Semi-supervised crowd counting is crucial for addressing the high annotation costs of densely populated scenes. Although several methods based on pseudo-labeling have been proposed, it remains challenging to effectively and accurately utilize unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Taste More Taste Better (TMTB), which emphasizes both data and model aspects. Firstly, we explore a data augmentation technique well-suited for the crowd counting task. By inpainting the background regions, this technique can effectively enhance data diversity while preserving the fidelity of the entire scenes. Secondly, we introduce the Visual State Space Model as backbone to capture the global context information from crowd scenes, which is crucial for extremely crowded, low-light, and adverse weather scenarios. In addition to the traditional regression head for exact prediction, we employ an Anti-Noise classification head to provide less exact but more accurate supervision, since the regression head is sensitive to noise in manual annotations. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Code is publicly available on https://github.com/syhien/taste_more_taste_better.
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The image-to-image translation abilities of generative learning models have recently made significant progress in the estimation of complex (steered) mappings between image distributions. While appearance based tasks like image in-painting or style transfer have been studied at length, we propose to investigate the potential of generative models in the context of physical simulations. Providing a dataset of 300k image-pairs and baseline evaluations for three different physical simulation tasks, we propose a benchmark to investigate the following research questions: i) are generative models able to learn complex physical relations from input-output image pairs? ii) what speedups can be achieved by replacing differential equation based simulations? While baseline evaluations of different current models show the potential for high speedups (ii), these results also show strong limitations toward the physical correctness (i). This underlines the need for new methods to enforce physical correctness.
Tightening Robustness Verification of MaxPool-based Neural Networks via Minimizing the Over-Approximation Zone
PDF ↗The robustness of neural network classifiers is important in the safety-critical domain and can be quantified by robustness verification. At present, efficient and scalable verification techniques are always sound but incomplete, and thus, the improvement of verified robustness results is the key criterion to evaluate the performance of incomplete verification approaches. The multi-variate function MaxPool is widely adopted yet challenging to verify. In this paper, we present Ti-Lin, a robustness verifier for MaxPool-based CNNs with Tight Linear Approximation. Following the sequel of minimizing the over-approximation zone of the non-linear function of CNNs, we are the first to propose the provably neuron-wise tightest linear bounds for the MaxPool function. By our proposed linear bounds, we can certify larger robustness results for CNNs. We evaluate the effectiveness of Ti-Lin on different verification frameworks with open-sourced benchmarks, including LeNet, PointNet, and networks trained on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, Tiny ImageNet and ModelNet40 datasets. Experimental results show that Ti-Lin significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across all networks with up to 78.6% improvement in terms of the certified accuracy with almost the same time consumption as the fastest tool. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Ti-Lin-cvpr-72EE.
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in a variety of tasks, particularly in terms of prediction accuracy. However, in real-world scenarios, especially in safety-critical applications, accuracy alone is insufficient; reliable uncertainty estimates are essential. Modern DNNs, often trained with cross-entropy loss, tend to exhibit overconfidence, especially on ambiguous samples. Many techniques aim to improve uncertainty calibration, yet they often come at the cost of reduced accuracy or increased computational demands. To address this challenge, we propose Differentiated Deep Mutual Learning (Diff-DML), an efficient ensemble approach that simultaneously enhances accuracy and uncertainty calibration. Diff-DML draws inspiration from Deep Mutual Learning (DML) while introducing two strategies to maintain prediction diversity: (1) Differentiated Training Strategy (DTS) and (2) Diversity-Preserving Learning Objective (DPLO). Our theoretical analysis shows that Diff-DML's diversified learning framework not only leverages ensemble benefits but also avoids the loss of prediction diversity observed in traditional DML setups, which is crucial for improved calibration. Extensive evaluations on various benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of Diff-DML. For instance, on the CIFAR-100 dataset, Diff-DML on ResNet34 model achieved substantial improvements over the previous state-of-the-art method, MDCA, with absolute accuracy gains of 1.3%/3.1%, relative ECE reductions of 49.6%/43.8%, and relative classwise-ECE reductions of 7.7%/13.0%.
