OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
LaMPilot: An Open Benchmark Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Language Model Programs
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous driving (AD) has made significant strides in recent years. However, existing frameworks struggle to interpret and execute spontaneous user instructions, such as "overtake the car ahead." Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities showing potential to bridge this gap. In this paper, we present LaMPilot, a novel framework that integrates LLMs into AD systems, enabling them to follow user instructions by generating code that leverages established functional primitives. We also introduce LaMPilot-Bench, the first benchmark dataset specifically designed to quantitatively evaluate the efficacy of language model programs in AD. Adopting the LaMPilot framework, we conduct extensive experiments to assess the performance of off-the-shelf LLMs on LaMPilot-Bench. Our results demonstrate the potential of LLMs in handling diverse driving scenarios and following user instructions in driving. To facilitate further research in this area, we release our code and data at https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/LaMPilot.
FairDeDup: Detecting and Mitigating Vision-Language Fairness Disparities in Semantic Dataset Deduplication
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Recent dataset deduplication techniques have demonstrated that content-aware dataset pruning can dramatically reduce the cost of training Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) models without significant performance losses compared to training on the original dataset. These results have been based on pruning commonly used image-caption datasets collected from the web -- datasets that are known to harbor harmful social biases that may then be codified in trained models. In this work, we evaluate how deduplication affects the prevalence of these biases in the resulting trained models and introduce an easy-to-implement modification to the recent SemDeDup algorithm that can reduce the negative effects that we observe. When examining CLIP-style models trained on deduplicated variants of LAION-400M, we find our proposed FairDeDup algorithm consistently leads to improved fairness metrics over SemDeDup on the FairFace and FACET datasets while maintaining zero-shot performance on CLIP benchmarks.
Auto MC-Reward: Automated Dense Reward Design with Large Language Models for Minecraft
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Many reinforcement learning environments (e.g., Minecraft) provide only sparse rewards that indicate task completion or failure with binary values. The challenge in exploration efficiency in such environments makes it difficult for reinforcement-learning-based agents to learn complex tasks. To address this, this paper introduces an advanced learning system, named Auto MC-Reward, that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically design dense reward functions, thereby enhancing the learning efficiency. Auto MC-Reward consists of three important components: Reward Designer, Reward Critic, and Trajectory Analyzer. Given the environment information and task descriptions, the Reward Designer first design the reward function by coding an executable Python function with predefined observation inputs. Then, our Reward Critic will be responsible for verifying the code, checking whether the code is self-consistent and free of syntax and semantic errors. Further, the Trajectory Analyzer summarizes possible failure causes and provides refinement suggestions according to collected trajectories. In the next round, Reward Designer will further refine and iterate the dense reward function based on feedback. Experiments demonstrate a significant improvement in the success rate and learning efficiency of our agents in complex tasks in Minecraft, such as obtaining diamond with the efficient ability to avoid lava, and efficiently explore trees and animals that are sparse in the plains biome.
GenFlow: Generalizable Recurrent Flow for 6D Pose Refinement of Novel Objects
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the progress of learning-based methods for 6D object pose estimation, the trade-off between accuracy and scalability for novel objects still exists. Specifically, previous methods for novel objects do not make good use of the target object's 3D shape information since they focus on generalization by processing the shape indirectly, making them less effective. We present GenFlow, an approach that enables both accuracy and generalization to novel objects with the guidance of the target object's shape. Our method predicts optical flow between the rendered image and the observed image and refines the 6D pose iteratively. It boosts the performance by a constraint of the 3D shape and the generalizable geometric knowledge learned from an end-to-end differentiable system. We further improve our model by designing a cascade network architecture to exploit the multi-scale correlations and coarse-to-fine refinement. GenFlow ranked first on the unseen object pose estimation benchmarks in both the RGB and RGB-D cases. It also achieves performance competitive with existing state-of-the-art methods for the seen object pose estimation without any fine-tuning.
Motion Blur Decomposition with Cross-shutter Guidance
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Motion blur is a frequently observed image artifact, especially under insufficient illumination where exposure time has to be prolonged so as to collect more photons for a bright enough image. Rather than simply removing such blurring effects, recent researches have aimed at decomposing a blurry image into multiple sharp images with spatial and temporal coherence. Since motion blur decomposition itself is highly ambiguous, priors from neighbouring frames or human annotation are usually needed for motion disambiguation. In this paper, inspired by the complementary exposure characteristics of a global shutter (GS) camera and a rolling shutter (RS) camera, we propose to utilize the ordered scanline-wise delay in a rolling shutter image to robustify motion decomposition of a single blurry image. To evaluate this novel dual imaging setting, we construct a triaxial system to collect realistic data, as well as a deep network architecture that explicitly addresses temporal and contextual information through reciprocal branches for cross-shutter motion blur decomposition. Experiment results have verified the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, as well as the validity of our dual imaging setting.
