Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Attentive Alignment Network for Multispectral Pedestrian Detection

Multispectral pedestrian detection is of great importance in various around-the-clock applications, i.e., self-driving and video surveillance. Fusing the features from RGB images and thermal infrared (TIR) images to explore the complementary information between different modalities is one of the most effective manners to improve multispectral pedestrian detection performance. However, the misalignment between different modalities in spatial dimension and modality reliability would introduce harmful information during feature fusion, limiting the performance of multispectral pedestrian detection. To address the above issues, we propose an attentive alignment network, consisting of an attentive position alignment (APA) module and an attentive modality alignment (AMA) module. Our APA module emphasizes pedestrian regions while aligning the pedestrian regions between different modalities. Our AMA module utilizes a channel-wise attention mechanism with illumination guidance to eliminate the imbalance between different modalities. The experiments are conducted on two widely used multispectral detection datasets, KASIT and CVC-14. Our approach surpasses the current state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
Modal-aware Visual Prompting for Incomplete Multi-modal Brain Tumor Segmentation

In the realm of medical imaging, distinct magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modalities can provide complementary medical insights. However, it is not uncommon for one or more modalities to be absent due to image corruption, artifacts, acquisition protocols, allergies to contrast agents, or cost constraints, posing a significant challenge for perceiving the modality-absent state in incomplete modality segmentation.In this work, we introduce a novel incomplete multi-modal segmentation framework called Modal-aware Visual Prompting (MAVP), which draws inspiration from the widely used pre-training and prompt adjustment protocol employed in natural language processing (NLP). In contrast to previous prompts that typically use textual network embeddings, we utilize embeddings as the prompts generated by a modality state classifier that focuses on the missing modality states. Additionally, we integrate modality state prompts into both the extraction stage of each modality and the modality fusion stage to facilitate intra/inter-modal adaptation. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in various modality-incomplete scenarios compared to incomplete modality-specific solutions.
Towards Deconfounded Image-Text Matching with Causal Inference

Prior image-text matching methods have shown remarkable performance on many benchmark datasets, but most of them overlook the bias in the dataset, which exists in intra-modal and inter-modal, and tend to learn the spurious correlations that extremely degrade the generalization ability of the model. Furthermore, these methods often incorporate biased external knowledge from large-scale datasets as prior knowledge into image-text matching model, which is inevitable to force model further learn biased associations. To address above limitations, this paper firstly utilizes Structural Causal Models (SCMs) to illustrate how intra- and inter-modal confounders damage the image-text matching. Then, we employ backdoor adjustment to propose an innovative Deconfounded Causal Inference Network (DCIN) for image-text matching task. DCIN (1) decomposes the intra- and inter-modal confounders and incorporates them into the encoding stage of visual and textual features, effectively eliminating the spurious correlations during image-text matching, and (2) uses causal inference to mitigate biases of external knowledge. Consequently, the model can learn causality instead of spurious correlations caused by dataset bias. Extensive experiments on two well-known benchmark datasets, i.e., Flickr30K and MSCOCO, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.
Triple-Granularity Contrastive Learning for Deep Multi-View Subspace Clustering

Multi-view subspace clustering (MVSC), which leverages comprehensive information from multiple views to effectively reveal the intrinsic relationships among instances, has garnered significant research interest. However, previous MVSC research focuses on exploring the cross-view consistent information only in the instance representation hierarchy or affinity relationship hierarchy, which prevents a joint investigation of the multi-view consistency in multiple hierarchies. To this end, we propose a Triple-gRanularity contrastive learning framework for deep mUlti-view Subspace clusTering (TRUST), which benefits from the comprehensive discovery of valuable information from three hierarchies, including the instance, specific-affinity relationship, and consensus-affinity relationship. Specifically, we first use multiple view-specific autoencoders to extract noise-robust instance representations, which are then respectively input into the MLP model and self-representation model to obtain high-level instance representations and view-specific affinity matrices. Then, the instance and specific-affinity relationship contrastive regularization terms are separately imposed on the high-level instance representations and view specific-affinity matrices, ensuring the cross-view consistency can be found from the instance representations to the view-specific affinity matrices. Furthermore, multiple view-specific affinity matrices are fused into a consensus one associated with the consensus-affinity relationship contrastive constraint, which embeds the local structural relationship of high-level instance representations into the consensus affinity matrix. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our method is more effective when compared with other state-of-art methods.
Practical Deep Dispersed Watermarking with Synchronization and Fusion

