This paper presents a pioneering method for teaching computer sketching that transforms input images into sequential, parameterized strokes. However, two challenges are raised for this sketching task: weak stimuli during stroke decomposition and maintaining semantic correctness, stylistic consistency, and detail integrity in the final drawings. To tackle the challenge of weak stimuli, our method incorporates an attention agent, which enhances the algorithm's sensitivity to subtle canvas changes by focusing on smaller, magnified areas. Moreover, in enhancing the perceived quality of drawing outcomes, we integrate a sketching style feature extractor to seamlessly capture semantic information and execute style adaptation at feature level, alongside a drawing agent that decomposes strokes under the guidance of a fine-grained reward, thereby ensuring the integrity of sketch details. Based on dual intelligent agents, we have constructed an efficient sketching model. Experimental results attest to the superiority of our approach in both visual effects and perceptual metrics when compared to state-of-the-art techniques, confirming its efficacy in achieving realistic sketching.
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The highly abstract nature of image aesthetics perception (IAP) poses a significant challenge for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The lack of human-annotated multi-modality aesthetic data further exacerbates this dilemma, resulting in MLLMs falling short of aesthetics perception capabilities. To address the above challenge, we first introduce a comprehensively annotated Aesthetic Multi-Modality Instruction Tuning (AesMMIT) dataset, which serves as the footstone for building multi-modality aesthetics foundation models. Specifically, to align MLLMs with human aesthetics perception, we construct a corpus-rich aesthetic critique database with 21,904 diverse-sourced images and 88K human natural language feedbacks, which are collected via progressive questions, ranging from coarse-grained aesthetic grades to fine-grained aesthetic descriptions. To ensure that MLLMs can handle diverse queries, we further prompt GPT to refine the aesthetic critiques and assemble the large-scale aesthetic instruction tuning dataset, i.e. AesMMIT, which consists of 409K multi-typed instructions to activate stronger aesthetic capabilities. Based on the AesMMIT database, we fine-tune the open-sourced general foundation models, achieving multi-modality Aesthetic Expert models, dubbed AesExpert. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed AesExpert models deliver significantly better aesthetic perception performances than the state-of-the-art MLLMs, including the most advanced GPT-4V and Gemini-Pro-Vision. Project Page: https://yipoh.github.io/aes-expert/.
Embodied Laser Attack: Leveraging Scene Priors to Achieve Agent-based Robust Non-contact Attacks
PDF ↗As physical adversarial attacks become extensively applied in unearthing the potential risk of security-critical scenarios, especially in dynamic scenarios, their vulnerability to environmental variations has also been brought to light. The non-robust nature of physical adversarial attack methods brings less-than-stable performance consequently. Although methods such as Expectation over Transformation (EOT) have enhanced the robustness of traditional contact attacks like adversarial patches, they fall short in practicality and concealment within dynamic environments such as traffic scenarios. Meanwhile, non-contact laser attacks, while offering enhanced adaptability, face constraints due to a limited optimization space for their attributes, rendering EOT less effective. This limitation underscores the necessity for developing a new strategy to augment the robustness of such practices. To address these issues, this paper introduces the Embodied Laser Attack (ELA), a novel framework that leverages the embodied intelligence paradigm of Perception-Decision-Control to dynamically tailor non-contact laser attacks. For the perception module, given the challenge of simulating the victim's view by full-image transformation, ELA has innovatively developed a local perspective transformation network, based on the intrinsic prior knowledge of traffic scenes and enables effective and efficient estimation. For the decision and control module, ELA trains an attack agent with data-driven reinforcement learning instead of adopting time-consuming heuristic algorithms, making it capable of instantaneously determining a valid attack strategy with the perceived information by well-designed rewards, which is then conducted by a controllable laser emitter. Experimentally, we apply our framework to diverse traffic scenarios both in the digital and physical world, verifying the effectiveness of our method under dynamic successive scenes.
Unpaired point cloud completion involves filling in missing parts of a point cloud without requiring partial-complete correspondence. Meanwhile, since point cloud completion is an ill-posed problem, there are multiple ways to generate the missing parts. Existing unpaired completion methods usually leverage generative adversarial training by transforming partial shape encoding into a complete one in the low-dimensional latent feature space. However, "mode collapse" often occurs, where only a subset of the shapes is represented in the low-dimensional space, reducing the diversity of the generated shapes. In this paper, we propose a novel unpaired multimodal shape completion approach that directly operates on point coordinate space. We achieve unpaired completion via a single diffusion model trained on complete data by "hijacking" the generative process. We further augment the diffusion model by introducing two guidance mechanisms to facilitate mapping the partial point cloud to the complete one while preserving its original structure. We conduct extensive evaluations of our approach, which show that our method generates shapes that are more diverse and better preserve the original structures compared to alternative methods.