Instance-Aware Group Quantization for Vision Transformers
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is an efficient model compression technique that quantizes a pretrained full-precision model using only a small calibration set of unlabeled samples without retraining. PTQ methods for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provide quantization results comparable to full-precision counterparts. Directly applying them to vision transformers (ViTs), however, incurs severe performance degradation, mainly due to the differences in architectures between CNNs and ViTs. In particular, the distribution of activations for each channel vary drastically according to input instances, making PTQ methods for CNNs inappropriate for ViTs. To address this, we introduce instance-aware group quantization for ViTs (IGQ-ViT). To this end, we propose to split the channels of activation maps into multiple groups dynamically for each input instance, such that activations within each group share similar statistical properties. We also extend our scheme to quantize softmax attentions across tokens. In addition, the number of groups for each layer is adjusted to minimize the discrepancies between predictions from quantized and full-precision models, under a bit-operation (BOP) constraint. We show extensive experimental results on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation, with various transformer architectures, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
A General and Efficient Training for Transformer via Token Expansion
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

The remarkable performance of Vision Transformers (ViTs) typically requires an extremely large training cost. Existing methods have attempted to accelerate the training of ViTs, yet typically disregard method universality with accuracy dropping. Meanwhile, they break the training consistency of the original transformers, including the consistency of hyper-parameters, architecture, and strategy, which prevents them from being widely applied to different Transformer networks. In this paper, we propose a novel token growth scheme Token Expansion (termed ToE) to achieve consistent training acceleration for ViTs. We introduce an "initialization-expansion-merging" pipeline to maintain the integrity of the intermediate feature distribution of original transformers, preventing the loss of crucial learnable information in the training process. ToE can not only be seamlessly integrated into the training and fine-tuning process of transformers (e.g., DeiT and LV-ViT), but also effective for efficient training frameworks (e.g., EfficientTrain), without twisting the original training hyper-parameters, architecture, and introducing additional training strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ToE achieves about 1.3x faster for the training of ViTs in a lossless manner, or even with performance gains over the full-token training baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Osilly/TokenExpansion .
YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

The You Only Look Once (YOLO) series of detectors have established themselves as efficient and practical tools. However, their reliance on predefined and trained object categories limits their applicability in open scenarios. Addressing this limitation, we introduce YOLO-World, an innovative approach that enhances YOLO with open-vocabulary detection capabilities through vision-language modeling and pre-training on large-scale datasets. Specifically, we propose a new Re-parameterizable Vision-Language Path Aggregation Network (RepVL-PAN) and region-text contrastive loss to facilitate the interaction between visual and linguistic information. Our method excels in detecting a wide range of objects in a zero-shot manner with high efficiency. On the challenging LVIS dataset, YOLO-World achieves 35.4 AP with 52.0 FPS on V100, which outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. Furthermore, the fine-tuned YOLO-World achieves remarkable performance on several downstream tasks, including object detection and open-vocabulary instance segmentation.
Producing and Leveraging Online Map Uncertainty in Trajectory Prediction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

High-definition (HD) maps have played an integral role in the development of modern autonomous vehicle (AV) stacks, albeit with high associated labeling and maintenance costs. As a result, many recent works have proposed methods for estimating HD maps online from sensor data, enabling AVs to operate outside of previously-mapped regions. However, current online map estimation approaches are developed in isolation of their downstream tasks, complicating their integration in AV stacks. In particular, they do not produce uncertainty or confidence estimates. In this work, we extend multiple state-of-the-art online map estimation methods to additionally estimate uncertainty and show how this enables more tightly integrating online mapping with trajectory forecasting. In doing so, we find that incorporating uncertainty yields up to 50% faster training convergence and up to 15% better prediction performance on the real-world nuScenes driving dataset.
