SphereDiffusion: Spherical Geometry-Aware Distortion Resilient Diffusion Model

Controllable spherical panoramic image generation holds substantial applicative potential across a variety of domains.However, it remains a challenging task due to the inherent spherical distortion and geometry characteristics, resulting in low-quality content generation.In this paper, we introduce a novel framework of SphereDiffusion to address these unique challenges, for better generating high-quality and precisely controllable spherical panoramic images.For the spherical distortion characteristic, we embed the semantics of the distorted object with text encoding, then explicitly construct the relationship with text-object correspondence to better use the pre-trained knowledge of the planar images.Meanwhile, we employ a deformable technique to mitigate the semantic deviation in latent space caused by spherical distortion.For the spherical geometry characteristic, in virtue of spherical rotation invariance, we improve the data diversity and optimization objectives in the training process, enabling the model to better learn the spherical geometry characteristic.Furthermore, we enhance the denoising process of the diffusion model, enabling it to effectively use the learned geometric characteristic to ensure the boundary continuity of the generated images.With these specific techniques, experiments on Structured3D dataset show that SphereDiffusion significantly improves the quality of controllable spherical image generation and relatively reduces around 35% FID on average.

Quantifying and Enhancing Multi-modal Robustness with Modality Preference

Multi-modal models have shown a promising capability to effectively integrate information from various sources, yet meanwhile, they are found vulnerable to pervasive perturbations, such as uni-modal attacks and missing conditions. To counter these perturbations, robust multi-modal representations are highly expected, which are positioned well away from the discriminative multi-modal decision boundary. In this paper, different from conventional empirical studies, we focus on a commonly used joint multi-modal framework and theoretically discover that larger uni-modal representation margins and more reliable integration for modalities are essential components for achieving higher robustness. This discovery can further explain the limitation of multi-modal robustness and the phenomenon that multi-modal models are often vulnerable to attacks on the specific modality. Moreover, our analysis reveals how the widespread issue, that the model has different preferences for modalities, limits the multi-modal robustness by influencing the essential components and could lead to attacks on the specific modality highly effective. Inspired by our theoretical finding, we introduce a training procedure called Certifiable Robust Multi-modal Training (CRMT), which can alleviate this influence from modality preference and explicitly regulate essential components to significantly improve robustness in a certifiable manner. Our method demonstrates substantial improvements in performance and robustness compared with existing methods. Furthermore, our training procedure can be easily extended to enhance other robust training strategies, highlighting its credibility and flexibility.

Kinematic-aware Prompting for Generalizable Articulated Object Manipulation with LLMs

Generalizable articulated object manipulation is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent efforts focus on imitation learning from demonstrations or reinforcement learning in simulation, however, due to the prohibitive costs of real-world data collection and precise object simulation, it still remains challenging for these works to achieve broad adaptability across diverse articulated objects. Recently, many works have tried to utilize the strong in-context learning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve generalizable robotic manipulation, but most of these researches focus on high-level task planning, sidelining low-level robotic control. In this work, building on the idea that the kinematic structure of the object determines how we can manipulate it, we propose a kinematic-aware prompting framework that prompts LLMs with kinematic knowledge of objects to generate low-level motion trajectory waypoints, supporting various object manipulation. To effectively prompt LLMs with the kinematic structure of different objects, we design a unified kinematic knowledge parser, which represents various articulated objects as a unified textual description containing kinematic joints and contact location. Building upon this unified description, a kinematic-aware planner model is proposed to generate precise 3D manipulation waypoints via a designed kinematic-aware chain-of-thoughts prompting method. Our evaluation spanned 48 instances across 16 distinct categories, revealing that our framework not only outperforms traditional methods on 8 seen categories but also shows a powerful zero-shot capability for 8 unseen articulated object categories. Moreover, the real-world experiments on 7 different object categories prove our framework's adaptability in practical scenarios. Code is released at \href{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/LLM_articulated_object_manipulation/tree/main}{here}.

Prompting Segmentation with Sound is Generalizable Audio-Visual Source Localizer

Never having seen an object and heard its sound simultaneously, can the model still accurately localize its visual position from the input audio? In this work, we concentrate on the Audio-Visual Localization and Segmentation tasks but under the demanding zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. To achieve this goal, different from existing approaches that mostly employ the encoder-fusion-decoder paradigm to decode localization information from the fused audio-visual feature, we introduce the encoder-prompt-decoder paradigm, aiming to better fit the data scarcity and varying data distribution dilemmas with the help of abundant knowledge from pre-trained models. Specifically, we first propose to construct Semantic-aware Audio Prompt (SAP) to help the visual foundation model focus on sounding objects, meanwhile, the semantic gap between the visual and audio modalities is also encouraged to shrink. Then, we develop a Correlation Adapter (ColA) to keep minimal training efforts as well as maintain adequate knowledge of the visual foundation model. By equipping with these means, extensive experiments demonstrate that this new paradigm outperforms other fusion-based methods in both the unseen class and cross-dataset settings. We hope that our work can further promote the generalization study of Audio-Visual Localization and Segmentation in practical application scenarios.

