Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Enhanced Soft Label for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

As a mainstream framework in the field of semi-supervised learning (SSL), self-training via pseudo labeling and its variants have witnessed impressive progress in semi-supervised semantic segmentation with the recent advance of deep neural networks. However, modern self-training based SSL algorithms use a pre-defined constant threshold to select unlabeled pixel samples that contribute to the training, thus failing to be compatible with different learning difficulties of variant categories and different learning status of the model. To address these issues, we propose Enhanced Soft Label (ESL), a curriculum learning approach to fully leverage the high-value supervisory signals implicit in the untrustworthy pseudo label. ESL believes that pixels with unconfident predictions can be pretty sure about their belonging to a subset of dominant classes though being arduous to determine the exact one. It thus contains a Dynamic Soft Label (DSL) module to dynamically maintain the high probability classes, keeping the label "soft" so as to make full use of the high entropy prediction. However, the DSL itself will inevitably introduce ambiguity between dominant classes, thus blurring the classification boundary. Therefore, we further propose a pixel-to-part contrastive learning method cooperated with an unsupervised object part grouping mechanism to improve its ability to distinguish between different classes. Extensive experimental results on Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscapes show that our approach achieves remarkable improvements over existing state-of-the-art approaches.
LAW-Diffusion: Complex Scene Generation by Diffusion with Layouts

Thanks to the rapid development of diffusion models, unprecedented progress has been witnessed in image synthesis. Prior works mostly rely on pre-trained linguistic models, but a text is often too abstract to properly specify all the spatial properties of an image, e.g., the layout configuration of a scene, leading to the sub-optimal results of complex scene generation. In this paper, we achieve accurate complex scene generation by proposing a semantically controllable Layout-AWare diffusion model, termed LAW-Diffusion. Distinct from the previous Layout-to-Image generation (L2I) methods that primarily explore category-aware relationships, LAW-Diffusion introduces a spatial dependency parser to encode the location-aware semantic coherence across objects as a layout embedding and produces a scene with perceptually harmonious object styles and contextual relations. To be specific, we delicately instantiate each object’s regional semantics as an object region map and leverage a location-aware cross-object attention module to capture the spatial dependencies among those disentangled representations. We further propose an adaptive guidance schedule for our layout guidance to mitigate the trade-off between the regional semantic alignment and the texture fidelity of generated objects. Moreover, LAW-Diffusion allows for instance reconfiguration while maintaining the other regions in a synthesized image by introducing a layout-aware latent grafting mechanism to recompose its local regional semantics. To better verify the plausibility of generated scenes, we propose a new evaluation metric for the L2I task, dubbed Scene Relation Score (SRS) to measure how the images preserve the rational and harmonious relations among contextual objects. Comprehensive experiments on COCO-Stuff and Visual-Genome demonstrate that our LAW-Diffusion yields the state-of-the-art generative performance, especially with coherent object relations.
Learning Spatial-context-aware Global Visual Feature Representation for Instance Image Retrieval

In instance image retrieval, considering local spatial information within an image has proven effective to boost retrieval performance, as demonstrated by local visual descriptor based geometric verification. Nevertheless, it will be highly valuable to make ordinary global image representations spatial-context-aware because global representation based image retrieval is appealing thanks to its algorithmic simplicity, low memory cost, and being friendly to sophisticated data structures. To this end, we propose a novel feature learning framework for instance image retrieval, which embeds local spatial context information into the learned global feature representations. Specifically, in parallel to the visual feature branch in a CNN backbone, we design a spatial context branch that consists of two modules called online token learning and distance encoding. For each local descriptor learned in CNN, the former module is used to indicate the types of its surrounding descriptors, while their spatial distribution information is captured by the latter module. After that, the visual feature branch and the spatial context branch are fused to produce a single global feature representation per image. As experimentally demonstrated, with the spatial-context-aware characteristic, we can well improve the performance of global representation based image retrieval while maintaining all of its appealing properties. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zy-Zhang/SpCa.
CiT: Curation in Training for Effective Vision-Language Data

Large vision-language models are generally applicable to many downstream tasks, but come at an exorbitant training cost that only large institutions can afford. This paper trades generality for efficiency and presents Curation in Training (CiT), a simple and efficient vision-text learning algorithm that couples a data objective into training. CiT automatically yields quality data to speed-up contrastive image-text training and alleviates the need for an offline data filtering pipeline, allowing broad data sources (including raw image-text pairs from the web). CiT contains two loops: an outer loop curating the training data and an inner loop consuming the curated training data. The text encoder connects the two loops. Given metadata for tasks of interest, e.g., class names, and a large pool of image-text pairs, CiT alternatively selects relevant training data from the pool by measuring the similarity of their text embeddings and embeddings of the metadata. In our experiments, we observe that CiT can speed up training by over an order of magnitude, especially if the raw data size is large.
Flexible Visual Recognition by Evidential Modeling of Confusion and Ignorance

