Exploring Dynamic Transformer for Efficient Object Tracking

The speed-precision trade-off is a critical problem for visual object tracking which usually requires low latency and deployment on constrained resources. Existing solutions for efficient tracking mainly focus on adopting light-weight backbones or modules, which nevertheless come at the cost of a sacrifice in precision. In this paper, inspired by dynamic network routing, we propose DyTrack, a dynamic transformer framework for efficient tracking. Real-world tracking scenarios exhibit diverse levels of complexity. We argue that a simple network is sufficient for easy frames in video sequences, while more computation could be assigned to difficult ones. DyTrack automatically learns to configure proper reasoning routes for various inputs, gaining better utilization of the available computational budget. Thus, it can achieve higher performance with the same running speed. We formulate instance-specific tracking as a sequential decision problem and attach terminating branches to intermediate layers of the entire model. Especially, to fully utilize the computations, we introduce the feature recycling mechanism to reuse the outputs of predecessors. Furthermore, a target-aware self-distillation strategy is designed to enhance the discriminating capabilities of early predictions by effectively mimicking the representation pattern of the deep model. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DyTrack achieves promising speed-precision trade-offs with only a single model. For instance, DyTrack obtains 64.9% AUC on LaSOT with a speed of 256 fps.

Toward Generalist Anomaly Detection via In-context Residual Learning with Few-shot Sample Prompts

This paper explores the problem of Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD), aiming to train one single detection model that can generalize to detect anomalies in diverse datasets from different application domains without any further training on the target data. Some recent studies have shown that large pre-trained Visual-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have strong generalization capabilities on detecting industrial defects from various datasets, but their methods rely heavily on handcrafted text prompts about defects, making them difficult to generalize to anomalies in other applications, e.g., medical image anomalies or semantic anomalies in natural images. In this work, we propose to train a GAD model with few-shot normal images as sample prompts for AD on diverse datasets on the fly. To this end, we introduce a novel approach that learns an in-context residual learning model for GAD, termed InCTRL. It is trained on an auxiliary dataset to discriminate anomalies from normal samples based on a holistic evaluation of the residuals between query images and few-shot normal sample prompts. Regardless of the datasets, per definition of anomaly, larger residuals are expected for anomalies than normal samples, thereby enabling InCTRL to generalize across different domains without further training. Comprehensive experiments on nine AD datasets are performed to establish a GAD benchmark that encapsulate the detection of industrial defect anomalies, medical anomalies, and semantic anomalies in both one-vs-all and multi-class setting, on which InCTRL is the best performer and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/InCTRL.

EmoWear: Exploring Emotional Teasers for Voice Message Interaction on Smartwatches

Voice messages, by nature, prevent users from gauging the emotional tone without fully diving into the audio content. This hinders the shared emotional experience at the pre-retrieval stage. Research scarcely explored "Emotional Teasers"-pre-retrieval cues offering a glimpse into an awaiting message's emotional tone without disclosing its content. We introduce EmoWear, a smartwatch voice messaging system enabling users to apply 30 animation teasers on message bubbles to reflect emotions. EmoWear eases senders' choice by prioritizing emotions based on semantic and acoustic processing. EmoWear was evaluated in comparison with a mirroring system using color-coded message bubbles as emotional cues (N=24). Results showed EmoWear significantly enhanced emotional communication experience in both receiving and sending messages. The animated teasers were considered intuitive and valued for diverse expressions. Desirable interaction qualities and practical implications are distilled for future design. We thereby contribute both a novel system and empirical knowledge concerning emotional teasers for voice messaging.

Tracking with Human-Intent Reasoning

Advances in perception modeling have significantly improved the performance of object tracking. However, the current methods for specifying the target object in the initial frame are either by 1) using a box or mask template, or by 2) providing an explicit language description. These manners are cumbersome and do not allow the tracker to have self-reasoning ability. Therefore, this work proposes a new tracking task -- Instruction Tracking, which involves providing implicit tracking instructions that require the trackers to perform tracking automatically in video frames. To achieve this, we investigate the integration of knowledge and reasoning capabilities from a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) for object tracking. Specifically, we propose a tracker called TrackGPT, which is capable of performing complex reasoning-based tracking. TrackGPT first uses LVLM to understand tracking instructions and condense the cues of what target to track into referring embeddings. The perception component then generates the tracking results based on the embeddings. To evaluate the performance of TrackGPT, we construct an instruction tracking benchmark called InsTrack, which contains over one thousand instruction-video pairs for instruction tuning and evaluation. Experiments show that TrackGPT achieves competitive performance on referring video object segmentation benchmarks, such as getting a new state-of the-art performance of 66.5 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ on Refer-DAVIS. It also demonstrates a superior performance of instruction tracking under new evaluation protocols. The code and models are available at \href{https://github.com/jiawen-zhu/TrackGPT}{https://github.com/jiawen-zhu/TrackGPT}.

