Label-anticipated Event Disentanglement for Audio-Visual Video Parsing

Audio-Visual Video Parsing (AVVP) task aims to detect and temporally locate events within audio and visual modalities. Multiple events can overlap in the timeline, making identification challenging. While traditional methods usually focus on improving the early audio-visual encoders to embed more effective features, the decoding phase -- crucial for final event classification, often receives less attention. We aim to advance the decoding phase and improve its interpretability. Specifically, we introduce a new decoding paradigm, \underline{l}abel s\underline{e}m\underline{a}ntic-based \underline{p}rojection (LEAP), that employs labels texts of event categories, each bearing distinct and explicit semantics, for parsing potentially overlapping events.LEAP works by iteratively projecting encoded latent features of audio/visual segments onto semantically independent label embeddings. This process, enriched by modeling cross-modal (audio/visual-label) interactions, gradually disentangles event semantics within video segments to refine relevant label embeddings, guaranteeing a more discriminative and interpretable decoding process. To facilitate the LEAP paradigm, we propose a semantic-aware optimization strategy, which includes a novel audio-visual semantic similarity loss function. This function leverages the Intersection over Union of audio and visual events (EIoU) as a novel metric to calibrate audio-visual similarities at the feature level, accommodating the varied event densities across modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving new state-of-the-art performance for AVVP and also enhancing the relevant audio-visual event localization task.

MMAD: Multi-label Micro-Action Detection in Videos

Human body actions are an important form of non-verbal communication in social interactions. This paper focuses on a specific subset of body actions known as micro-actions, which are subtle, low-intensity body movements that provide a deeper understanding of inner human feelings. In real-world scenarios, human micro-actions often co-occur, with multiple micro-actions overlapping in time, such as simultaneous head and hand movements. However, current research primarily focuses on recognizing individual micro-actions while overlooking their co-occurring nature. To narrow this gap, we propose a new task named Multi-label Micro-Action Detection (MMAD), which involves identifying all micro-actions in a given short video, determining their start and end times, and categorizing them. Achieving this requires a model capable of accurately capturing both long-term and short-term action relationships to locate and classify multiple micro-actions. To support the MMAD task, we introduce a new dataset named Multi-label Micro-Action-52 (MMA-52), specifically designed to facilitate the detailed analysis and exploration of complex human micro-actions. The proposed MMA-52 dataset is available at: https://github.com/VUT-HFUT/Micro-Action.

Micro-gesture Online Recognition using Learnable Query Points

In this paper, we briefly introduce the solution developed by our team, HFUT-VUT, for the Micro-gesture Online Recognition track in the MiGA challenge at IJCAI 2024. The Micro-gesture Online Recognition task involves identifying the category and locating the start and end times of micro-gestures in video clips. Compared to the typical Temporal Action Detection task, the Micro-gesture Online Recognition task focuses more on distinguishing between micro-gestures and pinpointing the start and end times of actions. Our solution ranks 2nd in the Micro-gesture Online Recognition track.

A Two-Stage Adverse Weather Semantic Segmentation Method for WeatherProof Challenge CVPR 2024 Workshop UG2+

This technical report presents our team's solution for the WeatherProof Dataset Challenge: Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather at CVPR'24 UG2+. We propose a two-stage deep learning framework for this task. In the first stage, we preprocess the provided dataset by concatenating images into video sequences. Subsequently, we leverage a low-rank video deraining method to generate high-fidelity pseudo ground truths. These pseudo ground truths offer superior alignment compared to the original ground truths, facilitating model convergence during training. In the second stage, we employ the InternImage network to train for the semantic segmentation task using the generated pseudo ground truths. Notably, our meticulously designed framework demonstrates robustness to degraded data captured under adverse weather conditions. In the challenge, our solution achieved a competitive score of 0.43 on the Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, securing a respectable rank of 4th.

Joint Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Contrastive Learning for Self-supervised Heart Rate Measurement

This paper briefly introduces the solutions developed by our team, HFUT-VUT, for Track 1 of self-supervised heart rate measurement in the 3rd Vision-based Remote Physiological Signal Sensing (RePSS) Challenge hosted at IJCAI 2024. The goal is to develop a self-supervised learning algorithm for heart rate (HR) estimation using unlabeled facial videos. To tackle this task, we present two self-supervised HR estimation solutions that integrate spatial-temporal modeling and contrastive learning, respectively. Specifically, we first propose a non-end-to-end self-supervised HR measurement framework based on spatial-temporal modeling, which can effectively capture subtle rPPG clues and leverage the inherent bandwidth and periodicity characteristics of rPPG to constrain the model. Meanwhile, we employ an excellent end-to-end solution based on contrastive learning, aiming to generalize across different scenarios from complementary perspectives. Finally, we combine the strengths of the above solutions through an ensemble strategy to generate the final predictions, leading to a more accurate HR estimation. As a result, our solutions achieved a remarkable RMSE score of 8.85277 on the test dataset, securing \textbf{2nd place} in Track 1 of the challenge.