In real-world scenarios, typical visual recognition systems could fail under two major causes, i.e., the misclassification between known classes and the excusable misbehavior on unknown-class images. To tackle these deficiencies, flexible visual recognition should dynamically predict multiple classes when they are unconfident between choices and reject making predictions when the input is entirely out of the training distribution. Two challenges emerge along with this novel task. First, prediction uncertainty should be separately quantified as confusion depicting inter-class uncertainties and ignorance identifying out-of-distribution samples. Second, both confusion and ignorance should be comparable between samples to enable effective decision-making. In this paper, we propose to model these two sources of uncertainty explicitly with the theory of Subjective Logic. Regarding recognition as an evidence-collecting process, confusion is then defined as conflicting evidence, while ignorance is the absence of evidence. By predicting Dirichlet concentration parameters for singletons, comprehensive subjective opinions, including confusion and ignorance, could be achieved via further evidence combinations. Through a series of experiments on synthetic data analysis, visual recognition, and open-set detection, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in quantifying two sources of uncertainties and dealing with flexible recognition.
Machine Learning Boosting Algorithms to Detect the Fake User Profiles on Instagram

Social media use has become a significant part of every person’s daily life during the past several years. These social media sites support in the three Cs: creating, connecting, and communicating with others. Nearly 4.8 billion people use social media globally, according to use data. There are millions of individuals worldwide that spend the majority of their time on social networking websites. A variety of threats, such as bogus profiles, account hacking, safety and security problems, might arise with an increase in usage. The most popular and broadly used social networking site is Instagram. The purpose of the following paper is to identify phoney accounts of people on Instagram using machine learning boosting techniques. We developed a new set of algorithms described as ADB-CB, which includes extra tree classifier, cat boost, and Ada boost, for recognising or detecting these false user profiles. Additionally, various feature selection and reduction strategies are then used. Kaggle Instagram datasets were taken into account when evaluating the model. Catboost, Adaboost, and the extra tree classifier all performed with accuracy ratings of 96, 91.87, and 93.78 respectively. Of all boosting algorithms, the Catboost had the highest level of accuracy of 96.
DQNdot: A Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Object Tracking in UAV-Enabled Aerial Surveillance

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) object tracking enables various applications in diverse domains, such as surveillance, traffic scrutiny, and search and rescue. However, it presents a formidable challenge that necessitates the proficiency to trail objects under arduous circumstances. In this paper, Deep Q Networks on dynamic object tracking (DQNdot) are presented, encompassing the ensuing components: You only look once (YOLOv8) that spotlights objects in video frames, UAV for Multi-Object Tracking (UAVMOT) traces objects in video frames employing the Kalman filter and Hungarian method. Subsequently, the prioritizing module is also advanced to prioritize things that are more liable to be seamlessly traced. This module harnesses a range of factors to appraise the probability of an object being efficaciously traced, such as its size, speed, and appearance. Deep Q network(DQN) endows the capability to trail resourcefully, learn and adapt to the environment. DQNdot has accomplished 92% accuracy of prophesying the results for pursuit. It transcends all the other frameworks as it can proficiently track as many targets as required.
Unified Pre-training with Pseudo Texts for Text-To-Image Person Re-identification

The pre-training task is indispensable for the text-to-image person re-identification (T2I-ReID) task. However, there are two underlying inconsistencies between these two tasks that may impact the performance: i) Data inconsistency. A large domain gap exists between the generic images/texts used in public pre-trained models and the specific person data in the T2I-ReID task. This gap is especially severe for texts, as general textual data are usually unable to describe specific people in fine-grained detail. ii) Training inconsistency. The processes of pre-training of images and texts are independent, despite cross-modality learning being critical to T2I-ReID. To address the above issues, we present a new unified pre-training pipeline (UniPT) designed specifically for the T2I-ReID task. We first build a large-scale text-labeled person dataset "LUPerson-T", in which pseudo-textual descriptions of images are automatically generated by the CLIP paradigm using a divide-conquer-combine strategy. Benefiting from this dataset, we then utilize a simple vision-and-language pre-training framework to explicitly align the feature space of the image and text modalities during pre-training. In this way, the pre-training task and the T2I-ReID task are made consistent with each other on both data and training levels. Without the need for any bells and whistles, our UniPT achieves competitive Rank-1 accuracy of, i.e., 68.50%, 60.09%, and 51.85% on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES and RSTPReid, respectively. Both the LUPerson-T dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ZhiyinShao-H/UniPT.
Skip-Plan: Procedure Planning in Instructional Videos via Condensed Action Space Learning

