pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AvatarGO: Zero-shot 4D Human-Object Interaction Generation and Animation
Authors: Yukang Cao, Liang Pan, Kai Han, Kwan-Yee K. Wong, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Human-Object Interaction Generation, Motion Generation, Object

Recent advancements in diffusion models have led to significant improvements in the generation and animation of 4D full-body human-object interactions (HOI). Nevertheless, existing methods primarily focus on SMPL-based motion generation, which is limited by the scarcity of realistic large-scale interaction data. This constraint affects their ability to create everyday HOI scenes. This paper addresses this challenge using a zero-shot approach with a pre-trained diffusion model. Despite this potential, achieving our goals is difficult due to the diffusion model's lack of understanding of ''where'' and ''how'' objects interact with the human body. To tackle these issues, we introduce AvatarGO, a novel framework designed to generate animatable 4D HOI scenes directly from textual inputs. Specifically, 1) for the ''where'' challenge, we propose LLM-guided contact retargeting, which employs Lang-SAM to identify the contact body part from text prompts, ensuring precise representation of human-object spatial relations. 2) For the ''how'' challenge, we introduce correspondence-aware motion optimization that constructs motion fields for both human and object models using the linear blend skinning function from SMPL-X. Our framework not only generates coherent compositional motions, but also exhibits greater robustness in handling penetration issues. Extensive experiments with existing methods validate AvatarGO's superior generation and animation capabilities on a variety of human-object pairs and diverse poses. As the first attempt to synthesize 4D avatars with object interactions, we hope AvatarGO could open new doors for human-centric 4D content creation.
Trans4D: Realistic Geometry-Aware Transition for Compositional Text-to-4D Synthesis
Authors: Bohan Zeng, Ling Yang, Siyu Li, Jiaming Liu, Zixiang Zhang, Juanxi Tian, Kaixin Zhu, Yongzhen Guo, Fu-Yun Wang, Minkai Xu, Stefano Ermon, Wentao Zhang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

Recent advances in diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in image and video generation, further improving the effectiveness of 4D synthesis. Existing 4D generation methods can generate high-quality 4D objects or scenes based on user-friendly conditions, benefiting the gaming and video industries. However, these methods struggle to synthesize significant object deformation of complex 4D transitions and interactions within scenes. To address this challenge, we propose Trans4D, a novel text-to-4D synthesis framework that enables realistic complex scene transitions. Specifically, we first use multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to produce a physic-aware scene description for 4D scene initialization and effective transition timing planning. Then we propose a geometry-aware 4D transition network to realize a complex scene-level 4D transition based on the plan, which involves expressive geometrical object deformation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Trans4D consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in generating 4D scenes with accurate and high-quality transitions, validating its effectiveness. Code: https://github.com/YangLing0818/Trans4D
Towards Interpreting Visual Information Processing in Vision-Language Models
Authors: Clement Neo, Luke Ong, Philip Torr, Mor Geva, David Krueger, Fazl Barez
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Object

