Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
OT-Filter: An Optimal Transport Filter for Learning with Noisy Labels

The success of deep learning is largely attributed to the training over clean data. However, data is often coupled with noisy labels in practice. Learning with noisy labels is challenging because the performance of the deep neural networks (DNN) drastically degenerates, due to confirmation bias caused by the network memorization over noisy labels. To alleviate that, a recent prominent direction is on sample selection, which retrieves clean data samples from noisy samples, so as to enhance the model's robustness and tolerance to noisy labels. In this paper, we re-vamp the sample selection from the perspective of optimal transport theory and propose a novel method, called the OT-Filter. The OT-Filter provides geometrically meaningful distances and preserves distribution patterns to measure the data discrepancy, thus alleviating the confirmation bias. Extensive experiments on benchmarks, such as Clothing1M and ANIMAL-10N, show that the performance of the OT-Filter outperforms its counterparts. Meanwhile, results on benchmarks with synthetic labels, such as CIFAR-10/100, show the superiority of the OT-Filter in handling data labels of high noise.
Hierarchical Video-Moment Retrieval and Step-Captioning

There is growing interest in searching for information from large video corpora. Prior works have studied relevant tasks, such as text-based video retrieval, moment retrieval, video summarization, and video captioning in isolation, without an end-to-end setup that can jointly search from video corpora and generate summaries. Such an end-to-end setup would allow for many interesting applications, e.g., a text-based search that finds a relevant video from a video corpus, extracts the most relevant moment from that video, and segments the moment into important steps with captions. To address this, we present the HIREST (HIerarchical REtrieval and STep-captioning) dataset and propose a new benchmark that covers hierarchical information retrieval and visual/textual stepwise summarization from an instructional video corpus. Hirest consists of 3.4K text-video pairs from an instructional video dataset, where 1.1 K videos have annotations of moment spans relevant to text query and breakdown of each moment into key instruction steps with caption and timestamps (totaling 8.6K step captions). Our hierarchical benchmark consists of video retrieval, moment retrieval, and two novel moment segmentation and step captioning tasks. In moment segmentation, models break down a video moment into instruction steps and identify start-end boundaries. In step captioning, models generate a textual summary for each step. We also present starting point task-specific and end-to-end joint baseline models for our new benchmark. While the baseline models show some promising results, there still exists large room for future improvement by the community. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> code and data: https://github.com/j-min/HiREST
CiaoSR: Continuous Implicit Attention-in-Attention Network for Arbitrary-Scale Image Super-Resolution

Learning continuous image representations is recently gaining popularity for image super-resolution (SR) because of its ability to reconstruct high-resolution images with arbitrary scales from low-resolution inputs.Existing methods mostly ensemble nearby features to predict the new pixel at any queried coordinate in the SR image.Such a local ensemble suffers from some limitations: i) it has no learnable parameters and it neglects the similarity of the visual features; ii) it has a limited receptive field and cannot ensemble relevant features in a large field which are important in an image.To address these issues, this paper proposes a continuous implicit attention-in-attention network, called CiaoSR.We explicitly design an implicit attention network to learn the ensemble weights for the nearby local features.Furthermore, we embed a scale-aware attention in this implicit attention network to exploit additional non-local information.Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate CiaoSR significantly outperforms the existing single image SR methods with the same backbone.In addition, CiaoSR also achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the arbitrary-scale SR task.The effectiveness of the method is also demonstrated on the real-world SR setting.More importantly, CiaoSR can be flexibly integrated into any backbone to improve the SR performance.
NÜWA-LIP: Language-guided Image Inpainting with Defect-free VQGAN

Language-guided image inpainting aims to fill the defective regions of an image under the guidance of text while keeping the non-defective regions unchanged. However, directly encoding the defective images is prone to have an adverse effect on the non-defective regions, giving rise to distorted structures on non-defective parts. To better adapt the text guidance to the inpainting task, this paper proposes NÜWA-LIP, which involves defect-free VQGAN (DF-VQGAN) and a multi-perspective sequence-to-sequence module (MP-S2S). To be specific, DF-VQGAN introduces relative estimation to carefully control the receptive spreading, as well as symmetrical connections to protect structure details unchanged. For harmoniously embedding text guidance into the locally defective regions, MP-S2S is employed by aggregating the complementary perspectives from low-level pixels, high-level tokens as well as the text description. Experiments show that our DF-VQGAN effectively aids the inpainting process while avoiding unexpected changes in non-defective regions. Results on three open-domain benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method against state-of-the-arts. Our code, datasets, and model will be made publicly available <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> https://github.com/kodenii/NUWA-LIP.
Joint HDR Denoising and Fusion: A Real-World Mobile HDR Image Dataset