DemoCaricature: Democratising Caricature Generation with a Rough Sketch
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we democratise caricature generation, empowering individuals to effortlessly craft personalised caricatures with just a photo and a conceptual sketch. Our objective is to strike a delicate balance between abstraction and identity, while preserving the creativity and subjectivity inherent in a sketch. To achieve this, we present Explicit Rank-1 Model Editing alongside single-image personalisation, selectively applying nuanced edits to cross-attention layers for a seamless merge of identity and style. Additionally, we propose Random Mask Reconstruction to enhance robustness, directing the model to focus on distinctive identity and style features. Crucially, our aim is not to replace artists but to eliminate accessibility barriers, allowing enthusiasts to engage in the artistry.
Riemannian Multinomial Logistics Regression for SPD Neural Networks
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Deep neural networks for learning Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices are gaining increasing attention in machine learning. Despite the significant progress, most existing SPD networks use traditional Euclidean classifiers on an approximated space rather than intrinsic classifiers that accurately capture the geometry of SPD manifolds. Inspired by Hyperbolic Neural Networks (HNNs), we propose Riemannian Multinomial Logistics Regression (RMLR) for the classification layers in SPD networks. We introduce a unified framework for building Riemannian classifiers under the metrics pulled back from the Euclidean space, and showcase our framework under the parameterized Log-Euclidean Metric (LEM) and Log-Cholesky Metric (LCM). Besides, our framework offers a novel intrinsic explanation for the most popular LogEig classifier in existing SPD networks. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated in three applications: radar recognition, human action recognition, and electroencephalography (EEG) classification. The code is available at https://github.com/GitZH-Chen/SPDMLR.git.
What Sketch Explainability Really Means for Downstream Tasks?
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we explore the unique modality of sketch for explainability, emphasising the profound impact of human strokes compared to conventional pixel-oriented studies. Beyond explanations of network behavior, we discern the genuine implications of explainability across diverse downstream sketch-related tasks. We propose a lightweight and portable explainability solution -- a seamless plugin that integrates effortlessly with any pre-trained model, eliminating the need for re-training. Demonstrating its adaptability, we present four applications: highly studied retrieval and generation, and completely novel assisted drawing and sketch adversarial attacks. The centrepiece to our solution is a stroke-level attribution map that takes different forms when linked with downstream tasks. By addressing the inherent non-differentiability of rasterisation, we enable explanations at both coarse stroke level (SLA) and partial stroke level (P-SLA), each with its advantages for specific downstream tasks.
SFOD: Spiking Fusion Object Detector
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Event cameras, characterized by high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, low power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth, offer unique capabilities for object detection in specialized contexts. Despite these advantages, the inherent sparsity and asynchrony of event data pose challenges to existing object detection algorithms. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), inspired by the way the human brain codes and processes information, offer a potential solution to these difficulties. However, their performance in object detection using event cameras is limited in current implementations. In this paper, we propose the Spiking Fusion Object Detector (SFOD), a simple and efficient approach to SNN-based object detection. Specifically, we design a Spiking Fusion Module, achieving the first-time fusion of feature maps from different scales in SNNs applied to event cameras. Additionally, through integrating our analysis and experiments conducted during the pretraining of the backbone network on the NCAR dataset, we delve deeply into the impact of spiking decoding strategies and loss functions on model performance. Thereby, we establish state-of-the-art classification results based on SNNs, achieving 93.7\% accuracy on the NCAR dataset. Experimental results on the GEN1 detection dataset demonstrate that the SFOD achieves a state-of-the-art mAP of 32.1\%, outperforming existing SNN-based approaches. Our research not only underscores the potential of SNNs in object detection with event cameras but also propels the advancement of SNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/yimeng-fan/SFOD.
DePT: Decoupled Prompt Tuning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

This work breaks through the Base-New Tradeoff (BNT)dilemma in prompt tuning, i.e., the better the tuned model generalizes to the base (or target) task, the worse it generalizes to new tasks, and vice versa. Specifically, through an in-depth analysis of the learned features of the base and new tasks, we observe that the BNT stems from a channel bias issue, i.e., the vast majority of feature channels are occupied by base-specific knowledge, resulting in the collapse of taskshared knowledge important to new tasks. To address this, we propose the Decoupled Prompt Tuning (DePT) framework, which decouples base-specific knowledge from feature channels into an isolated feature space during prompt tuning, so as to maximally preserve task-shared knowledge in the original feature space for achieving better zero-shot generalization on new tasks. Importantly, our DePT is orthogonal to existing prompt tuning methods, hence it can improve all of them. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets show the strong flexibility and effectiveness of DePT. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/Koorye/DePT.