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are powerful tools for processing and understanding text and images. We study the processing of visual tokens in the language model component of LLaVA, a prominent VLM. Our approach focuses on analyzing the localization of object information, the evolution of visual token representations across layers, and the mechanism of integrating visual information for predictions. Through ablation studies, we demonstrated that object identification accuracy drops by over 70\% when object-specific tokens are removed. We observed that visual token representations become increasingly interpretable in the vocabulary space across layers, suggesting an alignment with textual tokens corresponding to image content. Finally, we found that the model extracts object information from these refined representations at the last token position for prediction, mirroring the process in text-only language models for factual association tasks. These findings provide crucial insights into how VLMs process and integrate visual information, bridging the gap between our understanding of language and vision models, and paving the way for more interpretable and controllable multimodal systems.
EvolveDirector: Approaching Advanced Text-to-Image Generation with Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Rui Zhao, Hangjie Yuan, Yujie Wei, Shiwei Zhang, YuChao Gu, Lingmin Ran, Xiang Wang, Zhangjie Wu, Junhao Zhang, Yingya Zhang, Mike Zheng Shou
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Recent advancements in generation models have showcased remarkable capabilities in generating fantastic content. However, most of them are trained on proprietary high-quality data, and some models withhold their parameters and only provide accessible application programming interfaces (APIs), limiting their benefits for downstream tasks. To explore the feasibility of training a text-to-image generation model comparable to advanced models using publicly available resources, we introduce EvolveDirector. This framework interacts with advanced models through their public APIs to obtain text-image data pairs to train a base model. Our experiments with extensive data indicate that the model trained on generated data of the advanced model can approximate its generation capability. However, it requires large-scale samples of 10 million or more. This incurs significant expenses in time, computational resources, and especially the costs associated with calling fee-based APIs. To address this problem, we leverage pre-trained large vision-language models (VLMs) to guide the evolution of the base model. VLM continuously evaluates the base model during training and dynamically updates and refines the training dataset by the discrimination, expansion, deletion, and mutation operations. Experimental results show that this paradigm significantly reduces the required data volume. Furthermore, when approaching multiple advanced models, EvolveDirector can select the best samples generated by them to learn powerful and balanced abilities. The final trained model Edgen is demonstrated to outperform these advanced models. The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/showlab/EvolveDirector.
Personalized Visual Instruction Tuning
Authors: Renjie Pi, Jianshu Zhang, Tianyang Han, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Tong Zhang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress; however, these models exhibit a notable limitation, which we refer to as "face blindness". Specifically, they can engage in general conversations but fail to conduct personalized dialogues targeting at specific individuals. This deficiency hinders the application of MLLMs in personalized settings, such as tailored visual assistants on mobile devices, or domestic robots that need to recognize members of the family. In this paper, we introduce Personalized Visual Instruction Tuning (PVIT), a novel data curation and training framework designed to enable MLLMs to identify target individuals within an image and engage in personalized and coherent dialogues. Our approach involves the development of a sophisticated pipeline that autonomously generates training data containing personalized conversations. This pipeline leverages the capabilities of various visual experts, image generation models, and (multi-modal) large language models. To evaluate the personalized potential of MLLMs, we present a benchmark called P-Bench, which encompasses various question types with different levels of difficulty. The experiments demonstrate a substantial personalized performance enhancement after fine-tuning with our curated dataset.
Continual Learning: Less Forgetting, More OOD Generalization via Adaptive Contrastive Replay
Authors: Hossein Rezaei, Mohammad Sabokrou
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Contrastive Learning

Machine learning models often suffer from catastrophic forgetting of previously learned knowledge when learning new classes. Various methods have been proposed to mitigate this issue. However, rehearsal-based learning, which retains samples from previous classes, typically achieves good performance but tends to memorize specific instances, struggling with Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization. This often leads to high forgetting rates and poor generalization. Surprisingly, the OOD generalization capabilities of these methods have been largely unexplored. In this paper, we highlight this issue and propose a simple yet effective strategy inspired by contrastive learning and data-centric principles to address it. We introduce Adaptive Contrastive Replay (ACR), a method that employs dual optimization to simultaneously train both the encoder and the classifier. ACR adaptively populates the replay buffer with misclassified samples while ensuring a balanced representation of classes and tasks. By refining the decision boundary in this way, ACR achieves a balance between stability and plasticity. Our method significantly outperforms previous approaches in terms of OOD generalization, achieving an improvement of 13.41\% on Split CIFAR-100, 9.91\% on Split Mini-ImageNet, and 5.98\% on Split Tiny-ImageNet.
LaMP: Language-Motion Pretraining for Motion Generation, Retrieval, and Captioning
Authors: Zhe Li, Weihao Yuan, Yisheng He, Lingteng Qiu, Shenhao Zhu, Xiaodong Gu, Weichao Shen, Yuan Dong, Zilong Dong, Laurence T. Yang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Motion Captioning, Motion Generation, Representation Learning, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

Language plays a vital role in the realm of human motion. Existing methods have largely depended on CLIP text embeddings for motion generation, yet they fall short in effectively aligning language and motion due to CLIP's pretraining on static image-text pairs. This work introduces LaMP, a novel Language-Motion Pretraining model, which transitions from a language-vision to a more suitable language-motion latent space. It addresses key limitations by generating motion-informative text embeddings, significantly enhancing the relevance and semantics of generated motion sequences. With LaMP, we advance three key tasks: text-to-motion generation, motion-text retrieval, and motion captioning through aligned language-motion representation learning. For generation, we utilize LaMP to provide the text condition instead of CLIP, and an autoregressive masked prediction is designed to achieve mask modeling without rank collapse in transformers. For retrieval, motion features from LaMP's motion transformer interact with query tokens to retrieve text features from the text transformer, and vice versa. For captioning, we finetune a large language model with the language-informative motion features to develop a strong motion captioning model. In addition, we introduce the LaMP-BertScore metric to assess the alignment of generated motions with textual descriptions. Extensive experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over previous methods across all three tasks. The code of our method will be made public.
Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodology
Authors: Xiangyu Wang, Donglin Yang, Ziqin Wang, Hohin Kwan, Jinyu Chen, Wenjun Wu, Hongsheng Li, Yue Liao, Si Liu
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Vision-Language Navigation

