Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Bayesian Prompt Learning for Image-Language Model Generalization

Foundational image-language models have generated considerable interest due to their efficient adaptation to downstream tasks by prompt learning. Prompt learning treats part of the language model input as trainable while freezing the rest, and optimizes an Empirical Risk Mini-mization objective. However, Empirical Risk Minimization is known to suffer from distributional shifts which hurt gen-eralizability to prompts unseen during training. By leveraging the regularization ability of Bayesian methods, we frame prompt learning from the Bayesian perspective and formulate it as a variational inference problem. Our approach regularizes the prompt space, reduces overfitting to the seen prompts and improves the prompt generalization on unseen prompts. Our framework is implemented by modeling the input prompt space in a probabilistic manner, as an a priori distribution which makes our proposal compatible with prompt learning approaches that are unconditional or conditional on the image. We demonstrate empirically on 15 benchmarks that Bayesian prompt learning provides an appropriate coverage of the prompt space, prevents learning spurious features, and exploits transferable invariant features. This results in better generalization of unseen prompts, even across different datasets and domains.Code available at: https://github.com/saic-fi/Bayesian-Prompt-Learning
Controllable Person Image Synthesis with Pose-Constrained Latent Diffusion

Controllable person image synthesis aims at rendering a source image based on user-specified changes in body pose or appearance. Prior art approaches leverage pixel-level denoising diffusion models conditioned on the coarse skeleton via cross-attention. This leads to two limitations: low efficiency and inaccurate condition information. To address both issues, a novel Pose-Constrained Latent Diffusion model (PoCoLD) is introduced. Rather than using the skeleton as a sparse pose representation, we exploit DensePose which offers much richer body structure information. To effectively capitalize DensePose at a low cost, we propose an efficient pose-constrained attention module that is capable of modeling the complex interplay between appearance and pose. Extensive experiments show that our PoCoLD outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors in image synthesis fidelity. Critically, it runs 2× faster and consumes 3.6× smaller memory than the latest diffusion-model-based alternative during inference. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/BrandonHanx/PoCoLD.
On the Robustness of Open-World Test-Time Training: Self-Training with Dynamic Prototype Expansion

Generalizing deep learning models to unknown target domain distribution with low latency has motivated research into test-time training/adaptation (TTT/TTA). Existing approaches often focus on improving test-time training performance under well-curated target domain data. As figured out in this work, many state-of-the-art methods fail to maintain the performance when the target domain is contaminated with strong out-of-distribution (OOD) data, a.k.a. open-world test-time training (OWTTT). The failure is mainly due to the inability to distinguish strong OOD samples from regular weak OOD samples. To improve the robustness of OWTTT we first develop an adaptive strong OOD pruning which improves the efficacy of the self-training TTT method. We further propose a way to dynamically expand the prototypes to represent strong OOD samples for an improved weak/strong OOD data separation. Finally, we regularize self-training with distribution alignment and the combination yields the state-of-the-art performance on 5 OWTTT benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Yushu-Li/OWTTT.
ARNOLD: A Benchmark for Language-Grounded Task Learning With Continuous States in Realistic 3D Scenes

Understanding the continuous states of objects is essential for task learning and planning in the real world. However, most existing task learning benchmarks assume discrete (e.g., binary) object goal states, which poses challenges for the learning of complex tasks and transferring learned policy from simulated environments to the real world. Furthermore, state discretization limits a robot’s ability to follow human instructions based on the grounding of actions and states. To tackle these challenges, we present ARNOLD, a benchmark that evaluates language-grounded task learning with continuous states in realistic 3D scenes. ARNOLD is comprised of 8 language-conditioned tasks that involve understanding object states and learning policies for continuous goals. To promote language-instructed learning, we provide expert demonstrations with template-generated language descriptions. We assess task performance by utilizing the latest language-conditioned policy learning models. Our results indicate that current models for language-conditioned manipulations continue to experience significant challenges in novel goal-state generalizations, scene generalizations, and object generalizations. These findings highlight the need to develop new algorithms that address this gap and underscore the potential for further research in this area. Project website: https://arnold-benchmark.github.io.
SegPrompt: Boosting Open-world Segmentation via Category-level Prompt Learning

