Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Token Pruning in Plain Vision Transformers for Semantic Segmentation

Vision transformers have achieved leading performance on various visual tasks yet still suffer from high computational complexity. The situation deteriorates in dense prediction tasks like semantic segmentation, as high-resolution inputs and outputs usually imply more tokens involved in computations. Directly removing the less attentive tokens has been discussed for the image classification task but can not be extended to semantic segmentation since a dense prediction is required for every patch. To this end, this work introduces a Dynamic Token Pruning (DToP) method based on the early exit of tokens for semantic segmentation. Motivated by the coarse-to-fine segmentation process by humans, we naturally split the widely adopted auxiliary-loss-based network architecture into several stages, where each auxiliary block grades every token’s difficulty level. We can finalize the prediction of easy tokens in advance without completing the entire forward pass. Moreover, we keep k highest confidence tokens for each semantic category to uphold the representative context information. Thus, computational complexity will change with the difficulty of the input, akin to the way humans do segmentation. Experiments suggest that the proposed DToP architecture reduces on average 20% ∼ 35% of computational cost for current semantic segmentation methods based on plain vision transformers without accuracy degradation. The code is available through the following link: https://github.com/zbwxp/Dynamic-Token-Pruning.
BlendFace: Re-designing Identity Encoders for Face-Swapping

The great advancements of generative adversarial networks and face recognition models in computer vision have made it possible to swap identities on images from single sources. Although a lot of studies seems to have proposed almost satisfactory solutions, we notice previous methods still suffer from an identity-attribute entanglement that causes undesired attributes swapping because widely used identity encoders, e.g., ArcFace, have some crucial attribute biases owing to their pretraining on face recognition tasks. To address this issue, we design BlendFace, a novel identity encoder for face-swapping. The key idea behind BlendFace is training face recognition models on blended images whose attributes are replaced with those of another mitigates inter-personal biases such as hairsyles. BlendFace feeds disentangled identity features into generators and guides generators properly as an identity loss function. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BlendFace improves the identity-attribute disentanglement in face-swapping models, maintaining a comparable quantitative performance to previous methods. The code and models are available at https://github.com/mapooon/BlendFace.
DynaMITe: Dynamic Query Bootstrapping for Multi-object Interactive Segmentation Transformer

Most state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods rely on large amounts of pixel-precise ground-truth annotations for training, which are expensive to create. Interactive segmentation networks help generate such annotations based on an image and the corresponding user interactions such as clicks. Existing methods for this task can only process a single instance at a time and each user interaction requires a full forward pass through the entire deep network. We introduce a more efficient approach, called DynaMITe, in which we represent user interactions as spatio-temporal queries to a Transformer decoder with a potential to segment multiple object instances in a single iteration. Our architecture also alleviates any need to re-compute image features during refinement, and requires fewer interactions for segmenting multiple instances in a single image when compared to other methods. DynaMITe achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple existing interactive segmentation benchmarks, and also on the new multi-instance benchmark that we propose in this paper.
Multimodal High-order Relation Transformer for Scene Boundary Detection

Scene boundary detection breaks down long videos into meaningful story-telling units and plays a crucial role in high-level video understanding. Despite significant advancements in this area, this task remains a challenging problem as it requires a comprehensive understanding of multimodal cues and high-level semantics. To tackle this issue, we propose a multimodal high-order relation transformer, which integrates a high-order encoder and an adaptive decoder in a unified framework. By modeling the mul-timodal cues and exploring similarities between the shots, the encoder is capable of capturing high-order relations between shots and extracting shot features with context semantics. By clustering the shots adaptively, the decoder can discover more universal switch pattern between successive scenes, thus helping scene boundary detection. Extensive experimental results on three standard benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against state-of-the-art video scene detection methods.
ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes

We present ScanNet++, a large-scale dataset that couples together capture of high-quality and commodity-level geometry and color of indoor scenes. Each scene is captured with a high-end laser scanner at sub-millimeter resolution, along with registered 33-megapixel images from a DSLR camera, and RGB-D streams from an iPhone. Scene reconstructions are further annotated with an open vocabulary of semantics, with label-ambiguous scenarios explicitly annotated for comprehensive semantic understanding. ScanNet++ enables a new real-world benchmark for novel view synthesis, both from high-quality RGB capture, and importantly also from commodity-level images, in addition to a new benchmark for 3D semantic scene understanding that comprehensively encapsulates diverse and ambiguous semantic labeling scenarios. Currently, ScanNet++ contains 460 scenes, 280,000 captured DSLR images, and over 3.7M iPhone RGBD frames.
Imitator: Personalized Speech-driven 3D Facial Animation