Due to the limited scale of multimodal table understanding (MTU) data, model performance is constrained. A straightforward approach is to use multimodal large language models to obtain more samples, but this may cause hallucinations, generate incorrect sample pairs, and cost significantly.To address the above issues, we design a simple yet effective synthesis framework that consists of two independent steps: table image rendering and table question and answer (Q&A) pairs generation.We use table codes (HTML, LaTeX, Markdown) to synthesize images and generate Q&A pairs with large language model (LLM).This approach leverages LLM's high concurrency and low cost to boost annotation efficiency and reduce expenses. By inputting code instead of images, LLMs can directly access the content and structure of the table, reducing hallucinations in table understanding and improving the accuracy of generated Q&A pairs. Finally, we synthesize a large-scale MTU dataset, SynTab, containing 636K images and 1.8M samples costing within \200 in US dollars. We further introduce a generalist tabular multimodal model, SynTab-LLaVA. This model not only effectively extracts local textual content within the table but also enables global modeling of relationships between cells.SynTab-LLaVA achieves SOTA performance on 21 out of 24 in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization of our method. The Code is available at \href https://github.com/bang123-box/SynTab-LLaVA SynTab-LLaVA .
In this paper, we focus on weakly supervised referring expression comprehension (REC), and identify that the lack of fine-grained visual capability greatly limits the upper performance bound of existing methods. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for weakly supervised REC, namely Dynamic Visual routing Network (DViN), which overcomes the visual shortcomings from the perspective of feature combination and alignment. In particular, DViN is equipped with a novel sparse routing mechanism to efficiently combine features of multiple visual encoders in a dynamic manner, thus improving the visual descriptive power. Besides, we further propose an innovative weakly supervised objective, namely Routing-based Feature Alignment (RFA), which facilitates the visual understanding of routed features through the intra-modal and inter-modal alignment. To validate DViN, we conduct extensive experiments on four REC benchmark datasets. Experiments demonstrate that DViN achieves state-of-the-art results on four benchmarks while maintaining competitive inference efficiency. Besides, the strong generalization ability of DViN is also validated on weakly supervised referring expression segmentation. Source codes are anonymously released at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DViN-7736.
Shadows are often underconsidered or even ignored in image editing applications, limiting the realism of the edited results. In this paper, we introduce MetaShadow, a three-in-one versatile framework that enables detection, removal, and controllable synthesis of shadows in natural images in an object-centered fashion. MetaShadow combines the strengths of two cooperative components: Shadow Analyzer, for object-centered shadow detection and removal, and Shadow Synthesizer, for reference-based controllable shadow synthesis. Notably, we optimize the learning of the intermediate features from Shadow Analyzer to guide Shadow Synthesizer to generate more realistic shadows that blend seamlessly with the scene. Extensive evaluations on multiple shadow benchmark datasets show significant improvements of MetaShadow over the existing state-of-the-art methods on object-centered shadow detection, removal, and synthesis. MetaShadow excels in supporting imageediting tasks such as object removal, relocation, and insertion, pushing the boundaries of object-centered image editing.
High-performance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely heavily on data quality. This study introduces a novel data synthesis method, leveraging insights from contrastive learning and image difference captioning to enhance fine-grained image recognition in MLLMs. By analyzing object differences in detailed regions between similar images, we challenge the model to identify both matching and distinct components. Specifically, our method initially create pairs of similar images that highlight object variations. After that, we introduce a Difference Area Generator for object differences identifying, followed by a Difference Captions Generator for differences describing. The outcome is a high-quality dataset of "object replacement" samples, named Img-Diff, which can be expanded as needed due to its automation. We use the generated dataset to finetune state-of-the-art (SOTA) MLLMs such as InternVL2, yielding comprehensive improvements across numerous image difference and Visual Question Answering tasks. For instance, the trained models notably surpass the SOTA models GPT-4V and Gemini on the MMVP benchmark. Additionally, we conduct thorough evaluations to confirm the dataset's diversity, quality, and robustness, presenting several insights on the synthesis of such a contrastive dataset. We release our codes and dataset to encourage further research on multimodal data synthesis and MLLMs' fundamental capabilities for image understanding.
