Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Visual Captioning at Will: Describing Images and Videos Guided by a Few Stylized Sentences

Stylized visual captioning aims to generate image or video descriptions with specific styles, making them more attractive and emotionally appropriate. One major challenge with this task is the lack of paired stylized captions for visual content, so most existing works focus on unsupervised methods that do not rely on parallel datasets. However, these approaches still require training with sufficient examples that have style labels, and the generated captions are limited to predefined styles. To address these limitations, we explore the problem of Few-Shot Stylized Visual Captioning, which aims to generate captions in any desired style, using only a few examples as guidance during inference, without requiring further training. We propose a framework called FS-StyleCap for this task, which utilizes a conditional encoder-decoder language model and a visual projection module. Our two-step training scheme proceeds as follows: first, we train a style extractor to generate style representations on an unlabeled text-only corpus. Then, we freeze the extractor and enable our decoder to generate stylized descriptions based on the extracted style vector and projected visual content vectors. During inference, our model can generate desired stylized captions by deriving the style representation from user-supplied examples. Our automatic evaluation results for few-shot sentimental visual captioning outperform state-of-the-art approaches and are comparable to models that are fully trained on labeled style corpora. Human evaluations further confirm our model's ability to handle multiple styles.
Hierarchical Dynamic Image Harmonization

Image harmonization is a critical task in computer vision, which aims to adjust the foreground to make it compatible with the background. Recent works mainly focus on using global transformations (i.e., normalization and color curve rendering) to achieve visual consistency. However, these models ignore local visual consistency and their huge model sizes limit their harmonization ability on edge devices. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical dynamic network (HDNet) to adapt features from local to global view for better feature transformation in efficient image harmonization. Inspired by the success of various dynamic models, local dynamic (LD) module and mask-aware global dynamic (MGD) module are proposed in this paper. Specifically, LD matches local representations between the foreground and background regions based on semantic similarities, then adaptively adjust every foreground local representation according to the appearance of its K-nearest neighbor background regions. In this way, LD can produce more realistic images at a more fine-grained level, and simultaneously enjoy the characteristic of semantic alignment. The MGD effectively applies distinct convolution to the foreground and background, learning the representations of foreground and background regions as well as their correlations to the global harmonization, facilitating local visual consistency for the images much more efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed HDNet significantly reduces the total model parameters by more than 80% compared to previous methods, while still attaining state-of-the-art performance on the popular iHarmony4 dataset. Additionally, we introduced a lightweight version of HDNet, i.e., HDNet-lite, which has only 0.65MB parameters, yet it still achieve competitive performance. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/chenhaoxing/HDNet.
Sequential Affinity Learning for Video Restoration

Video restoration networks aim to restore high-quality frame sequences from degraded ones. However, traditional video restoration methods heavily rely on temporal modeling operators or optical flow estimation, which limits their versatility. The aim of this work is to present a novel approach for video restoration that eliminates inefficient temporal modeling operators and pixel-level feature alignment in the network architecture. The proposed method, Sequential Affinity Learning Network (SALN), is designed based on an affinity mechanism that establishes direct correspondences between the Query frame, degraded sequence, and restored frames in latent space. This unique perspective allows for more accurate and effective restoration of video content without relying on temporal modeling operators or optical flow estimation techniques. Moreover, we enhanced the design of the channel-wise self-attention block to improve the decoder's performance for video restoration. Our method outperformed previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in several classic video tasks, including video deraining, video dehazing, and video waterdrop removal, demonstrating excellent efficiency. As a novel network that differs significantly from previous video restoration methods, SALN aims to provide innovative ideas and directions for video restoration. Our contributions include proposing a novel affinity-based approach for video restoration, enhancing the design of the channel-wise self-attention block, and achieving state-of-the-art performance on several classic video tasks.
AutoPoster: A Highly Automatic and Content-aware Design System for Advertising Poster Generation

