Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Faster Video Moment Retrieval with Point-Level Supervision

Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims at retrieving the most relevant events from an untrimmed video with natural language queries. Existing VMR methods suffer from two defects: (1) massive expensive temporal annotations are required to obtain satisfying performance; (2) complicated cross-modal interaction modules are deployed, which lead to high computational cost and low efficiency for the retrieval process. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed Cheaper and Faster Moment Retrieval (CFMR), which balances the retrieval accuracy, efficiency, and annotation cost for VMR. Specifically, our proposed CFMR method learns from point-level supervision where each annotation is a single frame randomly located within the target moment. Such a labeling strategy achieves 6 times cheaper than the conventional annotations of event boundaries. Furthermore, we also design a concept-based multimodal alignment mechanism to bypass the usage of cross-modal interaction modules during the inference process, remarkably improving retrieval efficiency. The experimental results on three widely used VMR benchmarks demonstrate our proposed CFMR method achieves superior comprehensive performance to current state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, it significantly accelerates the retrieval speed with more than 100 times FLOPs compared to existing approaches with point-level supervision. Our open-source implementation is available at https://github.com/CFM-MSG/Code_CFMR.
HSVLT: Hierarchical Scale-Aware Vision-Language Transformer for Multi-Label Image Classification

The task of multi-label image classification involves recognizing multiple objects within a single image. Considering both valuable semantic information contained in the labels and essential visual features presented in the image, tight visual-linguistic interactions play a vital role in improving classification performance. Moreover, given the potential variance in object size and appearance within a single image, attention to features of different scales can help to discover possible objects in the image. Recently, Transformer-based methods have achieved great success in multi-label image classification by leveraging the advantage of modeling long-range dependencies, but they have several limitations. Firstly, existing methods treat visual feature extraction and cross-modal fusion as separate steps, resulting in insufficient visual-linguistic alignment in the joint semantic space. Additionally, they only extract visual features and perform cross-modal fusion at a single scale, neglecting objects with different characteristics. To address these issues, we propose a Hierarchical Scale-Aware Vision-Language Transformer (HSVLT) with two appealing designs: (1)A hierarchical multi-scale architecture that involves a Cross-Scale Aggregation module, which leverages joint multi-modal features extracted from multiple scales to recognize objects of varying sizes and appearances in images. (2)Interactive Visual-Linguistic Attention, a novel attention mechanism module that tightly integrates cross-modal interaction, enabling the joint updating of visual, linguistic and multi-modal features. We have evaluated our method on three benchmark datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that HSVLT surpasses state-of-the-art methods with lower computational cost.
PArtNNer: Platform-agnostic Adaptive Edge-Cloud DNN Partitioning for minimizing End-to-End Latency

The last decade has seen the emergence of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) as the de facto algorithm for various computer vision applications. In intelligent edge devices, sensor data streams acquired by the device are processed by a DNN application running on either the edge device itself or in the cloud. However, ‘edge-only’ and ‘cloud-only’ execution of State-of-the-Art DNNs may not meet an application’s latency requirements due to the limited compute, memory, and energy resources in edge devices, dynamically varying bandwidth of edge-cloud connectivity networks, and temporal variations in the computational load of cloud servers. This work investigates distributed (partitioned) inference across edge devices (mobile/end device) and cloud servers to minimize end-to-end DNN inference latency. We study the impact of temporally varying operating conditions and the underlying compute and communication architecture on the decision of whether to run the inference solely on the edge, entirely in the cloud, or by partitioning the DNN model execution among the two. Leveraging the insights gained from this study and the wide variation in the capabilities of various edge platforms that run DNN inference, we propose PArtNNer , a platform-agnostic adaptive DNN partitioning algorithm that finds the optimal partitioning point in DNNs to minimize inference latency. PArtNNer can adapt to dynamic variations in communication bandwidth and cloud server load without requiring pre-characterization of underlying platforms. Experimental results for six image classification and object detection DNNs on a set of five commercial off-the-shelf compute platforms and three communication standards indicate that PArtNNer results in 10.2 × and 3.2 × (on average) and up to 21.1 × and 6.7 × improvements in end-to-end inference latency compared to execution of the DNN entirely on the edge device or entirely on a cloud server, respectively. Compared to pre-characterization-based partitioning approaches, PArtNNer converges to the optimal partitioning point 17.6 × faster.
Adaptive Decoupled Pose Knowledge Distillation