Current closed-set instance segmentation models rely on pre-defined class labels for each mask during training and evaluation, largely limiting their ability to detect novel objects. Open-world instance segmentation (OWIS) models address this challenge by detecting unknown objects in a class-agnostic manner. However, previous OWIS approaches completely erase category information during training to keep the model’s ability to generalize to unknown objects. In this work, we propose a novel training mechanism termed SegPrompt that uses category information to improve the model’s class-agnostic segmentation ability for both known and unknown categories. In addition, the previous OWIS training setting exposes the unknown classes to the training set and brings information leakage, which is unreasonable in the real world. Therefore, we provide a new open-world benchmark closer to a real-world scenario by dividing the dataset classes into known-seen-unseen parts. For the first time, we focus on the model’s ability to discover objects that never appear in the training set images.Experiments show that SegPrompt can improve the overall and unseen detection performance by 5.6% and 6.1% in AR on our new benchmark without affecting the inference efficiency. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on existing cross-dataset transfer and strongly supervised settings, leading to 5.5% and 12.3% relative improvement. Code and data are released at: https://github.com/aim-uofa/SegPrompt
StyleDomain: Efficient and Lightweight Parameterizations of StyleGAN for One-shot and Few-shot Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation of GANs is a problem of fine-tuning GAN models pretrained on a large dataset (e.g. StyleGAN) to a specific domain with few samples (e.g. painting faces, sketches, etc.). While there are many methods that tackle this problem in different ways, there are still many important questions that remain unanswered. In this paper, we provide a systematic and in-depth analysis of the domain adaptation problem of GANs, focusing on the StyleGAN model. We perform a detailed exploration of the most important parts of StyleGAN that are responsible for adapting the generator to a new domain depending on the similarity between the source and target domains. As a result of this study, we propose new efficient and lightweight parameterizations of StyleGAN for domain adaptation. Particularly, we show that there exist directions in StyleSpace (StyleDomain directions) that are sufficient for adapting to similar domains. For dissimilar domains, we propose Affine+ and AffineLight+ parameterizations that allows us to outperform existing baselines in few-shot adaptation while having significantly less training parameters. Finally, we examine StyleDomain directions and discover their many sur prising properties that we apply for domain mixing and cross-domain image morphing. Source code can be found at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/StyleDomain.
Decoupled Iterative Refinement Framework for Interacting Hands Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image

Reconstructing interacting hands from a single RGB image is a very challenging task. On the one hand, severe mutual occlusion and similar local appearance between two hands confuse the extraction of visual features, resulting in the misalignment of estimated hand meshes and the image. On the other hand, there are complex spatial relationship between interacting hands, which significantly increases the solution space of hand poses and increases the difficulty of network learning. In this paper, we propose a decoupled iterative refinement framework to achieve pixel-alignment hand reconstruction while efficiently modeling the spatial relationship between hands. Specifically, we define two feature spaces with different characteristics, namely 2D visual feature space and 3D joint feature space. First, we obtain joint-wise features from the visual feature map and utilize a graph convolution network and a transformer to perform intra- and inter-hand information interaction in the 3D joint feature space, respectively. Then, we project the joint features with global information back into the 2D visual feature space in an obfuscation-free manner and utilize the 2D convolution for pixel-wise enhancement. By performing multiple alternate enhancements in the two feature spaces, our method can achieve an accurate and robust reconstruction of interacting hands. Our method outperforms all existing two-hand reconstruction methods by a large margin on the InterHand2.6M dataset.
DiffTAD: Temporal Action Detection with Proposal Denoising Diffusion

We propose a new formulation of temporal action detection (TAD) with denoising diffusion, DiffTAD in short. Taking as input random temporal proposals, it can yield action proposals accurately given an untrimmed long video. This presents a generative modeling perspective, against previous discriminative learning manners. This capability is achieved by first diffusing the ground-truth proposals to random ones (i.e., the forward/noising process) and then learning to reverse the noising process (i.e., the backward/denoising process). Concretely, we establish the denoising process in the Transformer decoder (e.g., DETR) by introducing a temporal location query design with faster convergence in training. We further propose a cross-step selective conditioning algorithm for inference acceleration. Extensive evaluations on ActivityNet and THUMOS show that our DiffTAD achieves top performance compared to previous art alternatives. The code is available at https://github.com/sauradip/DiffusionTAD.
C<sup>2</sup>ST: Cross-modal Contextualized Sequence Transduction for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) aims to transcribe the signs of an untrimmed video into written words or glosses. The mainstream framework for CSLR consists of a spatial module for visual representation learning, a temporal module aggregating the local and global temporal information of frame sequence, and the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss, which aligns video features with gloss sequence. Unfortunately, the language prior implicit in the gloss sequence is ignored throughout the modeling process. Furthermore, the contextualization of glosses is further ignored in alignment learning, as CTC makes an independence assumption between glosses. In this paper, we propose a Cross-modal Contextualized Sequence Transduction (C <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ST) for CSLR, which effectively incorporates the knowledge of gloss sequence into the process of video representation learning and sequence transduction. Specifically, we introduce a cross-modal context learning framework for CSLR, in which the linguistic features of gloss sequences are extracted by a language model, and recurrently integrate with visual features for video modelling. Moreover, we introduce the contextualized sequence transduction loss that incorporates the contextual information of gloss sequences in label prediction, without making any independence assumptions between the glosses. Our method sets the new state of the art on three widely used large-scale sign language recognition datasets: Phoenix-2014, Phoenix-2014-T, and CSL-Daily. On CSL-Daily, our approach achieves an absolute gain of 4.9% WER compared to the best published results.
Alleviating Catastrophic Forgetting of Incremental Object Detection via Within-Class and Between-Class Knowledge Distillation