Advertising posters, a form of information presentation, combine visual and linguistic modalities. Creating a poster involves multiple steps and necessitates design experience and creativity. This paper introduces AutoPoster, a highly automatic and content-aware system for generating advertising posters. With only product images and titles as inputs, AutoPoster can automatically produce posters of varying sizes through four key stages: image cleaning and retargeting, layout generation, tagline generation, and style attribute prediction. To ensure visual harmony of posters, two content-aware models are incorporated for layout and tagline generation. Moreover, we propose a novel multi-task Style Attribute Predictor (SAP) to jointly predict visual style attributes. Meanwhile, to our knowledge, we propose the first poster generation dataset that includes visual attribute annotations for over 76k posters. Qualitative and quantitative outcomes from user studies and experiments substantiate the efficacy of our system and the aesthetic superiority of the generated posters compared to other poster generation methods.
Towards Decision-based Sparse Attacks on Video Recognition

Recent studies indicate that sparse attacks threaten the security of deep learning models, which modify only a small set of pixels in the input based on the l0 norm constraint. While existing research has primarily focused on sparse attacks against image models, there is a notable gap in evaluating the robustness of video recognition models. To bridge this gap, we are the first to study sparse video attacks and propose an attack framework named V-DSA in the most challenging decision-based setting, in which threat models only return the predicted hard label. Specifically, V-DSA comprises two modules: a Cross-Modal Generator (CMG) for query-free transfer attacks on each frame and an Optical flow Grouping Evolution algorithm (OGE) for query-efficient spatial-temporal attacks. CMG passes each frame to generate the transfer video as the starting point of the attack based on the feature similarity between image classification and video recognition models. OGE first initializes populations based on transfer video and then leverages optical flow to establish the temporal connection of the perturbed pixels in each frame, which can reduce the parameter space and break the temporal relationship between frames specifically. Finally, OGE complements the above optical flow modeling by grouping evolution which can realize the coarse-to-fine attack to avoid falling into the local optimum. In addition, OGE makes the perturbation with temporal coherence while balancing the number of perturbed pixels per frame, further increasing the imperceptibility of the attack. Extensive experiments demonstrate that V-DSA achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both threat effectiveness and imperceptibility. We hope V-DSA can provide valuable insights into the security of video recognition systems.
Let's ViCE! Mimicking Human Cognitive Behavior in Image Generation Evaluation

Research in Image Generation has recently made significant progress, particularly boosted by the introduction of VisionLanguage models which are able to produce high-quality visual content based on textual inputs. Despite ongoing advancements in terms of generation quality and realism, no methodical frameworks have been defined yet to quantitatively measure the quality of the generated content and the adherence with the prompted requests: so far, only humanbased evaluations have been adopted for quality satisfaction and for comparing different generative methods. We introduce a novel automated method for Visual Concept Evaluation (ViCE), i.e. to assess consistency between a generated/edited image and the corresponding prompt/instructions, with a process inspired by the human cognitive behaviour. ViCE combines the strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Question Answering (VQA) into a unified pipeline, aiming to replicate the human cognitive process in quality assessment. This method outlines visual concepts, formulates image-specific verification questions, utilizes the Q&A system to investigate the image, and scores the combined outcome. Although this brave new hypothesis of mimicking humans in the image evaluation process is in its preliminary assessment stage, results are promising and open the door to a new form of automatic evaluation which could have significant impact as the image generation or the image target editing tasks become more and more sophisticated.
Calibration-based Dual Prototypical Contrastive Learning Approach for Domain Generalization Semantic Segmentation

Prototypical contrastive learning (PCL) has been widely used to learn class-wise domain-invariant features recently. These methods are based on the assumption that the prototypes, which are represented as the central value of the same class in a certain domain, are domain-invariant. Since the prototypes of different domains have discrepancies as well, the class-wise domain-invariant features learned from the source domain by PCL need to be aligned with the prototypes of other domains simultaneously. However, the prototypes of the same class in different domains may be different while the prototypes of different classes may be similar, which may affect the learning of class-wise domain-invariant features. Based on these observations, a calibration-based dual prototypical contrastive learning (CDPCL) approach is proposed to reduce the domain discrepancy between the learned class-wise features and the prototypes of different domains for domain generalization semantic segmentation. It contains an uncertainty-guided PCL (UPCL) and a hard-weighted PCL (HPCL). Since the domain discrepancies of the prototypes of different classes may be different, we propose an uncertainty probability matrix to represent the domain discrepancies of the prototypes of all the classes. The UPCL estimates the uncertainty probability matrix to calibrate the weights of the prototypes during the PCL. Moreover, considering that the prototypes of different classes may be similar in some circumstances, which means these prototypes are hard-aligned, the HPCL is proposed to generate a hard-weighted matrix to calibrate the weights of the hard-aligned prototypes during the PCL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance over current approaches on domain generalization segmentation tasks. The source code will be released at https://github.com/seabearlmx/CDPCL.
Isolation and Induction: Training Robust Deep Neural Networks against Model Stealing Attacks