As social networks grow exponentially, there is an increasing demand for video retrieval using natural language. Cross-modal hashing that encodes multi-modal data using compact hash code has been widely used in large-scale image-text retrieval, primarily due to its computation and storage efficiency. When applied to video-text retrieval, existing unsupervised cross-modal hashing extracts the frame- or word-level features individually, and thus ignores long-term dependencies. In addition, effectively exploiting the multi-modal structure is a remarkable challenge owing to the complex nature of video and text. To address the above issues, we propose Similarity Preserving Transformer Cross-Modal Hashing (SPTCH), a new unsupervised deep cross-modal hashing method for video-text retrieval. SPTCH encodes video and text by bidirectional transformer encoder that exploits their long-term dependencies. SPTCH constructs a multi-modal collaborative graph to model correlations among multi-modal data, and applies semantic aggregation by employing Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) on such graph. SPTCH designs unsupervised multi-modal contrastive loss and neighborhood reconstruction loss to effectively leverage inter- and intra-modal similarity structure among videos and texts. The empirical results on three video benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed SPTCH generally outperforms state-of-the-arts in video-text retrieval.
Deep neural networks have revealed enormous potential in video super-resolution (VSR), yet the expensive computational expense limits their deployment on resource-limited devices and actual scenarios, especially for restoring multiple frames simultaneously. Existing VSR models contain considerable redundant filters, which drag down the inference efficiency. To accelerate the inference of VSR models, we propose a scalable method based on adaptive patch routing to achieve practical speedup. Specifically, we design a confidence estimator to predict the aggregation performance of each block for adjacent patch information. It learns to dynamically perform block skipping, i.e., choose which basic blocks of the VSR network to execute during inference so as to reduce total computation to the maximum extent without degrading reconstruction accuracy dramatically. However, we observe that skipping error would be amplified as the hidden states propagate along with recurrent networks. To alleviate the issue, we design temporal feature alignment to guarantee the performance. This proposal essentially proposes an adaptive routing scheme for each patch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can not only accelerate inference but also provide strong quantitative and qualitative results. Built upon the BasicVSR model, our method achieves a speedup of 20% on average, going as high as 50% for some images, while even maintaining competitive performance on REDS4.
Human behavior anomaly detection aims to identify unusual human actions, playing a crucial role in intelligent surveillance and other areas. The current mainstream methods still adopt reconstruction or future frame prediction techniques. However, reconstructing or predicting low-level pixel features easily enables the network to achieve overly strong generalization ability, allowing anomalies to be reconstructed or predicted as effectively as normal data. Different from their methods, inspired by the Student-Teacher Network, we propose a novel framework called the Multilevel Guidance-Exploration Network (MGENet), which detects anomalies through the difference in high-level representation between the Guidance and Exploration network. Specifically, we first utilize the Normalizing Flow that takes skeletal keypoints as input to guide an RGB encoder, which takes unmasked RGB frames as input, to explore latent motion features. Then, the RGB encoder guides the mask encoder, which takes masked RGB frames as input, to explore the latent appearance feature. Additionally, we design a Behavior-Scene Matching Module to detect scene-related behavioral anomalies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on ShanghaiTech and UBnormal datasets, with AUC of 86.9% and 74.3%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/molu-ggg/GENet.
The Conversational Recommendation System (CRS) aims to capture user dynamic preferences and provide item recommendations based on multi-turn conversations. However, effectively modeling these dynamic preferences faces challenges due to conversational limitations, which mainly manifests as limited turns in a conversation (quantity aspect) and low compliance with queries (quality aspect). Previous studies often address these challenges in isolation, overlooking their interconnected nature. The fundamental issue underlying both problems lies in the potential abrupt changes in user preferences, to which CRS may not respond promptly. We acknowledge that user preferences are influenced by temporal factors, serving as a bridge between conversation quantity and quality. Therefore, we propose a more comprehensive CRS framework called Time-aware User-preference Tracking for Conversational Recommendation System (TUT4CRS), leveraging time dynamics to tackle both issues simultaneously. Specifically, we construct a global time interaction graph to incorporate rich external information and establish a local time-aware weight graph based on this information to adeptly select queries and effectively model user dynamic preferences. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate that TUT4CRS can significantly improve recommendation performance while reducing the number of conversation turns.