Deep learning based blind watermarking works have gradually emerged and achieved impressive performance. However, previous deep watermarking studies mainly focus on fixed low-resolution images while paying less attention to arbitrary resolution images, especially widespread high-resolution images nowadays. Moreover, most works usually demonstrate robustness against typical non-geometric attacks (e.g., JPEG compression) but ignore common geometric attacks (e.g., Rotate) and more challenging combined attacks. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a practical deep Dispersed Watermarking with Synchronization and Fusion, called DWSF. Specifically, given an arbitrary-resolution cover image, we adopt a dispersed embedding scheme which sparsely and randomly selects several fixed small-size cover blocks to embed a consistent watermark message by a well-trained encoder. In the extraction stage, we first design a watermark synchronization module to locate and rectify the encoded blocks in the noised watermarked image. We then utilize a decoder to obtain messages embedded in these blocks, and propose a message fusion strategy based on similarity to make full use of the consistency among messages, thus determining a reliable message. Extensive experiments conducted on different datasets convincingly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DWSF. Compared with state-of-the-art approaches, our blind watermarking can achieve better performance: averagely improve the bit accuracy by 5.28% and 5.93% against single and combined attacks, respectively, and show less file size increment and better visual quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/DWSF.
ACQ: Few-shot Backdoor Defense via Activation Clipping and Quantizing

In recent years, deep neural networks(DNNs) have relied on an increasing amount of training samples as the premise of the deployment for real-world scenarios. This gives rise to backdoor attacks, where a small fraction of poisoned data is inserted into the training dataset to manipulate the predictions of DNNs when presented with backdoor inputs. Backdoor attacks pose serious security threats during the prediction stage of DNNs. As a result, there is growing research attention to defend against backdoor attacks. This paper proposes Activation Clipping and Quantizing (ACQ), a novel backdoor elimination module via transforming the intermediate-layer output of DNNs during forward propagation by embedding Clipper and Quantizer into the backdoored DNNs. ACQ is motivated by the observation that the backdoored DNNs always output abnormally large or small intermediate-layer activations when presented with backdoored samples, eventually leading to the malicious prediction of backdoored DNNs. ACQ modifies backdoored DNNs to keep the intermediate-layer activations in a proper domain and align the forward propagation of backdoored samples with that of clean samples. Besides, we highlight that ACQ has the ability to eliminate the backdoor of DNNs in few-shot even zero-shot scenarios, which requires much fewer or even no clean samples for the backdoor elimination stage than existing approaches. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ACQ against various attacks and tasks compared to existing methods. Our code and Appendix can be found in https://github.com/Backdoor-defense/ACQ
Sample Less, Learn More: Efficient Action Recognition via Frame Feature Restoration

Training an effective video action recognition model poses significant computational challenges, particularly under limited resource budgets. Current methods primarily aim to either reduce model size or utilize pre-trained models, limiting their adaptability to various backbone architectures. This paper investigates the issue of over-sampled frames, a prevalent problem in many approaches yet it has received relatively little attention. Despite the use of fewer frames being a potential solution, this approach often results in a substantial decline in performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to restore the intermediate features for two sparsely sampled and adjacent video frames. This feature restoration technique brings a negligible increase in computational requirements compared to resource-intensive image encoders, such as ViT. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on four public datasets, including Kinetics-400, ActivityNet, UCF-101, and HMDB-51. With the integration of our method, the efficiency of three commonly used baselines has been improved by over 50%, with a mere 0.5% reduction in recognition accuracy. In addition, our method also surprisingly helps improve the generalization ability of the models under zero-shot settings.
Perceiving Ambiguity and Semantics without Recognition: An Efficient and Effective Ambiguous Scene Text Detector

Ambiguous scene text detection is an extremely challenging task. Existing text detectors that rely solely on visual cues often suffer from confusion due to being evenly distributed in rows/columns or incomplete detection owing to large character spacing. To overcome these challenges, the previous method recognizes a large number of proposals and utilizes semantic information predicted from recognition results to eliminate ambiguity. However, this method is inefficient, which limits their practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient and effective ambiguous text detector, which can Perceive Ambiguity and SEmantics without Recognition, termed PASER. On the one hand, PASER can perceive semantics without recognition with a light Perceiving Semantics (PerSem) module. In this way, proposals without reasonable semantics are filtered out, which largely speeds up the overall detection process. On the other hand, to detect both ambiguous and regular texts with a unified framework, PASER employs a Perceiving Ambiguity (PerAmb) module to distinguish ambiguous texts and regular texts, so that only the ambiguous proposals will be processed by PerSem while the regular texts are not, which further ensures the high efficiency. Extensive experiments show that our detector achieves state-of-the-art results on both ambiguous and regular scene text detection benchmarks. Notably, over 6 times faster speed and superior accuracy are achieved on TDA-ReCTS simultaneously.
Improving Zero-shot Visual Question Answering via Large Language Models with Reasoning Question Prompts