Despite the broad application of Machine Learning models as a Service (MLaaS), they are vulnerable to model stealing attacks. These attacks can replicate the model functionality by using the black-box query process without any prior knowledge of the target victim model. Existing stealing defenses add deceptive perturbations to the victim's posterior probabilities to mislead the attackers. However, these defenses are now suffering problems of high inference computational overheads and unfavorable trade-offs between benign accuracy and stealing robustness, which challenges the feasibility of deployed models in practice. To address the problems, this paper proposes Isolation and Induction (InI), a novel and effective training framework for model stealing defenses. Instead of deploying auxiliary defense modules that introduce redundant inference time, InI directly trains a defensive model by isolating the adversary's training gradient from the expected gradient, which can effectively reduce the inference computational cost. In contrast to adding perturbations over model predictions that harm the benign accuracy, we train models to produce uninformative outputs against stealing queries, which can induce the adversary to extract little useful knowledge from victim models with minimal impact on the benign performance. Extensive experiments on several visual classification datasets (e.g., MNIST and CIFAR10) demonstrate the superior robustness (up to 48% reduction on stealing accuracy) and speed (up to 25.4× faster) of our InI over other state-of-the-art methods. Our codes can be found in https://github.com/DIG-Beihang/InI-Model-Stealing-Defense.
Flexible and Secure Watermarking for Latent Diffusion Model

Since the significant advancements and open-source support of latent diffusion models (LDMs) in the field of image generation, numerous researchers and enterprises start fine-tuning the pre-trained models to generate specialized images for different objectives. However, the criminals may turn their attention to generate images by LDMs and then carry out illegal activities. The watermarking technique is a typical solution to deal with this problem. But, the post-hoc watermarking methods can be easily escaped to obtain the non-watermarked images, and the existing watermarking methods designed for LDMs can only embed a fixed message, i.e., the to-be-embedded message cannot be changed unless retraining the model. Therefore, in this work, we propose an end-to-end watermarking method based on the encoder-decoder (ENDE) and message-matrix. The message can be embedded into generated images through fusing the message-matrix and intermediate outputs in the forward propagation of image generation based on LDM. Thus, the message can be flexibly changed by utilizing the message-encoder to generate message-matrix, without training the LDM again. On the other hand, the security mechanism in our watermarking method can defeat the attack that the users may escape the message-matrix usage during image generation. A series of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of our watermarking method compared with SOTA methods.
Equivariant Learning for Out-of-Distribution Cold-start Recommendation

Recommender systems rely on user-item interactions to learn Collaborative Filtering (CF) signals and easily under-recommend the cold-start items without historical interactions. To boost cold-start item recommendation, previous studies usually incorporate item features (e.g., micro-video content features) into CF models. They essentially align the feature representations of warm-start items with CF representations during training, and then adopt the feature representations of cold-start items to make recommendations. However, cold-start items might have feature distribution shifts from warm-start ones due to different upload times. As such, these cold-start item features fall into the underrepresented feature space, where their feature representations cannot align well with CF signals, causing poor cold-start recommendation.
Improving Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Dual-Level Siamese Structure Network