Incremental object detection (IOD) task requires a model to learn continually from newly added data. However, directly fine-tuning a well-trained detection model on a new task will sharply decrease the performance on old tasks, which is known as catastrophic forgetting. Knowledge distillation, including feature distillation and response distillation, has been proven to be an effective way to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. However, previous works on feature distillation heavily rely on low-level feature information, while under-exploring the importance of high-level semantic information. In this paper, we discuss the cause of catastrophic forgetting in IOD task as destruction of semantic feature space. We propose a method that dynamically distills both semantic and feature information with consideration of both between-class discriminativeness and within-class consistency on Transformer-based detector. Between-class discriminativeness is preserved by distilling class-level semantic distance and feature distance among various categories, while within-class consistency is preserved by distilling instance-level semantic information and feature information within each category. Extensive experiments are conducted on both Pascal VOC and MS COCO benchmarks. Our method outperforms all the previous CNN-based SOTA methods under various experimental scenarios, with a remarkable mAP improvement from 36.90% to 39.80% under one-step IOD task.
Shatter and Gather: Learning Referring Image Segmentation with Text Supervision

Referring image segmentation, the task of segmenting any arbitrary entities described in free-form texts, opens up a variety of vision applications. However, manual labeling of training data for this task is prohibitively costly, leading to lack of labeled data for training. We address this issue by a weakly supervised learning approach using text descriptions of training images as the only source of supervision. To this end, we first present a new model that discovers semantic entities in input image and then combines such entities relevant to text query to predict the mask of the referent. We also present a new loss function that allows the model to be trained without any further supervision. Our method was evaluated on four public benchmarks for referring image segmentation, where it clearly outperformed the existing method for the same task and recent open-vocabulary segmentation models on all the benchmarks.
AutoDiffusion: Training-Free Optimization of Time Steps and Architectures for Automated Diffusion Model Acceleration

Diffusion models are emerging expressive generative models, in which a large number of time steps (inference steps) are required for a single image generation. To accelerate such tedious process, reducing steps uniformly is considered as an undisputed principle of diffusion models. We consider that such a uniform assumption is not the optimal solution in practice; i.e., we can find different optimal time steps for different models. Therefore, we propose to search the optimal time steps sequence and compressed model architecture in a unified framework to achieve effective image generation for diffusion models without any further training. Specifically, we first design a unified search space that consists of all possible time steps and various architectures. Then, a two stage evolutionary algorithm is introduced to find the optimal solution in the designed search space. To further accelerate the search process, we employ FID score between generated and real samples to estimate the performance of the sampled examples. As a result, the proposed method is (i).training-free, obtaining the optimal time steps and model architecture without any training process; (ii). orthogonal to most advanced diffusion samplers and can be integrated to gain better sample quality. (iii). generalized, where the searched time steps and architectures can be directly applied on different diffusion models with the same guidance scale. Experimental results show that our method achieves excellent performance by using only a few time steps, e.g. 17.86 FID score on ImageNet 64 × 64 with only four steps, compared to 138.66 with DDIM.
IHNet: Iterative Hierarchical Network Guided by High-Resolution Estimated Information for Scene Flow Estimation

Scene flow estimation, which predicts the 3D displacements of point clouds, is a fundamental task in autonomous driving. Most methods have adopted a coarse-to-fine structure to balance computational efficiency with accuracy, particularly when handling large displacements. However, inaccuracies in the initial coarse layer’s scene flow estimates may accumulate, leading to incorrect final estimates. To alleviate this, we introduce a novel Iterative Hierarchical Network——IHNet. This approach circulates high-resolution estimated information (scene flow and feature) from the preceding iteration back to the low-resolution layer of the current iteration. Serving as a guide, the high-resolution estimated scene flow, instead of initializing the scene flow from zero, provides a more precise center for low-resolution layer to identify matches. Meanwhile, the decoder’s feature at the high-resolution layer can contribute essential movement information. Furthermore, based on the recurrent structure, we design a resampling scheme to enhance the correspondence between points across two consecutive frames. By employing the previous estimated scene flow to fine-tune the target frame’s coordinates, we can significantly reduce the correspondence discrepancy between two frame points, a problem often caused by point sparsity. Following this adjustment, we continue to estimate the scene flow using the newly updated coordinates, along with the reencoded feature. Our approach outperforms the recent state-of-the-art method WSAFlowNet by 20.1% on FlyingThings3D and 56.0% on KITTI scene flow datasets according to EPE3D metric. The code is available at https://github.com/wangyunlhr/IHNet.
MVPSNet: Fast Generalizable Multi-view Photometric Stereo