Existing state-of-the-art human pose estimation approaches require heavy computational resources for accurate prediction. One promising technique to obtain an accurate yet lightweight pose estimator is Knowledge Distillation (KD), which distills the pose knowledge from a powerful teacher model to a lightweight student model. However, existing human pose KD methods focus more on designing paired student and teacher network architectures, yet ignore the mechanism of pose knowledge distillation. In this work, we reformulate the human pose KD to a coarse to fine process and decouple the classical KD loss into three terms: Binary Keypoint vs. Non-Keypoint Distillation (BiKD), Keypoint Area Distillation (KAD) and Non-keypoint Area Distillation (NAD). Observing the decoupled formulation, we point out an important limitation of the classical pose KD, i.e. the bias between different loss terms limits the performance gain of the student network. To address the biased knowledge distillation problem, we present a novel KD method named Adaptive Decoupled Pose knowledge Distillation (ADPD), enabling BiKD, KAD and NAD to play their roles more effectively and flexibly. Extensive experiments on two standard human pose datasets, MPII and MS COCO, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous KD methods and is generalizable to different teacher-student pairs. The code will be available at https://github.com/SuperJay1996/ADPD.
Orthogonal Uncertainty Representation of Data Manifold for Robust Long-Tailed Learning

In scenarios with long-tailed distributions, the model's ability to identify tail classes is limited due to the under-representation of tail samples. Class rebalancing, information augmentation, and other techniques have been proposed to facilitate models to learn the potential distribution of tail classes. The disadvantage is that these methods generally pursue models with balanced class accuracy on the data manifold, while ignoring the ability of the model to resist interference. By constructing noisy data manifold, we found that the robustness of models trained on unbalanced data has a long-tail phenomenon. That is, even if the class accuracy is balanced on the data domain, it still has bias on the noisy data manifold. However, existing methods cannot effectively mitigate the above phenomenon, which makes the model vulnerable in long-tailed scenarios. In this work, we propose an Orthogonal Uncertainty Representation (hOUR) of feature embedding and an end-to-end training strategy to improve the long-tail phenomenon of model robustness. As a general enhancement tool, OUR has excellent compatibility with other methods and does not require additional data generation, ensuring fast and efficient training. Comprehensive evaluations on long-tailed datasets show that our method significantly improves the long-tail phenomenon of robustness, bringing consistent performance gains to other long-tailed learning methods.
Preserving Local and Global Information: An Effective Metric-based Subspace Clustering

Subspace clustering, which recoveries the subspace representation in the form of an affinity graph, has drawn tons of attention due to its effectiveness in various clustering tasks. However, existing subspace clustering methods are usually fed with raw data, which may lead to a suboptimal result since it is difficult to directly and accurately depict the inherent relation between data points. In this paper, we propose a novel subspace clustering method by holistically utilizing the pairwise similarity and graph geometric structure. Our model first constructs an initial subspace representation by means of self-expression, which is able to depict the global structure of data. Then, we use an effective metric to recover an intrinsic matrix with pairwise similarity based on the obtained representation, which further preserves the local structure. Besides, we propose to facilitate the downstream subspace learning task by searching for a smooth representation of the original data, which is obtained by applying a low-pass filter to retain the graph geometric features. By leveraging the subtasks of learning the smooth representation, performing the subspace learning, and recovering the intrinsic similarity matrix in a unified learning framework, each subtask can be alternately boosted. Experiments on several benchmark data sets have been conducted to verify the proposed method.
Progressive Visual Content Understanding Network for Image Emotion Classification

Most existing methods for image emotion classification extract features directly from images supervised by a single emotional label. However, this approach has a limitation known as the affective gap which restricts the capability of these features as they do not always align with the emotions perceived by users. To effectively bridge the affective gap, this paper proposes a visual content understanding network inspired by the human staged emotion perception process. The proposed network is comprised of three perception modules designed to extract multi-level information. Firstly, an entity perception module extracts entities from images. Secondly, an attribute perception module extracts the attribute content of each entity. Thirdly, an emotion perception module extracts emotion features based on both the entity and attribute information. We generate pseudo-labels of entities and attributes through image segmentation and vision-language models to provide auxiliary guidance for network learning. The progressive entity and attribute understanding enable the network to hierarchically extract semantic-level features for emotion analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our progressive learning network achieves superior performance on various benchmark datasets for image emotion classification.
One-step Multi-view Clustering with Consensus Graph and Data Representation Convolution

