Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Foreground-Background Distribution Modeling Transformer for Visual Object Tracking

Visual object tracking is a fundamental research topic with a broad range of applications. Benefiting from the rapid development of Transformer, pure Transformer trackers have achieved great progress. However, the feature learning of these Transformer-based trackers is easily disturbed by complex backgrounds. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel foreground-background distribution modeling transformer for visual object tracking (F-BDMTrack), including a fore-background agent learning (FBAL) module and a distribution-aware attention (DA <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) module in a unified transformer architecture. The proposed F-BDMTrack enjoys several merits. First, the proposed FBAL module can effectively mine fore-background information with designed fore-background agents. Second, the DA <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> module can suppress the incorrect interaction between foreground and background by modeling fore-background distribution similarities. Finally, F-BDMTrack can extract discriminative features under ever-changing tracking scenarios for more accurate target state estimation. Extensive experiments show that our F-BDMTrack outperforms previous state-of-the-art trackers on eight tracking benchmarks.
StegaNeRF: Embedding Invisible Information within Neural Radiance Fields

Recent advancements in neural rendering have paved the way for a future marked by the widespread distribution of visual data through the sharing of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) model weights. However, while established techniques exist for embedding ownership or copyright information within conventional visual data such as images and videos, the challenges posed by the emerging NeRF format have remained unaddressed. In this paper, we introduce StegaNeRF, an innovative approach for steganographic information embedding within NeRF renderings. We have meticulously developed an optimization framework that enables precise retrieval of hidden information from images generated by NeRF, while ensuring the original visual quality of the rendered images to remain intact. Through rigorous experimentation, we assess the efficacy of our methodology across various potential deployment scenarios. Furthermore, we delve into the insights gleaned from our analysis. StegaNeRF represents an initial foray into the intriguing realm of infusing NeRF renderings with customizable, imperceptible, and recoverable information, all while minimizing any discernible impact on the rendered images. For more details, please visit our project page: https://xggnet.github.io/StegaNeRF/
Improving Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Cross-Lingual Signs

This work dedicates to continuous sign language recognition (CSLR), which is a weakly supervised task dealing with the recognition of continuous signs from videos, without any prior knowledge about the temporal boundaries between consecutive signs. Data scarcity heavily impedes the progress of CSLR. Existing approaches typically train CSLR models on a monolingual corpus, which is orders of magnitude smaller than that of speech recognition. In this work, we explore the feasibility of utilizing multilingual sign language corpora to facilitate monolingual CSLR. Our work is built upon the observation of cross-lingual signs, which originate from different sign languages but have similar visual signals (e.g., hand shape and motion). The underlying idea of our approach is to identify the cross-lingual signs in one sign language and properly leverage them as auxiliary training data to improve the recognition capability of another. To achieve the goal, we first build two sign language dictionaries containing isolated signs that appear in two datasets. Then we identify the sign-to-sign mappings between two sign languages via a well-optimized isolated sign language recognition model. At last, we train a CSLR model on the combination of the target data with original labels and the auxiliary data with mapped labels. Experimentally, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely-used CSLR datasets: Phoenix-2014 and Phoenix-2014T.
SwiftFormer: Efficient Additive Attention for Transformer-based Real-time Mobile Vision Applications

Self-attention has become a defacto choice for capturing global context in various vision applications. However, its quadratic computational complexity with respect to image resolution limits its use in real-time applications, especially for deployment on resource-constrained mobile devices. Although hybrid approaches have been proposed to combine the advantages of convolutions and self-attention for a better speed-accuracy trade-off, the expensive matrix multiplication operations in self-attention remain a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a novel efficient additive attention mechanism that effectively replaces the quadratic matrix multiplication operations with linear element-wise multiplications. Our design shows that the key-value interaction can be replaced with a linear layer without sacrificing any accuracy. Unlike previous state-of-the-art methods, our efficient formulation of self-attention enables its usage at all stages of the network. Using our proposed efficient additive attention, we build a series of models called "SwiftFormer" which achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both accuracy and mobile inference speed. Our small variant achieves 78.5% top-1 ImageNet-1K accuracy with only 0.8 ms latency on iPhone 14, which is more accurate and 2× faster compared to MobileViT-v2. Our code and models: https://tinyurl.com/5ft8v46w
HM-ViT: Hetero-modal Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative Perception with Vision Transformer