Mobile phones have become a ubiquitous and indispensable photographing device in our daily life, while the small aperture and sensor size make mobile phones more susceptible to noise and over-saturation, resulting in low dynamic range (LDR) and low image quality. It is thus crucial to develop high dynamic range (HDR) imaging techniques for mobile phones. Unfortunately, the existing HDR image datasets are mostly constructed by DSLR cameras in daytime, limiting their applicability to the study of HDR imaging for mobile phones. In this work, we develop, for the first time to our best knowledge, an HDR image dataset by using mobile phone cameras, namely Mobile-HDR dataset. Specifically, we utilize three mobile phone cameras to collect paired LDR-HDR images in the raw image domain, covering both daytime and night-time scenes with different noise levels. We then propose a transformer based model with a pyramid cross-attention alignment module to aggregate highly correlated features from different exposure frames to perform joint HDR denoising and fusion. Experiments validate the advantages of our dataset and our method on mobile HDR imaging. Dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/shuaizhengliu/Joint-HDRDN.
Uni-Perceiver v2: A Generalist Model for Large-Scale Vision and Vision-Language Tasks

Despite the remarkable success of foundation models, their task-specific fine-tuning paradigm makes them inconsistent with the goal of general perception modeling. The key to eliminating this inconsistency is to use generalist models for general task modeling. However, existing attempts at generalist models are inadequate in both versatility and performance. In this paper, we propose Uni-Perceiver v2, which is the first generalist model capable of handling major large-scale vision and vision-language tasks with competitive performance. Specifically, images are encoded as general region proposals, while texts are encoded via a Transformer-based language model. The encoded representations are transformed by a task-agnostic decoder. Different tasks are formulated as a unified maximum likelihood estimation problem. We further propose an effective optimization technique named Task-Balanced Gradient Normalization to ensure stable multi-task learning with an unmixed sampling strategy, which is helpful for tasks requiring large batch-size training. After being jointly trained on various tasks, Uni-Perceiver v2 is capable of directly handling downstream tasks without any task-specific adaptation. Results show that Uni-Perceiver v2 outperforms all existing generalist models in both versatility and performance. Meanwhile, compared with the commonly-recognized strong baselines that require tasks-specific fine-tuning, Uni-Perceiver v2 achieves competitive performance on a broad range of vision and vision-language tasks.
Modeling Inter-Class and Intra-Class Constraints in Novel Class Discovery

Novel class discovery (NCD) aims at learning a model that transfers the common knowledge from a class-disjoint labelled dataset to another unlabelled dataset and discovers new classes (clusters) within it. Many methods, as well as elaborate training pipelines and appropriate objectives, have been proposed and considerably boosted performance on NCD tasks. Despite all this, we find that the existing methods do not sufficiently take advantage of the essence of the NCD setting. To this end, in this paper, we propose to model both inter-class and intra-class constraints in NCD based on the symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence (sKLD). Specifically, we propose an inter-class sKLD constraint to effectively exploit the disjoint relationship between labelled and unlabelled classes, enforcing the separability for different classes in the embedding space. In addition, we present an intra-class sKLD constraint to explicitly constrain the intra-relationship between a sample and its augmentations and ensure the stability of the training process at the same time. We conduct extensive experiments on the popular CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks and successfully demonstrate that our method can establish a new state of the art and can achieve significant performance improvements, e.g., 3.5%/3.7% clustering accuracy improvements on CIFAR100-50 dataset split under the task-aware/-agnostic evaluation protocol, over previous state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/FanZhichen/NCD-IIC.
DynamicDet: A Unified Dynamic Architecture for Object Detection

Dynamic neural network is an emerging research topic in deep learning. With adaptive inference, dynamic models can achieve remarkable accuracy and computational efficiency. However, it is challenging to design a powerful dynamic detector, because of no suitable dynamic architecture and exiting criterion for object detection. To tackle these difficulties, we propose a dynamic framework for object detection, named DynamicDet. Firstly, we carefully design a dynamic architecture based on the nature of the object detection task. Then, we propose an adaptive router to analyze the multi-scale information and to decide the inference route automatically. We also present a novel optimization strategy with an exiting criterion based on the detection losses for our dynamic detectors. Last, we present a variable-speed inference strategy, which helps to realize a wide range of accuracy-speed trade-offs with only one dynamic detector. Extensive experiments conducted on the COCO benchmark demonstrate that the proposed DynamicDet achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy-speed trade-offs. For instance, with comparable accuracy, the inference speed of our dynamic detector Dy-YOLOv7-W6 surpasses YOLOv7-E6 by 12%, YOLOv7-D6 by 17%, and YOLOv7-E6E by 39%. The code is available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/DynamicDet.
High-fidelity 3D Face Generation from Natural Language Descriptions