We propose a fast and generalizable solution to Multiview Photometric Stereo (MVPS), called MVPSNet. The key to our approach is a feature extraction network that effectively combines images from the same view captured under multiple lighting conditions to extract geometric features from shading cues for stereo matching. We demonstrate these features, termed ‘Light Aggregated Feature Maps’ (LAFM), are effective for feature matching even in textureless regions, where traditional multi-view stereo methods often fail. Our method produces similar reconstruction results to PS-NeRF, a state-of-the-art MVPS method that optimizes a neural network per-scene, while being 411× faster (105 seconds vs. 12 hours) in inference. Additionally, we introduce a new synthetic dataset for MVPS, sMVPS, which is shown to be effective for training a generalizable MVPS method.
From Chaos Comes Order: Ordering Event Representations for Object Recognition and Detection

Today, state-of-the-art deep neural networks that process events first convert them into dense, grid-like input representations before using an off-the-shelf network. However, selecting the appropriate representation for the task traditionally requires training a neural network for each representation and selecting the best one based on the validation score, which is very time-consuming. This work eliminates this bottleneck by selecting representations based on the Gromov-Wasserstein Discrepancy (GWD) between raw events and their representation. It is about 200 times faster to compute than training a neural network and preserves the task performance ranking of event representations across multiple representations, network backbones, datasets, and tasks. Thus finding representations with high task scores is equivalent to finding representations with a low GWD. We use this insight to, for the first time, perform a hyperparameter search on a large family of event representations, revealing new and powerful representations that exceed the state-of-the-art. Our optimized representations outperform existing representations by 1.7 mAP on the 1 Mpx dataset and 0.3 mAP on the Gen1 dataset, two established object detection benchmarks, and reach a 3.8% higher classification score on the mini N-ImageNet benchmark. Moreover, we outperform state-of-the-art by 2.1 mAP on Gen1 and state-of-the-art feed-forward methods by 6.0 mAP on the 1 Mpx datasets. This work opens a new unexplored field of explicit representation optimization for event-based learning.
MetaGCD: Learning to Continually Learn in Generalized Category Discovery

In this paper, we consider a real-world scenario where a model that is trained on pre-defined classes continually encounters unlabeled data that contains both known and novel classes. The goal is to continually discover novel classes while maintaining the performance in known classes. We name the setting Continual Generalized Category Discovery (C-GCD). Existing methods for novel class discovery cannot directly handle the C-GCD setting due to some unrealistic assumptions, such as the unlabeled data only containing novel classes. Furthermore, they fail to discover novel classes in a continual fashion. In this work, we lift all these assumptions and propose an approach, called MetaGCD, to learn how to incrementally discover with less forgetting. Our proposed method uses a meta-learning framework and leverages the offline labeled data to simulate the testing incremental learning process. A meta-objective is defined to revolve around two conflicting learning objectives to achieve novel class discovery without forgetting. Furthermore, a soft neighborhood-based contrastive network is proposed to discriminate uncorrelated images while attracting correlated images. We build strong baselines and conduct extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks to demonstrate the superiority of our method.
TeD-SPAD: Temporal Distinctiveness for Self-supervised Privacy-preservation for video Anomaly Detection

Video anomaly detection (VAD) without human monitoring is a complex computer vision task that can have a positive impact on society if implemented successfully. While recent advances have made significant progress in solving this task, most existing approaches overlook a critical real-world concern: privacy. With the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence technologies, it becomes crucial to implement proper AI ethics into their development. Privacy leakage in VAD allows models to pick up and amplify unnecessary biases related to people’s personal information, which may lead to undesirable decision making. In this paper, we propose TeD-SPAD, a privacy-aware video anomaly detection framework that destroys visual private information in a self-supervised manner. In particular, we propose the use of a temporally-distinct triplet loss to promote temporally discriminative features, which complements current weakly-supervised VAD methods. Using TeD-SPAD, we achieve a positive trade-off between privacy protection and utility anomaly detection performance on three popular weakly supervised VAD datasets: UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and ShanghaiTech. Our proposed anonymization model reduces private attribute prediction by 32.25% while only reducing frame-level ROC AUC on the UCF-Crime anomaly detection dataset by 3.69%.