Vehicle-to-Vehicle technologies have enabled autonomous vehicles to share information to see through occlusions, greatly enhancing perception performance. Nevertheless, existing works all focused on homogeneous traffic where vehicles are equipped with the same type of sensors, which significantly hampers the scale of collaboration and benefit of cross-modality interactions. In this paper, we investigate the multi-agent hetero-modal cooperative perception problem where agents may have distinct sensor modalities. We present HM-ViT, the first unified multi-agent hetero-modal cooperative perception framework that can collaboratively predict 3D objects for highly dynamic Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) collaborations with varying numbers and types of agents. To effectively fuse features from multi-view images and LiDAR point clouds, we design a novel heterogeneous 3D graph transformer to jointly reason inter-agent and intra-agent interactions. The extensive experiments on the V2V perception dataset OPV2V demonstrate that the HM-ViT outperforms SOTA cooperative perception methods for V2V hetero-modal cooperative perception. Our code will be released at https://github.com/XHwind/HM-ViT.
Semantics Meets Temporal Correspondence: Self-supervised Object-centric Learning in Videos

Self-supervised methods have shown remarkable progress in learning high-level semantics and low-level temporal correspondence. Building on these results, we take one step further and explore the possibility of integrating these two features to enhance object-centric representations. Our preliminary experiments indicate that query slot attention can extract different semantic components from the RGB feature map, while random sampling based slot attention can exploit temporal correspondence cues between frames to assist instance identification. Motivated by this, we propose a novel semantic-aware masked slot attention on top of the fused semantic features and correspondence maps. It comprises two slot attention stages with a set of shared learnable Gaussian distributions. In the first stage, we use the mean vectors as slot initialization to decompose potential semantics and generate semantic segmentation masks through iterative attention. In the second stage, for each semantics, we randomly sample slots from the corresponding Gaussian distribution and perform masked feature aggregation within the semantic area to exploit temporal correspondence patterns for instance identification. We adopt semantic- and instance-level temporal consistency as self-supervision to encourage temporally coherent object-centric representations. Our model effectively identifies multiple object instances with semantic structure, reaching promising results on unsupervised video object discovery. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on dense label propagation tasks, demonstrating the potential for object-centric analysis. The code is released at https://github.com/shvdiwnkozbw/SMTC.
Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators

Recent text-to-video generation approaches rely on computationally heavy training and require large-scale video datasets. In this paper, we introduce a new task, zero-shot text-to-video generation, and propose a low-cost approach (without any training or optimization) by leveraging the power of existing text-to-image synthesis methods (e.g. Stable Diffusion), making them suitable for the video domain. Our key modifications include (i) enriching the latent codes of the generated frames with motion dynamics to keep the global scene and the background time consistent; and (ii) reprogramming frame-level self-attention using a new cross-frame attention of each frame on the first frame, to preserve the context, appearance, and identity of the foreground object. Experiments show that this leads to low overhead, yet high-quality and remarkably consistent video generation. Moreover, our approach is not limited to text-to-video synthesis but is also applicable to other tasks such as conditional and content-specialized video generation, and Video Instruct-Pix2Pix, i.e., instruction-guided video editing. As experiments show, our method performs comparably or sometimes better than recent approaches, despite not being trained on additional video data. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Text2Video-Zero.
FRAug: Tackling Federated Learning with Non-IID Features via Representation Augmentation

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning paradigm, in which multiple clients collaboratively train neural networks without centralizing their local data, and hence preserve data privacy. However, real-world FL applications usually encounter challenges arising from distribution shifts across the local datasets of individual clients. These shifts may drift the global model aggregation or result in convergence to deflected local optimum. While existing efforts have addressed distribution shifts in the label space, an equally important challenge remains relatively unexplored. This challenge involves situations where the local data of different clients indicate identical label distributions but exhibit divergent feature distributions. This issue can significantly impact the global model performance in the FL framework. In this work, we propose Federated Representation Augmentation (FRAug) to resolve this practical and challenging problem. FRAug optimizes a shared embedding generator to capture client consensus. Its output synthetic embeddings are transformed into client-specific by a locally optimized RTNet to augment the training space of each client. Our empirical evaluation on three public benchmarks and a real-world medical dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method, which substantially outperforms the current state-of-the-art FL methods for feature distribution shifts, including PartialFed and FedBN.
DiffuMask: Synthesizing Images with Pixel-level Annotations for Semantic Segmentation Using Diffusion Models