Multi-view clustering aims to partition unlabeled patterns into disjoint clusters using consistent and complementary information derived from features of patterns in multiple views. Downstream methods perform this clustering sequentially: estimation of individual or consistent similarity matrices, spectral embedding, and clustering. In this article, we present an approach that can address some of the shortcomings of previous multiview clustering methods. We propose a single objective function whose optimization can jointly provide the consistent graph matrix for all views, the unified spectral data representation, the cluster assignments, and the view weights. We propose a new constraint term that sets the cluster index matrix to the convolution of the consistent spectral projection matrix over the consistent graph. Our proposed scheme has two interesting properties that the recent works do not have simultaneously. First, the cluster assignments can be estimated directly without the need for an additional clustering phase, which depends heavily on initialization. Second, the soft cluster assignments are directly linked to the kernel representation of the features of the views. Moreover, our method automatically computes the weights of each view, requiring fewer hyperparameters. We have conducted a series of experiments on real datasets. These demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which compares favorably to many competing multi-view clustering methods.
Depth-aided Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to identify and segment objects that blend into their surroundings. Since the color and texture of the camouflaged objects are extremely similar to the surrounding environment, it is super challenging for vision models to precisely detect them. Inspired by research on biology and evolution, we introduce depth information as an additional cue to help break camouflage, which can provide spatial information and texture-free separation for foreground and background. To dig clues of camouflaged objects in both RGB and depth modalities, we innovatively propose Depth-aided Camouflaged Object Detection (DaCOD), which involves two key components. We firstly propose the Multi-modal Collaborative Learning (MCL) module, which aims to collaboratively learning deep features from both RGB and depth channels via a hybrid backbone. Then, we propose a novel Cross-modal Asymmetric Fusion (CAF) strategy, which asymmetrically fuse RGB and depth information for complementary depth feature enhancement to produce accurate predictions. We conducted numerous experiments of the proposed DaCOD on three widely-used challenging COD benchmark datasets, in which DaCOD outperforms the current state-of-the-arts by a large margin. All resources are available at https://github.com/qingwei-wang/DaCOD.
Model-Contrastive Learning for Backdoor Elimination

Due to the popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, we are witnessing an increasing number of backdoor injection attacks that are designed to maliciously threaten Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) causing misclassification. Although there exist various defense methods that can effectively erase backdoors from DNNs, they greatly suffer from both high Attack Success Rate (ASR) and a non-negligible loss in Benign Accuracy (BA). Inspired by the observation that a backdoored DNN tends to form a new cluster in its feature spaces for poisoned data, in this paper, we propose a novel two-stage backdoor defense method, named MCLDef, based on Model-Contrastive Learning (MCL). MCLDef can purify the backdoored model by pulling the feature representations of poisoned data towards those of their clean data counterparts. Due to the shrunken cluster of poisoned data, the backdoor formed by end-to-end supervised learning can be effectively eliminated. Comprehensive experimental results show that, with only 5% of clean data, MCLDef significantly outperforms state-of-the-art defense methods by up to 95.79% reduction in ASR, while in most cases, the BA degradation can be controlled within less than 2%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zhihao151/MCL.
Learning Pixel-wise Alignment for Unsupervised Image Stitching

Image stitching aims to align a pair of images in the same view. Generating precise alignment with natural structures is challenging for image stitching, as there is no wider field-of-view image as a reference, especially in non-coplanar practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised image stitching framework, breaking through the coplanar constraints in homography estimation, yielding accurate pixel-wise alignment under limited overlapping regions. First, we generate a global transformation by an iterative dense feature matching combined with an error control strategy to alleviate the difference introduced by large parallax. Second, we propose a pixel-wise warping network embedded within a large-scale feature extractor and a correlative feature enhancement module to explicitly learn correspondences between the inputs, and generate accurate pixel-level offsets upon novel constraints on both overlapping and non-overlapping regions. Notably, we leverage the pixel-level offsets in the overlapping area to guide the adjustment in the non-overlapping area upon content and structure consistency constraints, rendering a natural transition between two regions and distortions suppression over the entire stitched image. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance that surpasses both traditional and deep learning approaches by a large margin. It also achieves the shortest execution time and has the best generalization ability on the traditional dataset.
Robust Spectral Embedding Completion Based Incomplete Multi-view Clustering

Graph based methods have been widely used in incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC). Most recent methods try to fill the original missing samples or incomplete affinity matrices to obtain a complete similarity graph for the subsequent spectral clustering. However, recovering the original high-dimensional data or complete n X n similarity matrix is usually time-consuming and noise-sensitive. Besides, they generally separate the cluster indicator learning into an individual step, which may result in sub-optimal graphs or spectral embeddings for clustering. To address these problems, this paper proposes a robust Spectral Embedding Completion based IMVC (SEC-IMVC) method, which incorporates spectral embedding completion and discrete cluster indicator learning into a unified framework. SEC-IMVC performs completion on spectral embeddings, and the embedding noise is eliminated to reduce the negative influence of original data noise. The discrete cluster indicator matrix is seamlessly learned by using spectral rotation, and it can explore the first-order feature consistency among different views. To further improve the completion robustness, the second-order correlation consistency is also captured by pairwise relations alignment. We compare our method with some state-of-the-art approaches on several datasets, and the experimental results show the effectiveness and advantages of our method.
MovieFactory: Automatic Movie Creation from Text using Large Generative Models for Language and Images

