Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
DiffCollage: Parallel Generation of Large Content with Diffusion Models

We present DiffCollage, a compositional diffusion model that can generate large content by leveraging diffusion models trained on generating pieces of the large content. Our approach is based on a factor graph representation where each factor node represents a portion of the content and a variable node represents their overlap. This representation allows us to aggregate intermediate outputs from diffusion models defined on individual nodes to generate content of arbitrary size and shape in parallel without resorting to an autoregressive generation procedure. We apply DiffCollage to various tasks, including infinite image generation, panorama image generation, and long-duration text-guided motion generation. Extensive experimental results with a comparison to strong autoregressive baselines verify the effectiveness of our approach.
Dionysus: Recovering Scene Structures by Dividing into Semantic Pieces

Most existing 3D reconstruction methods result in either detail loss or unsatisfying efficiency. However, effectiveness and efficiency are equally crucial in real-world applications, e.g., autonomous driving and augmented reality. We argue that this dilemma comes from wasted resources on valueless depth samples. This paper tackles the problem by proposing a novel learning-based 3D reconstruction framework named Dionysus. Our main contribution is to find out the most promising depth candidates from estimated semantic maps. This strategy simultaneously enables high effectiveness and efficiency by attending to the most reliable nominators. Specifically, we distinguish unreliable depth candidates by checking the cross-view semantic consistency and allow adaptive sampling by redistributing depth nominators among pixels. Experiments on the most popular datasets confirm our proposed framework's effectiveness.
Clover: Towards A Unified Video-Language Alignment and Fusion Model

Building a universal Video-Language model for solving various video understanding tasks (e.g., text-video retrieval, video question answering) is an open challenge to the machine learning field. Towards this goal, most recent works build the model by stacking uni-modal and cross-modal feature encoders and train it with pair-wise contrastive pre-text tasks. Though offering attractive generality, the resulted models have to compromise between efficiency and performance. They mostly adopt different architectures to deal with different downstream tasks. We find this is because the pair-wise training cannot well align and fuse features from different modalities. We then introduce Clover-a Correlated Video-Language pre-training method-towards a universal Video-Language modelfor solving multiple video understanding tasks with neither performance nor efficiency compromise. It improves cross-modal feature alignment and fusion via a novel tri-modal alignment pre-training task. Additionally, we propose to enhance the tri-modal alignment via incorporating learning from semantic masked samples and a new pair-wise ranking loss. Clover establishes new state-of-the-arts on multiple downstream tasks, including three retrieval tasks for both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, and eight video question answering tasks. Codes and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/LeeYN-43/Clover.
Reliable and Interpretable Personalized Federated Learning

Federated learning can coordinate multiple users to participate in data training while ensuring data privacy. The collaboration of multiple agents allows for a natural connection between federated learning and collective intelligence. When there are large differences in data distribution among clients, it is crucial for federated learning to design a reliable client selection strategy and an interpretable client communication framework to better utilize group knowledge. Herein, a reliable personalized federated learning approach, termed RIPFL, is proposed and fully interpreted from the perspective of social learning. RIPFL reliably selects and divides the clients involved in training such that each client can use different amounts of social information and more effectively communicate with other clients. Simultaneously, the method effectively integrates personal information with the social information generated by the global model from the perspective of Bayesian decision rules and evidence theory, enabling individuals to grow better with the help of collective wisdom. An interpretable federated learning mind is well scalable, and the experimental results indicate that the proposed method has superior robustness and accuracy than other state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms.
BiCro: Noisy Correspondence Rectification for Multi-modality Data via Bi-directional Cross-modal Similarity Consistency

As one of the most fundamental techniques in multi-modal learning, cross-modal matching aims to project various sensory modalities into a shared feature space. To achieve this, massive and correctly aligned data pairs are required for model training. However, unlike unimodal datasets, multimodal datasets are extremely harder to collect and annotate precisely. As an alternative, the co-occurred data pairs (e.g., image-text pairs) collected from the Internet have been widely exploited in the area. Unfortunately, the cheaply collected dataset unavoidably contains many mismatched data pairs, which have been proven to be harmful to the model's performance. To address this, we propose a general framework called BiCro (Bidirectional Cross-modal similarity consistency), which can be easily integrated into existing cross-modal matching models and improve their robustness against noisy data. Specifically, BiCro aims to estimate soft labels for noisy data pairs to reflect their true correspondence degree. The basic idea of BiCro is motivated by that – taking image-text matching as an example – similar images should have similar textual descriptions and vice versa. Then the consistency of these two similarities can be recast as the estimated soft labels to train the matching model. The experiments on three popular cross-modal matching datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves the noise-robustness of various matching models, and surpass the state-of-the-art by a clear margin. The code is available at https://github.com/xu5zhao/BiCro.
SMAE: Few-shot Learning for HDR Deghosting with Saturation-Aware Masked Autoencoders

Generating a high-quality High Dynamic Range (HDR) image from dynamic scenes has recently been extensively studied by exploiting Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Most DNNs-based methods require a large amount of training data with ground truth, requiring tedious and time-consuming work. Few-shot HDR imaging aims to generate satisfactory images with limited data. However, it is difficult for modern DNNs to avoid overfitting when trained on only a few images. In this work, we propose a novel semi-supervised approach to realize few-shot HDR imaging via two stages of training, called SSHDR. Unlikely previous methods, directly recovering content and removing ghosts simultaneously, which is hard to achieve optimum, we first generate content of saturated regions with a self-supervised mechanism and then address ghosts via an iterative semi-supervised learning framework. Concretely, considering that saturated regions can be regarded as masking Low Dynamic Range (LDR) input regions, we design a Saturated Mask AutoEncoder (SMAE) to learn a robust feature representation and reconstruct a non-saturated HDR image. We also propose an adaptive pseudo-label selection strategy to pick high-quality HDR pseudo-labels in the second stage to avoid the effect of mislabeled samples. Experiments demonstrate that SSHDR outperforms state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively within and across different datasets, achieving appealing HDR visualization with few labeled samples.
Uni3D: A Unified Baseline for Multi-Dataset 3D Object Detection

Current 3D object detection models follow a single dataset-specific training and testing paradigm, which often faces a serious detection accuracy drop when they are directly deployed in another dataset. In this paper, we study the task of training a unified 3D detector from multiple datasets. We observe that this appears to be a challenging task, which is mainly due to that these datasets present substantial data-level differences and taxonomy-level variations caused by different LiDAR types and data acquisition standards. Inspired by such observation, we present a Uni3D which leverages a simple data-level correction operation and a designed semantic-level coupling-and-recoupling module to alleviate the unavoidable data-level and taxonomy-level differences, respectively. Our method is simple and easily combined with many 3D object detection baselines such as PV-RCNN and Voxel-RCNN, enabling them to effectively learn from multiple off-the-shelf 3D datasets to obtain more discriminative and generalizable representations. Experiments are conducted on many dataset consolidation settings. Their results demonstrate that Uni3D exceeds a series of individual detectors trained on a single dataset, with a 1.04× parameter increase over a selected baseline detector. We expect this work will inspire the research of 3D generalization since it will push the limits of perceptual performance. Our code is available at: https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/3DTrans.
Revisiting Rolling Shutter Bundle Adjustment: Toward Accurate and Fast Solution

We propose an accurate and fast bundle adjustment (BA) solution that estimates the 6-DoF pose with an independent RS model of the camera and the geometry of the environment based on measurements from a rolling shutter (RS) camera. This tackles the challenges in the existing works, namely, relying on high frame rate video as input, restrictive assumptions on camera motion and poor efficiency. To this end, we first verify the positive influence of the image point normalization to RSBA. Then we present a novel visual residual covariance model to standardize the reprojection error during RSBA, which consequently improves the overall accuracy. Besides, we demonstrate the combination of Normalization and covariance standardization Weighting in RSBA (NW-RSBA) can avoid common planar degeneracy without the need to constrain the filming manner. Finally, we propose an acceleration strategy for NW-RSBA based on the sparsity of its Jacobian matrix and Schur complement. The extensive synthetic and real data experiments verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution over the state-of-the-art works.
A Probabilistic Framework for Lifelong Test-Time Adaptation

Test-time adaptation (TTA) is the problem of updating a pre-trained source model at inference time given test input(s) from a different target domain. Most existing TTA approaches assume the setting in which the target domain is stationary, i.e., all the test inputs come from a single target domain. However, in many practical settings, the test input distribution might exhibit a lifelong/continual shift over time. Moreover, existing TTA approaches also lack the ability to provide reliable uncertainty estimates, which is crucial when distribution shifts occur between the source and target domain. To address these issues, we present PETAL (Probabilistic lifElong Test-time Adaptation with self-training prior), which solves lifelong TTA using a probabilistic approach, and naturally results in (1) a student-teacher framework, where the teacher model is an exponential moving average of the student model, and (2) regularizing the model updates at inference time using the source model as a regularizer. To prevent model drift in the lifelong/continual TTA setting, we also propose a data-driven parameter restoration technique which contributes to reducing the error accumulation and maintaining the knowledge of recent domains by restoring only the irrelevant parameters. In terms of predictive error rate as well as uncertainty based metrics such as Brier score and negative log-likelihood, our method achieves better results than the current state-of-the-art for online lifelong test-time adaptation across various benchmarks, such as CIFAR-10C, CIFAR-100C, ImageNetC, and ImageNet3DCC datasets. The source code for our approach is accessible at https://github.com/dhanajitb/petal.
Self-Supervised Video Forensics by Audio-Visual Anomaly Detection

Manipulated videos often contain subtle inconsistencies between their visual and audio signals. We propose a video forensics method, based on anomaly detection, that can identify these inconsistencies, and that can be trained solely using real, unlabeled data. We train an autoregressive model to generate sequences of audio-visual features, using feature sets that capture the temporal synchronization between video frames and sound. At test time, we then flag videos that the model assigns low probability. Despite being trained entirely on real videos, our model obtains strong performance on the task of detecting manipulated speech videos. Project site: https://cfeng16.github.io/audio-visual-forensics.
Exemplar-FreeSOLO: Enhancing Unsupervised Instance Segmentation with Exemplars

Instance segmentation seeks to identify and segment each object from images, which often relies on a large number of dense annotations for model training. To alleviate this burden, unsupervised instance segmentation methods have been developed to train class-agnostic instance segmentation models without any annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised instance segmentation approach, Exemplar-FreeSOLO, to enhance unsupervised instance segmentation by exploiting a limited number of unannotated and unsegmented exemplars. The proposed framework offers a new perspective on directly perceiving top-down information without annotations. Specifically, Exemplar-FreeSOLO introduces a novel exemplar-knowledge abstraction module to acquire beneficial top-down guidance knowledge for instances using unsupervised exemplar object extraction. Moreover, a new exemplar embedding contrastive module is designed to enhance the discriminative capability of the segmentation model by exploiting the contrastive exemplar-based guidance knowledge in the embedding space. To evaluate the proposed Exemplar-FreeSOLO, we conduct comprehensive experiments and perform in-depth analyses on three image instance segmentation datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Open-vocabulary Attribute Detection

Vision-language modeling has enabled open-vocabulary tasks where predictions can be queried using any text prompt in a zero-shot manner. Existing open-vocabulary tasks focus on object classes, whereas research on object attributes is limited due to the lack of a reliable attribute-focused evaluation benchmark. This paper introduces the Open- Vocabulary Attribute Detection (OVAD) task and the corresponding OVAD benchmark. The objective of the novel task and benchmark is to probe object-level attribute information learned by vision-language models. To this end, we created a clean and densely annotated test set covering 117 attribute classes on the 80 object classes of MS COCO. It includes positive and negative annotations, which enables open-vocabulary evaluation. Overall, the benchmark consists of 1.4 million annotations. For reference, we provide a first baseline method for open-vocabulary attribute detection. Moreover, we demonstrate the benchmark's value by studying the attribute detection performance of several foundation models.
Cross-Domain 3D Hand Pose Estimation with Dual Modalities

Recent advances in hand pose estimation have shed light on utilizing synthetic data to train neural networks, which however inevitably hinders generalization to real-world data due to domain gaps. To solve this problem, we present a framework for cross-domain semi-supervised hand pose estimation and target the challenging scenario of learning models from labelled multimodal synthetic data and unlabelled real-world data. To that end, we propose a dual-modality network that exploits synthetic RGB and synthetic depth images. For pre-training, our network uses multi-modal contrastive learning and attention-fused supervision to learn effective representations of the RGB images. We then integrate a novel self-distillation technique during fine-tuning to reduce pseudo-label noise. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves 3D hand pose estimation and 2D keypoint detection on benchmarks.
Modernizing Old Photos Using Multiple References via Photorealistic Style Transfer

This paper firstly presents old photo modernization using multiple references by performing stylization and enhancement in a unified manner. In order to modernize old photos, we propose a novel multi-reference-based old photo modernization (MROPM) framework consisting of a network MROPM-Net and a novel synthetic data generation scheme. MROPM-Net stylizes old photos using multiple references via photorealistic style transfer (PST) and further enhances the results to produce modern-looking images. Meanwhile, the synthetic data generation scheme trains the network to effectively utilize multiple references to perform modernization. To evaluate the performance, we propose a new old photos benchmark dataset (CHD) consisting of diverse natural indoor and outdoor scenes. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms other baselines in performing modernization on real old photos, even though no old photos were used during training. Moreover, our method can appropriately select styles from multiple references for each semantic region in the old photo to further improve the modernization performance.
HOTNAS: Hierarchical Optimal Transport for Neural Architecture Search

