We present SegGen, a new data generation approach that pushes the performance boundaries of state-of-the-art image segmentation models. One major bottleneck of previous data synthesis methods for segmentation is the design of segmentation labeler module'', which is used to synthesize segmentation masks for images. The segmentation labeler modules, which are segmentation models by themselves, bound the performance of downstream segmentation models trained on the synthetic masks. These methods encounter achicken or egg dilemma'' and thus fail to outperform existing segmentation models. To address this issue, we propose a novel method that reverses the traditional data generation process: we first (i) generate highly diverse segmentation masks that match real-world distribution from text prompts, and then (ii) synthesize realistic images conditioned on the segmentation masks. In this way, we avoid the need for any segmentation labeler module. SegGen integrates two data generation strategies, namely MaskSyn and ImgSyn, to largely improve data diversity in synthetic masks and images. Notably, the high quality of our synthetic data enables our method to outperform the previous data synthesis method by +25.2 mIoU on ADE20K when trained with pure synthetic data. On the highly competitive ADE20K and COCO benchmarks, our data generation method markedly improves the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation models in semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and instance segmentation. Moreover, experiments show that training with our synthetic data makes the segmentation models more robust towards unseen data domains, including real-world and AI-generated images.
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In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-Plus, an end-to-end training approach to systematically expanding the capabilities of large multimodal models (LMM), towards building general-purpose multimodal agents. It maintains a skill repository that contains a wide range of vision and vision-language pre-trained models as multimodal tools. Based on the user instruction and input image, LMM is trained to activate the appropriated tools when needed, grasping skills on the fly and aggregating the tool execution results to complete the real-world tasks in the wild. To facilitate the model capability on learning to use skills, we make the first attempt to build multimodal instruction-following data for tool use, covering skills in visual understanding, generation, external knowledge and their compositions. Empirical results show that LLaVA-Plus outperforms LLaVA in existing capabilities, and extends many new capabilities. Compared with large language model (LLM) based tool use methods, LLaVA-Plus is distinct in that the query image is considered throughout the entire interaction process, yielding higher multimodal tool use performance and enabling new scenarios.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities in text comprehension and generation, prompting research efforts towards video LLMs to facilitate human-AI interaction at the video level. However, how to effectively encode and understand videos in video-based dialogue systems remains to be solved. In this paper, we investigate a straightforward yet unexplored question: Can we feed all spatial-temporal tokens into the LLM, thus delegating the task of video sequence modeling to the LLMs? Surprisingly, this simple approach yields significant improvements in video understanding. Based upon this, we propose ST-LLM, an effective video-LLM baseline with Spatial-Temporal sequence modeling inside LLM. Furthermore, to address the overhead and stability issues introduced by uncompressed video tokens within LLMs, we develop a dynamic masking strategy with tailor-made training objectives. For particularly long videos, we have also designed a global-local input module to balance efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently, we harness LLM for proficient spatial-temporal modeling, while upholding efficiency and stability. Extensive experimental results attest to the effectiveness of our method. Through a more concise model and training pipeline, ST-LLM establishes a new state-of-the-art result on VideoChatGPT-Bench and MVBench.
Scene Coordinate Reconstruction: Posing of Image Collections via Incremental Learning of a Relocalizer
PDF ↗We address the task of estimating camera parameters from a set of images depicting a scene. Popular feature-based structure-from-motion (SfM) tools solve this task by incremental reconstruction: they repeat triangulation of sparse 3D points and registration of more camera views to the sparse point cloud. We re-interpret incremental structure-from-motion as an iterated application and refinement of a visual relocalizer, that is, of a method that registers new views to the current state of the reconstruction. This perspective allows us to investigate alternative visual relocalizers that are not rooted in local feature matching. We show that scene coordinate regression, a learning-based relocalization approach, allows us to build implicit, neural scene representations from unposed images. Different from other learning-based reconstruction methods, we do not require pose priors nor sequential inputs, and we optimize efficiently over thousands of images. Our method, ACE0, estimates camera poses to an accuracy comparable to feature-based SfM, as demonstrated by novel view synthesis.