Developing agents capable of navigating to a target location based on language instructions and visual information, known as vision-language navigation (VLN), has attracted widespread interest. Most research has focused on ground-based agents, while UAV-based VLN remains relatively underexplored. Recent efforts in UAV vision-language navigation predominantly adopt ground-based VLN settings, relying on predefined discrete action spaces and neglecting the inherent disparities in agent movement dynamics and the complexity of navigation tasks between ground and aerial environments. To address these disparities and challenges, we propose solutions from three perspectives: platform, benchmark, and methodology. To enable realistic UAV trajectory simulation in VLN tasks, we propose the OpenUAV platform, which features diverse environments, realistic flight control, and extensive algorithmic support. We further construct a target-oriented VLN dataset consisting of approximately 12k trajectories on this platform, serving as the first dataset specifically designed for realistic UAV VLN tasks. To tackle the challenges posed by complex aerial environments, we propose an assistant-guided UAV object search benchmark called UAV-Need-Help, which provides varying levels of guidance information to help UAVs better accomplish realistic VLN tasks. We also propose a UAV navigation LLM that, given multi-view images, task descriptions, and assistant instructions, leverages the multimodal understanding capabilities of the MLLM to jointly process visual and textual information, and performs hierarchical trajectory generation. The evaluation results of our method significantly outperform the baseline models, while there remains a considerable gap between our results and those achieved by human operators, underscoring the challenge presented by the UAV-Need-Help task.
JPEG Inspired Deep Learning
Authors: Ahmed H. Salamah, Kaixiang Zheng, YiWen Liu, En-hui Yang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Fine-Grained Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Compression, Quantization

Although it is traditionally believed that lossy image compression, such as JPEG compression, has a negative impact on the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs), it is shown by recent works that well-crafted JPEG compression can actually improve the performance of deep learning (DL). Inspired by this, we propose JPEG-DL, a novel DL framework that prepends any underlying DNN architecture with a trainable JPEG compression layer. To make the quantization operation in JPEG compression trainable, a new differentiable soft quantizer is employed at the JPEG layer, and then the quantization operation and underlying DNN are jointly trained. Extensive experiments show that in comparison with the standard DL, JPEG-DL delivers significant accuracy improvements across various datasets and model architectures while enhancing robustness against adversarial attacks. Particularly, on some fine-grained image classification datasets, JPEG-DL can increase prediction accuracy by as much as 20.9%. Our code is available on https://github.com/JpegInspiredDl/JPEG-Inspired-DL.git.
Pixtral 12B
Authors: Pravesh Agrawal, Szymon Antoniak, Emma Bou Hanna, Baptiste Bout, Devendra Chaplot, Jessica Chudnovsky, Diogo Costa, Baudouin De Monicault, Saurabh Garg, Theophile Gervet, Soham Ghosh, Amélie Héliou, Paul Jacob, Albert Q. Jiang, Kartik Khandelwal, Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, Diego Las Casas, Thibaut Lavril, Teven Le Scao, Andy Lo, William Marshall, Louis Martin, Arthur Mensch, Pavankumar Muddireddy, Valera Nemychnikova, Marie Pellat, Patrick von Platen, Nikhil Raghuraman, Baptiste Rozière, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Lucile Saulnier, Romain Sauvestre, Wendy Shang, Roman Soletskyi, Lawrence Stewart, Pierre Stock, Joachim Studnia, Sandeep Subramanian, Sagar Vaze, Thomas Wang, Sophia Yang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We introduce Pixtral-12B, a 12--billion-parameter multimodal language model. Pixtral-12B is trained to understand both natural images and documents, achieving leading performance on various multimodal benchmarks, surpassing a number of larger models. Unlike many open-source models, Pixtral is also a cutting-edge text model for its size, and does not compromise on natural language performance to excel in multimodal tasks. Pixtral uses a new vision encoder trained from scratch, which allows it to ingest images at their natural resolution and aspect ratio. This gives users flexibility on the number of tokens used to process an image. Pixtral is also able to process any number of images in its long context window of 128K tokens. Pixtral 12B substanially outperforms other open models of similar sizes (Llama-3.2 11B \& Qwen-2-VL 7B). It also outperforms much larger open models like Llama-3.2 90B while being 7x smaller. We further contribute an open-source benchmark, MM-MT-Bench, for evaluating vision-language models in practical scenarios, and provide detailed analysis and code for standardized evaluation protocols for multimodal LLMs. Pixtral-12B is released under Apache 2.0 license.
TinyEmo: Scaling down Emotional Reasoning via Metric Projection
Authors: Cristian Gutierrez
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Bias Detection, Classification, Emotion Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