Enhancing Multi-modal Cooperation via Fine-grained Modality Valuation

One primary topic of multi-modal learning is to jointly incorporate heterogeneous information from different modalities. However, most models often suffer from unsatisfactory multi-modal cooperation, which could not jointly utilize all modalities well. Some methods are proposed to identify and enhance the worse learnt modality, but are often hard to provide the fine-grained observation of multi-modal cooperation at sample-level with theoretical support. Hence, it is essential to reasonably observe and improve the fine-grained cooperation between modalities, especially when facing realistic scenarios where the modality discrepancy could vary across different samples. To this end, we introduce a fine-grained modality valuation metric to evaluate the contribution of each modality at sample-level. Via modality valuation, we regretfully observe that the multi-modal model tends to rely on one specific modality, resulting in other modalities being low-contributing. We further analyze this issue and improve cooperation between modalities by enhancing the discriminative ability of low-contributing modalities in a targeted manner. Overall, our methods reasonably observe the fine-grained uni-modal contribution at sample-level and achieve considerable improvement on different multi-modal models.

Progressive Spatio-temporal Perception for Audio-Visual Question Answering

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) task aims to answer questions about different visual objects, sounds, and their associations in videos. Such naturally multi-modal videos are composed of rich and complex dynamic audio-visual components, where most of which could be unrelated to the given questions, or even play as interference in answering the content of interest. Oppositely, only focusing on the question-aware audio-visual content could get rid of influence, meanwhile enabling the model to answer more efficiently. In this paper, we propose a Progressive Spatio-Temporal Perception Network (PSTP-Net), which contains three modules that progressively identify key spatio-temporal regions w.r.t. questions. Specifically, a temporal segment selection module is first introduced to select the most relevant audio-visual segments related to the given question. Then, a spatial region selection module is utilized to choose the most relevant regions associated with the question from the selected temporal segments. To further refine the selection of features, an audio-guided visual attention module is employed to perceive the association between auido and selected spatial regions. Finally, the spatio-temporal features from these modules are integrated for answering the question. Extensive experimental results on the public MUSIC-AVQA and AVQA datasets provide compelling evidence of the effectiveness and efficiency of PSTP-Net. Code is available at: \href{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/PSTP-Net}{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/PSTP-Net}

Supervised Knowledge May Hurt Novel Class Discovery Performance

Novel class discovery (NCD) aims to infer novel categories in an unlabeled dataset by leveraging prior knowledge of a labeled set comprising disjoint but related classes. Given that most existing literature focuses primarily on utilizing supervised knowledge from a labeled set at the methodology level, this paper considers the question: Is supervised knowledge always helpful at different levels of semantic relevance? To proceed, we first establish a novel metric, so-called transfer flow, to measure the semantic similarity between labeled/unlabeled datasets. To show the validity of the proposed metric, we build up a large-scale benchmark with various degrees of semantic similarities between labeled/unlabeled datasets on ImageNet by leveraging its hierarchical class structure. The results based on the proposed benchmark show that the proposed transfer flow is in line with the hierarchical class structure; and that NCD performance is consistent with the semantic similarities (measured by the proposed metric). Next, by using the proposed transfer flow, we conduct various empirical experiments with different levels of semantic similarity, yielding that supervised knowledge may hurt NCD performance. Specifically, using supervised information from a low-similarity labeled set may lead to a suboptimal result as compared to using pure self-supervised knowledge. These results reveal the inadequacy of the existing NCD literature which usually assumes that supervised knowledge is beneficial. Finally, we develop a pseudo-version of the transfer flow as a practical reference to decide if supervised knowledge should be used in NCD. Its effectiveness is supported by our empirical studies, which show that the pseudo transfer flow (with or without supervised knowledge) is consistent with the corresponding accuracy based on various datasets. Code is released at https://github.com/J-L-O/SK-Hurt-NCD

Multi-Scale Attention for Audio Question Answering

Audio question answering (AQA), acting as a widely used proxy task to explore scene understanding, has got more attention. The AQA is challenging for it requires comprehensive temporal reasoning from different scales' events of an audio scene. However, existing methods mostly extend the structures of visual question answering task to audio ones in a simple pattern but may not perform well when perceiving a fine-grained audio scene. To this end, we present a Multi-scale Window Attention Fusion Model (MWAFM) consisting of an asynchronous hybrid attention module and a multi-scale window attention module. The former is designed to aggregate unimodal and cross-modal temporal contexts, while the latter captures sound events of varying lengths and their temporal dependencies for a more comprehensive understanding. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed MWAFM can effectively explore temporal information to facilitate AQA in the fine-grained scene.Code: https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/MWAFM

Robust Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Unconstrained Videos

Cross-modal distillation has been widely used to transfer knowledge across different modalities, enriching the representation of the target unimodal one. Recent studies highly relate the temporal synchronization between vision and sound to the semantic consistency for cross-modal distillation. However, such semantic consistency from the synchronization is hard to guarantee in unconstrained videos, due to the irrelevant modality noise and differentiated semantic correlation. To this end, we first propose a \textit{Modality Noise Filter} (MNF) module to erase the irrelevant noise in teacher modality with cross-modal context. After this purification, we then design a \textit{Contrastive Semantic Calibration} (CSC) module to adaptively distill useful knowledge for target modality, by referring to the differentiated sample-wise semantic correlation in a contrastive fashion. Extensive experiments show that our method could bring a performance boost compared with other distillation methods in both visual action recognition and video retrieval task. We also extend to the audio tagging task to prove the generalization of our method. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/cross-modal-distillation}{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/cross-modal-distillation}.