As a non-contact method, eye-tracking data can be used to diagnose people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by comparing the differences of eye movements between ASD and healthy people. However, existing works mainly employ a simple free-viewing paradigm or visual search paradigm with restricted or unnatural stimuli to collect the gaze patterns of adults or children with an average age of 6-to-8 years, hindering the early diagnosis and intervention of preschool children with ASD. In this paper, we propose a novel method for identifying children with ASD in three unique features: First, we design a novel eye-tracking paradigm that records Visual Question Answering (VQA) driven gaze patterns in complex natural scenes as a powerful guide for differentiating children with ASD. Second, we contribute a carefully designed dataset, named VQA4ASD, for collecting VQA-driven eye-tracking data from 2-to-6-year-old ASD and healthy children. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset focusing on the early diagnosis of preschool children, which could facilitate the community to understand and explore the visual behaviors of ASD children. Third, we further develop a VQA-guided cooperative ASD screening network (VQA-CASN), in which both task-agnostic and task-specific visual scanpaths are explored simultaneously for ASD screening. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed VQA-CASN achieves competitive performance with the proposed VQA-driven eye-tracking paradigm. The code and dataset is available at: https://github.com/qijiansong/VQA4ASD.
Mainstream multimodal recommender systems are designed to learn user interest by analyzing user-item interaction graphs. However, what they learn about user interest needs to be completed because historical interactions only record items that best match user interest (i.e., the first-order interest), while suboptimal items are absent. To fully exploit user interest, we propose a Second-Order Interest Learning (SOIL) framework to retrieve second-order interest from unrecorded suboptimal items. In this framework, we build a user-item interaction graph augmented by second-order interest, an interest-aware item-item graph for the visual modality, and a similar graph for the textual modality. In our work, all three graphs are constructed from user-item interaction records and multimodal feature similarity. Similarly to other graph-based approaches, we apply graph convolutional networks to each of the three graphs to learn representations of users and items. To improve the exploitation of both first-order and second-order interest, we optimize the model by implementing contrastive learning modules for user and item representations at both the user-item and item-item levels. The proposed framework is evaluated on three real-world public datasets in online shopping scenarios. Experimental results verify that our method is able to significantly improve prediction performance. For instance, our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method MGCN by an average of 8.1% in terms of Recall@10. Code: https://github.com/TL-UESTC/SOIL.
Text-motion retrieval (TMR) is a significant cross-modal task that retrieves motion sequences semantically similar to a given query text. Existing TMR methods primarily utilize single embeddings to represent and align text and motion sequences. However, real-world motion sequences typically contain multiple atomic motions with complex semantics, which is hard to precisely capture by single embeddings. Additionally, the common co-occurring and coupling of atomic motions further post significant challenges in effective modeling and aligning text and motion sequences. In this paper, we regard TMR as a Multi-Instance Multi-Label (MIML) learning problem, where the motion sequence is viewed as a bag of atomic motions and the text is the bag of corresponding phrases. To address the MIML problem, we propose a novel Multi-Granularity Semantics Interaction (MGSI) approach, which effectively captures and aligns the semantics of text and motion sequences across various levels. Specifically, the MGSI approach initially decomposes both the query and motion sequences into three hierarchical levels: token, instance, and bag. Then, we utilize graph neural networks to explicitly model their semantics correlation and perform semantics interaction at these respective levels, precisely capturing the semantics at multiple granularities. To identify and model co-occurring atomic motions, we measure the frame-wise semantic consistency between motions and then fuse and interact the accordant ones to refine their representations. Finally, we exploit token, instance, and bag-wise semantics interaction to comprehensively align text and motion sequence. We evaluated our methods on two widely-used benchmark datasets, HumanML3D and KIT-ML. The proposed method achieves significant improvements, outperforming the state-of-the-art with a 23.09% increase in Rsum on HumanML3D and a 21.84% increase on KIT-ML.
Emotion cause analysis has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, the integration of multimodal information with emotion causes remains underexplored. Existing studies merely extract utterances from conversations as cause evidence, which is too coarse-grained to locate the exact causes from other modalities, especially those that may be reflected only in a specific video frame of an utterance. To address these limitations, we introduce a new task named Multimodal Emotion Cause Generation in Conversations (MECGC), which aims to generate an abstractive summary clearly and intuitively describing the causes that trigger the given emotion based on the multimodal context of conversations. We accordingly construct a dataset named ECGF that contains 1,374 conversations and 7,690 emotion instances from TV series. We further develop a generative framework that first generates emotion-cause aware video captions (Observe) and then facilitates the generation of emotion causes (Generate). The captioning model is trained with examples synthesized by a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and the significance of multimodal information for emotion cause analysis. Our dataset and source codes are available at https://github.com/NUSTM/MECGC.
Sentiment-oriented Sarcasm Integration for Video Sentiment Analysis Enhancement with Sarcasm Assistance
PDF ↗Sarcasm is an intricate expression phenomenon and has garnered increasing attentions over the recent years, especially for multimodal contexts such as videos. Nevertheless, despite being a significant aspect of human sentiment, the effect of sarcasm is consistently overlooked in sentiment analysis. Videos with sarcasm often convey sentiments that diverge or even contradict their explicit messages. Prior works mainly concentrate on simply modeling sarcasm and sentiment features by utilizing the Multi-Task Learning (MTL) framework, which we found introduces detrimental interplays between the sarcasm detection task and sentiment analysis task. Therefore, this study explores the effective enhancement of video sentiment analysis through the incorporation of sarcasm information. To this end, we propose the Progressively Sentiment-oriented Sarcasm Refinement and Integration (PS2RI) framework, which focuses on modeling sentiment-oriented sarcasm features to enhance sentiment prediction. Instead of naively combining sarcasm detection and sentiment prediction under an MTL framework, PS2RI iteratively performs the sentiment-oriented sarcasm refinement and sarcasm integration operations within the sentiment recognition framework, in order to progressively learn sarcasm-aware sentiment feature without suffering the detrimental interplays caused by information irrelevant to the sentiment analysis task. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/tiggers23/PS2RI.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely employed to derive meaningful node representations from graphs. Despite their success, deep GNNs frequently grapple with the oversmoothing issue, where node representations become highly indistinguishable due to repeated aggregations. In this work, we consider the oversmoothing issue from two aspects of the node embedding space: dimension and instance. Specifically, while existing methods primarily concentrate on instance-level node relations to mitigate oversmoothing, we propose to mitigate oversmoothing at dimension level. We reveal the heightened information redundancy between dimensions which diminishes information diversity and impairs node differentiation in GNNs. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Dimension-Level Decoupling (DLD) to reduce dimension redundancy, enhancing dimensional-level node differentiation. Besides, at the instance level, the neglect of class differences leads to vague classification boundaries. Hence, we introduce the Instance-Level Class-Difference Decoupling (ICDD) that repels inter-class nodes and attracts intra-class nodes, improving the instance-level node discrimination with clear classification boundaries. Additionally, we introduce a novel evaluation metric that considers the impact of class differences on node distances, facilitating precise oversmoothing measurement. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method Dual-Dimensional Class-Difference Decoupling (DDCD) across diverse scenarios.
Current Lifelong Person Re-Identification (LReID) methods focus on tackling a clean data stream with accurate labels. When noisy data with incorrect labels are given, their performance is severely degraded since the model inevitably and continually remembers erroneous knowledge induced by the label noises. Moreover, the well-known issue of catastrophic forgetting in LReID is exacerbated by noisy labels, which disrupt the retention of correct knowledge from previous models. Such a practical noisy LReID task is important but challenging, and rare works have attempted to handle it. In this paper, we initially investigate noisy LReID and propose a Continual Knowledge Purification (CKP) method to address the catastrophic remembering of erroneous knowledge and catastrophic forgetting of correct knowledge simultaneously. Specifically, a Cluster-aware Data Purification module (CDP) is designed to select clean labels based on clustering-guided label confidence estimation. Besides, an Iterative Label Rectification (ILR) pipeline is proposed to rectify wrong labels by fusing the prediction and label information throughout the training epochs. To handle the catastrophic remembering problem, an Erroneous Knowledge Filtering (EKF) algorithm is proposed to estimate and transfer the correct old knowledge to the new model. Finally, a Noisy LReID benchmark is constructed for performance evaluation and extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed CKP method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/MM2024-CKP
As posts on social media increase rapidly, analyzing the sentiments embedded in image-text pairs has become a popular research topic in recent years. Although existing works achieve impressive accomplishments in simultaneously harnessing image and text information, they lack the considerations of possible low-quality and missing modalities. In real-world applications, these issues might frequently occur, leading to urgent needs for models capable of predicting sentiment robustly. Therefore, we propose a Distribution-based feature Recovery and Fusion (DRF) method for robust multimodal sentiment analysis of image-text pairs. Specifically, we maintain a feature queue for each modality to approximate their feature distributions, through which we can simultaneously handle low-quality and missing modalities in a unified framework. For low-quality modalities, we reduce their contributions to the fusion by quantitatively estimating modality qualities based on the distributions. For missing modalities, we build inter-modal mapping relationships supervised by samples and distributions, thereby recovering the missing modalities from available ones. In experiments, two disruption strategies that corrupt and discard some modalities in samples are adopted to mimic the low-quality and missing modalities in various real-world scenarios. Through comprehensive experiments on three publicly available image-text datasets, we demonstrate the universal improvements of DRF compared to SOTA methods under both two strategies, validating its effectiveness in robust multimodal sentiment analysis.
