iDesigner: A High-Resolution and Complex-Prompt Following Text-to-Image Diffusion Model for Interior Design

With the open-sourcing of text-to-image models (T2I) such as stable diffusion (SD) and stable diffusion XL (SD-XL), there is an influx of models fine-tuned in specific domains based on the open-source SD model, such as in anime, character portraits, etc. However, there are few specialized models in certain domains, such as interior design, which is attributed to the complex textual descriptions and detailed visual elements inherent in design, alongside the necessity for adaptable resolution. Therefore, text-to-image models for interior design are required to have outstanding prompt-following capabilities, as well as iterative collaboration with design professionals to achieve the desired outcome. In this paper, we collect and optimize text-image data in the design field and continue training in both English and Chinese on the basis of the open-source CLIP model. We also proposed a fine-tuning strategy with curriculum learning and reinforcement learning from CLIP feedback to enhance the prompt-following capabilities of our approach so as to improve the quality of image generation. The experimental results on the collected dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which achieves impressive results and outperforms strong baselines.

Optimal Wildfire Escape Route Planning for Drones under Dynamic Fire and Smoke

In recent years, the increasing prevalence and intensity of wildfires have posed significant challenges to emergency response teams. The utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, has shown promise in aiding wildfire management efforts. This work focuses on the development of an optimal wildfire escape route planning system specifically designed for drones, considering dynamic fire and smoke models. First, the location of the source of the wildfire can be well located by information fusion between UAV and satellite, and the road conditions in the vicinity of the fire can be assessed and analyzed using multi-channel remote sensing data. Second, the road network can be extracted and segmented in real time using UAV vision technology, and each road in the road network map can be given priority based on the results of road condition classification. Third, the spread model of dynamic fires calculates the new location of the fire source based on the fire intensity, wind speed and direction, and the radius increases as the wildfire spreads. Smoke is generated around the fire source to create a visual representation of a burning fire. Finally, based on the improved A* algorithm, which considers all the above factors, the UAV can quickly plan an escape route based on the starting and destination locations that avoid the location of the fire source and the area where it is spreading. By considering dynamic fire and smoke models, the proposed system enhances the safety and efficiency of drone operations in wildfire environments.

Active Wildfires Detection and Dynamic Escape Routes Planning for Humans through Information Fusion between Drones and Satellites

UAVs are playing an increasingly important role in the field of wilderness rescue by virtue of their flexibility. This paper proposes a fusion of UAV vision technology and satellite image analysis technology for active wildfires detection and road networks extraction of wildfire areas and real-time dynamic escape route planning for people in distress. Firstly, the fire source location and the segmentation of smoke and flames are targeted based on Sentinel 2 satellite imagery. Secondly, the road segmentation and the road condition assessment are performed by D-linkNet and NDVI values in the central area of the fire source by UAV. Finally, the dynamic optimal route planning for humans in real time is performed by the weighted A* algorithm in the road network with the dynamic fire spread model. Taking the Chongqing wildfire on August 24, 2022, as a case study, the results demonstrate that the dynamic escape route planning algorithm can provide an optimal real-time navigation path for humans in the presence of fire through the information fusion of UAVs and satellites.

Detecting Voice Cloning Attacks via Timbre Watermarking

Nowadays, it is common to release audio content to the public. However, with the rise of voice cloning technology, attackers have the potential to easily impersonate a specific person by utilizing his publicly released audio without any permission. Therefore, it becomes significant to detect any potential misuse of the released audio content and protect its timbre from being impersonated. To this end, we introduce a novel concept, "Timbre Watermarking", which embeds watermark information into the target individual's speech, eventually defeating the voice cloning attacks. To ensure the watermark is robust to the voice cloning model's learning process, we design an end-to-end voice cloning-resistant detection framework. The core idea of our solution is to embed and extract the watermark in the frequency domain in a temporally invariant manner. To acquire generalization across different voice cloning attacks, we modulate their shared process and integrate it into our framework as a distortion layer. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed timbre watermarking can defend against different voice cloning attacks, exhibit strong resistance against various adaptive attacks (e.g., reconstruction-based removal attacks, watermark overwriting attacks), and achieve practicality in real-world services such as PaddleSpeech, Voice-Cloning-App, and so-vits-svc. In addition, ablation studies are also conducted to verify the effectiveness of our design. Some audio samples are available at https://timbrewatermarking.github.io/samples.

Machine Vision Therapy: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Enhance Visual Robustness via Denoising In-Context Learning

Although vision models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) show impressive generalization performance, their zero-shot robustness is still limited under Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios without fine-tuning. Instead of undesirably providing human supervision as commonly done, it is possible to take advantage of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that hold powerful visual understanding abilities. However, MLLMs are shown to struggle with vision problems due to the incompatibility of tasks, thus hindering their utilization. In this paper, we propose to effectively leverage MLLMs to conduct Machine Vision Therapy which aims to rectify the noisy predictions from vision models. By fine-tuning with the denoised labels, the learning model performance can be boosted in an unsupervised manner. To solve the incompatibility issue, we propose a novel Denoising In-Context Learning (DICL) strategy to align vision tasks with MLLMs. Concretely, by estimating a transition matrix that captures the probability of one class being confused with another, an instruction containing a correct exemplar and an erroneous one from the most probable noisy class can be constructed. Such an instruction can help any MLLMs with ICL ability to detect and rectify incorrect predictions of vision models. Through extensive experiments on ImageNet, WILDS, DomainBed, and other OOD datasets, we carefully validate the quantitative and qualitative effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/tmllab/Machine_Vision_Therapy.