Anomaly Heterogeneity Learning for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection

Open-set supervised anomaly detection (OSAD) - a recently emerging anomaly detection area - aims at utilizing a few samples of anomaly classes seen during training to detect unseen anomalies (i.e., samples from open-set anomaly classes), while effectively identifying the seen anomalies. Benefiting from the prior knowledge illustrated by the seen anomalies, current OSAD methods can often largely reduce false positive errors. However, these methods treat the anomaly examples as from a homogeneous distribution, rendering them less effective in generalizing to unseen anomalies that can be drawn from any distribution. In this paper, we propose to learn heterogeneous anomaly distributions using the limited anomaly examples to address this issue. To this end, we introduce a novel approach, namely Anomaly Heterogeneity Learning (AHL), that simulates a diverse set of heterogeneous (seen and unseen) anomaly distributions and then utilizes them to learn a unified heterogeneous abnormality model. Further, AHL is a generic framework that existing OSAD models can plug and play for enhancing their abnormality modeling. Extensive experiments on nine real-world anomaly detection datasets show that AHL can 1) substantially enhance different state-of-the-art (SOTA) OSAD models in detecting both seen and unseen anomalies, achieving new SOTA performance on a large set of datasets, and 2) effectively generalize to unseen anomalies in new target domains.

DCPT: Darkness Clue-Prompted Tracking in Nighttime UAVs

Existing nighttime unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trackers follow an "Enhance-then-Track" architecture - first using a light enhancer to brighten the nighttime video, then employing a daytime tracker to locate the object. This separate enhancement and tracking fails to build an end-to-end trainable vision system. To address this, we propose a novel architecture called Darkness Clue-Prompted Tracking (DCPT) that achieves robust UAV tracking at night by efficiently learning to generate darkness clue prompts. Without a separate enhancer, DCPT directly encodes anti-dark capabilities into prompts using a darkness clue prompter (DCP). Specifically, DCP iteratively learns emphasizing and undermining projections for darkness clues. It then injects these learned visual prompts into a daytime tracker with fixed parameters across transformer layers. Moreover, a gated feature aggregation mechanism enables adaptive fusion between prompts and between prompts and the base model. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art performance for DCPT on multiple dark scenario benchmarks. The unified end-to-end learning of enhancement and tracking in DCPT enables a more trainable system. The darkness clue prompting efficiently injects anti-dark knowledge without extra modules. Code and models will be released.

Tracking Anything in High Quality

Visual object tracking is a fundamental video task in computer vision. Recently, the notably increasing power of perception algorithms allows the unification of single/multiobject and box/mask-based tracking. Among them, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) attracts much attention. In this report, we propose HQTrack, a framework for High Quality Tracking anything in videos. HQTrack mainly consists of a video multi-object segmenter (VMOS) and a mask refiner (MR). Given the object to be tracked in the initial frame of a video, VMOS propagates the object masks to the current frame. The mask results at this stage are not accurate enough since VMOS is trained on several closeset video object segmentation (VOS) datasets, which has limited ability to generalize to complex and corner scenes. To further improve the quality of tracking masks, a pretrained MR model is employed to refine the tracking results. As a compelling testament to the effectiveness of our paradigm, without employing any tricks such as test-time data augmentations and model ensemble, HQTrack ranks the 2nd place in the Visual Object Tracking and Segmentation (VOTS2023) challenge. Code and models are available at https://github.com/jiawen-zhu/HQTrack.

3rd Place Solution for PVUW2023 VSS Track: A Large Model for Semantic Segmentation on VSPW

In this paper, we introduce 3rd place solution for PVUW2023 VSS track. Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision with numerous real-world applications. We have explored various image-level visual backbones and segmentation heads to tackle the problem of video semantic segmentation. Through our experimentation, we find that InternImage-H as the backbone and Mask2former as the segmentation head achieves the best performance. In addition, we explore two post-precessing methods: CascadePSP and Segment Anything Model (SAM). Ultimately, our approach obtains 62.60\% and 64.84\% mIoU on the VSPW test set1 and final test set, respectively, securing the third position in the PVUW2023 VSS track.