Oracle Bone Inscriptions Multi-modal Dataset

Oracle bone inscriptions(OBI) is the earliest developed writing system in China, bearing invaluable written exemplifications of early Shang history and paleography. However, the task of deciphering OBI, in the current climate of the scholarship, can prove extremely challenging. Out of the 4,500 oracle bone characters excavated, only a third have been successfully identified. Therefore, leveraging the advantages of advanced AI technology to assist in the decipherment of OBI is a highly essential research topic. However, fully utilizing AI's capabilities in these matters is reliant on having a comprehensive and high-quality annotated OBI dataset at hand whereas most existing datasets are only annotated in just a single or a few dimensions, limiting the value of their potential application. For instance, the Oracle-MNIST dataset only offers 30k images classified into 10 categories. Therefore, this paper proposes an Oracle Bone Inscriptions Multi-modal Dataset(OBIMD), which includes annotation information for 10,077 pieces of oracle bones. Each piece has two modalities: pixel-level aligned rubbings and facsimiles. The dataset annotates the detection boxes, character categories, transcriptions, corresponding inscription groups, and reading sequences in the groups of each oracle bone character, providing a comprehensive and high-quality level of annotations. This dataset can be used for a variety of AI-related research tasks relevant to the field of OBI, such as OBI Character Detection and Recognition, Rubbing Denoising, Character Matching, Character Generation, Reading Sequence Prediction, Missing Characters Completion task and so on. We believe that the creation and publication of a dataset like this will help significantly advance the application of AI algorithms in the field of OBI research.

NoiseBoost: Alleviating Hallucination with Noise Perturbation for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) contribute a powerful mechanism to understanding visual information building on large language models. However, MLLMs are notorious for suffering from hallucinations, especially when generating lengthy, detailed descriptions for images. Our analysis reveals that hallucinations stem from the inherent summarization mechanism of large language models, leading to excessive dependence on linguistic tokens while neglecting vision information. In this paper, we propose NoiseBoost, a broadly applicable and simple method for alleviating hallucinations for MLLMs through the integration of noise feature perturbations. Noise perturbation acts as a regularizer, facilitating a balanced distribution of attention weights among visual and linguistic tokens. Despite its simplicity, NoiseBoost consistently enhances the performance of MLLMs across common training strategies, including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Further, NoiseBoost pioneerly enables semi-supervised learning for MLLMs, unleashing the power of unlabeled data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that NoiseBoost improves dense caption accuracy by 8.1% with human evaluation and achieves comparable results with 50% of the data by mining unlabeled data. Code and models are available at https://kaiwu5.github.io/noiseboost.

M2-CLIP: A Multimodal, Multi-task Adapting Framework for Video Action Recognition

Recently, the rise of large-scale vision-language pretrained models like CLIP, coupled with the technology of Parameter-Efficient FineTuning (PEFT), has captured substantial attraction in video action recognition. Nevertheless, prevailing approaches tend to prioritize strong supervised performance at the expense of compromising the models' generalization capabilities during transfer. In this paper, we introduce a novel Multimodal, Multi-task CLIP adapting framework named \name to address these challenges, preserving both high supervised performance and robust transferability. Firstly, to enhance the individual modality architectures, we introduce multimodal adapters to both the visual and text branches. Specifically, we design a novel visual TED-Adapter, that performs global Temporal Enhancement and local temporal Difference modeling to improve the temporal representation capabilities of the visual encoder. Moreover, we adopt text encoder adapters to strengthen the learning of semantic label information. Secondly, we design a multi-task decoder with a rich set of supervisory signals to adeptly satisfy the need for strong supervised performance and generalization within a multimodal framework. Experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating exceptional performance in supervised learning while maintaining strong generalization in zero-shot scenarios.

PortraitBooth: A Versatile Portrait Model for Fast Identity-preserved Personalization

Recent advancements in personalized image generation using diffusion models have been noteworthy. However, existing methods suffer from inefficiencies due to the requirement for subject-specific fine-tuning. This computationally intensive process hinders efficient deployment, limiting practical usability. Moreover, these methods often grapple with identity distortion and limited expression diversity. In light of these challenges, we propose PortraitBooth, an innovative approach designed for high efficiency, robust identity preservation, and expression-editable text-to-image generation, without the need for fine-tuning. PortraitBooth leverages subject embeddings from a face recognition model for personalized image generation without fine-tuning. It eliminates computational overhead and mitigates identity distortion. The introduced dynamic identity preservation strategy further ensures close resemblance to the original image identity. Moreover, PortraitBooth incorporates emotion-aware cross-attention control for diverse facial expressions in generated images, supporting text-driven expression editing. Its scalability enables efficient and high-quality image creation, including multi-subject generation. Extensive results demonstrate superior performance over other state-of-the-art methods in both single and multiple image generation scenarios.

Dynamic Frame Interpolation in Wavelet Domain

Video frame interpolation is an important low-level vision task, which can increase frame rate for more fluent visual experience. Existing methods have achieved great success by employing advanced motion models and synthesis networks. However, the spatial redundancy when synthesizing the target frame has not been fully explored, that can result in lots of inefficient computation. On the other hand, the computation compression degree in frame interpolation is highly dependent on both texture distribution and scene motion, which demands to understand the spatial-temporal information of each input frame pair for a better compression degree selection. In this work, we propose a novel two-stage frame interpolation framework termed WaveletVFI to address above problems. It first estimates intermediate optical flow with a lightweight motion perception network, and then a wavelet synthesis network uses flow aligned context features to predict multi-scale wavelet coefficients with sparse convolution for efficient target frame reconstruction, where the sparse valid masks that control computation in each scale are determined by a crucial threshold ratio. Instead of setting a fixed value like previous methods, we find that embedding a classifier in the motion perception network to learn a dynamic threshold for each sample can achieve more computation reduction with almost no loss of accuracy. On the common high resolution and animation frame interpolation benchmarks, proposed WaveletVFI can reduce computation up to 40% while maintaining similar accuracy, making it perform more efficiently against other state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/ltkong218/WaveletVFI.