Zero-shot Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a prominent vision-language task that examines both the visual and textual understanding capability of systems in the absence of training data. Recently, by converting the images into captions, information across multi-modalities is bridged and Large Language Models (LLMs) can apply their strong zero-shot generalization capability to unseen questions. To design ideal prompts for solving VQA via LLMs, several studies have explored different strategies to select or generate question-answer pairs as the exemplar prompts, which guide LLMs to answer the current questions effectively. However, they totally ignore the role of question prompts. The original questions in VQA tasks usually encounter ellipses and ambiguity which require intermediate reasoning. To this end, we present Reasoning Question Prompts for VQA tasks, which can further activate the potential of LLMs in zero-shot scenarios. Specifically, for each question, we first generate self-contained questions as reasoning question prompts via an unsupervised question edition module considering sentence fluency, semantic integrity and syntactic invariance. Each reasoning question prompt clearly indicates the intent of the original question. This results in a set of candidate answers. Then, the candidate answers associated with their confidence scores acting as answer heuristics are fed into LLMs and produce the final answer. We evaluate reasoning question prompts on three VQA challenges, experimental results demonstrate that they can significantly improve the results of LLMs on zero-shot setting and outperform existing state-of-the-art zero-shot methods on three out of four data sets. Our source code is publicly released at https://github.com/ECNU-DASE-NLP/RQP.
Real20M: A Large-scale E-commerce Dataset for Cross-domain Retrieval

In e-commerce, products and micro-videos serve as two primary carriers. Introducing cross-domain retrieval between these carriers can establish associations, thereby leading to the advancement of specific scenarios, such as retrieving products based on micro-videos or recommending relevant videos based on products. However, existing datasets only focus on retrieval within the product domain while neglecting the micro-video domain and often ignore the multi-modal characteristics of the product domain. Additionally, these datasets strictly limit their data scale through content alignment and use a content-based data organization format that hinders the inclusion of user retrieval intentions. To address these limitations, we propose the PKU Real20M dataset, a large-scale e-commerce dataset designed for cross-domain retrieval. We adopt a query-driven approach to efficiently gather over 20 million e-commerce products and micro-videos, including multimodal information. Additionally, we design a three-level entity prompt learning framework to align inter-modality information from coarse to fine. Moreover, we introduce the Query-driven Cross-Domain retrieval framework (QCD), which leverages user queries to facilitate efficient alignment between the product and micro-video domains. Extensive experiments on two downstream tasks validate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/Real20M_ACMMM2023.
SUR-adapter: Enhancing Text-to-Image Pre-trained Diffusion Models with Large Language Models

Diffusion models, which have emerged to become popular text-to-image generation models, can produce high-quality and content-rich images guided by textual prompts. However, there are limitations to semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning in existing models when the input prompts are concise narrative, resulting in low-quality image generation. To improve the capacities for narrative prompts, we propose a simple-yet-effective parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach called the Semantic Understanding and Reasoning adapter (SUR-adapter) for pre-trained diffusion models. To reach this goal, we first collect and annotate a new dataset SURD which consists of more than 57,000 semantically corrected multi-modal samples. Each sample contains a simple narrative prompt, a complex keyword-based prompt, and a high-quality image. Then, we align the semantic representation of narrative prompts to the complex prompts and transfer knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to our SUR-adapter via knowledge distillation so that it can acquire the powerful semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities to build a high-quality textual semantic representation for text-to-image generation. We conduct experiments by integrating multiple LLMs and popular pre-trained diffusion models to show the effectiveness of our approach in enabling diffusion models to understand and reason concise natural language without image quality degradation. Our approach can make text-to-image diffusion models easier to use with better user experience, which demonstrates our approach has the potential for further advancing the development of user-friendly text-to-image generation models by bridging the semantic gap between simple narrative prompts and complex keyword-based prompts. The code is released at https://github.com/Qrange-group/SUR-adapter.
Understanding User Behavior in Volumetric Video Watching: Dataset, Analysis and Prediction

