MTKD: Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for Image Super-Resolution

Knowledge distillation (KD) has emerged as a promising technique in deep learning, typically employed to enhance a compact student network through learning from their high-performance but more complex teacher variant. When applied in the context of image super-resolution, most KD approaches are modified versions of methods developed for other computer vision tasks, which are based on training strategies with a single teacher and simple loss functions. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation (MTKD) framework specifically for image super-resolution. It exploits the advantages of multiple teachers by combining and enhancing the outputs of these teacher models, which then guides the learning process of the compact student network. To achieve more effective learning performance, we have also developed a new wavelet-based loss function for MTKD, which can better optimize the training process by observing differences in both the spatial and frequency domains. We fully evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing it to five commonly used KD methods for image super-resolution based on three popular network architectures. The results show that the proposed MTKD method achieves evident improvements in super-resolution performance, up to 0.46dB (based on PSNR), over state-of-the-art KD approaches across different network structures. The source code of MTKD will be made available here for public evaluation.

Cross-domain Fiber Cluster Shape Analysis for Language Performance Cognitive Score Prediction

Shape plays an important role in computer graphics, offering informative features to convey an object's morphology and functionality. Shape analysis in brain imaging can help interpret structural and functionality correlations of the human brain. In this work, we investigate the shape of the brain's 3D white matter connections and its potential predictive relationship to human cognitive function. We reconstruct brain connections as sequences of 3D points using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) tractography. To describe each connection, we extract 12 shape descriptors in addition to traditional dMRI connectivity and tissue microstructure features. We introduce a novel framework, Shape--fused Fiber Cluster Transformer (SFFormer), that leverages a multi-head cross-attention feature fusion module to predict subject-specific language performance based on dMRI tractography. We assess the performance of the method on a large dataset including 1065 healthy young adults. The results demonstrate that both the transformer-based SFFormer model and its inter/intra feature fusion with shape, microstructure, and connectivity are informative, and together, they improve the prediction of subject-specific language performance scores. Overall, our results indicate that the shape of the brain's connections is predictive of human language function.

Ensemble Adversarial Defense via Integration of Multiple Dispersed Low Curvature Models

The integration of an ensemble of deep learning models has been extensively explored to enhance defense against adversarial attacks. The diversity among sub-models increases the attack cost required to deceive the majority of the ensemble, thereby improving the adversarial robustness. While existing approaches mainly center on increasing diversity in feature representations or dispersion of first-order gradients with respect to input, the limited correlation between these diversity metrics and adversarial robustness constrains the performance of ensemble adversarial defense. In this work, we aim to enhance ensemble diversity by reducing attack transferability. We identify second-order gradients, which depict the loss curvature, as a key factor in adversarial robustness. Computing the Hessian matrix involved in second-order gradients is computationally expensive. To address this, we approximate the Hessian-vector product using differential approximation. Given that low curvature provides better robustness, our ensemble model was designed to consider the influence of curvature among different sub-models. We introduce a novel regularizer to train multiple more-diverse low-curvature network models. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that our ensemble model exhibits superior robustness against a range of attacks, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach.

Unifying Lane-Level Traffic Prediction from a Graph Structural Perspective: Benchmark and Baseline

Traffic prediction has long been a focal and pivotal area in research, witnessing both significant strides from city-level to road-level predictions in recent years. With the advancement of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies, autonomous driving, and large-scale models in the traffic domain, lane-level traffic prediction has emerged as an indispensable direction. However, further progress in this field is hindered by the absence of comprehensive and unified evaluation standards, coupled with limited public availability of data and code. This paper extensively analyzes and categorizes existing research in lane-level traffic prediction, establishes a unified spatial topology structure and prediction tasks, and introduces a simple baseline model, GraphMLP, based on graph structure and MLP networks. We have replicated codes not publicly available in existing studies and, based on this, thoroughly and fairly assessed various models in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and applicability, providing insights for practical applications. Additionally, we have released three new datasets and corresponding codes to accelerate progress in this field, all of which can be found on https://github.com/ShuhaoLii/TITS24LaneLevel-Traffic-Benchmark.

Speech-driven Personalized Gesture Synthetics: Harnessing Automatic Fuzzy Feature Inference

Speech-driven gesture generation is an emerging field within virtual human creation. However, a significant challenge lies in accurately determining and processing the multitude of input features (such as acoustic, semantic, emotional, personality, and even subtle unknown features). Traditional approaches, reliant on various explicit feature inputs and complex multimodal processing, constrain the expressiveness of resulting gestures and limit their applicability. To address these challenges, we present Persona-Gestor, a novel end-to-end generative model designed to generate highly personalized 3D full-body gestures solely relying on raw speech audio. The model combines a fuzzy feature extractor and a non-autoregressive Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN) transformer diffusion architecture. The fuzzy feature extractor harnesses a fuzzy inference strategy that automatically infers implicit, continuous fuzzy features. These fuzzy features, represented as a unified latent feature, are fed into the AdaLN transformer. The AdaLN transformer introduces a conditional mechanism that applies a uniform function across all tokens, thereby effectively modeling the correlation between the fuzzy features and the gesture sequence. This module ensures a high level of gesture-speech synchronization while preserving naturalness. Finally, we employ the diffusion model to train and infer various gestures. Extensive subjective and objective evaluations on the Trinity, ZEGGS, and BEAT datasets confirm our model's superior performance to the current state-of-the-art approaches. Persona-Gestor improves the system's usability and generalization capabilities, setting a new benchmark in speech-driven gesture synthesis and broadening the horizon for virtual human technology. Supplementary videos and code can be accessed at https://zf223669.github.io/Diffmotion-v2-website/