Deep neural networks are widely used in retrieval systems. However, they are notoriously vulnerable to attack. Among the various forms of adversarial attacks, the patch attack is one of the most threatening forms. This type of attack can introduce cognitive biases into the retrieval system by inserting deceptive patches into images. Despite the seriousness of this threat, there are still no well-established solutions in image retrieval systems. In this paper, we propose the Pre-denosing Augmented Image Retrieval (PAIR) model, a new approach designed to protect image retrieval systems against adversarial patch attacks. The core strategy of PAIR is to dynamically and randomly reconstruct entire images based on their semantic content. This purifies well-designed patch attacks while preserving the semantic integrity of the images. Furthermore, we present a novel training strategy that incorporates a semantic discriminator. This discriminator significantly improves PAIR's ability to capture real semantics and reconstruct images. Experiments show that PAIR significantly outperforms existing defense methods. It effectively reduces the success rate of two state-of-the-art patch attack methods to below 5%, achieving a 14% improvement over current leading methods. Moreover, in defending against global perturbation attacks, PAIR also achieves competitive results.
Semi-supervised visible-infrared person re-identification (SSVI-ReID) aims to match pedestrian images of the same identity from different modalities (visible and infrared) while only annotating visible images, which is highly related to multimedia and multi-modal processing. Existing works primarily focus on assigning accurate pseudo-labels to infrared images, but overlook the two key challenges: erroneous pseudo-labels and large modality discrepancy. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes a novel Modality-Unified and Confidence-Guided (MUCG) semi-supervised learning method. Specifically, we first propose a Dynamic Intermediate Modality Generation (DIMG) module, which transfers knowledge from labeled visible images to unlabeled infrared images, enhancing the pseudo-label quality and bridging the modality discrepancy. Meanwhile, we propose a Weighted Identification Loss (WIL) that can reduce the model's dependence on erroneous labels by using confidence weighting. Moreover, an effective Modality Consistency Loss (MCL) is proposed to narrow the distribution of visible and infrared features, further narrowing the modality discrepancy and enabling the learning of modality-unified features. Extensive experiments show that the proposed MUCG has significant advantages in improving the performance of the SSVI-ReID task, surpassing the current state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin.
Cross-modal hashing has emerged as a promising technique for retrieving relevant information across distinct media types thanks to its low storage cost and high retrieval efficiency. However, the success of most existing methods heavily relies on large-scale well-annotated datasets, which are costly and scarce in the real world due to ubiquitous labeling noise. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel framework, termed Noise Resistance Cross-modal Hashing (NRCH), to learn hashing with noisy labels by overcoming two key challenges, i.e. noise overfitting and error accumulation. Specifically, i) to mitigate the overfitting issue caused by noisy labels, we present a novel Robust Contrastive Hashing loss (RCH) to target homologous pairs instead of noisy positive pairs, thus avoiding overemphasizing noise. In other words, RCH enforces the model focus on more reliable positives instead of unreliable ones constructed by noisy labels, thereby enhancing the robustness of the model against noise; ii) to circumvent error accumulation, a Dynamic Noise Separator (DNS) is proposed to dynamically and accurately separate the clean and noisy samples by adaptively fitting the loss distribution, thus alleviate the adverse influence of noise on iterative training. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four widely used benchmarks to demonstrate the robustness of our NRCH against noisy labels for cross-modal retrieval. The code is available at: https://github.com/LonganWANG-cs/NRCH.git.
With the increased attention to model efficiency, post-training sparsity (PTS) has become more and more prevalent because of its effectiveness and efficiency. However, there remain questions on better practice of PTS algorithms and the sparsification ability of models, which hinders the further development of this area.Therefore, a benchmark to comprehensively investigate the issues above is urgently needed. In this paper, we propose the first comprehensive post-training sparsity benchmark called PTSBench towards algorithms and models. We benchmark 10+ PTS general-pluggable fine-grained techniques on 3 typical tasks using over 40 off-the-shelf model architectures. Through extensive experiments and analyses, we obtain valuable conclusions and provide several insights from both algorithms and model aspects. Our PTSBench can provide (1) new observations for a better understanding of the PTS algorithms, (2) in-depth and comprehensive evaluations for the sparsification ability of models, and (3) a well-structured and easy-integrate open-source framework. We hope this work will provide illuminating conclusions and advice for future studies of post-training sparsity methods and sparsification-friendly model design. The code for our PTSBench is released at https://github.com/ModelTC/msbench.