FreestyleRet: Retrieving Images from Style-Diversified Queries

Image Retrieval aims to retrieve corresponding images based on a given query. In application scenarios, users intend to express their retrieval intent through various query styles. However, current retrieval tasks predominantly focus on text-query retrieval exploration, leading to limited retrieval query options and potential ambiguity or bias in user intention. In this paper, we propose the Style-Diversified Query-Based Image Retrieval task, which enables retrieval based on various query styles. To facilitate the novel setting, we propose the first Diverse-Style Retrieval dataset, encompassing diverse query styles including text, sketch, low-resolution, and art. We also propose a light-weighted style-diversified retrieval framework. For various query style inputs, we apply the Gram Matrix to extract the query's textural features and cluster them into a style space with style-specific bases. Then we employ the style-init prompt tuning module to enable the visual encoder to comprehend the texture and style information of the query. Experiments demonstrate that our model, employing the style-init prompt tuning strategy, outperforms existing retrieval models on the style-diversified retrieval task. Moreover, style-diversified queries~(sketch+text, art+text, etc) can be simultaneously retrieved in our model. The auxiliary information from other queries enhances the retrieval performance within the respective query.

LLMs Accelerate Annotation for Medical Information Extraction

The unstructured nature of clinical notes within electronic health records often conceals vital patient-related information, making it challenging to access or interpret. To uncover this hidden information, specialized Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are required. However, training these models necessitates large amounts of labeled data, a process that is both time-consuming and costly when relying solely on human experts for annotation. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with human expertise to create an efficient method for generating ground truth labels for medical text annotation. By utilizing LLMs in conjunction with human annotators, we significantly reduce the human annotation burden, enabling the rapid creation of labeled datasets. We rigorously evaluate our method on a medical information extraction task, demonstrating that our approach not only substantially cuts down on human intervention but also maintains high accuracy. The results highlight the potential of using LLMs to improve the utilization of unstructured clinical data, allowing for the swift deployment of tailored NLP solutions in healthcare.

Transformer-empowered Multi-modal Item Embedding for Enhanced Image Search in E-Commerce

Over the past decade, significant advances have been made in the field of image search for e-commerce applications. Traditional image-to-image retrieval models, which focus solely on image details such as texture, tend to overlook useful semantic information contained within the images. As a result, the retrieved products might possess similar image details, but fail to fulfil the user's search goals. Moreover, the use of image-to-image retrieval models for products containing multiple images results in significant online product feature storage overhead and complex mapping implementations. In this paper, we report the design and deployment of the proposed Multi-modal Item Embedding Model (MIEM) to address these limitations. It is capable of utilizing both textual information and multiple images about a product to construct meaningful product features. By leveraging semantic information from images, MIEM effectively supplements the image search process, improving the overall accuracy of retrieval results. MIEM has become an integral part of the Shopee image search platform. Since its deployment in March 2023, it has achieved a remarkable 9.90% increase in terms of clicks per user and a 4.23% boost in terms of orders per user for the image search feature on the Shopee e-commerce platform.

RGBGrasp: Image-based Object Grasping by Capturing Multiple Views during Robot Arm Movement with Neural Radiance Fields

Robotic research encounters a significant hurdle when it comes to the intricate task of grasping objects that come in various shapes, materials, and textures. Unlike many prior investigations that heavily leaned on specialized point-cloud cameras or abundant RGB visual data to gather 3D insights for object-grasping missions, this paper introduces a pioneering approach called RGBGrasp. This method depends on a limited set of RGB views to perceive the 3D surroundings containing transparent and specular objects and achieve accurate grasping. Our method utilizes pre-trained depth prediction models to establish geometry constraints, enabling precise 3D structure estimation, even under limited view conditions. Finally, we integrate hash encoding and a proposal sampler strategy to significantly accelerate the 3D reconstruction process. These innovations significantly enhance the adaptability and effectiveness of our algorithm in real-world scenarios. Through comprehensive experimental validation, we demonstrate that RGBGrasp achieves remarkable success across a wide spectrum of object-grasping scenarios, establishing it as a promising solution for real-world robotic manipulation tasks. The demo of our method can be found on: https://sites.google.com/view/rgbgrasp

A Systematic Review of Deep Learning-based Research on Radiology Report Generation

Radiology report generation (RRG) aims to automatically generate free-text descriptions from clinical radiographs, e.g., chest X-Ray images. RRG plays an essential role in promoting clinical automation and presents significant help to provide practical assistance for inexperienced doctors and alleviate radiologists' workloads. Therefore, consider these meaningful potentials, research on RRG is experiencing explosive growth in the past half-decade, especially with the rapid development of deep learning approaches. Existing studies perform RRG from the perspective of enhancing different modalities, provide insights on optimizing the report generation process with elaborated features from both visual and textual information, and further facilitate RRG with the cross-modal interactions among them. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of deep learning-based RRG from various perspectives. Specifically, we firstly cover pivotal RRG approaches based on the task-specific features of radiographs, reports, and the cross-modal relations between them, and then illustrate the benchmark datasets conventionally used for this task with evaluation metrics, subsequently analyze the performance of different approaches and finally offer our summary on the challenges and the trends in future directions. Overall, the goal of this paper is to serve as a tool for understanding existing literature and inspiring potential valuable research in the field of RRG.