Volumetric video emerges as a new attractive video paradigm in recent years since it provides an immersive and interactive 3D viewing experience with six degree-of-freedom (DoF). Unlike traditional 2D or panoramic videos, volumetric videos require dense point clouds, voxels, meshes, or huge neural models to depict volumetric scenes, which results in a prohibitively high bandwidth burden for video delivery. Users' behavior analysis, especially the viewport and gaze analysis, then plays a significant role in prioritizing the content streaming within users' viewport and degrading the remaining content to maximize user QoE with limited bandwidth. Although understanding user behavior is crucial, to the best of our best knowledge, there are no available 3D volumetric video viewing datasets containing fine-grained user interactivity features, not to mention further analysis and behavior prediction.
Masked Text Modeling: A Self-Supervised Pre-training Method for Scene Text Detection

Scene text detection has made great progress recently with the wide use of pre-training. Nonetheless, existing scene text detection methods still suffer from two problems: 1) Limited annotated real data reduces the feature robustness. 2) Detectors perform poorly on text lacking of visual information. In this paper, we explore the potential of the CLIP model, and propose a novel self-supervised Masked Text Modeling (MTM) pre-training method for scene text detection, which can be trained with unlabeled data and improve the linguistic reasoning ability for text occlusion. Different from previous randomly pixel-level masking methods, MTM performs a targeted text-aware masking process under an unsupervised manner. Specifically, MTM consists of text perception and masked text modeling. In the text perception step, benefiting from the text-friendliness of CLIP, a Text Perception Module is proposed to attend to text area by computing the similarity between the text and image tokens from CLIP model. In the masked text modeling step, a Text-aware Masking Strategy is designed to mask the text area, and the Masked Text Modeling Module is used to reconstruct the masked texts. MTM obtains the ability to reason the linguistic information of masked texts with the reconstruction. This robust feature extraction learned by MTM ensures a more discriminative representation for the text lacking of visual information. Moreover, a new text dataset named OcclusionText is proposed to evaluate the robustness for text occlusion of detection methods. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that our MTM can boost the performance of existing text detectors.
AdaCLIP: Towards Pragmatic Multimodal Video Retrieval

Incorporating large image-text foundation models such as CLIP has substantially improved the performance of the multimodal video retrieval task. However, how to practically sample the frames from a video and aggregate the frame features into a video representation is still an open research question. In particular, real-world deployment scenarios, such as embodiment within consumer electronics or cloud-based inference pipelines, require two key facets of retrieval (representation building and search) to be computationally light and fast. In this paper, we propose AdaCLIP, a computation- and latency-aware system for pragmatic multimodal video retrieval. AdaCLIP consists of a learning-based frame selection module to select informative frames and a query-independent frame aggregation module to obtain strong video representations from the frame features. Specifically, in the frame selection module, we introduce a differentiable Hard-Top-k algorithm to sample a subset of the frames while optimizing the performance of the video retrieval task in an end-to-end manner. Moreover, to be latency-aware, we also propose a query-independent lightweight approach, MLP-Score, to aggregate the frame features into the video representation, which offers up to 142x speedup on GPU and 822x speedup on CPU in similarity search time compared to query-dependent matching methods. Experimental results on several popular video retrieval datasets confirm the effectiveness of AdaCLIP.
Enhancing Visibility in Nighttime Haze Images Using Guided APSF and Gradient Adaptive Convolution

Visibility in hazy nighttime scenes is frequently reduced by multiple factors, including low light, intense glow, light scattering, and the presence of multicolored light sources. Existing nighttime dehazing methods often struggle with handling glow or low-light conditions, resulting in either excessively dark visuals or unsuppressed glow outputs. In this paper, we enhance the visibility from a single nighttime haze image by suppressing glow and enhancing low-light regions. To handle glow effects, our framework learns from the rendered glow pairs. Specifically, a light source aware network is proposed to detect light sources of night images, followed by the APSF (Angular Point Spread Function)-guided glow rendering. Our framework is then trained on the rendered images, resulting in glow suppression. Moreover, we utilize gradient-adaptive convolution, to capture edges and textures in hazy scenes. By leveraging extracted edges and textures, we enhance the contrast of the scene without losing important structural details. To boost low-light intensity, our network learns an attention map, then adjusted by gamma correction. This attention has high values on low-light regions and low values on haze and glow regions. Extensive evaluation on real nighttime haze images, demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a PSNR of 30.38dB, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 13% on GTA5 nighttime haze dataset. Our data and code is available at: https://github.com/jinyeying/nighttime_dehaze.