Synthesizing high-quality 3D face models from natural language descriptions is very valuable for many applications, including avatar creation, virtual reality, and telepresence. However, little research ever tapped into this task. We argue the major obstacle lies in 1) the lack of high-quality 3D face data with descriptive text annotation, and 2) the complex mapping relationship between descriptive language space and shape/appearance space. To solve these problems, we build Describe3D dataset, the first large-scale dataset with fine-grained text descriptions for text-to-3D face generation task. Then we propose a two-stage framework to first generate a 3D face that matches the concrete descriptions, then optimize the parameters in the 3D shape and texture space with abstract description to refine the 3D face model. Extensive experimental results show that our method can produce a faithful 3D face that conforms to the input descriptions with higher accuracy and quality than previous methods. The code and Describe3D dataset are released at https://github.com/zhuhao-nju/describe3D.
Nerflets: Local Radiance Fields for Efficient Structure-Aware 3D Scene Representation from 2D Supervision

We address efficient and structure-aware 3D scene representation from images. Nerflets are our key contribution-a set of local neural radiance fields that together represent a scene. Each nerflet maintains its own spatial position, orientation, and extent, within which it contributes to panoptic, density, and radiance reconstructions. By leveraging only photometric and inferred panoptic image supervision, we can directly and jointly optimize the parameters of a set of nerflets so as to form a decomposed representation of the scene, where each object instance is represented by a group of nerflets. During experiments with indoor and outdoor environments, we find that nerflets: (1) fit and approximate the scene more efficiently than traditional global NeRFs, (2) allow the extraction of panoptic and photometric renderings from arbitrary views, and (3) enable tasks rare for NeRFs, such as 3D panoptic segmentation and interactive editing. Our project page.
X<sup>3</sup>KD: Knowledge Distillation Across Modalities, Tasks and Stages for Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection

Recent advances in 3D object detection (3DOD) have obtained remarkably strong results for LiDAR-based models. In contrast, surround-view 3DOD models based on multiple camera images underperform due to the necessary view transformation of features from perspective view (PV) to a 3D world representation which is ambiguous due to missing depth information. This paper introduces X <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> KD, a comprehensive knowledge distillation framework across different modalities, tasks, and stages for multi-camera 3DOD. Specifically, we propose cross-task distillation from an instance segmentation teacher (X-IS) in the PV feature extraction stage providing supervision without ambiguous error backpropagation through the view transformation. After the transformation, we apply cross-modal feature distillation (X-FD) and adversarial training (X-AT) to improve the 3D world representation of multi-camera features through the information contained in a LiDAR-based 3DOD teacher. Finally, we also employ this teacher for cross-modal output distillation (X-OD), providing dense supervision at the prediction stage. We perform extensive ablations of knowledge distillation at different stages of multi-camera 3DOD. Our final X <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> KD model outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on the nuScenes and Waymo datasets and generalizes to RADAR-based 3DOD. Qualitative results video at https://youtu.be/1do9DPFmr38.
Top-Down Visual Attention from Analysis by Synthesis

Current attention algorithms (e.g., self-attention) are stimulus-driven and highlight all the salient objects in an image. However, intelligent agents like humans often guide their attention based on the high-level task at hand, focusing only on task-related objects. This ability of task-guided top-down attention provides task-adaptive representation and helps the model generalize to various tasks. In this paper, we consider top-down attention from a classic Analysis-by-Synthesis (AbS) perspective of vision. Prior work indicates a functional equivalence between visual attention and sparse reconstruction; we show that an AbS visual system that optimizes a similar sparse reconstruction objective modulated by a goal-directed top-down signal naturally simulates top-down attention. We further propose Analysis-by-Synthesis Vision Transformer (AbSViT), which is a top-down modulated ViT model that variationally approximates AbS, and achieves controllable top-down attention. For real-world applications, AbSViT consistently improves over baselines on Vision-Language tasks such as VQA and zero-shot retrieval where language guides the top-down attention. AbSViT can also serve as a general backbone, improving performance on classification, semantic segmentation, and model robustness. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/absvit.
Towards a Smaller Student: Capacity Dynamic Distillation for Efficient Image Retrieval