In this study, we introduce a new problem raised by social media and photojournalism, named Image Address Localization (IAL), which aims to predict the readable textual address where an image was taken. Existing two-stage approaches involve predicting geographical coordinates and converting them into human-readable addresses, which can lead to ambiguity and be resource-intensive. In contrast, we propose an end-to-end framework named AddressCLIP to solve the problem with more semantics, consisting of two key ingredients: i) image-text alignment to align images with addresses and scene captions by contrastive learning, and ii) image-geography matching to constrain image features with the spatial distance in terms of manifold learning. Additionally, we have built three datasets from Pittsburgh and San Francisco on different scales specifically for the IAL problem. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves compelling performance on the proposed datasets and outperforms representative transfer learning methods for vision-language models. Furthermore, extensive ablations and visualizations exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed method. The datasets and source code are available at https://github.com/xsx1001/AddressCLIP.
This paper introduces TinySaver, an early-exit-like dynamic model compression approach which employs tiny models to substitute large models adaptively. Distinct from traditional compression techniques, dynamic methods like TinySaver can leverage the difficulty differences to allow certain inputs to complete their inference processes early, thereby conserving computational resources. Most existing early exit designs are implemented by attaching additional network branches to the model's backbone. Our study, however, reveals that completely independent tiny models can replace a substantial portion of the larger models' job with minimal impact on performance. Employing them as the first exit can remarkably enhance computational efficiency. By searching and employing the most appropriate tiny model as the computational saver for a given large model, the proposed approaches work as a novel and generic method to model compression. This finding will help the research community in exploring new compression methods to address the escalating computational demands posed by rapidly evolving AI models. Our evaluation of this approach in ImageNet-1k classification demonstrates its potential to reduce the number of compute operations by up to 90\%, with only negligible losses in performance, across various modern vision models. The code of this work will be available.
Given a ground-level query image and a geo-referenced aerial image that covers the query's local surroundings, fine-grained cross-view localization aims to estimate the location of the ground camera inside the aerial image. Recent works have focused on developing advanced networks trained with accurate ground truth (GT) locations of ground images. However, the trained models always suffer a performance drop when applied to images in a new target area that differs from training. In most deployment scenarios, acquiring fine GT, i.e. accurate GT locations, for target-area images to re-train the network can be expensive and sometimes infeasible. In contrast, collecting images with coarse GT with errors of tens of meters is often easy. Motivated by this, our paper focuses on improving the performance of a trained model in a new target area by leveraging only the target-area images without fine GT. We propose a weakly supervised learning approach based on knowledge self-distillation. This approach uses predictions from a pre-trained model as pseudo GT to supervise a copy of itself. Our approach includes a mode-based pseudo GT generation for reducing uncertainty in pseudo GT and an outlier filtering method to remove unreliable pseudo GT. We validate our approach using two recent state-of-the-art models on two benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our approach consistently and considerably boosts the localization accuracy in the target area.
Face swapping has gained significant attention for its varied applications. Most previous face swapping approaches have relied on the seesaw game training scheme, also known as the target-oriented approach. However, this often leads to instability in model training and results in undesired samples with blended identities due to the target identity leakage problem. Source-oriented methods achieve more stable training with self-reconstruction objective but often fail to accurately reflect target image's skin color and illumination. This paper introduces the Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncoder (SAMAE) training scheme, a novel self-supervised approach that combines the strengths of both target-oriented and source-oriented approaches. Our training scheme addresses the limitations of traditional training methods by circumventing the conventional seesaw game and introducing clear ground truth through its self-reconstruction training regime. Our model effectively mitigates identity leakage and reflects target albedo and illumination through learned disentangled identity and non-identity features. Additionally, we closely tackle the shape misalignment and volume discrepancy problems with new techniques, including perforation confusion and random mesh scaling. SAMAE establishes a new state-of-the-art, surpassing other baseline methods, preserving both identity and non-identity attributes without sacrificing on either aspect.