Advancing Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing via Segment-wise Pseudo Labeling

The Audio-Visual Video Parsing task aims to identify and temporally localize the events that occur in either or both the audio and visual streams of audible videos. It often performs in a weakly-supervised manner, where only video event labels are provided, \ie, the modalities and the timestamps of the labels are unknown. Due to the lack of densely annotated labels, recent work attempts to leverage pseudo labels to enrich the supervision. A commonly used strategy is to generate pseudo labels by categorizing the known video event labels for each modality. However, the labels are still confined to the video level, and the temporal boundaries of events remain unlabeled. In this paper, we propose a new pseudo label generation strategy that can explicitly assign labels to each video segment by utilizing prior knowledge learned from the open world. Specifically, we exploit the large-scale pretrained models, namely CLIP and CLAP, to estimate the events in each video segment and generate segment-level visual and audio pseudo labels, respectively. We then propose a new loss function to exploit these pseudo labels by taking into account their category-richness and segment-richness. A label denoising strategy is also adopted to further improve the visual pseudo labels by flipping them whenever abnormally large forward losses occur. We perform extensive experiments on the LLP dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of each proposed design and we achieve state-of-the-art video parsing performance on all types of event parsing, \ie, audio event, visual event, and audio-visual event. We also examine the proposed pseudo label generation strategy on a relevant weakly-supervised audio-visual event localization task and the experimental results again verify the benefits and generalization of our method.

The Ninth NTIRE 2024 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

Unified Static and Dynamic Network: Efficient Temporal Filtering for Video Grounding

Inspired by the activity-silent and persistent activity mechanisms in human visual perception biology, we design a Unified Static and Dynamic Network (UniSDNet), to learn the semantic association between the video and text/audio queries in a cross-modal environment for efficient video grounding. For static modeling, we devise a novel residual structure (ResMLP) to boost the global comprehensive interaction between the video segments and queries, achieving more effective semantic enhancement/supplement. For dynamic modeling, we effectively exploit three characteristics of the persistent activity mechanism in our network design for a better video context comprehension. Specifically, we construct a diffusely connected video clip graph on the basis of 2D sparse temporal masking to reflect the "short-term effect" relationship. We innovatively consider the temporal distance and relevance as the joint "auxiliary evidence clues" and design a multi-kernel Temporal Gaussian Filter to expand the context clue into high-dimensional space, simulating the "complex visual perception", and then conduct element level filtering convolution operations on neighbour clip nodes in message passing stage for finally generating and ranking the candidate proposals. Our UniSDNet is applicable to both Natural Language Video Grounding (NLVG) and Spoken Language Video Grounding (SLVG) tasks. Our UniSDNet achieves SOTA performance on three widely used datasets for NLVG, as well as three datasets for SLVG, e.g., reporting new records at 38.88% R@1,IoU@0.7 on ActivityNet Captions and 40.26% R@1,IoU@0.5 on TACoS. To facilitate this field, we collect two new datasets (Charades-STA Speech and TACoS Speech) for SLVG task. Meanwhile, the inference speed of our UniSDNet is 1.56$\times$ faster than the strong multi-query benchmark. Code is available at: https://github.com/xian-sh/UniSDNet.

Training A Small Emotional Vision Language Model for Visual Art Comprehension

This paper develops small vision language models to understand visual art, which, given an art work, aims to identify its emotion category and explain this prediction with natural language. While small models are computationally efficient, their capacity is much limited compared with large models. To break this trade-off, this paper builds a small emotional vision language model (SEVLM) by emotion modeling and input-output feature alignment. On the one hand, based on valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) knowledge annotated by psychology experts, we introduce and fuse emotional features derived through VAD dictionary and a VAD head to align VAD vectors of predicted emotion explanation and the ground truth. This allows the vision language model to better understand and generate emotional texts, compared with using traditional text embeddings alone. On the other hand, we design a contrastive head to pull close embeddings of the image, its emotion class, and explanation, which aligns model outputs and inputs. On two public affective explanation datasets, we show that the proposed techniques consistently improve the visual art understanding performance of baseline SEVLMs. Importantly, the proposed model can be trained and evaluated on a single RTX 2080 Ti while exhibiting very strong performance: it not only outperforms the state-of-the-art small models but is also competitive compared with LLaVA 7B after fine-tuning and GPT4(V).

Frequency Decoupling for Motion Magnification via Multi-Level Isomorphic Architecture

Video Motion Magnification (VMM) aims to reveal subtle and imperceptible motion information of objects in the macroscopic world. Prior methods directly model the motion field from the Eulerian perspective by Representation Learning that separates shape and texture or Multi-domain Learning from phase fluctuations. Inspired by the frequency spectrum, we observe that the low-frequency components with stable energy always possess spatial structure and less noise, making them suitable for modeling the subtle motion field. To this end, we present FD4MM, a new paradigm of Frequency Decoupling for Motion Magnification with a Multi-level Isomorphic Architecture to capture multi-level high-frequency details and a stable low-frequency structure (motion field) in video space. Since high-frequency details and subtle motions are susceptible to information degradation due to their inherent subtlety and unavoidable external interference from noise, we carefully design Sparse High/Low-pass Filters to enhance the integrity of details and motion structures, and a Sparse Frequency Mixer to promote seamless recoupling. Besides, we innovatively design a contrastive regularization for this task to strengthen the model's ability to discriminate irrelevant features, reducing undesired motion magnification. Extensive experiments on both Real-world and Synthetic Datasets show that our FD4MM outperforms SOTA methods. Meanwhile, FD4MM reduces FLOPs by 1.63$\times$ and boosts inference speed by 1.68$\times$ than the latest method. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jiafei127/FD4MM.