bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
QAGait: Revisit Gait Recognition from a Quality Perspective
Authors: Wang Zengbin , Hou Saihui , Zhang Man , Liu Xu , Cao Chunshui , Huang Yongzhen , Li Peipei , Xu Shibiao
Published: March 2024

Gait recognition is a promising biometric method that aims to identify pedestrians from their unique walking patterns. Silhouette modality, renowned for its easy acquisition, simple structure, sparse representation, and convenient modeling, has been widely employed in controlled in-the-lab research. However, as gait recognition rapidly advances from in-the-lab to in-the-wild scenarios, various conditions raise significant challenges for silhouette modality, including 1) unidentifiable low-quality silhouettes (abnormal segmentation, severe occlusion, or even non-human shape), and 2) identifiable but challenging silhouettes (background noise, non-standard posture, slight occlusion). To address these challenges, we revisit gait recognition pipeline and approach gait recognition from a quality perspective, namely QAGait. Specifically, we propose a series of cost-effective quality assessment strategies, including Maxmial Connect Area and Template Match to eliminate background noises and unidentifiable silhouettes, Alignment strategy to handle non-standard postures. We also propose two quality-aware loss functions to integrate silhouette quality into optimization within the embedding space. Extensive experiments demonstrate our QAGait can guarantee both gait reliability and performance enhancement. Furthermore, our quality assessment strategies can seamlessly integrate with existing gait datasets, showcasing our superiority. Code is available at https://github.com/wzb-bupt/QAGait.
DTMFormer: Dynamic Token Merging for Boosting Transformer-Based Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Wang Zhehao , Lin Xian , Wu Nannan , Yu Li , Cheng Kwang-Ting , Yan Zengqiang
Published: March 2024

Despite the great potential in capturing long-range dependency, one rarely-explored underlying issue of transformer in medical image segmentation is attention collapse, making it often degenerate into a bypass module in CNN-Transformer hybrid architectures. This is due to the high computational complexity of vision transformers requiring extensive training data while well-annotated medical image data is relatively limited, resulting in poor convergence. In this paper, we propose a plug-n-play transformer block with dynamic token merging, named DTMFormer, to avoid building long-range dependency on redundant and duplicated tokens and thus pursue better convergence. Specifically, DTMFormer consists of an attention-guided token merging (ATM) module to adaptively cluster tokens into fewer semantic tokens based on feature and dependency similarity and a light token reconstruction module to fuse ordinary and semantic tokens. In this way, as self-attention in ATM is calculated based on fewer tokens, DTMFormer is of lower complexity and more friendly to converge. Extensive experiments on publicly-available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DTMFormer working as a plug-n-play module for simultaneous complexity reduction and performance improvement. We believe it will inspire future work on rethinking transformers in medical image segmentation. Code: https://github.com/iam-nacl/DTMFormer.
Enhanced Fine-Grained Motion Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Synthesis
Authors: Wei Dong , Sun Xiaoning , Sun Huaijiang , Hu Shengxiang , Li Bin , Li Weiqing , Lu Jianfeng
Published: March 2024

The emergence of text-driven motion synthesis technique provides animators with great potential to create efficiently. However, in most cases, textual expressions only contain general and qualitative motion descriptions, while lack fine depiction and sufficient intensity, leading to the synthesized motions that either (a) semantically compliant but uncontrollable over specific pose details, or (b) even deviates from the provided descriptions, bringing animators with undesired cases. In this paper, we propose DiffKFC, a conditional diffusion model for text-driven motion synthesis with KeyFrames Collaborated, enabling realistic generation with collaborative and efficient dual-level control: coarse guidance at semantic level, with only few keyframes for direct and fine-grained depiction down to body posture level. Unlike existing inference-editing diffusion models that incorporate conditions without training, our conditional diffusion model is explicitly trained and can fully exploit correlations among texts, keyframes and the diffused target frames. To preserve the control capability of discrete and sparse keyframes, we customize dilated mask attention modules where only partial valid tokens participate in local-to-global attention, indicated by the dilated keyframe mask. Additionally, we develop a simple yet effective smoothness prior, which steers the generated frames towards seamless keyframe transitions at inference. Extensive experiments show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of semantic fidelity, but more importantly, is able to satisfy animator requirements through fine-grained guidance without tedious labor.
RetouchFormer: Semi-supervised High-Quality Face Retouching Transformer with Prior-Based Selective Self-Attention
Authors: Wen Xue , Xie Lianxin , Jiang Le , Chen Tianyi , Wu Si , Liu Cheng , Wong Hau-San
Published: March 2024

Face retouching is to beautify a face image, while preserving the image content as much as possible. It is a promising yet challenging task to remove face imperfections and fill with normal skin. Generic image enhancement methods are hampered by the lack of imperfection localization, which often results in incomplete removal of blemishes at large scales. To address this issue, we propose a transformer-based approach, RetouchFormer, which simultaneously identify imperfections and synthesize realistic content in the corresponding regions. Specifically, we learn a latent dictionary to capture the clean face priors, and predict the imperfection regions via a reconstruction-oriented localization module. Also based on this, we can realize face retouching by explicitly suppressing imperfections in our selective self-attention computation, such that local content will be synthesized from normal skin. On the other hand, multi-scale feature tokens lead to increased flexibility in dealing with the imperfections at various scales. The design elements bring greater effectiveness and efficiency. RetouchFormer outperforms the advanced face retouching methods and synthesizes clean face images with high fidelity in our list of extensive experiments performed.
Keep the Faith: Faithful Explanations in Convolutional Neural Networks for Case-Based Reasoning
Authors: Wolf Tom Nuno , Bongratz Fabian , Rickmann Anne-Marie , Pölsterl Sebastian , Wachinger Christian
Published: March 2024

Explaining predictions of black-box neural networks is crucial when applied to decision-critical tasks. Thus, attribution maps are commonly used to identify important image regions, despite prior work showing that humans prefer explanations based on similar examples. To this end, ProtoPNet learns a set of class-representative feature vectors (prototypes) for case-based reasoning. During inference, similarities of latent features to prototypes are linearly classified to form predictions and attribution maps are provided to explain the similarity. In this work, we evaluate whether architectures for case-based reasoning fulfill established axioms required for faithful explanations using the example of ProtoPNet. We show that such architectures allow the extraction of faithful explanations. However, we prove that the attribution maps used to explain the similarities violate the axioms. We propose a new procedure to extract explanations for trained ProtoPNets, named ProtoPFaith. Conceptually, these explanations are Shapley values, calculated on the similarity scores of each prototype. They allow to faithfully answer which prototypes are present in an unseen image and quantify each pixel’s contribution to that presence, thereby complying with all axioms. The theoretical violations of ProtoPNet manifest in our experiments on three datasets (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Dogs, RSNA) and five architectures (ConvNet, ResNet, ResNet50, WideResNet50, ResNeXt50). Our experiments show a qualitative difference between the explanations given by ProtoPNet and ProtoPFaith. Additionally, we quantify the explanations with the Area Over the Perturbation Curve, on which ProtoPFaith outperforms ProtoPNet on all experiments by a factor >10^3.
3D-STMN: Dependency-Driven Superpoint-Text Matching Network for End-to-End 3D Referring Expression Segmentation
Authors: Wu Changli , Ma Yiwei , Chen Qi , Wang Haowei , Luo Gen , Ji Jiayi , Sun Xiaoshuai
Published: March 2024

In 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-RES), the earlier approach adopts a two-stage paradigm, extracting segmentation proposals and then matching them with referring expressions. However, this conventional paradigm encounters significant challenges, most notably in terms of the generation of lackluster initial proposals and a pronounced deceleration in inference speed. Recognizing these limitations, we introduce an innovative end-to-end Superpoint-Text Matching Network (3D-STMN) that is enriched by dependency-driven insights. One of the keystones of our model is the Superpoint-Text Matching (STM) mechanism. Unlike traditional methods that navigate through instance proposals, STM directly correlates linguistic indications with their respective superpoints, clusters of semantically related points. This architectural decision empowers our model to efficiently harness cross-modal semantic relationships, primarily leveraging densely annotated superpoint-text pairs, as opposed to the more sparse instance-text pairs. In pursuit of enhancing the role of text in guiding the segmentation process, we further incorporate the Dependency-Driven Interaction (DDI) module to deepen the network's semantic comprehension of referring expressions. Using the dependency trees as a beacon, this module discerns the intricate relationships between primary terms and their associated descriptors in expressions, thereby elevating both the localization and segmentation capacities. Comprehensive experiments on the ScanRefer benchmark reveal that our model not only sets new performance standards, registering an mIoU gain of 11.7 points but also achieves a staggering enhancement in inference speed, surpassing traditional methods by 95.7 times. The code and models are available at https://github.com/sosppxo/3D-STMN.
p-Laplacian Adaptation for Generative Pre-trained Vision-Language Models
Authors: Wu Haoyuan , Zhang Xinyun , Xu Peng , Liao Peiyu , Yao Xufeng , Yu Bei
Published: March 2024

Vision-Language models (VLMs) pre-trained on large corpora have demonstrated notable success across a range of downstream tasks. In light of the rapidly increasing size of pre-trained VLMs, parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) has garnered attention as a viable alternative to full fine-tuning. One such approach is the adapter, which introduces a few trainable parameters into the pre-trained models while preserving the original parameters during adaptation.
In this paper, we present a novel modeling framework that recasts adapter tuning after attention as a graph message passing process on attention graphs, where the projected query and value features and attention matrix constitute the node features and the graph adjacency matrix, respectively. Within this framework, tuning adapters in VLMs necessitates handling heterophilic graphs, owing to the disparity between the projected query and value space.
To address this challenge, we propose a new adapter architecture, p-adapter, which employs p-Laplacian message passing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Specifically, the attention weights are re-normalized based on the features, and the features are then aggregated using the calibrated attention matrix, enabling the dynamic exploitation of information with varying frequencies in the heterophilic attention graphs.
We conduct extensive experiments on different pre-trained VLMs and multi-modal tasks, including visual question answering, visual entailment, and image captioning. The experimental results validate our method's significant superiority over other PETL methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/wuhy68/p-Adapter/.
CPN: Complementary Proposal Network for Unconstrained Text Detection
Authors: Wu Longhuang , Tian Shangxuan , Wang Youxin , Xiong Pengfei
Published: March 2024