Accurate depth estimation from monocular videos remains challenging due to ambiguities inherent in single-view geometry, as crucial depth cues like stereopsis are absent. However, humans often perceive relative depth intuitively by observing variations in the size and spacing of objects as they move. Inspired by this, we propose a novel method that infers relative depth by examining the spatial relationships and temporal evolution of a set of tracked 2D trajectories. Specifically, we use off-the-shelf point tracking models to capture 2D trajectories. Then, our approach employs spatial and temporal transformers to process these trajectories and directly infer depth changes over time. Evaluated on the TAPVid-3D benchmark, our method demonstrates robust zero-shot performance, generalizing effectively from synthetic to real-world datasets. Results indicate that our approach achieves temporally smooth, high-accuracy depth predictions across diverse domains.
Gain from Neighbors: Boosting Model Robustness in the Wild via Adversarial Perturbations Toward Neighboring Classes
PDF ↗Recent approaches, such as data augmentation, adversarial training, and transfer learning, have shown potential in addressing the issue of performance degradation caused by distributional shifts. However, they typically demand careful design in terms of data or models and lack awareness of the impact of distributional shifts. In this paper, we observe that classification errors arising from distribution shifts tend to cluster near the true values, suggesting that misclassifications commonly occur in semantically similar, neighboring categories. Furthermore, robust advanced vision foundation models maintain larger inter-class distances while preserving semantic consistency, making them less vulnerable to such shifts. Building on these findings, we propose a new method called GFN (Gain From Neighbors), which uses gradient priors from neighboring classes to perturb input images and incorporates an inter-class distance-weighted loss to improve class separation. This approach encourages the model to learn more resilient features from data prone to errors, enhancing its robustness against shifts in diverse settings. In extensive experiments across various model architectures and benchmark datasets, GFN consistently demonstrated superior performance. For instance, compared to the current state-of-the-art TAPADL method, our approach achieved a higher corruption robustness of 41.4% on ImageNet-C (+2.3%), without requiring additional parameters and using only minimal data.
AI-Face: A Million-Scale Demographically Annotated AI-Generated Face Dataset and Fairness Benchmark
PDF ↗AI-generated faces have enriched human life, such as entertainment, education, and art. However, they also pose misuse risks. Therefore, detecting AI-generated faces becomes crucial, yet current detectors show biased performance across different demographic groups. Mitigating biases can be done by designing algorithmic fairness methods, which usually require demographically annotated face datasets for model training. However, no existing dataset encompasses both demographic attributes and diverse generative methods simultaneously, which hinders the development of fair detectors for AI-generated faces. In this work, we introduce the AI-Face dataset, the first million-scale demographically annotated AI-generated face image dataset, including real faces, faces from deepfake videos, and faces generated by Generative Adversarial Networks and Diffusion Models. Based on this dataset, we conduct the first comprehensive fairness benchmark to assess various AI face detectors and provide valuable insights and findings to promote the future fair design of AI face detectors. Our AI-Face dataset and benchmark code are publicly available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/AI-Face-FairnessBench.
In this paper, we address the challenging problem of open-world instance segmentation. Existing works have shown that vanilla visual networks are biased toward learning appearance information, e.g. texture, to recognize objects. This implicit bias causes the model to fail in detecting novel objects with unseen textures in the open-world setting. To address this challenge, we propose a learning framework, called view-Consistent LeaRning (v-CLR), which aims to enforce the model to learn appearance-invariant representations for robust instance segmentation. In v-CLR, we first introduce additional views for each image, where the texture undergoes significant alterations while preserving the image's underlying structure. We then encourage the model to learn the appearance-invariant representation by enforcing the consistency between object features across different views, for which we obtain class-agnostic object proposals using off-the-shelf unsupervised models that possess strong object-awareness. These proposals enable cross-view object feature matching, greatly reducing the appearance dependency while enhancing the object-awareness. We thoroughly evaluate our method on public benchmarks under both cross-class and cross-dataset settings, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/vclr
Point-Supervised Object Detection (PSOD) in a discriminative style has recently gained significant attention for its impressive detection performance and cost-effectiveness. However, accurately predicting high-quality pseudo-box labels for drone-view images, which often feature densely packed small objects, remains a challenge. This difficulty arises primarily from the limitation of rigid sampling strategies, which hinder the pseudo-box optimization process. To address this, we propose PointSR, an effective and robust point-supervised object detection framework with self-regularized sampling that integrates temporal and informative constraints throughout the pseudo-box generation process. Specifically, the framework comprises three key components: Temporal-Ensembling Encoder (TE Encoder), Coarse Pseudo-box Prediction, and Pseudo-box Refinement. The TE Encoder builds an anchor prototype library by aggregating temporal information for dynamic anchor adjustment. In Coarse Pseudo-box Prediction, anchors are refined using the prototype library, and a set of informative samples is collected for subsequent refinement. During Pseudo-box Refinement, these informative negative samples are used to suppress low-confidence candidate positive samples, thereby improving the quality of the pseudo-boxes. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PointSR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 2.6%~\mathbf 7.2% higher AP_ 50 using only point supervision. Additionally, it exhibits strong robustness to perturbation in human-labeled points.