In this paper, we propose Skip-Plan, a condensed action space learning method for procedure planning in instructional videos. Current procedure planning methods all stick to the state-action pair prediction at every timestep and generate actions adjacently. Although it coincides with human intuition, such a methodology consistently struggles with high-dimensional state supervision and error accumulation on action sequences. In this work, we abstract the procedure planning problem as a mathematical chain model. By skipping uncertain nodes and edges in action chains, we transfer long and complex sequence functions into short but reliable ones in two ways. First, we skip all the intermediate state supervision and only focus on action predictions. Second, we decompose relatively long chains into multiple short sub-chains by skipping unreliable intermediate actions. By this means, our model explores all sorts of reliable sub-relations within an action sequence in the condensed action space. Extensive experiments show Skip-Plan achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CrossTask and COIN benchmarks for procedure planning.
Uncertainty-guided Learning for Improving Image Manipulation Detection

Image manipulation detection (IMD) is of vital importance as faking images and spreading misinformation can be malicious and harm our daily life. IMD is the core technique to solve these issues and poses challenges in two main aspects: (1) Data Uncertainty, i.e., the manipulated artifacts are often hard for humans to discern and lead to noisy labels, which may disturb model training; (2) Model Uncertainty, i.e., the same object may hold different categories (tampered or not) due to manipulation operations, which could potentially confuse the model training and result in unreliable outcomes. Previous works mainly focus on solving the model uncertainty issue by designing meticulous features and networks, however, the data uncertainty problem is rarely considered. In this paper, we address both problems by introducing an uncertainty-guided learning framework, which measures data and model uncertainties by a novel Uncertainty Estimation Network (UEN). UEN is trained under dynamic supervision, and outputs estimated uncertainty maps to refine manipulation detection results, which significantly alleviates the learning difficulties. To our knowledge, this is the first work to embed uncertainty modeling into IMD. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness and generalizability of our method.
LAN-HDR: Luminance-based Alignment Network for High Dynamic Range Video Reconstruction

As demands for high-quality videos continue to rise, high-resolution and high-dynamic range (HDR) imaging techniques are drawing attention. To generate an HDR video from low dynamic range (LDR) images, one of the critical steps is the motion compensation between LDR frames, for which most existing works employed the optical flow algorithm. However, these methods suffer from flow estimation errors when saturation or complicated motions exist. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end HDR video composition framework, which aligns LDR frames in the feature space and then merges aligned features into an HDR frame, without relying on pixel-domain optical flow. Specifically, we propose a luminance-based alignment network for HDR (LAN-HDR) consisting of an alignment module and a hallucination module. The alignment module aligns a frame to the adjacent reference by evaluating luminance-based attention, excluding color information. The hallucination module generates sharp details, especially for washed-out areas due to saturation. The aligned and hallucinated features are then blended adaptively to complement each other. Finally, we merge the features to generate a final HDR frame. In training, we adopt a temporal loss, in addition to frame reconstruction losses, to enhance temporal consistency and thus reduce flickering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs better or comparable to state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/haesoochung/LAN-HDR.
PARF: Primitive-Aware Radiance Fusion for Indoor Scene Novel View Synthesis

This paper proposes a method for fast scene radiance field reconstruction with strong novel view synthesis performance and convenient scene editing functionality. The key idea is to fully utilize semantic parsing and primitive extraction for constraining and accelerating the radiance field reconstruction process. To fulfill this goal, a primitive-aware hybrid rendering strategy was proposed to enjoy the best of both volumetric and primitive rendering. We further contribute a reconstruction pipeline conducts primitive parsing and radiance field learning iteratively for each input frame which successfully fuses semantic, primitive, and radiance information into a single framework. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the fast reconstruction ability, high rendering quality, and convenient editing functionality of our method.
Token-Label Alignment for Vision Transformers