Existing methods for scene text detection can be divided into two paradigms: segmentation-based and anchor-based. While Segmentation-based methods are well-suited for irregular shapes, they struggle with compact or overlapping layouts. Conversely, anchor-based approaches excel for complex layouts but suffer from irregular shapes. To strengthen their merits and overcome their respective demerits, we propose a Complementary Proposal Network (CPN) that seamlessly and parallelly integrates semantic and geometric information for superior performance. The CPN comprises two efficient networks for proposal generation: the Deformable Morphology Semantic Network, which generates semantic proposals employing an innovative deformable morphological operator, and the Balanced Region Proposal Network, which produces geometric proposals with pre-defined anchors. To further enhance the complementarity, we introduce an Interleaved Feature Attention module that enables semantic and geometric features to interact deeply before proposal generation. By leveraging both complementary proposals and features, CPN outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with significant margins under comparable computation cost. Specifically, our approach achieves improvements of 3.6%, 1.3% and 1.0% on challenging benchmarks ICDAR19-ArT, IC15, and MSRA-TD500, respectively. Code for our method will be released.
Point-to-Spike Residual Learning for Energy-Efficient 3D Point Cloud Classification
Authors: Wu Qiaoyun , Zhang Quanxiao , Tan Chunyu , Zhou Yun , Sun Changyin
Published: March 2024

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have revolutionized neural learning and are making remarkable strides in image analysis and robot control tasks with ultra-low power consumption advantages. Inspired by this success, we investigate the application of spiking neural networks to 3D point cloud processing. We present a point-to-spike residual learning network for point cloud classification, which operates on points with binary spikes rather than floating-point numbers. Specifically, we first design a spatial-aware kernel point spiking neuron to relate spiking generation to point position in 3D space. On this basis, we then design a 3D spiking residual block for effective feature learning based on spike sequences. By stacking the 3D spiking residual blocks, we build the point-to-spike residual classification network, which achieves low computation cost and low accuracy loss on two benchmark datasets, ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. Moreover, the classifier strikes a good balance between classification accuracy and biological characteristics, allowing us to explore the deployment of 3D processing to neuromorphic chips for developing energy-efficient 3D robotic perception systems.
Locality Preserving Refinement for Shape Matching with Functional Maps
Authors: Xia Yifan , Lu Yifan , Gao Yuan , Ma Jiayi
Published: March 2024

In this paper, we address the nonrigid shape matching with outliers by a novel and effective pointwise map refinement method, termed Locality Preserving Refinement. For accurate pointwise conversion from a given functional map, our method formulates a two-step procedure. Firstly, starting with noisy point-to-point correspondences, we identify inliers by leveraging the neighborhood support, which yields a closed-form solution with linear time complexity. After obtained the reliable correspondences of inliers, we refine the pointwise correspondences for outliers using local linear embedding, which operates in an adaptive spectral similarity space to further eliminate the ambiguities that are difficult to handle in the functional space. By refining pointwise correspondences with local consistency thus embedding geometric constraints into functional spaces, our method achieves considerable improvement in accuracy with linearithmic time and space cost. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/XiaYifan1999/LOPR.
Patched Line Segment Learning for Vector Road Mapping
Authors: Xu Jiakun , Xu Bowen , Xia Gui-Song , Dong Liang , Xue Nan
Published: March 2024

This paper presents a novel approach to computing vector road maps from satellite remotely sensed images, building upon a well-defined Patched Line Segment (PaLiS) representation for road graphs that holds geometric significance. Unlike prevailing methods that derive road vector representations from satellite images using binary masks or keypoints, our method employs line segments. These segments not only convey road locations but also capture their orientations, making them a robust choice for representation. More precisely, given an input image, we divide it into non-overlapping patches and predict a suitable line segment within each patch. This strategy enables us to capture spatial and structural cues from these patch-based line segments, simplifying the process of constructing the road network graph without the necessity of additional neural networks for connectivity. In our experiments, we demonstrate how an effective representation of a road graph significantly enhances the performance of vector road mapping on established benchmarks, without requiring extensive modifications to the neural network architecture. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with just 6 GPU hours of training, leading to a substantial 32-fold reduction in training costs in terms of GPU hours.
Gaze from Origin: Learning for Generalized Gaze Estimation by Embedding the Gaze Frontalization Process
Authors: Xu Mingjie , Lu Feng
Published: March 2024

