MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer

Transformers have recently gained significant attention in the computer vision community. However, the lack of scalability of self-attention mechanisms with respect to image size has limited their wide adoption in state-of-the-art vision backbones. In this paper we introduce an efficient and scalable attention model we call multi-axis attention, which consists of two aspects: blocked local and dilated global attention. These design choices allow global-local spatial interactions on arbitrary input resolutions with only linear complexity. We also present a new architectural element by effectively blending our proposed attention model with convolutions, and accordingly propose a simple hierarchical vision backbone, dubbed MaxViT, by simply repeating the basic building block over multiple stages. Notably, MaxViT is able to "see" globally throughout the entire network, even in earlier, high-resolution stages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on a broad spectrum of vision tasks. On image classification, MaxViT achieves state-of-the-art performance under various settings: without extra data, MaxViT attains 86.5\% ImageNet-1K top-1 accuracy; with ImageNet-21K pre-training, our model achieves 88.7\% top-1 accuracy. For downstream tasks, MaxViT as a backbone delivers favorable performance on object detection as well as visual aesthetic assessment. We also show that our proposed model expresses strong generative modeling capability on ImageNet, demonstrating the superior potential of MaxViT blocks as a universal vision module. We will make the code and models publicly available.

Analysis and Optimization of A Double-IRS Cooperatively Assisted System with A Quasi-Static Phase Shift Design

The analysis and optimization of single intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted systems have been extensively studied, whereas little is known regarding multiple-IRS-assisted systems. This paper investigates the analysis and optimization of a double-IRS cooperatively assisted downlink system, where a multi-antenna base station (BS) serves a single-antenna user with the help of two multi-element IRSs, connected by an inter-IRS channel. The channel between any two nodes is modeled with Rician fading. The BS adopts the instantaneous CSI-adaptive maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) beamformer, and the two IRSs adopt a cooperative quasi-static phase shift design. The goal is to maximize the average achievable rate, which can be reflected by the average channel power of the equivalent channel between the BS and user, at a low phase adjustment cost and computational complexity. First, we obtain tractable expressions of the average channel power of the equivalent channel in the general Rician factor, pure line of sight (LoS), and pure non-line of sight (NLoS) regimes, respectively. Then, we jointly optimize the phase shifts of the two IRSs to maximize the average channel power of the equivalent channel in these regimes. The optimization problems are challenging non-convex problems. We obtain globally optimal closed-form solutions for some cases and propose computationally efficient iterative algorithms to obtain stationary points for the other cases. Next, we compare the computational complexity for optimizing the phase shifts and the optimal average channel power of the double-IRS cooperatively assisted system with those of a counterpart single-IRS-assisted system at a large number of reflecting elements in the three regimes. Finally, we numerically demonstrate notable gains of the proposed solutions over the existing solutions at different system parameters.

Contrastive Embedding Distribution Refinement and Entropy-Aware Attention for 3D Point Cloud Classification

Learning a powerful representation from point clouds is a fundamental and challenging problem in the field of computer vision. Different from images where RGB pixels are stored in the regular grid, for point clouds, the underlying semantic and structural information of point clouds is the spatial layout of the points. Moreover, the properties of challenging in-context and background noise pose more challenges to point cloud analysis. One assumption is that the poor performance of the classification model can be attributed to the indistinguishable embedding feature that impedes the search for the optimal classifier. This work offers a new strategy for learning powerful representations via a contrastive learning approach that can be embedded into any point cloud classification network. First, we propose a supervised contrastive classification method to implement embedding feature distribution refinement by improving the intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Second, to solve the confusion problem caused by small inter-class compactness and inter-class separability. Second, to solve the confusion problem caused by small inter-class variations between some similar-looking categories, we propose a confusion-prone class mining strategy to alleviate the confusion effect. Finally, considering that outliers of the sample clusters in the embedding space may cause performance degradation, we design an entropy-aware attention module with information entropy theory to identify the outlier cases and the unstable samples by measuring the uncertainty of predicted probability. The results of extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by achieving 82.9% accuracy on the real-world ScanObjectNN dataset and substantial performance gains up to 2.9% in DCGNN, 3.1% in PointNet++, and 2.4% in GBNet.

MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing

Recent progress on Transformers and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models provide new network architectural designs for computer vision tasks. Although these models proved to be effective in many vision tasks such as image recognition, there remain challenges in adapting them for low-level vision. The inflexibility to support high-resolution images and limitations of local attention are perhaps the main bottlenecks for using Transformers and MLPs in image restoration. In this work we present a multi-axis MLP based architecture, called MAXIM, that can serve as an efficient and flexible general-purpose vision backbone for image processing tasks. MAXIM uses a UNet-shaped hierarchical structure and supports long-range interactions enabled by spatially-gated MLPs. Specifically, MAXIM contains two MLP-based building blocks: a multi-axis gated MLP that allows for efficient and scalable spatial mixing of local and global visual cues, and a cross-gating block, an alternative to cross-attention, which accounts for cross-feature mutual conditioning. Both these modules are exclusively based on MLPs, but also benefit from being both global and `fully-convolutional', two properties that are desirable for image processing. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed MAXIM model achieves state-of-the-art performance on more than ten benchmarks across a range of image processing tasks, including denoising, deblurring, deraining, dehazing, and enhancement while requiring fewer or comparable numbers of parameters and FLOPs than competitive models.

MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer

Image quality assessment (IQA) is an important research topic for understanding and improving visual experience. The current state-of-the-art IQA methods are based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The performance of CNN-based models is often compromised by the fixed shape constraint in batch training. To accommodate this, the input images are usually resized and cropped to a fixed shape, causing image quality degradation. To address this, we design a multi-scale image quality Transformer (MUSIQ) to process native resolution images with varying sizes and aspect ratios. With a multi-scale image representation, our proposed method can capture image quality at different granularities. Furthermore, a novel hash-based 2D spatial embedding and a scale embedding is proposed to support the positional embedding in the multi-scale representation. Experimental results verify that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple large scale IQA datasets such as PaQ-2-PiQ, SPAQ and KonIQ-10k.

An Improved Algorithm of Robot Path Planning in Complex Environment Based on Double DQN

Deep Q Network (DQN) has several limitations when applied in planning a path in environment with a number of dilemmas according to our experiment. The reward function may be hard to model, and successful experience transitions are difficult to find in experience replay. In this context, this paper proposes an improved Double DQN (DDQN) to solve the problem by reference to A* and Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RRT). In order to achieve the rich experiments in experience replay, the initialization of robot in each training round is redefined based on RRT strategy. In addition, reward for the free positions is specially designed to accelerate the learning process according to the definition of position cost in A*. The simulation experimental results validate the efficiency of the improved DDQN, and robot could successfully learn the ability of obstacle avoidance and optimal path planning in which DQN or DDQN has no effect.

Adversarially Adaptive Normalization for Single Domain Generalization

Single domain generalization aims to learn a model that performs well on many unseen domains with only one domain data for training. Existing works focus on studying the adversarial domain augmentation (ADA) to improve the model's generalization capability. The impact on domain generalization of the statistics of normalization layers is still underinvestigated. In this paper, we propose a generic normalization approach, adaptive standardization and rescaling normalization (ASR-Norm), to complement the missing part in previous works. ASR-Norm learns both the standardization and rescaling statistics via neural networks. This new form of normalization can be viewed as a generic form of the traditional normalizations. When trained with ADA, the statistics in ASR-Norm are learned to be adaptive to the data coming from different domains, and hence improves the model generalization performance across domains, especially on the target domain with large discrepancy from the source domain. The experimental results show that ASR-Norm can bring consistent improvement to the state-of-the-art ADA approaches by 1.6%, 2.7%, and 6.3% averagely on the Digits, CIFAR-10-C, and PACS benchmarks, respectively. As a generic tool, the improvement introduced by ASR-Norm is agnostic to the choice of ADA methods.

COMISR: Compression-Informed Video Super-Resolution

Most video super-resolution methods focus on restoring high-resolution video frames from low-resolution videos without taking into account compression. However, most videos on the web or mobile devices are compressed, and the compression can be severe when the bandwidth is limited. In this paper, we propose a new compression-informed video super-resolution model to restore high-resolution content without introducing artifacts caused by compression. The proposed model consists of three modules for video super-resolution: bi-directional recurrent warping, detail-preserving flow estimation, and Laplacian enhancement. All these three modules are used to deal with compression properties such as the location of the intra-frames in the input and smoothness in the output frames. For thorough performance evaluation, we conducted extensive experiments on standard datasets with a wide range of compression rates, covering many real video use cases. We showed that our method not only recovers high-resolution content on uncompressed frames from the widely-used benchmark datasets, but also achieves state-of-the-art performance in super-resolving compressed videos based on numerous quantitative metrics. We also evaluated the proposed method by simulating streaming from YouTube to demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness.

Deep 3D-to-2D Watermarking: Embedding Messages in 3D Meshes and Extracting Them from 2D Renderings

Digital watermarking is widely used for copyright protection. Traditional 3D watermarking approaches or commercial software are typically designed to embed messages into 3D meshes, and later retrieve the messages directly from distorted/undistorted watermarked 3D meshes. Retrieving messages from 2D renderings of such meshes, however, is still challenging and underexplored. We introduce a novel end-to-end learning framework to solve this problem through: 1) an encoder to covertly embed messages in both mesh geometry and textures; 2) a differentiable renderer to render watermarked 3D objects from different camera angles and under varied lighting conditions; 3) a decoder to recover the messages from 2D rendered images. From extensive experiments, we show that our models learn to embed information visually imperceptible to humans, and to reconstruct the embedded information from 2D renderings robust to 3D distortions. In addition, we demonstrate that our method can be generalized to work with different renderers, such as ray tracers and real-time renderers.

Deep Perceptual Image Quality Assessment for Compression

Lossy Image compression is necessary for efficient storage and transfer of data. Typically the trade-off between bit-rate and quality determines the optimal compression level. This makes the image quality metric an integral part of any imaging system. While the existing full-reference metrics such as PSNR and SSIM may be less sensitive to perceptual quality, the recently introduced learning methods may fail to generalize to unseen data. In this paper we propose the largest image compression quality dataset to date with human perceptual preferences, enabling the use of deep learning, and we develop a full reference perceptual quality assessment metric for lossy image compression that outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. We show that the proposed model can effectively learn from thousands of examples available in the new dataset, and consequently it generalizes better to other unseen datasets of human perceptual preference.