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, with applications in gaming, character animation, virtual reality, and telepresence systems. State-of-the-art methods deform the face topology of the target actor to sync the input audio without considering the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies, thus, resulting in unrealistic and inaccurate lip movements. To address this, we present Imitator, a speech-driven facial expression synthesis method, which learns identity-specific details from a short input video and produces novel facial expressions matching the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor. Specifically, we train a style-agnostic transformer on a large facial expression dataset which we use as a prior for audio-driven facial expressions. We utilize this prior to optimize for identity-specific speaking style based on a short reference video. To train the prior, we introduce a novel loss function based on detected bilabial consonants to ensure plausible lip closures and consequently improve the realism of the generated expressions. Through detailed experiments and user studies, we show that our approach improves Lip-Sync by 49% and produces expressive facial animations from input audio while preserving the actor’s speaking style. Project page: https://balamuruganthambiraja.github.io/Imitator
ICICLE: Interpretable Class Incremental Continual Learning

Continual learning enables incremental learning of new tasks without forgetting those previously learned, resulting in positive knowledge transfer that can enhance performance on both new and old tasks. However, continual learning poses new challenges for interpretability, as the rationale behind model predictions may change over time, leading to interpretability concept drift. We address this problem by proposing Interpretable Class-InCremental LEarning (ICICLE), an exemplar-free approach that adopts a prototypical part-based approach. It consists of three crucial novelties: interpretability regularization that distills previously learned concepts while preserving user-friendly positive reasoning; proximity-based prototype initialization strategy dedicated to the fine-grained setting; and task-recency bias compensation devoted to prototypical parts. Our experimental results demonstrate that ICICLE reduces the interpretability concept drift and outperforms the existing exemplar-free methods of common class-incremental learning when applied to concept-based models.
Multimodal Distillation for Egocentric Action Recognition

The focal point of egocentric video understanding is modelling hand-object interactions. Standard models, e.g. CNNs or Vision Transformers, which receive RGB frames as input perform well, however, their performance improves further by employing additional input modalities (e.g. object detections, optical flow, audio, etc.) which provide cues complementary to the RGB modality. The added complexity of the modality-specific modules, on the other hand, makes these models impractical for deployment. The goal of this work is to retain the performance of such a multi-modal approach, while using only the RGB frames as input at inference time. We demonstrate that for egocentric action recognition on the Epic-Kitchens and the Something-Something datasets, students which are taught by multi-modal teachers tend to be more accurate and better calibrated than architecturally equivalent models trained on ground truth labels in a unimodal or multimodal fashion. We further adopt a principled multimodal knowledge distillation framework, allowing us to deal with issues which occur when applying multimodal knowledge distillation in a naïve manner. Lastly, we demonstrate the achieved reduction in computational complexity, and show that our approach maintains higher performance with the reduction of the number of input views. We release our code at: https://github.com/gorjanradevski/multimodal-distillation
Global Perception Based Autoregressive Neural Processes

Increasingly, autoregressive approaches are being used to serialize observed variables based on specific criteria. The Neural Processes (NPs) model variable distribution as a continuous function and provide quick solutions for different tasks using a meta-learning framework. This paper proposes an autoregressive-based framework for NPs, based on their autoregressive properties. This framework leverages the autoregressive stacking effects of various variables to enhance the representation of the latent distribution, concurrently refining local and global relationships within the positional representation through the use of a sliding window mechanism. Autoregression improves function approximations in a stacked fashion, thereby raising the upper bound of the optimization. We have designated this framework as Autoregressive Neural Processes (AENPs) or Conditional Autoregressive Neural Processes (CAENPs). Traditional NP models and their variants aim to capture relationships between the context sample points, without addressing either local or global considerations. Specifically, we capture contextual relationships in the deterministic path and introduce sliding window attention and global attention to reconcile local and global relationships in the context sample points. Autoregressive constraints exist between multiple latent variables in the latent paths, thus building a complex global structure that allows our model to learn complex distributions. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the NPs or CFANPs models for 1D data, Bayesian optimization, and 2D data.
Robust Evaluation of Diffusion-Based Adversarial Purification