Gaze estimation aims to accurately estimate the direction or position at which a person is looking. With the development of deep learning techniques, a number of gaze estimation methods have been proposed and achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, these methods are limited to within-dataset settings, whose performance drops when tested on unseen datasets. We argue that this is caused by infinite and continuous gaze labels. To alleviate this problem, we propose using gaze frontalization as an auxiliary task to constrain gaze estimation. Based on this, we propose a novel gaze domain generalization framework named Gaze Frontalization-based Auxiliary Learning (GFAL) Framework which embeds the gaze frontalization process, i.e., guiding the feature so that the eyeball can rotate and look at the front (camera), without any target domain information during training. Experimental results show that our proposed framework is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on gaze domain generalization task, which is competitive with or even superior to the SOTA gaze unsupervised domain adaptation methods.
Revisiting Gradient Pruning: A Dual Realization for Defending against Gradient Attacks
Authors: Xue Lulu , Hu Shengshan , Zhao Ruizhi , Zhang Leo Yu , Hu Shengqing , Sun Lichao , Yao Dezhong
Published: March 2024

Collaborative learning (CL) is a distributed learning framework that aims to protect user privacy by allowing users to jointly train a model by sharing their gradient updates only. However, gradient inversion attacks (GIAs), which recover users' training data from shared gradients, impose severe privacy threats to CL. Existing defense methods adopt different techniques, e.g., differential privacy, cryptography, and perturbation defenses, to defend against the GIAs. Nevertheless, all current defense methods suffer from a poor trade-off between privacy, utility, and efficiency. To mitigate the weaknesses of existing solutions, we propose a novel defense method, Dual Gradient Pruning (DGP), based on gradient pruning, which can improve communication efficiency while preserving the utility and privacy of CL. Specifically, DGP slightly changes gradient pruning with a stronger privacy guarantee. And DGP can also significantly improve communication efficiency with a theoretical analysis of its convergence and generalization. Our extensive experiments show that DGP can effectively defend against the most powerful GIAs and reduce the communication cost without sacrificing the model's utility.
Hybrid-SORT: Weak Cues Matter for Online Multi-Object Tracking
Authors: Yang Mingzhan , Han Guangxin , Yan Bin , Zhang Wenhua , Qi Jinqing , Lu Huchuan , Wang Dong
Published: March 2024

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) aims to detect and associate all desired objects across frames. Most methods accomplish the task by explicitly or implicitly leveraging strong cues (i.e., spatial and appearance information), which exhibit powerful instance-level discrimination. However, when object occlusion and clustering occur, spatial and appearance information will become ambiguous simultaneously due to the high overlap among objects. In this paper, we demonstrate this long-standing challenge in MOT can be efficiently and effectively resolved by incorporating weak cues to compensate for strong cues. Along with velocity direction, we introduce the confidence and height state as potential weak cues. With superior performance, our method still maintains Simple, Online and Real-Time (SORT) characteristics. Also, our method shows strong generalization for diverse trackers and scenarios in a plug-and-play and training-free manner. Significant and consistent improvements are observed when applying our method to 5 different representative trackers. Further, with both strong and weak cues, our method Hybrid-SORT achieves superior performance on diverse benchmarks, including MOT17, MOT20, and especially DanceTrack where interaction and severe occlusion frequently happen with complex motions. The code and models are available at https://github.com/ymzis69/HybridSORT.
Diverse and Stable 2D Diffusion Guided Text to 3D Generation with Noise Recalibration
Authors: Yang Xiaofeng , Liu Fayao , Xu Yi , Su Hanjing , Wu Qingyao , Lin Guosheng
Published: March 2024

In recent years, following the success of text guided image generation, text guided 3D generation has gained increasing attention among researchers. Dreamfusion is a notable approach that enhances generation quality by utilizing 2D text guided diffusion models and introducing SDS loss, a technique for distilling 2D diffusion model information to train 3D models. However, the SDS loss has two major limitations that hinder its effectiveness. Firstly, when given a text prompt, the SDS loss struggles to produce diverse content. Secondly, during training, SDS loss may cause the generated content to overfit and collapse, limiting the model's ability to learn intricate texture details. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel approach called Noise Recalibration algorithm. By incorporating this technique, we can generate 3D content with significantly greater diversity and stunning details. Our approach offers a promising solution to the limitations of SDS loss.
Progressive Text-to-Image Diffusion with Soft Latent Direction
Authors: Ye YuTeng , Cai Jiale , Zhou Hang , Li Guanwen , Zhang Youjia , Song Zikai , Gao Chenxing , Yu Junqing , Yang Wei
Published: March 2024