Gradient-Aware Logit Adjustment Loss for Long-tailed Classifier

In the real-world setting, data often follows a long-tailed distribution, where head classes contain significantly more training samples than tail classes. Consequently, models trained on such data tend to be biased toward head classes. The medium of this bias is imbalanced gradients, which include not only the ratio of scale between positive and negative gradients but also imbalanced gradients from different negative classes. Therefore, we propose the Gradient-Aware Logit Adjustment (GALA) loss, which adjusts the logits based on accumulated gradients to balance the optimization process. Additionally, We find that most of the solutions to long-tailed problems are still biased towards head classes in the end, and we propose a simple and post hoc prediction re-balancing strategy to further mitigate the basis toward head class. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple popular long-tailed recognition benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of these two designs. Our approach achieves top-1 accuracy of 48.5\%, 41.4\%, and 73.3\% on CIFAR100-LT, Places-LT, and iNaturalist, outperforming the state-of-the-art method GCL by a significant margin of 3.62\%, 0.76\% and 1.2\%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/lt-project-repository/lt-project.

LTGC: Long-tail Recognition via Leveraging LLMs-driven Generated Content

Long-tail recognition is challenging because it requires the model to learn good representations from tail categories and address imbalances across all categories. In this paper, we propose a novel generative and fine-tuning framework, LTGC, to handle long-tail recognition via leveraging generated content. Firstly, inspired by the rich implicit knowledge in large-scale models (e.g., large language models, LLMs), LTGC leverages the power of these models to parse and reason over the original tail data to produce diverse tail-class content. We then propose several novel designs for LTGC to ensure the quality of the generated data and to efficiently fine-tune the model using both the generated and original data. The visualization demonstrates the effectiveness of the generation module in LTGC, which produces accurate and diverse tail data. Additionally, the experimental results demonstrate that our LTGC outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on popular long-tailed benchmarks.

EVA-CLIP-18B: Scaling CLIP to 18 Billion Parameters

Scaling up contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) is critical for empowering both vision and multimodal models. We present EVA-CLIP-18B, the largest and most powerful open-source CLIP model to date, with 18-billion parameters. With only 6-billion training samples seen, EVA-CLIP-18B achieves an exceptional 80.7% zero-shot top-1 accuracy averaged across 27 widely recognized image classification benchmarks, outperforming its forerunner EVA-CLIP (5-billion parameters) and other open-source CLIP models by a large margin. Remarkably, we observe a consistent performance improvement with the model size scaling of EVA-CLIP, despite maintaining a constant training dataset of 2-billion image-text pairs from LAION-2B and COYO-700M. This dataset is openly available and much smaller than the in-house datasets (e.g., DFN-5B, WebLI-10B) employed in other state-of-the-art CLIP models. EVA-CLIP-18B demonstrates the potential of EVA-style weak-to-strong visual model scaling. With our model weights made publicly available, we hope to facilitate future research in vision and multimodal foundation models.

Immersive Video Compression using Implicit Neural Representations

Recent work on implicit neural representations (INRs) has evidenced their potential for efficiently representing and encoding conventional video content. In this paper we, for the first time, extend their application to immersive (multi-view) videos, by proposing MV-HiNeRV, a new INR-based immersive video codec. MV-HiNeRV is an enhanced version of a state-of-the-art INR-based video codec, HiNeRV, which was developed for single-view video compression. We have modified the model to learn a different group of feature grids for each view, and share the learnt network parameters among all views. This enables the model to effectively exploit the spatio-temporal and the inter-view redundancy that exists within multi-view videos. The proposed codec was used to compress multi-view texture and depth video sequences in the MPEG Immersive Video (MIV) Common Test Conditions, and tested against the MIV Test model (TMIV) that uses the VVenC video codec. The results demonstrate the superior performance of MV-HiNeRV, with significant coding gains (up to 72.33%) over TMIV. The implementation of MV-HiNeRV will be published for further development and evaluation.

3D Landmark Detection on Human Point Clouds: A Benchmark and A Dual Cascade Point Transformer Framework

3D landmark detection plays a pivotal role in various applications such as 3D registration, pose estimation, and virtual try-on. While considerable success has been achieved in 2D human landmark detection or pose estimation, there is a notable scarcity of reported works on landmark detection in unordered 3D point clouds. This paper introduces a novel challenge, namely 3D landmark detection on human point clouds, presenting two primary contributions. Firstly, we establish a comprehensive human point cloud dataset, named HPoint103, designed to support the 3D landmark detection community. This dataset comprises 103 human point clouds created with commercial software and actors, each manually annotated with 11 stable landmarks. Secondly, we propose a Dual Cascade Point Transformer (D-CPT) model for precise point-based landmark detection. D-CPT gradually refines the landmarks through cascade Transformer decoder layers across the entire point cloud stream, simultaneously enhancing landmark coordinates with a RefineNet over local regions. Comparative evaluations with popular point-based methods on HPoint103 and the public dataset DHP19 demonstrate the dramatic outperformance of our D-CPT. Additionally, the integration of our RefineNet into existing methods consistently improves performance.