Previous Knowledge Distillation based efficient image retrieval methods employ a lightweight network as the stu-dent model for fast inference. However, the lightweight stu-dent model lacks adequate representation capacity for effective knowledge imitation during the most critical early training period, causing final performance degeneration. To tackle this issue, we propose a Capacity Dynamic Distillation framework, which constructs a student model with editable representation capacity. Specifically, the employed student model is initially a heavy model to fruitfully learn distilled knowledge in the early training epochs, and the stu-dent model is gradually compressed during the training. To dynamically adjust the model capacity, our dynamic frame-work inserts a learnable convolutional layer within each residual block in the student model as the channel importance indicator. The indicator is optimized simultaneously by the image retrieval loss and the compression loss, and a retrieval- guided gradient resetting mechanism is proposed to release the gradient conflict. Extensive experiments show that our method has superior inference speed and accu-racy, e.g., on the VeRi-776 dataset, given the ResNet101 as a teacher, our method saves 67.13% model parameters and 65.67% FLOPs without sacrificing accuracy. Code is avail-able at https://github.com/SCY-X/Capacity_Dynamic_Distillation.
Improving Table Structure Recognition with Visual-Alignment Sequential Coordinate Modeling

Table structure recognition aims to extract the logical and physical structure of unstructured table images into a machine-readable format. The latest end-to-end image-to-text approaches simultaneously predict the two structures by two decoders, where the prediction of the physical structure (the bounding boxes of the cells) is based on the representation of the logical structure. However, the previous methods struggle with imprecise bounding boxes as the logical representation lacks local visual information. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end sequential modeling framework for table structure recognition called VAST. It contains a novel coordinate sequence decoder triggered by the representation of the non-empty cell from the logical structure decoder. In the coordinate sequence decoder, we model the bounding box coordinates as a language sequence, where the left, top, right and bottom coordinates are decoded sequentially to leverage the inter-coordinate dependency. Furthermore, we propose an auxiliary visual-alignment loss to enforce the logical representation of the non-empty cells to contain more local visual details, which helps produce better cell bounding boxes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art results in both logical and physical structure recognition. The ablation study also validates that the proposed coordinate sequence decoder and the visual-alignment loss are the keys to the success of our method.
Hierarchical Semantic Correspondence Networks for Video Paragraph Grounding

Video Paragraph Grounding (VPG) is an essential yet challenging task in vision-language understanding, which aims to jointly localize multiple events from an untrimmed video with a paragraph query description. One of the critical challenges in addressing this problem is to comprehend the complex semantic relations between visual and textual modalities. Previous methods focus on modeling the contextual information between the video and text from a single-level perspective (i.e., the sentence level), ignoring rich visual-textual correspondence relations at different semantic levels, e.g., the video-word and video-paragraph correspondence. To this end, we propose a novel Hierarchical Semantic Correspondence Network (HSCNet), which explores multi-level visual-textual correspondence by learning hierarchical semantic alignment and utilizes dense supervision by grounding diverse levels of queries. Specifically, we develop a hierarchical encoder that encodes the multi-modal inputs into semantics-aligned representations at different levels. To exploit the hierarchical semantic correspondence learned in the encoder for multi-level supervision, we further design a hierarchical decoder that progressively performs finer grounding for lower-level queries conditioned on higher-level semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of HSCNet and our method significantly outstrips the state-of-the-arts on two challenging benchmarks, i.e., ActivityNet-Captions and TACoS.
Federated Domain Generalization with Generalization Adjustment

Federated Domain Generalization (FedDG) attempts to learn a global model in a privacy-preserving manner that generalizes well to new clients possibly with domain shift. Recent exploration mainly focuses on designing an unbiased training strategy within each individual domain. However, without the support of multi-domain data jointly in the minibatch training, almost all methods cannot guarantee the generalization under domain shift. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel global objective incorporating a new variance reduction regularizer to encourage fairness. A novel FL-friendly method named Generalization Adjustment (GA) is proposed to optimize the above objective by dynamically calibrating the aggregation weights. The theoretical analysis of GA demonstrates the possibility to achieve a tighter generalization bound with an explicit reweighted aggregation, substituting the implicit multi-domain data sharing that is only applicable to the conventional DG settings. Besides, the proposed algorithm is generic and can be combined with any local client training-based methods. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method, with consistent improvements over several FedDG algorithms when used in combination. The source code is released at https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/FedDG-GA