In spite of the rapidly evolving landscape of text-to-image generation, the synthesis and manipulation of multiple entities while adhering to specific relational constraints pose enduring challenges. This paper introduces an innovative progressive synthesis and editing operation that systematically incorporates entities into the target image, ensuring their adherence to spatial and relational constraints at each sequential step. Our key insight stems from the observation that while a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model adeptly handles one or two entities, it often falters when dealing with a greater number. To address this limitation, we propose harnessing the capabilities of a Large Language Model (LLM) to decompose intricate and protracted text descriptions into coherent directives adhering to stringent formats. To facilitate the execution of directives involving distinct semantic operations—namely insertion, editing, and erasing—we formulate the Stimulus, Response, and Fusion (SRF) framework. Within this framework, latent regions are gently stimulated in alignment with each operation, followed by the fusion of the responsive latent components to achieve cohesive entity manipulation. Our proposed framework yields notable advancements in object synthesis, particularly when confronted with intricate and lengthy textual inputs. Consequently, it establishes a new benchmark for text-to-image generation tasks, further elevating the field's performance standards.
Attacks on Continual Semantic Segmentation by Perturbing Incremental Samples
Authors: Yu Zhidong , Yang Wei , Xie Xike , Shi Zhenbo
Published: March 2024

As an essential computer vision task, Continual Semantic Segmentation (CSS) has received a lot of attention. However, security issues regarding this task have not been fully studied. To bridge this gap, we study the problem of attacks in CSS in this paper. We first propose a new task, namely, attacks on incremental samples in CSS, and reveal that the attacks on incremental samples corrupt the performance of CSS in both old and new classes. Moreover, we present an adversarial sample generation method based on class shift, namely Class Shift Attack (CS-Attack), which is an offline and easy-to-implement approach for CSS. CS-Attack is able to significantly degrade the performance of models on both old and new classes without knowledge of the incremental learning approach, which undermines the original purpose of the incremental learning, i.e., learning new classes while retaining old knowledge. Experiments show that on the popular datasets Pascal VOC, ADE20k, and Cityscapes, our approach easily degrades the performance of currently popular CSS methods, which reveals the importance of security in CSS.
Mono3DVG: 3D Visual Grounding in Monocular Images
Authors: Zhan Yang , Yuan Yuan , Xiong Zhitong
Published: March 2024

We introduce a novel task of 3D visual grounding in monocular RGB images using language descriptions with both appearance and geometry information. Specifically, we build a large-scale dataset, Mono3DRefer, which contains 3D object targets with their corresponding geometric text descriptions, generated by ChatGPT and refined manually. To foster this task, we propose Mono3DVG-TR, an end-to-end transformer-based network, which takes advantage of both the appearance and geometry information in text embeddings for multi-modal learning and 3D object localization. Depth predictor is designed to explicitly learn geometry features. The dual text-guided adapter is proposed to refine multiscale visual and geometry features of the referred object. Based on depth-text-visual stacking attention, the decoder fuses object-level geometric cues and visual appearance into a learnable query. Comprehensive benchmarks and some insightful analyses are provided for Mono3DVG. Extensive comparisons and ablation studies show that our method significantly outperforms all baselines. The dataset and code will be released.
Amodal Scene Analysis via Holistic Occlusion Relation Inference and Generative Mask Completion
Authors: Zhang Bowen , Liu Qing , Zhang Jianming , Wang Yilin , Liu Liyang , Lin Zhe , Liu Yifan
Published: March 2024

Amodal scene analysis entails interpreting the occlusion relationship among scene elements and inferring the possible shapes of the invisible parts. Existing methods typically frame this task as an extended instance segmentation or a pair-wise object de-occlusion problem. In this work, we propose a new framework, which comprises a Holistic Occlusion Relation Inference (HORI) module followed by an instance-level Generative Mask Completion (GMC) module.
Unlike previous approaches, which rely on mask completion results for occlusion reasoning, our HORI module directly predicts an occlusion relation matrix in a single pass. This approach is much more efficient than the pair-wise de-occlusion process and it naturally handles mutual occlusion, a common but often neglected situation.
Moreover, we formulate the mask completion task as a generative process and use a diffusion-based GMC module for instance-level mask completion. This improves mask completion quality and provides multiple plausible solutions.
We further introduce a large-scale amodal segmentation dataset with high-quality human annotations, including mutual occlusions. Experiments on our dataset and two public benchmarks demonstrate the advantages of our method. code public available at https://github.com/zbwxp/Amodal-AAAI.
Improving the Adversarial Transferability of Vision Transformers with Virtual Dense Connection
Authors: Zhang Jianping , Huang Yizhan , Xu Zhuoer , Wu Weibin , Lyu Michael R.
Published: March 2024