Collecting and annotating images with pixel-wise labels is time-consuming and laborious. In contrast, synthetic data can be freely available using a generative model (e.g., DALL-E, Stable Diffusion). In this paper, we show that it is possible to automatically obtain accurate semantic masks of synthetic images generated by the Off-the-shelf Stable Diffusion model, which uses only text-image pairs during training. Our approach, termed DiffuMask, exploits the potential of the cross-attention map between text and image, which is natural and seamless to extend the text-driven image synthesis to semantic mask generation. DiffuMask uses text-guided cross-attention information to localize class/word-specific regions, which are combined with practical techniques to create a novel high-resolution and class-discriminative pixel-wise mask. The methods help to significantly reduce data collection and annotation costs. Experiments demonstrate that the existing segmentation methods trained on synthetic data of DiffuMask can achieve a competitive performance over the counterpart of real data (VOC 2012, Cityscapes). For some classes (e.g., bird), DiffuMask presents promising performance, close to the state-of-the-art result of real data (within 3% mIoU gap). Moreover, in the open-vocabulary segmentation (zero-shot) setting, DiffuMask achieves new state-of-the-art results on the Unseen classes of VOC 2012. The project website can be found at ${\color{red}{\text{DiffuMask}}}$.
Spatially-Adaptive Feature Modulation for Efficient Image Super-Resolution

Although deep learning-based solutions have achieved impressive reconstruction performance in image super-resolution (SR), these models are generally large, with complex architectures, making them incompatible with low-power devices with many computational and memory constraints. To overcome these challenges, we propose a spatially-adaptive feature modulation (SAFM) mechanism for efficient SR design. In detail, the SAFM layer uses independent computations to learn multi-scale feature representations and aggregates these features for dynamic spatial modulation. As the SAFM prioritizes exploiting non-local feature dependencies, we further introduce a convolutional channel mixer (CCM) to encode local contextual information and mix channels simultaneously. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method is 3× smaller than state-of-the-art efficient SR methods, e.g., IMDN, and yields comparable performance with much less memory usage. Our source codes and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/sunny2109/SAFMN.
Vision Relation Transformer for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Recent years have seen a growing interest in Scene Graph Generation (SGG), a comprehensive visual scene understanding task that aims to predict entity relationships using a relation encoder-decoder pipeline stacked on top of an object encoder-decoder backbone. Unfortunately, current SGG methods suffer from an information loss regarding the entities’ local-level cues during the relation encoding process. To mitigate this, we introduce the Vision rElation TransfOrmer (VETO), consisting of a novel local-level entity relation encoder. We further observe that many existing SGG methods claim to be unbiased, but are still biased towards either head or tail classes. To overcome this bias, we introduce a Mutually Exclusive ExperT (MEET) learning strategy that captures important relation features without bias towards head or tail classes. Experimental results on the VG and GQA datasets demonstrate that VETO + MEET boosts the predictive performance by up to 47% over the state of the art while being ∼ 10× smaller. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>
GlobalMapper: Arbitrary-Shaped Urban Layout Generation

Modeling and designing urban building layouts is of significant interest in computer vision, computer graphics, and urban applications. A building layout consists of a set of buildings in city blocks defined by a network of roads. We observe that building layouts are discrete structures, consisting of multiple rows of buildings of various shapes, and are amenable to skeletonization for mapping arbitrary city block shapes to a canonical form. Hence, we propose a fully automatic approach to building layout generation using graph attention networks. Our method generates realistic urban layouts given arbitrary road networks, and enables conditional generation based on learned priors. Our results, including user study, demonstrate superior performance as compared to prior layout generation networks, support arbitrary city block and varying building shapes as demonstrated by generating layouts for 28 large cities.
Pretrained Language Models as Visual Planners for Human Assistance

In our pursuit of advancing multi-modal AI assistants capable of guiding users to achieve complex multi-step goals, we propose the task of ‘Visual Planning for Assistance (VPA)’. Given a succinct natural language goal, e.g., "make a shelf", and a video of the user’s progress so far, the aim of VPA is to devise a plan, i.e. a sequence of actions such as "sand shelf", "paint shelf", etc. to realize the specified goal. This requires assessing the user’s progress from the (untrimmed) video, and relating it to the requirements of natural language goal, i.e. which actions to select and in what order? Consequently, this requires handling long video history and arbitrarily complex action dependencies. To address these challenges, we decompose VPA into video action segmentation and forecasting. Importantly, we experiment by formulating the forecasting step as a multimodal sequence modeling problem, allowing us to leverage the strength of pre-trained LMs (as the sequence model). This novel approach, which we call Visual Language Model based Planner (VLaMP), outperforms baselines across a suite of metrics that gauge the quality of the generated plans. Furthermore, through comprehensive ablations, we also isolate the value of each component – language pre-training, visual observations, and goal information. We have open-sourced all the data, model checkpoints, and training code.
FastViT: A Fast Hybrid Vision Transformer using Structural Reparameterization