Category discovery methods aim to find novel categories in unlabeled visual data. At training time, a set of labeled and unlabeled images are provided, where the labels correspond to the categories present in the images. The labeled data provides guidance during training by indicating what types of visual properties and features are relevant for performing discovery in the unlabeled data. As a result, changing the categories present in the labeled set can have a large impact on what is ultimately discovered in the unlabeled set. Despite its importance, the impact of labeled data selection has not been explored in the category discovery literature to date. We show that changing the labeled data can significantly impact discovery performance. Motivated by this, we propose two new approaches for automatically selecting the most suitable labeled data based on the similarity between the labeled and unlabeled data. Our observation is that, unlike in conventional supervised transfer learning, the best labeled is neither too similar, nor too dissimilar, to the unlabeled categories. Our resulting approaches obtains state-of-the-art discovery performance across a range of challenging fine-grained benchmark datasets.
Recent advancements in graph-based approaches for multiplexed immunofluorescence (mIF) images have significantly propelled the field forward, offering deeper insights into patient-level phenotype prediction. However, current graph-based methodologies encounter two primary challenges: ① Cellular Heterogeneity, where existing approaches fail to adequately address the inductive biases inherent in graphs, particularly the homophily characteristic observed in cellular connectivity; and ② Scalability, where handling cellular graphs from high-dimensional images faces difficulties in managing a high number of cells. To overcome these limitations, we introduce m^2IF, a novel multiplex network framework designed to efficiently process mIF images. m^2IF innovatively constructs a multiplex network comprising two distinct layers: a Voronoi network for geometric information and a Cell-type network for capturing cell-wise homogeneity. This framework equips a scalable and efficient Graph Neural Network (GNN), capable of processing the entire graph during training. Furthermore, m^2IF integrates an interpretable attention module that autonomously identifies relevant layers for image classification. Extensive experiments on a real-world patient dataset from various institutions highlight m^2IF’s remarkable efficacy and efficiency, marking a significant advancement in mIF analysis. m^2IF not only addresses the prevalent challenges in graph-based ML for mIF images but also establishes a new benchmark for accuracy and scalability in the domain.
Continual learning (CL) addresses the problem of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, which occurs when a trained model tends to overwrite previously learned information, when presented with a new task. CL aims to instill the lifelong learning characteristic of humans in intelligent systems, making them capable of learning continuously while retaining what was already learned. Current CL problems involve either learning new domains (domain-incremental) or new and previously unseen classes (class-incremental). However, general learning processes are not just limited to learning information, but also refinement of existing information. In this paper, we define CLEO -- Continual Learning of Evolving Ontologies, as a new incremental learning setting under CL to tackle evolving classes. CLEO is motivated by the need for intelligent systems to adapt to real-world ontologies that change over time, such as those in autonomous driving. We use Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC, and Mapillary Vistas to define the task settings and demonstrate the applicability of CLEO. We highlight the shortcomings of existing CIL methods in adapting to CLEO and propose a baseline solution, called Modelling Ontologies (MoOn). CLEO is a promising new approach to CL that addresses the challenge of evolving ontologies in real-world applications. MoOn surpasses previous CL approaches in the context of CLEO.
We present DetToolChain, a novel prompting paradigm, to unleash the zero-shot object detection ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4V and Gemini. Our approach consists of a detection prompting toolkit inspired by high-precision detection priors and a new Chain-of-Thought to implement these prompts. Specifically, the prompts in the toolkit are designed to guide the MLLM to focus on regional information (e.g, zooming in), read coordinates according to measure standards (e.g., overlaying rulers and compasses), and infer from the contextual information (e.g., overlaying scene graphs). Building upon these tools, the new detection chain-of-thought can automatically decompose the task into simple subtasks, diagnose the predictions, and plan for progressive box refinements. The effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated across a spectrum of detection tasks, especially hard cases. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, GPT-4V with our DetToolChain improves state-of-the-art object detectors by +21.5% AP50 on MS COCO Novel class set for open-vocabulary detection, +24.23% Acc on RefCOCO val set for referring expression comprehension, +14.5% AP on D-cube describe object detection FULL setting. The codes shall be released upon acceptance.