Data mixing strategies (e.g., CutMix) have shown the ability to greatly improve the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). They mix two images as inputs for training and assign them with a mixed label with the same ratio. While they are shown effective for vision transformers (ViTs), we identify a token fluctuation phenomenon that has suppressed the potential of data mixing strategies. We empirically observe that the contributions of input tokens fluctuate as forward propagating, which might induce a different mixing ratio in the output tokens. The training target computed by the original data mixing strategy can thus be inaccurate, resulting in less effective training. To address this, we propose a token-label alignment (TL-Align) method to trace the correspondence between transformed tokens and the original tokens to maintain a label for each to-ken. We reuse the computed attention at each layer for efficient token-label alignment, introducing only negligible additional training costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves the performance of ViTs on image classification, semantic segmentation, objective detection, and transfer learning tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/Euphoria16/TL-Align.
Rethinking Data Distillation: Do Not Overlook Calibration

Neural networks trained on distilled data often produce over-confident output and require correction by calibration methods. Existing calibration methods such as temperature scaling and mixup work well for networks trained on original large-scale data. However, we find that these methods fail to calibrate networks trained on data distilled from large source datasets. In this paper, we show that distilled data lead to networks that are not calibratable due to (i) a more concentrated distribution of the maximum logits and (ii) the loss of information that is semantically meaningful but unrelated to classification tasks. To address this problem, we propose <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> Masked Temperature Scaling (MTS) and Masked Distillation Training (MDT) which mitigate the limitations of distilled data and achieve better calibration results while maintaining the efficiency of dataset distillation.
TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering

Despite thousands of researchers, engineers, and artists actively working on improving text-to-image generation models, systems often fail to produce images that accurately align with the text inputs. We introduce TIFA (Text-to-Image Faithfulness evaluation with question Answering), an automatic evaluation metric that measures the faithfulness of a generated image to its text input via visual question answering (VQA). Specifically, given a text input, we automatically generate several question-answer pairs using a language model. We calculate image faithfulness by checking whether existing VQA models can answer these questions using the generated image. TIFA is a reference-free metric that allows for fine-grained and interpretable evaluations of generated images. TIFA also has better correlations with human judgments than existing metrics. Based on this approach, we introduce TIFA v1.0, a benchmark consisting of 4K diverse text inputs and 25K questions across 12 categories (object, counting, etc.). We present a comprehensive evaluation of existing text-to-image models using TIFA v1.0 and highlight the limitations and challenges of current models. For instance, we find that current text-to-image models, despite doing well on color and material, still struggle in counting, spatial relations, and composing multiple objects. We hope our benchmark will help carefully measure the research progress in text-to-image synthesis and provide valuable insights for further research. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>
A Progressive Image Inpainting Algorithm Based on Gated Convolution Optimization

Image inpainting has very important practical significance and application value. Aiming at the problems of blurring or structural confusion in image inpainting for large irregular defects, we propose a progressive image inpainting algorithm based on gated convolution optimization. The algorithm accomplishes the initial prediction of image structure and semantics by adding a coarse repair network. The coarse repair network uses gated convolution to compensate for the loss of information continuity caused by dilated convolution, and introduces semantic feature loss to improve the semantic correctness of the initial repair. The refinement repair network uses recurrent feature reasoning module and applies a attention mechanism to make full use of the valid information in known regions of the image to achieve progressive image inpainting. This model is effective in restoring broken images, and the obtained image inpainting results are clearer in details. We evaluate our model on the publicly available datasets CelebA and Paris Street View to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through qualitative and quantitative experimental validation. The restoration results of the model show higher consistency in visual effects.
RealGraph: A Multiview Dataset for 4D Real-world Context Graph Generation

Understanding 4D scene context in real world has become urgently critical for deploying sophisticated AI systems. In this paper, we propose a brand new scene understanding paradigm called "Context Graph Generation (CGG)", aiming at abstracting holistic semantic information in the complicated 4D world. The CGG task capitalizes on the calibrated multiview videos of a dynamic scene, and targets at recovering semantic information (coordination, trajectories and relationships) of the presented objects in the form of spatio-temporal context graph in 4D space. We also present a benchmark 4D video dataset "RealGraph", the first dataset tailored for the proposed CGG task. The raw data of RealGraph is composed of calibrated and synchronized multiview videos. We exclusively provide manual annotations including object 2D&3D bounding boxes, category labels and semantic relationships. We also make sure the annotated ID for every single object is temporally and spatially consistent. We propose the first CGG baseline algorithm, Multiview-based Context Graph Generation Network (MCGNet), to empirically investigate the legitimacy of CGG task on RealGraph dataset. We nevertheless reveal the great challenges behind this task and encourage the community to explore beyond our solution. Our project page is at https://github.com/THU-luvision/RealGraph.