Instead of searching the entire network directly, current NAS approaches increasingly search for multiple relatively small cells to reduce search costs. A major challenge is to jointly measure the similarity of cell micro-architectures and the difference in macro-architectures between different cell-based networks. Recently, optimal transport (OT) has been successfully applied to NAS as it can capture the operational and structural similarity across various networks. However, existing OT-based NAS methods either ignore the cell similarity or focus solely on searching for a single cell architecture. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical optimal transport metric called HOTNN for measuring the similarity of different networks. In HOTNN, the cell-level similarity computes the OT distance between cells in various networks by considering the similarity of each node and the differences in the information flow costs between node pairs within each cell in terms of operational and structural information. The network-level similarity calculates OT distance between networks by considering both the cell-level similarity and the variation in the global position of each cell within their respective networks. We then explore HOTNN in a Bayesian optimization framework called HOTNAS, and demonstrate its efficacy in diverse tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that H OT-NAS can discover network architectures with better performance in multiple modular cell-based search spaces.
H2ONet: Hand-Occlusion-and-Orientation-Aware Network for Real-Time 3D Hand Mesh Reconstruction

Real-time 3D hand mesh reconstruction is challenging, especially when the hand is holding some object. Beyond the previous methods, we design H2ONet to fully exploit non-occluded information from multiple frames to boost the reconstruction quality. First, we decouple hand mesh reconstruction into two branches, one to exploit finger-level nonoccluded information and the other to exploit global hand orientation, with lightweight structures to promote real-time inference. Second, we propose finger-level occlusionaware feature fusion, leveraging predicted finger-level occlusion information as guidance to fuse finger-level information across time frames. Further, we design hand-level occlusion-aware feature fusion to fetch non-occluded information from nearby time frames. We conduct experiments on the Dex-YCB and HO3D-v2 datasets with challenging hand-object occlusion cases, manifesting that H2ONet is able to run in real-time and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the hand mesh and pose precision. The code will be released on GitHub.
Post-Processing Temporal Action Detection

Existing Temporal Action Detection (TAD) methods typically take a pre-processing step in converting an input varying-length video into a fixed-length snippet representation sequence, before temporal boundary estimation and action classification. This pre-processing step would temporally downsample the video, reducing the inference resolution and hampering the detection performance in the original temporal resolution. In essence, this is due to a temporal quantization error introduced during resolution downsampling and recovery. This could negatively impact the TAD performance, but is largely ignored by existing methods. To address this problem, in this work we introduce a novel model-agnostic post-processing method without model redesign and retraining. Specifically, we model the start and end points of action instances with a Gaussian distribution for enabling temporal boundary inference at a sub-snippet level. We further introduce an efficient Taylor-expansion based approximation, dubbed as Gaussian Approximated Post-processing (GAP). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our GAP can consistently improve a wide variety of pre-trained off-the-shelf TAD models on the challenging ActivityNet (+0.2%~0. 7% in average mAP) and THUMOS (+0.2%~0.5% in average mAP) benchmarks. Such performance gains are already significant and highly comparable to those achieved by novel model designs. Also, GAP can be integrated with model training for further performance gain. Importantly, GAP enables lower temporal resolutions for more efficient inference, facilitating low-resource application. The code is available at https://github.com/sauradip/GAP
Streaming Video Model

Video understanding tasks have traditionally been modeled by two separate architectures, specially tailored for two distinct tasks. Sequence-based video tasks, such as action recognition, use a video backbone to directly extract spatiotemporal features, while frame-based video tasks, such as multiple object tracking (MOT), rely on single fixed-image backbone to extract spatial features. In contrast, we propose to unify video understanding tasks into one novel streaming video architecture, referred to as Streaming Vision Transformer (S-ViT). S-ViT first produces frame-level features with a memory-enabled temporally-aware spatial encoder to serve the frame-based video tasks. Then the frame features are input into a task-related temporal decoder to obtain spatiotemporal features for sequence-based tasks. The efficiency and efficacy of S-ViT is demonstrated by the state-of-the-art accuracy in the sequence-based action recognition task and the competitive advantage over conventional architecture in the frame-based MOT task. We believe that the concept of streaming video model and the implementation of S-ViT are solid steps towards a unified deep learning architecture for video understanding. Code will be available at https://github.com/yuzhms/Streaming-Video-Model.