Prompt learning has surfaced as an effective approach to enhance the performance of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP when applied to downstream tasks. However, current learnable prompt tokens are primarily used for the single phase of adapting to tasks (i.e., adapting prompt), easily leading to overfitting risks. In this work, we propose a novel Cascade Prompt Learning (CasPL) framework to enable prompt learning to serve both generic and specific expertise (i.e., boosting and adapting prompt) simultaneously. Specifically, CasPL is a new learning paradigm comprising two distinct phases of learnable prompts: the first boosting prompt is crafted to extract domain-general knowledge from a senior larger CLIP teacher model by aligning their predicted logits using extensive unlabeled domain images. The second adapting prompt is then cascaded with the frozen first set to fine-tune the downstream tasks, following the approaches employed in prior research. In this manner, CasPL can effectively capture both domain-general and task-specific representations into explicitly different gradual groups of prompts, thus potentially alleviating overfitting issues in the target domain. It's worth noting that CasPL serves as a plug-and-play module that can seamlessly integrate into any existing prompt learning approach. CasPL achieves a significantly better balance between performance and inference speed, which is especially beneficial for deploying smaller VLM models in resource-constrained environments. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art method PromptSRC, CasPL shows an average improvement of 1.85% for base classes, 3.44% for novel classes, and 2.72% for the harmonic mean over 11 image classification datasets.
Simplifying Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Object Detection: Effective Self-Training Strategies and Performance Insights
PDF ↗This paper focuses on source-free domain adaptation for object detection in computer vision. This task is challenging and of great practical interest, due to the cost of obtaining annotated data sets for every new domain. Recent research has proposed various solutions for Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD), most being variations of teacher-student architectures with diverse feature alignment, regularization and pseudo-label selection strategies. Our work investigates simpler approaches and their performance compared to more complex SFOD methods in several adaptation scenarios. We highlight the importance of batch normalization layers in the detector backbone, and show that adapting only the batch statistics is a strong baseline for SFOD. We propose a simple extension of a Mean Teacher with strong-weak augmentation in the source-free setting, Source-Free Unbiased Teacher (SF-UT), and show that it actually outperforms most of the previous SFOD methods. Additionally, we showcase that an even simpler strategy consisting in training on a fixed set of pseudo-labels can achieve similar performance to the more complex teacher-student mutual learning, while being computationally efficient and mitigating the major issue of teacher-student collapse. We conduct experiments on several adaptation tasks using benchmark driving datasets including (Foggy)Cityscapes, Sim10k and KITTI, and achieve a notable improvement of 4.7\% AP50 on Cityscapes$\rightarrow$Foggy-Cityscapes compared with the latest state-of-the-art in SFOD. Source code will be released upon acceptance.
This work addresses a new challenge of understanding human nonverbal interaction in social contexts. Nonverbal signals pervade virtually every communicative act. Our gestures, facial expressions, postures, gaze, even physical appearance all convey messages, without anything being said. Despite their critical role in social life, nonverbal signals receive very limited attention as compared to the linguistic counterparts, and existing solutions typically examine nonverbal cues in isolation. Our study marks the first systematic effort to enhance the interpretation of multifaceted nonverbal signals. First, we contribute a novel large-scale dataset, called NVI, which is meticulously annotated to include bounding boxes for humans and corresponding social groups, along with 22 atomic-level nonverbal behaviors under five broad interaction types. Second, we establish a new task NVI-DET for nonverbal interaction detection, which is formalized as identifying triplets in the form from images. Third, we propose a nonverbal interaction detection hypergraph (NVI-DEHR), a new approach that explicitly models high-order nonverbal interactions using hypergraphs. Central to the model is a dual multi-scale hypergraph that adeptly addresses individual-to-individual and group-to-group correlations across varying scales, facilitating interactional feature learning and eventually improving interaction prediction. Extensive experiments on NVI show that NVI-DEHR improves various baselines significantly in NVI-DET. It also exhibits leading performance on HOI-DET, confirming its versatility in supporting related tasks and strong generalization ability. We hope that our study will offer the community new avenues to explore nonverbal signals in more depth.
Multi-modal models such as CLIP possess remarkable zero-shot transfer capabilities, making them highly effective in continual learning tasks. However, this advantage is severely compromised by catastrophic forgetting, which undermines the valuable zero-shot learning abilities of these models. Existing methods predominantly focus on preserving zero-shot capabilities but often fall short in fully exploiting the rich modal information inherent in multi-modal models. In this paper, we propose a strategy to enhance both the zero-shot transfer ability and adaptability to new data distribution. We introduce a novel graph-based multi-modal proximity distillation approach that preserves the intra- and inter-modal information for visual and textual modalities. This approach is further enhanced with a sample re-weighting mechanism, dynamically adjusting the influence of teachers for each individual sample. Experimental results demonstrate a considerable improvement over existing methodologies, which illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the field of continual learning.