Recent open-vocabulary human-object interaction (OV-HOI) detection methods primarily rely on large language model (LLM) for generating auxiliary descriptions and leverage knowledge distilled from CLIP to detect unseen interaction categories. Despite their effectiveness, these methods face two challenges: (1) feature granularity deficiency, due to reliance on last layer visual features for text alignment, leading to the neglect of crucial object-level details from intermediate layers; (2) semantic similarity confusion, resulting from CLIP's inherent biases toward certain classes, while LLM-generated descriptions based solely on labels fail to adequately capture inter-class similarities. To address these challenges, we propose a stratified granular comparison network. First, we introduce a granularity sensing alignment module that aggregates global semantic features with local details, refining interaction representations and ensuring robust alignment between intermediate visual features and text embeddings. Second, we develop a hierarchical group comparison module that recursively compares and groups classes using LLMs, generating fine-grained and discriminative descriptions for each interaction category. Experimental results on two widely-used benchmark datasets, SWIG-HOI and HICO-DET, demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in OV-HOI detection. Codes is available at https://github.com/Phil0212/SGC-Net.
Successful forensic detectors can produce excellent results in supervised learning benchmarks but struggle to transfer to real-world applications. We believe this limitation is largely due to inadequate training data quality. While most research focuses on developing new algorithms, less attention is given to training data selection, despite evidence that performance can be strongly impacted by spurious correlations such as content, format, or resolution. A well-designed forensic detector should detect generator specific artifacts rather than reflect data biases. To this end, we propose B-Free, a bias-free training paradigm, where fake images are generated from real ones using the conditioning procedure of stable diffusion models. This ensures semantic alignment between real and fake images, allowing any differences to stem solely from the subtle artifacts introduced by AI generation. Through content-based augmentation, we show significant improvements in both generalization and robustness over state-of-the-art detectors and more calibrated results across 27 different generative models, including recent releases, like FLUX and Stable Diffusion 3.5. Our findings emphasize the importance of a careful dataset design, highlighting the need for further research on this topic. Code and data are publicly available at https://grip-unina.github.io/B-Free/.
Narrating the Video: Boosting Text-Video Retrieval via Comprehensive Utilization of Frame-Level Captions
PDF ↗In recent text-video retrieval, the use of additional captions from vision-language models has shown promising effects on the performance. However, existing models using additional captions often have struggled to capture the rich semantics, including temporal changes, inherent in the video. In addition, incorrect information caused by generative models can lead to inaccurate retrieval. To address these issues, we propose a new framework, Narrating the Video (NarVid), which strategically leverages the comprehensive information available from frame-level captions, the narration. The proposed NarVid exploits narration in multiple ways: 1) feature enhancement through cross-modal interactions between narration and video, 2) query-aware adaptive filtering to suppress irrelevant or incorrect information, 3) dual-modal matching score by adding query-video similarity and query-narration similarity, and 4) hard-negative loss to learn discriminative features from multiple perspectives using the two similarities from different views. Experimental results demonstrate that NarVid achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmark datasets.
Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is an intriguing open-world problem that has garnered increasing attention. Given a dataset that includes both labelled and unlabelled images, GCD aims to categorize all images in the unlabelled subset, regardless of whether they belong to known or unknown classes. In GCD, the common practice typically involves applying a spherical projection operator at the end of the self-supervised pretrained backbone, operating within Euclidean or spherical space. However, both of these spaces have been shown to be suboptimal for encoding samples that possess hierarchical structures. In contrast, hyperbolic space exhibits exponential volume growth relative to radius, making it inherently strong at capturing the hierarchical structure of samples from both seen and unseen categories. Therefore, we propose to tackle the category discovery challenge in the hyperbolic space. We introduce HypCD, a simple Hyperbolic framework for learning hierarchy-aware representations and classifiers for generalized Category Discovery. HypCD first transforms the Euclidean embedding space of the backbone network into hyperbolic space, facilitating subsequent representation and classification learning by considering both hyperbolic distance and the angle between samples. This approach is particularly helpful for knowledge transfer from known to unknown categories in GCD. We thoroughly evaluate HypCD on public GCD benchmarks, by applying it to various baseline and state-of-the-art methods, consistently achieving significant improvements.
Deterministic Image-to-Image Translation via Denoising Brownian Bridge Models with Dual Approximators
PDF ↗Image-to-Image (I2I) translation involves converting an im- age from one domain to another. Deterministic I2I transla- tion, such as in image super-resolution, extends this con- cept by guaranteeing that each input generates a consistent and predictable output, closely matching the ground truth (GT) with high fidelity. In this paper, we propose a denois- ing Brownian bridge model with dual approximators (Dual- approx Bridge), a novel generative model that exploits the Brownian bridge dynamics and two neural network-based approximators (one for forward and one for reverse pro- cess) to produce faithful output with negligible variance and high image quality in I2I translations. Our extensive exper- iments on benchmark datasets including image generation and super-resolution demonstrate the consistent and supe- rior performance of Dual-approx Bridge in terms of im- age quality and faithfulness to GT when compared to both stochastic and deterministic baselines. Project page and code: https://github.com/bohan95/dual-app-bridge
Allusion recognition—a task demanding contextual activation of cultural knowledge—serves as a critical test of LLMs’ ability to deploy stored information in open-ended, figurative settings. We introduce a framework for evaluating Persian literary allusions through (1) classical poetry annotations and (2) LLM-generated texts incorporating allusions in novel contexts. By combining knowledge assessments, multiple-choice tasks, and open-ended recognition, we analyze whether failures stem from knowledge gaps or activation challenges. Evaluations across eleven LLMs highlight a notable observation: models exhibit strong foundational knowledge and high multiple-choice accuracy, yet performance drops substantially in open-ended tasks, especially for indirect references. Reasoning-optimized models generalize better to novel contexts, whereas distilled models show marked degradation in cultural reasoning. The gap underscores that LLMs’ limitations arise not from missing knowledge but from difficulties in spontaneously activating cultural references without explicit cues. We propose allusion recognition as a benchmark for contextual knowledge deployment, highlighting the need for training paradigms that bridge factual recall and culturally grounded reasoning. Our code, datasets and results are available at https://github.com/MelikaNobakhtian/Allusion
Recent advancements in speech-language models have yielded significant improvements in speech tokenization and synthesis. However, effectively mapping the complex, multidimensional attributes of speech into discrete tokens remains challenging. This process demands acoustic, semantic, and contextual information for precise speech representations. Existing speech representations generally fall into two categories: acoustic tokens from audio codecs and semantic tokens from speech self-supervised learning models. Although recent efforts have unified acoustic and semantic tokens for improved performance, they overlook the crucial role of contextual representation in comprehensive speech modeling. Our empirical investigations reveal that the absence of contextual representations results in elevated Word Error Rate (WER) and Word Information Lost (WIL) scores in speech transcriptions. To address these limitations, we propose two novel distillation approaches: (1) a language model (LM)-guided distillation method that incorporates contextual information, and (2) a combined LM and self-supervised speech model (SM)-guided distillation technique that effectively distills multimodal representations (acoustic, semantic, and contextual) into a comprehensive speech tokenizer, termed DM-Codec. The DM-Codec architecture adopts a streamlined encoder-decoder framework with a Residual Vector Quantizer (RVQ) and incorporates the LM and SM during the training process. Experiments show DM-Codec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art speech tokenization models, reducing WER by up to 13.46%, WIL by 9.82%, and improving speech quality by 5.84% and intelligibility by 1.85% on the LibriSpeech benchmark dataset.