With the great achievement of vision transformers (ViTs), transformer-based approaches have become the new paradigm for solving various computer vision tasks. However, recent research shows that similar to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), ViTs are still vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To explore the shared deficiency of models with different structures, researchers begin to analyze the cross-structure adversarial transferability, which is still under-explored. Therefore, in this work, we focus on the ViT attacks to improve the cross-structure transferability between the transformer-based and convolution-based models. Previous studies fail to thoroughly investigate the influence of the components inside the ViT models on adversarial transferability, leading to inferior performance. To overcome the drawback, we launch a motivating study by linearly down-scaling the gradients of components inside the ViT models to analyze their influence on adversarial transferability. Based on the motivating study, we find that the gradient of the skip connection most influences transferability and believe that back-propagating gradients from deeper blocks can enhance transferability. Therefore, we propose the Virtual Dense Connection method (VDC). Specifically, without changing the forward pass, we first recompose the original network to add virtual dense connections. Then we back-propagate gradients of deeper Attention maps and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) blocks via virtual dense connections when generating adversarial samples. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art baselines, with an 8.2% improvement in transferability between ViT models and a 7.2% improvement in cross-structure transferability from ViTs to CNNs.
IRPruneDet: Efficient Infrared Small Target Detection via Wavelet Structure-Regularized Soft Channel Pruning
Authors: Zhang Mingjin , Yang Handi , Guo Jie , Li Yunsong , Gao Xinbo , Zhang Jing
Published: March 2024

Infrared Small Target Detection (IRSTD) refers to detecting faint targets in infrared images, which has achieved notable progress with the advent of deep learning. However, the drive for improved detection accuracy has led to larger, intricate models with redundant parameters, causing storage and computation inefficiencies. In this pioneering study, we introduce the concept of utilizing network pruning to enhance the efficiency of IRSTD. Due to the challenge posed by low signal-to-noise ratios and the absence of detailed semantic information in infrared images, directly applying existing pruning techniques yields suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a novel wavelet structure-regularized soft channel pruning method, giving rise to the efficient IRPruneDet model. Our approach involves representing the weight matrix in the wavelet domain and formulating a wavelet channel pruning strategy. We incorporate wavelet regularization to induce structural sparsity without incurring extra memory usage. Moreover, we design a soft channel reconstruction method that preserves important target information against premature pruning, thereby ensuring an optimal sparse structure while maintaining overall sparsity. Through extensive experiments on two widely-used benchmarks, our IRPruneDet method surpasses established techniques in both model complexity and accuracy. Specifically, when employing U-net as the baseline network, IRPruneDet achieves a 64.13% reduction in parameters and a 51.19% decrease in FLOPS, while improving IoU from 73.31% to 75.12% and nIoU from 70.92% to 74.30%. The code is available at https://github.com/hd0013/IRPruneDet.
MobileInst: Video Instance Segmentation on the Mobile
Authors: Zhang Renhong , Cheng Tianheng , Yang Shusheng , Jiang Haoyi , Zhang Shuai , Lyu Jiancheng , Li Xin , Ying Xiaowen , Gao Dashan , Liu Wenyu , Wang Xinggang
Published: March 2024

Video instance segmentation on mobile devices is an important yet very challenging edge AI problem. It mainly suffers from (1) heavy computation and memory costs for frame-by-frame pixel-level instance perception and (2) complicated heuristics for tracking objects. To address these issues, we present MobileInst, a lightweight and mobile-friendly framework for video instance segmentation on mobile devices. Firstly, MobileInst adopts a mobile vision transformer to extract multi-level semantic features and presents an efficient query-based dual-transformer instance decoder for mask kernels and a semantic-enhanced mask decoder to generate instance segmentation per frame. Secondly, MobileInst exploits simple yet effective kernel reuse and kernel association to track objects for video instance segmentation. Further, we propose temporal query passing to enhance the tracking ability for kernels. We conduct experiments on COCO and YouTube-VIS datasets to demonstrate the superiority of MobileInst and evaluate the inference latency on one single CPU core of the Snapdragon 778G Mobile Platform, without other methods of acceleration. On the COCO dataset, MobileInst achieves 31.2 mask AP and 433 ms on the mobile CPU, which reduces the latency by 50% compared to the previous SOTA. For video instance segmentation, MobileInst achieves 35.0 AP and 30.1 AP on YouTube-VIS 2019 & 2021.
Negative Pre-aware for Noisy Cross-Modal Matching
Authors: Zhang Xu , Li Hao , Ye Mang
Published: March 2024