The recent amalgamation of transformer and convolutional designs has led to steady improvements in accuracy and efficiency of the models. In this work, we introduce FastViT, a hybrid vision transformer architecture that obtains the state-of-the-art latency-accuracy trade-off. To this end, we introduce a novel token mixing operator, RepMixer, a building block of FastViT, that uses structural reparameterization to lower the memory access cost by removing skip-connections in the network. We further apply traintime overparametrization and large kernel convolutions to boost accuracy and empirically show that these choices have minimal effect on latency. We show that - our model is 3.5× faster than CMT, a recent state-of-the-art hybrid transformer architecture, 4.9× faster than EfficientNet, and 1.9× faster than ConvNeXt on a mobile device for the same accuracy on the ImageNet dataset. At similar latency, our model obtains 4.2% better Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet than MobileOne. Our model consistently outperforms competing architectures across several tasks - image classification, detection, segmentation and 3D mesh regression with significant improvement in latency on both a mobile device and a desktop GPU. Furthermore, our model is highly robust to out-of-distribution samples and corruptions, improving over competing robust models. Code and models are available at https://github.com/apple/ml-fastvit
Object as Query: Lifting any 2D Object Detector to 3D Detection

3D object detection from multi-view images has drawn much attention over the past few years. Existing methods mainly establish 3D representations from multi-view images and adopt a dense detection head for object detection, or employ object queries distributed in 3D space to localize objects. In this paper, we design Multi-View 2D Objects guided 3D Object Detector (MV2D), which can lift any 2D object detector to multi-view 3D object detection. Since 2D detections can provide valuable priors for object existence, MV2D exploits 2D detectors to generate object queries conditioned on the rich image semantics. These dynamically generated queries help MV2D to recall objects in the field of view and show a strong capability of localizing 3D objects. For the generated queries, we design a sparse cross attention module to force them to focus on the features of specific objects, which suppresses interference from noises. The evaluation results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the dynamic object queries and sparse feature aggregation can promote 3D detection capability. MV2D also exhibits a state-of-the-art performance among existing methods. We hope MV2D can serve as a new baseline for future research. Code is available at https://github.com/tusen-ai/MV2D.
Learn TAROT with MENTOR: A Meta-Learned Self-supervised Approach for Trajectory Prediction

Predicting diverse yet admissible trajectories that adhere to the map constraints is challenging. Graph-based scene encoders have been proven effective for preserving local structures of maps by defining lane-level connections. However, such encoders do not capture more complex patterns emerging from long-range heterogeneous connections between nonadjacent interacting lanes. To this end, we shed new light on learning common driving patterns by introducing meTA ROad paTh (TAROT) to formulate combinations of various relations between lanes on the road topology. Intuitively, this can be viewed as finding feasible routes. Furthermore, we propose MEta-road NeTwORk (MENTOR) that helps trajectory prediction by providing it with TAROT as navigation tips. More specifically, 1) we define TAROT prediction as a novel self-supervised proxy task to identify the complex heterogeneous structure of the map. 2) For typical driving actions, we establish several TAROTs that result in multiple Heterogeneous Structure Learning (HSL) tasks. These tasks are used in MENTOR, which performs meta-learning by simultaneously predicting trajectories along with proxy tasks, identifying an optimal combination of them, and automatically balancing them to improve the primary task. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse dataset, especially on diversity and admissibility metrics, achieving up to 20% improvements in challenging scenarios. We further investigate the contribution of proposed modules in ablation studies.
Focal Network for Image Restoration

Image restoration aims to reconstruct a sharp image from its degraded counterpart, which plays an important role in many fields. Recently, Transformer models have achieved promising performance on various image restoration tasks. However, their quadratic complexity remains an intractable issue for practical applications. The aim of this study is to develop an efficient and effective framework for image restoration. Inspired by the fact that different regions in a corrupted image always undergo degradations in various degrees, we propose to focus more on the important areas for reconstruction. To this end, we introduce a dual-domain selection mechanism to emphasize crucial information for restoration, such as edge signals and hard regions. In addition, we split high-resolution features to insert multi-scale receptive fields into the network, which improves both efficiency and performance. Finally, the proposed network, dubbed FocalNet, is built by incorporating these designs into a U-shaped backbone. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on ten datasets for three tasks, including single-image defocus deblurring, image dehazing, and image desnowing. Our code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/FocalNet.