We question the current evaluation practice on diffusion-based purification methods. Diffusion-based purification methods aim to remove adversarial effects from an input data point at test time. The approach gains increasing attention as an alternative to adversarial training due to the disentangling between training and testing. Well-known white-box attacks are often employed to measure the robustness of the purification. However, it is unknown whether these attacks are the most effective for the diffusion-based purification since the attacks are often tailored for adversarial training. We analyze the current practices and provide a new guideline for measuring the robustness of purification methods against adversarial attacks. Based on our analysis, we further propose a new purification strategy improving robustness compared to the current diffusion-based purification methods.
Confidence-aware Pseudo-label Learning for Weakly Supervised Visual Grounding

Visual grounding aims at localizing the target object in image which is most related to the given free-form natural language query. As labeling the position of target object is labor-intensive, the weakly supervised methods, where only image-sentence annotations are required during model training have recently received increasing attention. Most of the existing weakly-supervised methods first generate region proposals via pre-trained object detectors and then employ either cross-modal similarity score or reconstruction loss as the criteria to select proposal from them. However, due to the cross-modal heterogeneous gap, these method often suffer from high confidence spurious association and model prone to error propagation. In this paper, we propose Confidence-aware Pseudo-label Learning (CPL) to overcome the above limitations. Specifically, we first adopt both the uni-modal and cross-modal pre-trained models and propose conditional prompt engineering to automatically generate multiple ‘descriptive, realistic and diverse’ pseudo language queries for each region proposal, and then establish reliable cross-modal association for model training based on the uni-modal similarity score (between pseudo and real text queries). Secondly, we propose a confidence-aware pseudo label verification module which reduces the amount of noise encountered in the training process and the risk of error propagation. Experiments on five widely used datasets validate the efficacy of our proposed components and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Code can be found at https://github.com/zjh31/CPL.git
Preserving Modality Structure Improves Multi-Modal Learning

Self-supervised learning on large-scale multi-modal datasets allows learning semantically meaningful embeddings in a joint multi-modal representation space without relying on human annotations. These joint embeddings enable zero-shot cross-modal tasks like retrieval and classification. However, these methods often struggle to generalize well on out-of-domain data as they ignore the semantic structure present in modality-specific embeddings. In this context, we propose a novel Semantic-Structure-Preserving Consistency approach to improve generalizability by preserving the modality-specific relationships in the joint embedding space. To capture modality-specific semantic relationships between samples, we propose to learn multiple anchors and represent the multifaceted relationship between samples with respect to their relationship with these anchors. To assign multiple anchors to each sample, we propose a novel Multi-Assignment Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. Our experimentation demonstrates that our proposed approach learns semantically meaningful anchors in a self-supervised manner. Furthermore, our evaluation on MSR-VTT and YouCook2 datasets demonstrates that our proposed multi-anchor assignment based solution achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes to both in-and out-of-domain datasets. Code: https://github.com/Swetha5/Multi_Sinkhorn_Knopp
Replay: Multi-modal Multi-view Acted Videos for Casual Holography

We introduce Replay, a collection of multi-view, multi-modal videos of humans interacting socially. Each scene is filmed in high production quality, from different view-points with several static cameras, as well as wearable action cameras, and recorded with a large array of microphones at different positions in the room. Overall, the dataset contains over 4000 minutes of footage and over 7 million timestamped high-resolution frames annotated with camera poses and partially with foreground masks. The Replay dataset has many potential applications, such as novel-view synthesis, 3D reconstruction, novel-view acoustic synthesis, human body and face analysis, and training generative models. We provide a benchmark for training and evaluating novel-view synthesis, with two scenarios of different difficulty. Finally, we evaluate several baseline state-of-the-art methods on the new benchmark.
MoTIF: Learning Motion Trajectories with Local Implicit Neural Functions for Continuous Space-Time Video Super-Resolution

This work addresses continuous space-time video super-resolution (C-STVSR) that aims to up-scale an input video both spatially and temporally by any scaling factors. One key challenge of C-STVSR is to propagate information temporally among the input video frames. To this end, we introduce a space-time local implicit neural function. It has the striking feature of learning forward motion for a continuum of pixels. We motivate the use of forward motion from the perspective of learning individual motion trajectories, as opposed to learning a mixture of motion trajectories with backward motion. To ease motion interpolation, we encode sparsely sampled forward motion extracted from the input video as the contextual input. Along with a reliability-aware splatting and decoding scheme, our framework, termed MoTIF, achieves the state-of-the-art performance on C-STVSR. The source code of MoTIF is available at https://github.com/sichun233746/MoTIF.
VLSlice: Interactive Vision-and-Language Slice Discovery