This paper introduces TinyEmo, a family of small multi-modal language models for emotional reasoning and classification. Our approach features: (1) a synthetic emotional instruct dataset for both pre-training and fine-tuning stages, (2) a Metric Projector that delegates classification from the language model allowing for more efficient training and inference, (3) a multi-modal large language model (MM-LLM) for emotional reasoning, and (4) a semi-automated framework for bias detection. TinyEmo is able to perform emotion classification and emotional reasoning, all while using substantially fewer parameters than comparable models. This efficiency allows us to freely incorporate more diverse emotional datasets, enabling strong performance on classification tasks, with our smallest model (700M parameters) outperforming larger state-of-the-art models based on general-purpose MM-LLMs with over 7B parameters. Additionally, the Metric Projector allows for interpretability and indirect bias detection in large models without additional training, offering an approach to understand and improve AI systems. We release code, models, and dataset at https://github.com/ggcr/TinyEmo
S2HPruner: Soft-to-Hard Distillation Bridges the Discretization Gap in Pruning
Authors: Weihao Lin, Shengji Tang, Chong Yu, Peng Ye, Tao Chen
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Recently, differentiable mask pruning methods optimize the continuous relaxation architecture (soft network) as the proxy of the pruned discrete network (hard network) for superior sub-architecture search. However, due to the agnostic impact of the discretization process, the hard network struggles with the equivalent representational capacity as the soft network, namely discretization gap, which severely spoils the pruning performance. In this paper, we first investigate the discretization gap and propose a novel structural differentiable mask pruning framework named S2HPruner to bridge the discretization gap in a one-stage manner. In the training procedure, SH2Pruner forwards both the soft network and its corresponding hard network, then distills the hard network under the supervision of the soft network. To optimize the mask and prevent performance degradation, we propose a decoupled bidirectional knowledge distillation. It blocks the weight updating from the hard to the soft network while maintaining the gradient corresponding to the mask. Compared with existing pruning arts, S2HPruner achieves surpassing pruning performance without fine-tuning on comprehensive benchmarks, including CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet with a variety of network architectures. Besides, investigation and analysis experiments explain the effectiveness of S2HPruner. Codes will be released soon.
Z-upscaling: Optical Flow Guided Frame Interpolation for Isotropic Reconstruction of 3D EM Volumes
Authors: Fisseha A. Ferede, Ali Khalighifar, Jaison John, Krishnan Venkataraman, Khaled Khairy
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Optical Flow Estimation, Transfer Learning, Video Frame Interpolation

We propose a novel optical flow based approach to enhance the axial resolution of anisotropic 3D EM volumes to achieve isotropic 3D reconstruction. Assuming spatial continuity of 3D biological structures in well aligned EM volumes, we reasoned that optical flow estimation techniques, often applied for temporal resolution enhancement in videos, can be utilized. Pixel level motion is estimated between neighboring 2D slices along z, using spatial gradient flow estimates to interpolate and generate new 2D slices resulting in isotropic voxels. We leverage recent state-of-the-art learning methods for video frame interpolation and transfer learning techniques, and demonstrate the success of our approach on publicly available ultrastructure EM volumes.
Clean Evaluations on Contaminated Visual Language Models
Authors: Hongyuan Lu, Shujie Miao, Wai Lam
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

How to evaluate large language models (LLMs) cleanly has been established as an important research era to genuinely report the performance of possibly contaminated LLMs. Yet, how to cleanly evaluate the visual language models (VLMs) is an under-studied problem. We propose a novel approach to achieve such goals through data augmentation methods on the visual input information. We then craft a new visual clean evaluation benchmark with thousands of data instances. Through extensive experiments, we found that the traditional visual data augmentation methods are useful, but they are at risk of being used as a part of the training data as a workaround. We further propose using BGR augmentation to switch the colour channel of the visual information. We found that it is a simple yet effective method for reducing the effect of data contamination and fortunately, it is also harmful to be used as a data augmentation method during training. It means that it is hard to integrate such data augmentation into training by malicious trainers and it could be a promising technique to cleanly evaluate visual LLMs. Our code, data, and model weights will be released upon publication.