The Devil is in the Statistics: Mitigating and Exploiting Statistics Difference for Generalizable Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
PDF ↗Despite the recent success of domain generalization in medical image segmentation, it is known that precisely conducting voxel-wise annotation for all available source domains remains a huge burden. To combat this challenge, as a new setting, semi-supervised domain generalization has been proposed very recently by leveraging limited labeled data along with abundant unlabeled data collected from multiple medical institutions to enhance model generalization. To achieve promising results in this setting, correctly harnessing unlabeled data while improving the generalization ability to unseen domains plays a critical role simultaneously. In this work, we observe that the domain shifts between medical institutions (i.e., source domains) cause disparate feature statistics, which significantly deteriorates the pseudo-label quality due to an unexpected normalization process. Nevertheless, this phenomenon also could be exploited to facilitate unseen domain generalization. Therefore, to fully exploit the potential of statistics difference while mitigating its negative impacts, we in this paper propose 1) multiple statistics-individual branches to reduce the interference of domain shifts between source domains for reliable pseudo-labels and 2) one statistics-aggregated branch for domain-invariant feature learning. Furthermore, to simulate unseen domains with the statistics difference, we approach this from two aspects, i.e., a perturbation with histogram matching from the image level and a random batch normalization selection strategy from the feature level, producing diverse statistics to expand the training distribution. Evaluation results on the Prostate, Fundus, and M&Ms datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared with recent SOTA methods. The code will be available in Supplementary Materials.
We present AutoDIR, an innovative all-in-one image restoration system incorporating latent diffusion. AutoDIR excels in its ability to automatically identify and restore images suffering from a range of unknown degradations. AutoDIR offers intuitive open-vocabulary image editing, empowering users to customize and enhance images according to their preferences. AutoDIR consists of two key stages: a Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) stage based on a semantic-agnostic vision-language model which automatically detects unknown image degradations for input images, an All-in-One Image Restoration (AIR) stage utilizes structural-corrected latent diffusion which handles multiple types of image degradations. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that AutoDIR outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for a wider range of image restoration tasks. The design of AutoDIR also enables flexible user control (via text prompt) and generalization to new tasks as a foundation model of image restoration.
Exemplar-free class-incremental learning using a backbone trained from scratch and starting from a small first task presents a significant challenge for continual representation learning. Prototype-based approaches, when continually updated, face the critical issue of semantic drift due to which the old class prototypes drift to different positions in the new feature space. Through an analysis of forgetting in prototype-based continual learning, we show that forgetting is not due to diminished discriminative power of the feature extractor, and can potentially be corrected by drift compensation. To address this, we propose a novel feature drift correction method called Learnable Drift Compensation (LDC). LDC can effectively mitigate drift in any moving backbone, whether supervised or unsupervised. LDC is fast and straightforward to integrate on top of existing continual learning approaches. Finally, we showcase how LDC can be applied in combination with self-supervised CL methods, resulting in the first exemplar-free semi-supervised continual learning approach. We achieve state-of-the-art performance in both supervised and semi-supervised settings across multiple datasets.
While recent advancements in model fine-tuning predominantly emphasize the utilization of low-rank adaptation (LoRA), we propose an alternative approach centered on reducing the precision of adaptation matrices. In particular, we depart from the common viewpoint that considers adaptation matrices solely as weight differences, and reinterpret them as "control variables'' to perturb pre-trained ViT systems. This new perspective enables the establishment of a control-oriented framework, facilitating the exploration of optimal controls guided by the Pontryagin Maximum Principle. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for bounded control sets such as hypercubes, the optimal controls often take on boundary values, leading naturally to a binary controller design. Theoretical analysis reveals that employing a binary control strategy achieves the same reachable state as its full-precision counterpart in the continuous idealisation of deep residual structures, a finding corroborated by later empirical investigations. Our studies further indicate that the controller's rank holds greater significance than its precision. As such, opting for low-precision yet high-rank controls is demonstrated to obtain better performance for practical vision tasks.