Cross-modal noise-robust learning is a challenging task since noisy correspondence is hard to recognize and rectify. Due to the cumulative and unavoidable negative impact of unresolved noise, existing methods cannot maintain a stable performance when the noise increases. In this paper, we present a novel Negative Pre-aware Cross-modal (NPC) matching solution for large visual-language model fine-tuning on noisy downstream tasks. It is featured in two aspects: (1) For noise recognition and resistance, previous methods usually directly filter out a noise subset, we propose to estimate the negative impact of each sample. It does not need additional correction mechanisms that may predict unreliable correction results, leading to self-reinforcing error. We assign a confidence weight to each sample according to its negative impact in the training process. This adaptively adjusts the contribution of each sample to avoid noisy accumulation. (2) For maintaining stable performance with increasing noise, we utilize the memorization effect of DNNs by maintaining a memory bank. Specifically, we apply GMM to select high-confident clean samples as the memory entry, where the memory entry is used to estimate the negative impact of each sample. Since clean samples are easier distinguished by GMM with increasing noise, the memory bank can still maintain high quality at a high noise ratio. Compared to the correction mechanism focusing on noise samples, memory bank-based estimation is more robust, which makes the model performance stable on noisy datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves matching accuracy and performance stability at increasing noise ratio. Our approach also surpasses the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. The code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangXu0963/NPC.
Concept-Guided Prompt Learning for Generalization in Vision-Language Models
Authors: Zhang Yi , Zhang Ce , Yu Ke , Tang Yushun , He Zhihai
Published: March 2024

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model has exhibited remarkable efficacy in establishing cross-modal connections between texts and images, yielding impressive
performance across a broad spectrum of downstream applications through fine-tuning. However, for generalization tasks, the current fine-tuning methods for CLIP, such as CoOp and
CoCoOp, demonstrate relatively low performance on some fine-grained datasets. We recognize the underlying reason is that these previous methods only projected global features
into the prompt, neglecting the various visual concepts, such as colors, shapes, and sizes, which are naturally transferable
across domains and play a crucial role in generalization tasks. To address this issue, in this work, we propose
Concept-Guided Prompt Learning (CPL) for vision-language models. Specifically, we leverage the well-learned knowledge
of CLIP to create a visual concept cache to enable conceptguided prompting. In order to refine the text features, we further
develop a projector that transforms multi-level visual features into text features. We observe that this concept-guided
prompt learning approach is able to achieve enhanced consistency between visual and linguistic modalities. Extensive
experimental results demonstrate that our CPL method significantly improves generalization capabilities compared to
the current state-of-the-art methods.
Spatial-Contextual Discrepancy Information Compensation for GAN Inversion
Authors: Zhang Ziqiang , Yan Yan , Xue Jing-Hao , Wang Hanzi
Published: March 2024

Most existing GAN inversion methods either achieve accurate reconstruction but lack editability or offer strong editability at the cost of fidelity. Hence, how to balance the distortion-editability trade-off is a significant challenge for GAN inversion. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel spatial-contextual discrepancy information compensation-based GAN-inversion method (SDIC), which consists of a discrepancy information prediction network (DIPN) and a discrepancy information compensation network (DICN). SDIC follows a ``compensate-and-edit'' paradigm and successfully bridges the gap in image details between the original image and the reconstructed/edited image. On the one hand, DIPN encodes the multi-level spatial-contextual information of the original and initial reconstructed images and then predicts a spatial-contextual guided discrepancy map with two hourglass modules. In this way, a reliable discrepancy map that models the contextual relationship and captures fine-grained image details is learned. On the other hand, DICN incorporates the predicted discrepancy information into both the latent code and the GAN generator with different transformations, generating high-quality reconstructed/edited images. This effectively compensates for the loss of image details during GAN inversion. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the excellent distortion-editability trade-off at a fast inference speed for both image inversion and editing tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZzqLKED/SDIC.
Self-Distillation Regularized Connectionist Temporal Classification Loss for Text Recognition: A Simple Yet Effective Approach
Authors: Zhang Ziyin , Lu Ning , Liao Minghui , Huang Yongshuai , Li Cheng , Wang Min , Peng Wei
Published: March 2024

Text recognition methods are gaining rapid development. Some advanced techniques, e.g., powerful modules, language models, and un- and semi-supervised learning schemes, consecutively push the performance on public benchmarks forward. However, the problem of how to better optimize a text recognition model from the perspective of loss functions is largely overlooked. CTC-based methods, widely used in practice due to their good balance between performance and inference speed, still grapple with accuracy degradation. This is because CTC loss emphasizes the optimization of the entire sequence target while neglecting to learn individual characters. We propose a self-distillation scheme for CTC-based model to address this issue. It incorporates a framewise regularization term in CTC loss to emphasize individual supervision, and leverages the maximizing-a-posteriori of latent alignment to solve the inconsistency problem that arises in distillation between CTC-based models. We refer to the regularized CTC loss as Distillation Connectionist Temporal Classification (DCTC) loss. DCTC loss is module-free, requiring no extra parameters, longer inference lag, or additional training data or phases. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that DCTC can boost text recognition model accuracy by up to 2.6%, without any of these drawbacks.
Optical Flow for Spike Camera with Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Spike Fusion
Authors: Zhao Rui , Xiong Ruiqin , Zhang Jian , Zhang Xinfeng , Yu Zhaofei , Huang Tiejun
Published: March 2024