In this paper, we present MovieFactory, a powerful framework to generate cinematic-picture (3072x1280), film-style (multi-scene), and multi-modality (sounding) movies on the demand of natural languages. As the first fully automated movie generation model to the best of our knowledge, our approach empowers users to create captivating movies with smooth transitions using simple text inputs, surpassing existing methods that produce soundless videos limited to a single scene of modest quality. To facilitate this distinctive functionality, we leverage ChatGPT to expand user-provided text into detailed sequential scripts for movie generation. Then we bring scripts to life visually and acoustically through vision generation and audio retrieval. To generate videos, we extend the capabilities of a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model through a two-stage process. Firstly, we employ spatial finetuning to bridge the gap between the pretrained image model and the new video dataset. Subsequently, we introduce temporal learning to capture object motion. In terms of audio, we leverage sophisticated retrieval models to select and align audio elements that correspond to the plot and visual content of the movie.
FlexIcon: Flexible Icon Colorization via Guided Images and Palettes

Automatic icon colorization systems show great potential value as they can serve as a source of inspiration for designers. Despite yielding promising results, previous reference-guided approaches ignore how to effectively fuse icon structure and style, leading to unpleasant color effects. Meanwhile, they cannot take free-style palettes as inputs, which is less user-friendly. To this end, we present FlexIcon, a Flexible Icon colorization model based on guided images and palettes. To promote visual quality, our model first leverages a Hybrid Multi-expert Module to aggregate better structural features, followed by dynamically integrating the global style with each individual pixel of the structure map via the Pixel-Style Aggregation Layer. We also introduce an efficient learning scheme for free-style palette-based colorization, editing, interpolation, and diverse generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework compared with state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we contribute a Mandala dataset to the multimedia community and further validate the application value of the proposed model.
Moiré Backdoor Attack (MBA): A Novel Trigger for Pedestrian Detectors in the Physical World

A backdoor attack is executed by injecting a few poisoned samples into the training dataset of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), enabling attackers to implant a hidden manipulation. This manipulation can be triggered during inference to exhibit controlled behavior, posing risks in real-world deployments. In this paper, we specifically focus on the safety-critical task of pedestrian detection and propose a novel backdoor trigger by exploiting the Moiré effect. The Moiré effect, a common physical phenomenon, disrupts camera-captured images by introducing Moiré patterns and unavoidable interference. Our method comprises three key steps. Firstly, we analyze the Moiré effect's cause and simulate its patterns on pedestrians' clothing. Next, we embed these Moiré patterns as a backdoor trigger into digital images and use this dataset to train a backdoored detector. Finally, we physically test the trained detector by wearing clothing that generates Moiré patterns. We demonstrate that individuals wearing such clothes can effectively evade detection by the backdoored model while wearing regular clothes does not trigger the attack, ensuring the attack remains covert. Extensive experiments in both digital and physical spaces thoroughly demonstrate the effectiveness and efficacy of our proposed Moiré Backdoor Attack.
Cross-modal &amp; Cross-domain Learning for Unsupervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, cross-modal domain adaptation has been studied on the paired 2D image and 3D LiDAR data to ease the labeling costs for 3D LiDAR semantic segmentation (3DLSS) in the target domain. However, in such a setting the paired 2D and 3D data in the source domain are still collected with additional effort. Since the 2D-3D projections can enable the 3D model to learn semantic information from the 2D counterpart, we ask whether we could further remove the need of source 3D data and only rely on the source 2D images. To answer it, this paper studies a new 3DLSS setting where a 2D dataset (source) with semantic annotations and a paired but unannotated 2D image and 3D LiDAR data (target) are available1. To achieve 3DLSS in this scenario, we propose Cross-Modal and Cross-Domain Learning (CoMoDaL). Specifically, our CoMoDaL aims at modeling 1) inter-modal cross-domain distillation between the unpaired source 2D image and target 3D LiDAR data, and 2) the intra-domain cross-modal guidance between the target 2D image and 3D LiDAR data pair. In CoMoDaL, we propose to apply several constraints, such as point-to-pixel and prototype-to pixel alignments, to associate the semantics in different modalities and domains by constructing mixed samples in two modalities. The experimental results on several datasets show that in the proposed setting, the developed CoMoDaL can achieve segmentation without the supervision of labeled LiDAR data. Ablations are also conducted to provide more analysis. Code will be available publicly2.