A Generative Approach for Wikipedia-Scale Visual Entity Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we address web-scale visual entity recognition, specifically the task of mapping a given query image to one of the 6 million existing entities in Wikipedia. One way of approaching a problem of such scale is using dual-encoder models (eg CLIP), where all the entity names and query images are embedded into a unified space, paving the way for an approximate k-NN search. Alternatively, it is also possible to re-purpose a captioning model to directly generate the entity names for a given image. In contrast, we introduce a novel Generative Entity Recognition (GER) framework, which given an input image learns to auto-regressively decode a semantic and discriminative ``code'' identifying the target entity. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of this GER paradigm, showcasing state-of-the-art performance on the challenging OVEN benchmark. GER surpasses strong captioning, dual-encoder, visual matching and hierarchical classification baselines, affirming its advantage in tackling the complexities of web-scale recognition.
Open-Vocabulary Object 6D Pose Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce the new setting of open-vocabulary object 6D pose estimation, in which a textual prompt is used to specify the object of interest. In contrast to existing approaches, in our setting (i) the object of interest is specified solely through the textual prompt, (ii) no object model (e.g., CAD or video sequence) is required at inference, and (iii) the object is imaged from two RGBD viewpoints of different scenes. To operate in this setting, we introduce a novel approach that leverages a Vision-Language Model to segment the object of interest from the scenes and to estimate its relative 6D pose. The key of our approach is a carefully devised strategy to fuse object-level information provided by the prompt with local image features, resulting in a feature space that can generalize to novel concepts. We validate our approach on a new benchmark based on two popular datasets, REAL275 and Toyota-Light, which collectively encompass 34 object instances appearing in four thousand image pairs. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms both a well-established hand-crafted method and a recent deep learning-based baseline in estimating the relative 6D pose of objects in different scenes. Code and dataset are available at https://jcorsetti.github.io/oryon.
Plug and Play Active Learning for Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Annotating datasets for object detection is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. To minimize this burden, active learning (AL) techniques are employed to select the most informative samples for annotation within a constrained "annotation budget". Traditional AL strategies typically rely on model uncertainty or sample diversity for query sampling, while more advanced methods have focused on developing AL-specific object detector architectures to enhance performance. However, these specialized approaches are not readily adaptable to different object detectors due to the significant engineering effort required for integration. To overcome this challenge, we introduce Plug and Play Active Learning (PPAL), a simple and effective AL strategy for object detection. PPAL is a two-stage method comprising uncertainty-based and diversity-based sampling phases. In the first stage, our Difficulty Calibrated Uncertainty Sampling leverage a category-wise difficulty coefficient that combines both classification and localisation difficulties to re-weight instance uncertainties, from which we sample a candidate pool for the subsequent diversity-based sampling. In the second stage, we propose Category Conditioned Matching Similarity to better compute the similarities of multi-instance images as ensembles of their instance similarities, which is used by the k-Means++ algorithm to sample the final AL queries. PPAL makes no change to model architectures or detector training pipelines; hence it can be easily generalized to different object detectors. We benchmark PPAL on the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets using different detector architectures and show that our method outperforms prior work by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/PPAL
CapHuman: Capture Your Moments in Parallel Universes
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

We concentrate on a novel human-centric image synthesis task, that is, given only one reference facial photograph, it is expected to generate specific individual images with diverse head positions, poses, facial expressions, and illuminations in different contexts. To accomplish this goal, we argue that our generative model should be capable of the following favorable characteristics: (1) a strong visual and semantic understanding of our world and human society for basic object and human image generation. (2) generalizable identity preservation ability. (3) flexible and fine-grained head control. Recently, large pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models have shown remarkable results, serving as a powerful generative foundation. As a basis, we aim to unleash the above two capabilities of the pre-trained model. In this work, we present a new framework named CapHuman. We embrace the "encode then learn to align" paradigm, which enables generalizable identity preservation for new individuals without cumbersome tuning at inference. CapHuman encodes identity features and then learns to align them into the latent space. Moreover, we introduce the 3D facial prior to equip our model with control over the human head in a flexible and 3D-consistent manner. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate our CapHuman can produce well-identity-preserved, photo-realistic, and high-fidelity portraits with content-rich representations and various head renditions, superior to established baselines. Code and checkpoint will be released at https://github.com/VamosC/CapHuman.