As an emerging neuromorphic camera with an asynchronous working mechanism, spike camera shows good potential for high-speed vision tasks. Each pixel in spike camera accumulates photons persistently and fires a spike whenever the accumulation exceeds a threshold. Such high-frequency fine-granularity photon recording facilitates the analysis and recovery of dynamic scenes with high-speed motion. This paper considers the optical flow estimation problem for spike cameras. Due to the Poisson nature of incoming photons, the occurrence of spikes is random and fluctuating, making conventional image matching inefficient. We propose a Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal (HiST) fusion module for spike representation to pursue reliable feature matching and develop a robust optical flow network, dubbed as HiST-SFlow. The HiST extracts features at multiple moments and hierarchically fuses the spatial-temporal information. We also propose an intra-moment filtering module to further extract the feature and suppress the influence of randomness in spikes. A scene loss is proposed to ensure that this hierarchical representation recovers the essential visual information in the scene. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with the existing methods. The source codes are available at https://github.com/ruizhao26/HiST-SFlow.
Unifying Multi-Modal Uncertainty Modeling and Semantic Alignment for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification
Authors: Zhao Zhiwei , Liu Bin , Lu Yan , Chu Qi , Yu Nenghai
Published: March 2024

Text-to-Image person re-identification (TI-ReID) aims to retrieve the images of target identity according to the given textual description. The existing methods in TI-ReID focus on aligning the visual and textual modalities through contrastive feature alignment or reconstructive masked language modeling (MLM). However, these methods parameterize the image/text instances as deterministic embeddings and do not explicitly consider the inherent uncertainty in pedestrian images and their textual descriptions, leading to limited image-text relationship expression and semantic alignment. To address the above problem, in this paper, we propose a novel method that unifies multi-modal uncertainty modeling and semantic alignment for TI-ReID. Specifically, we model the image and textual feature vectors of pedestrian as Gaussian distributions, where the multi-granularity uncertainty of the distribution is estimated by incorporating batch-level and identity-level feature variances for each modality. The multi-modal uncertainty modeling acts as a feature augmentation and provides richer image-text semantic relationship. Then we present a bi-directional cross-modal circle loss to more effectively align the probabilistic features between image and text in a self-paced manner. To further promote more comprehensive image-text semantic alignment, we design a task that complements the masked language modeling, focusing on the cross-modality semantic recovery of global masked token after cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments conducted on three TI-ReID datasets highlight the effectiveness and superiority of our method over state-of-the-arts.
SpFormer: Spatio-Temporal Modeling for Scanpaths with Transformer
Authors: Zhong Wenqi , Yu Linzhi , Xia Chen , Han Junwei , Zhang Dingwen
Published: March 2024

Saccadic scanpath, a data representation of human visual behavior, has received broad interest in multiple domains. Scanpath is a complex eye-tracking data modality that includes the sequences of fixation positions and fixation duration, coupled with image information. However, previous methods usually face the spatial misalignment problem of fixation features and loss of critical temporal data (including temporal correlation and fixation duration). In this study, we propose a Transformer-based scanpath model, SpFormer, to alleviate these problems. First, we propose a fixation-centric paradigm to extract the aligned spatial fixation features and tokenize the scanpaths. Then, according to the visual working memory mechanism, we design a local meta attention to reduce the semantic redundancy of fixations and guide the model to focus on the meta scanpath. Finally, we progressively integrate the duration information and fuse it with the fixation features to solve the problem of ambiguous location with the Transformer block increasing. We conduct extensive experiments on four databases under three tasks. The SpFormer establishes new state-of-the-art results in distinct settings, verifying its flexibility and versatility in practical applications. The code can be obtained from https://github.com/wenqizhong/SpFormer.
Lifting by Image – Leveraging Image Cues for Accurate 3D Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Zhou Feng , Yin Jianqin , Li Peiyang
Published: March 2024

The "lifting from 2D pose" method has been the dominant approach to 3D Human Pose Estimation (3DHPE) due to the powerful visual analysis ability of 2D pose estimators. Widely known, there exists a depth ambiguity problem when estimating solely from 2D pose, where one 2D pose can be mapped to multiple 3D poses. Intuitively, the rich semantic and texture information in images can contribute to a more accurate "lifting" procedure. Yet, existing research encounters two primary challenges. Firstly, the distribution of image data in 3D motion capture datasets is too narrow because of the laboratorial environment, which leads to poor generalization ability of methods trained with image information. Secondly, effective strategies for leveraging image information are lacking. In this paper, we give new insight into the cause of poor generalization problems and the effectiveness of image features. Based on that, we propose an advanced framework. Specifically, the framework consists of two stages. First, we enable the keypoints to query and select the beneficial features from all image patches. To reduce the keypoints attention to inconsequential background features, we design a novel Pose-guided Transformer Layer, which adaptively limits the updates to unimportant image patches. Then, through a designed Adaptive Feature Selection Module, we prune less significant image patches from the feature map. In the second stage, we allow the keypoints to further emphasize the retained critical image features. This progressive learning approach prevents further training on insignificant image features. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the Human3.6M dataset and the MPI-INF-3DHP dataset.