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS) is an important task that utilizes both labeled and unlabeled data to reduce expenses on labeling training examples. However, the effectiveness of SSS algorithms is limited by the difficulty of fully exploiting the potential of unlabeled data. To address this, we propose a dual-level Siamese structure network (DSSN) for pixel-wise contrastive learning. By aligning positive pairs with a pixel-wise contrastive loss using strong augmented views in both low-level image space and high-level feature space, the proposed DSSN is designed to maximize the utilization of available unlabeled data. Additionally, we introduce a novel class-aware pseudo-label selection strategy for weak-to-strong supervision, which addresses the limitations of most existing methods that do not perform selection or apply a predefined threshold for all classes. Specifically, our strategy selects the top high-confidence prediction of the weak view for each class to generate pseudo labels that supervise the strong augmented views. This strategy is capable of taking into account the class imbalance and improving the performance of long-tailed classes. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on two datasets, PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes, outperforming other SSS algorithms by a significant margin. The source code is available at https://github.com/kunzhan/DSSN.
Unveiling the Power of CLIP in Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Large-scale Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) model, e.g., CLIP, has demonstrated its natural advantage in generating textual descriptions for images. These textual descriptions afford us greater semantic monitoring insights while not requiring any domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose a new prompt learning paradigm for unsupervised visible-infrared person re-identification (USL-VI-ReID) by taking full advantage of the visual-text representation ability from CLIP. In our framework, we establish a learnable cluster-aware prompt for person images and obtain textual descriptions allowing for subsequent unsupervised training. This description complements the rigid pseudo-labels and provides an important semantic supervised signal. On that basis, we propose a new memory-swapping contrastive learning, where we first find the correlated cross-modal prototypes by the Hungarian matching method and then swap the prototype pairs in the memory. Thus typical contrastive learning without any change could easily associate the cross-modal information. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. For example, on SYSU-MM01 we arrive at 54.0% in terms of Rank-1 accuracy, over 9% improvement against state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/CzAngus/CCLNet.
Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Joint Contrastive Learning with Sensitivity

Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA) aims to learn a well-performed model using fully labeled source samples and scarcely labeled target samples, along with unlabeled target samples. Due to the dominant presence of labeled samples from the source domain in the training data, both the feature extractor and classifier can display bias towards the source domain. This can result in sub-optimal feature extraction for the challenging target samples that have notable differences from the source domain. Moreover, the source-favored classifier can hinder the classification performance of the target domain. To this end, we propose a novel Joint Contrastive Learning with Sensitivity (JCLS) in this paper, which consists of sensitivity-aware feature contrastive learning (SFCL) and class-wise probabilistic contrastive learning (CPCL). Different from the traditional contrastive learning, SFCL pays more attention to the sensitive samples during optimizing the feature extractor, and consequently the feature discrimination of unlabeled samples can be enhanced. CPCL performs class-wise contrastive learning in the probabilistic space to enforce the cross-domain classifier to match the real distribution of source and target samples. By combining these two components, our JCLS is able to extract domain-invariant and compact features and obtain a well-performed classifier. We conduct the experiments on the DomainNet and Office-Home benchmarks, and the results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.
GraphMedia: Communication-balanced Graph Searching for Billion-scale Social Media Access

The graph has recently enabled substantial advances in big data analysis. As graphs are increasing from billions to trillions, efficient graph processing requires large-scale distributed clusters, which have up to thousands of nodes. For big data applications of which the computation is relatively simple, while the communication, especially for imbalanced communication is the bottleneck on distributed clusters, where huge numbers of small messages are transferred through 2D-topology networks. Graph partitioning is the dominant factor to affect the performance of large-scale distributed graph processing. Current graph partitioning policies have paid extensive attention to the utilization of the power law of big graphs but failed to exploit the advanced architectural benefits of 2D topology. To address such a problem, this paper presents GraphMedia, a communication-balanced graph partitioning for distributed search at scale. The key idea of GraphMedia is a communication-balanced partitioning to balance communication based on hardware/software co-design, in which the power law of graphs would be explored to average communication among nodes, and communication would be balanced between row and column by leveraging advanced 2D-topology knowledge. We use both benchmarks and real-world graphs to validate GraphMedia. Specially, GraphMedia-based Graph500 tests on the Tianhe supercomputer are superior to the fastest systems in the latest Graph500 lists (June 2022). We finally apply GraphMedia to real-world graphs for online graph media access, which outperforms the state-of-the-art graph partitioning and graph system by orders of magnitude.
Scene-aware Human Pose Generation using Transformer

Affordance learning considers the interaction opportunities for an actor in the scene and thus has wide application in scene understanding and intelligent robotics. In this paper, we focus on contextual affordance learning, i.e., using affordance as context to generate a reasonable human pose in a scene. Existing scene-aware human pose generation methods could be divided into two categories depending on whether using pose templates. Our proposed method belongs to the template-based category, which benefits from the representative pose templates. Moreover, inspired by recent transformer-based methods, we associate each query embedding with a pose template, and use the interaction between query embeddings and scene feature map to effectively predict the scale and offsets for each pose template. In addition, we employ knowledge distillation to facilitate the offset learning given the predicted scale. Comprehensive experiments on Sitcom dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.