Probabilistic Triangulation for Uncalibrated Multi-View 3D Human Pose Estimation

3D human pose estimation has been a long-standing challenge in computer vision and graphics, where multi-view methods have significantly progressed but are limited by the tedious calibration processes. Existing multi-view methods are restricted to fixed camera pose and therefore lack generalization ability. This paper presents a novel Probabilistic Triangulation module that can be embedded in a calibrated 3D human pose estimation method, generalizing it to uncalibration scenes. The key idea is to use a probability distribution to model the camera pose and iteratively update the distribution from 2D features instead of using camera pose. Specifically, We maintain a camera pose distribution and then iteratively update this distribution by computing the posterior probability of the camera pose through Monte Carlo sampling. This way, the gradients can be directly back-propagated from the 3D pose estimation to the 2D heatmap, enabling end-to-end training. Extensive experiments on Human3.6M and CMU Panoptic demonstrate that our method outperforms other uncalibration methods and achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art calibration methods. Thus, our method achieves a trade-off between estimation accuracy and generalizability. Our code is in https://github.com/bymaths/probabilistic_triangulation

Pose-aware Attention Network for Flexible Motion Retargeting by Body Part

Motion retargeting is a fundamental problem in computer graphics and computer vision. Existing approaches usually have many strict requirements, such as the source-target skeletons needing to have the same number of joints or share the same topology. To tackle this problem, we note that skeletons with different structure may have some common body parts despite the differences in joint numbers. Following this observation, we propose a novel, flexible motion retargeting framework. The key idea of our method is to regard the body part as the basic retargeting unit rather than directly retargeting the whole body motion. To enhance the spatial modeling capability of the motion encoder, we introduce a pose-aware attention network (PAN) in the motion encoding phase. The PAN is pose-aware since it can dynamically predict the joint weights within each body part based on the input pose, and then construct a shared latent space for each body part by feature pooling. Extensive experiments show that our approach can generate better motion retargeting results both qualitatively and quantitatively than state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we also show that our framework can generate reasonable results even for a more challenging retargeting scenario, like retargeting between bipedal and quadrupedal skeletons because of the body part retargeting strategy and PAN. Our code is publicly available.

IFRNet: Intermediate Feature Refine Network for Efficient Frame Interpolation

Prevailing video frame interpolation algorithms, that generate the intermediate frames from consecutive inputs, typically rely on complex model architectures with heavy parameters or large delay, hindering them from diverse real-time applications. In this work, we devise an efficient encoder-decoder based network, termed IFRNet, for fast intermediate frame synthesizing. It first extracts pyramid features from given inputs, and then refines the bilateral intermediate flow fields together with a powerful intermediate feature until generating the desired output. The gradually refined intermediate feature can not only facilitate intermediate flow estimation, but also compensate for contextual details, making IFRNet do not need additional synthesis or refinement module. To fully release its potential, we further propose a novel task-oriented optical flow distillation loss to focus on learning the useful teacher knowledge towards frame synthesizing. Meanwhile, a new geometry consistency regularization term is imposed on the gradually refined intermediate features to keep better structure layout. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the excellent performance and fast inference speed of proposed approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/ltkong218/IFRNet.

Learning Comprehensive Motion Representation for Action Recognition

For action recognition learning, 2D CNN-based methods are efficient but may yield redundant features due to applying the same 2D convolution kernel to each frame. Recent efforts attempt to capture motion information by establishing inter-frame connections while still suffering the limited temporal receptive field or high latency. Moreover, the feature enhancement is often only performed by channel or space dimension in action recognition. To address these issues, we first devise a Channel-wise Motion Enhancement (CME) module to adaptively emphasize the channels related to dynamic information with a channel-wise gate vector. The channel gates generated by CME incorporate the information from all the other frames in the video. We further propose a Spatial-wise Motion Enhancement (SME) module to focus on the regions with the critical target in motion, according to the point-to-point similarity between adjacent feature maps. The intuition is that the change of background is typically slower than the motion area. Both CME and SME have clear physical meaning in capturing action clues. By integrating the two modules into the off-the-shelf 2D network, we finally obtain a Comprehensive Motion Representation (CMR) learning method for action recognition, which achieves competitive performance on Something-Something V1 & V2 and Kinetics-400. On the temporal reasoning datasets Something-Something V1 and V2, our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art by 2.3% and 1.9% when using 16 frames as input, respectively.

Multi-Level Adaptive Region of Interest and Graph Learning for Facial Action Unit Recognition

In facial action unit (AU) recognition tasks, regional feature learning and AU relation modeling are two effective aspects which are worth exploring. However, the limited representation capacity of regional features makes it difficult for relation models to embed AU relationship knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-level adaptive ROI and graph learning (MARGL) framework to tackle this problem. Specifically, an adaptive ROI learning module is designed to automatically adjust the location and size of the predefined AU regions. Meanwhile, besides relationship between AUs, there exists strong relevance between regional features across multiple levels of the backbone network as level-wise features focus on different aspects of representation. In order to incorporate the intra-level AU relation and inter-level AU regional relevance simultaneously, a multi-level AU relation graph is constructed and graph convolution is performed to further enhance AU regional features of each level. Experiments on BP4D and DISFA demonstrate the proposed MARGL significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods.