model with causal spatio-temporal modeling ability by introducing two self-supervision auxiliary tasks. Specifically, these auxiliary tasks enable the network to infer challenging keypoints based on observed keypoint information, thereby imbuing causal reasoning capabilities into the model and making it robust to challenging scenes. In the second stage, we argue that not all feature tokens contribute equally to pose estimation. Prioritizing causal (keypoint-relevant) tokens is crucial to achieve reliable results, which could improve the interpretability of the model. To this end, we propose a Token Causal Importance Selection module to identify the causal tokens and non-causal tokens (e.g., background and objects). Additionally, non-causal tokens could provide potentially beneficial cues but may be redundant. We further introduce a non-causal tokens clustering module to merge the similar non-causal tokens. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three large-scale benchmark datasets.