Recent work in vision-and-language demonstrates that large-scale pretraining can learn generalizable models that are efficiently transferable to downstream tasks. While this may improve dataset-scale aggregate metrics, analyzing performance around hand-crafted subgroups targeting specific bias dimensions reveals systemic undesirable behaviors. However, this subgroup analysis is frequently stalled by annotation efforts, which require extensive time and resources to collect the necessary data. Prior art attempts to automatically discover subgroups to circumvent these constraints but typically leverages model behavior on existing task-specific annotations and rapidly degrades on more complex inputs beyond "tabular" data, none of which study vision-and-language models. This paper presents VLSlice, an interactive system enabling user-guided discovery of coherent representation-level subgroups with consistent visiolinguistic behavior, denoted as vision-and-language slices, from unlabeled image sets. We show that VLSlice enables users to quickly generate diverse high-coherency slices in a user study (n=22) and release the tool publicly <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Pattern-Generalizable Image Corruption Detection

Effective image restoration with large-size corruptions, such as blind image inpainting, entails precise detection of corruption region masks which remains extremely challenging due to diverse shapes and patterns of corruptions. In this work, we present a novel method for automatic corruption detection, which allows for blind corruption restoration without known corruption masks. Specifically, we develop a hierarchical contrastive learning framework to detect corrupted regions by capturing the intrinsic semantic distinctions between corrupted and uncorrupted regions. In particular, our model detects the corrupted mask in a coarse-to-fine manner by first predicting a coarse mask by contrastive learning in low-resolution feature space and then refines the uncertain area of the mask by high-resolution contrastive learning. A specialized hierarchical interaction mechanism is designed to facilitate the knowledge propagation of contrastive learning in different scales, boosting the modeling performance substantially. The detected multi-scale corruption masks are then leveraged to guide the corruption restoration. Detecting corrupted regions by learning the contrastive distinctions rather than the semantic patterns of corruptions, our model has well generalization ability across different corruption patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate following merits of our model: 1) the superior performance over other methods on both corruption detection and various image restoration tasks including blind inpainting and watermark removal, and 2) strong generalization across different corruption patterns such as graffiti, random noise or other image content. Codes and trained weights are available at https://github.com/xyfJASON/HCL.
Indoor Depth Recovery Based on Deep Unfolding with Non-Local Prior

In recent years, depth recovery based on deep networks has achieved great success. However, the existing state-of-the-art network designs perform like black boxes in depth recovery tasks, lacking a clear mechanism. Utilizing the property that there is a large amount of non-local common characteristics in depth images, we propose a novel model-guided depth recovery method, namely the DC-NLAR model. A non-local auto-regressive regular term is also embedded into our model to capture more non-local depth information. To fully use the excellent performance of neural networks, we develop a deep image prior to better describe the characteristic of depth images. We also introduce an implicit data consistency term to tackle the degenerate operator with high heterogeneity. We then unfold the proposed model into networks by using the half-quadratic splitting algorithm. This proposed method is experimented on the NYU-Depth V2 and SUN RGB-D datasets, and the experimental results achieve comparable performance to that of deep learning methods.
WaveIPT: Joint Attention and Flow Alignment in the Wavelet domain for Pose Transfer

Human pose transfer aims to synthesis a new image of the source person in a target pose. Among the various existing methods, attention and flow have emerged as two of the most popular and effective approaches. Attention excels at preserving the semantic structure of the source image, which is more reflected in the low-frequency domain. Contrastively, flow is better at retaining fine-grained texture details in the high-frequency domain. To leverage the advantages of both attention and flow simultaneously, this paper proposes Wavelet-aware Image-based Pose Transfer (WaveIPT) as a novel approach to fuse the attention and flow in the wavelet domain. To improve the fusion effect and avoid interference from irrelevant information across different frequencies, WaveIPT first applies Intra-scale Local Correlation (ILC) to adaptively fuse attention and flow in the same scale according to their strengths in low and high-frequency domains. Subsequently, WaveIPT employs Inter-scale Feature Interaction (IFI) to explore inter-scale frequency features, facilitating effective information transfer across different scales. Furthermore, we introduce Progressive Flow Regularization (PFR), an effective method that alleviates the challenges of flow estimation under large pose differences. The experiments on the DeepFashion dataset demonstrate that WaveIPT achieves a new state-of-the-art in terms of both FID and LPIPS, with improvements of 4.97% and 3.89%, respectively.