FreePIH: Training-Free Painterly Image Harmonization with Diffusion Model

This paper provides an efficient training-free painterly image harmonization (PIH) method, dubbed FreePIH, that leverages only a pre-trained diffusion model to achieve state-of-the-art harmonization results. Unlike existing methods that require either training auxiliary networks or fine-tuning a large pre-trained backbone, or both, to harmonize a foreground object with a painterly-style background image, our FreePIH tames the denoising process as a plug-in module for foreground image style transfer. Specifically, we find that the very last few steps of the denoising (i.e., generation) process strongly correspond to the stylistic information of images, and based on this, we propose to augment the latent features of both the foreground and background images with Gaussians for a direct denoising-based harmonization. To guarantee the fidelity of the harmonized image, we make use of multi-scale features to enforce the consistency of the content and stability of the foreground objects in the latent space, and meanwhile, aligning both fore-/back-grounds with the same style. Moreover, to accommodate the generation with more structural and textural details, we further integrate text prompts to attend to the latent features, hence improving the generation quality. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on COCO and LAION 5B datasets demonstrate that our method can surpass representative baselines by large margins.

Attribute-Aware Representation Rectification for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Generalized Zero-shot Learning (GZSL) has yielded remarkable performance by designing a series of unbiased visual-semantics mappings, wherein, the precision relies heavily on the completeness of extracted visual features from both seen and unseen classes. However, as a common practice in GZSL, the pre-trained feature extractor may easily exhibit difficulty in capturing domain-specific traits of the downstream tasks/datasets to provide fine-grained discriminative features, i.e., domain bias, which hinders the overall recognition performance, especially for unseen classes. Recent studies partially address this issue by fine-tuning feature extractors, while may inevitably incur catastrophic forgetting and overfitting issues. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Attribute-Aware Representation Rectification framework for GZSL, dubbed $\mathbf{(AR)^{2}}$, to adaptively rectify the feature extractor to learn novel features while keeping original valuable features. Specifically, our method consists of two key components, i.e., Unseen-Aware Distillation (UAD) and Attribute-Guided Learning (AGL). During training, UAD exploits the prior knowledge of attribute texts that are shared by both seen/unseen classes with attention mechanisms to detect and maintain unseen class-sensitive visual features in a targeted manner, and meanwhile, AGL aims to steer the model to focus on valuable features and suppress them to fit noisy elements in the seen classes by attribute-guided representation learning. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Sparsity-Driven EEG Channel Selection for Brain-Assisted Speech Enhancement

Speech enhancement is widely used as a front-end to improve the speech quality in many audio systems, while it is still hard to extract the target speech in multi-talker conditions without prior information on the speaker identity. It was shown by auditory attention decoding that the attended speaker can be revealed by the electroencephalogram (EEG) of the listener implicitly. In this work, we therefore propose a novel end-to-end brain-assisted speech enhancement network (BASEN), which incorporates the listeners' EEG signals and adopts a temporal convolutional network together with a convolutional multi-layer cross attention module to fuse EEG-audio features. Considering that an EEG cap with sparse channels exhibits multiple benefits and in practice many electrodes might contribute marginally, we further propose two channel selection methods, called residual Gumbel selection and convolutional regularization selection. They are dedicated to tackling the issues of training instability and duplicated channel selections, respectively. Experimental results on a public dataset show the superiority of the proposed baseline BASEN over existing approaches. The proposed channel selection methods can significantly reduce the amount of informative EEG channels with a negligible impact on the performance.

Improving Adversarial Transferability by Stable Diffusion

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to adversarial examples, which introduce imperceptible perturbations to benign samples, deceiving DNN predictions. While some attack methods excel in the white-box setting, they often struggle in the black-box scenario, particularly against models fortified with defense mechanisms. Various techniques have emerged to enhance the transferability of adversarial attacks for the black-box scenario. Among these, input transformation-based attacks have demonstrated their effectiveness. In this paper, we explore the potential of leveraging data generated by Stable Diffusion to boost adversarial transferability. This approach draws inspiration from recent research that harnessed synthetic data generated by Stable Diffusion to enhance model generalization. In particular, previous work has highlighted the correlation between the presence of both real and synthetic data and improved model generalization. Building upon this insight, we introduce a novel attack method called Stable Diffusion Attack Method (SDAM), which incorporates samples generated by Stable Diffusion to augment input images. Furthermore, we propose a fast variant of SDAM to reduce computational overhead while preserving high adversarial transferability. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin. Moreover, our approach is compatible with existing transfer-based attacks to further enhance adversarial transferability.

Pix2HDR -- A pixel-wise acquisition and deep learning-based synthesis approach for high-speed HDR videos

Accurately capturing dynamic scenes with wide-ranging motion and light intensity is crucial for many vision applications. However, acquiring high-speed high dynamic range (HDR) video is challenging because the camera's frame rate restricts its dynamic range. Existing methods sacrifice speed to acquire multi-exposure frames. Yet, misaligned motion in these frames can still pose complications for HDR fusion algorithms, resulting in artifacts. Instead of frame-based exposures, we sample the videos using individual pixels at varying exposures and phase offsets. Implemented on a pixel-wise programmable image sensor, our sampling pattern simultaneously captures fast motion at a high dynamic range. We then transform pixel-wise outputs into an HDR video using end-to-end learned weights from deep neural networks, achieving high spatiotemporal resolution with minimized motion blurring. We demonstrate aliasing-free HDR video acquisition at 1000 FPS, resolving fast motion under low-light conditions and against bright backgrounds - both challenging conditions for conventional cameras. By combining the versatility of pixel-wise sampling patterns with the strength of deep neural networks at decoding complex scenes, our method greatly enhances the vision system's adaptability and performance in dynamic conditions.

Segue: Side-information Guided Generative Unlearnable Examples for Facial Privacy Protection in Real World

The widespread use of face recognition technology has given rise to privacy concerns, as many individuals are worried about the collection and utilization of their facial data. To address these concerns, researchers are actively exploring the concept of ``unlearnable examples", by adding imperceptible perturbation to data in the model training stage, which aims to prevent the model from learning discriminate features of the target face. However, current methods are inefficient and cannot guarantee transferability and robustness at the same time, causing impracticality in the real world. To remedy it, we propose a novel method called Segue: Side-information guided generative unlearnable examples. Specifically, we leverage a once-trained multiple-used model to generate the desired perturbation rather than the time-consuming gradient-based method. To improve transferability, we introduce side information such as true labels and pseudo labels, which are inherently consistent across different scenarios. For robustness enhancement, a distortion layer is integrated into the training pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed Segue is much faster than previous methods (1000$\times$) and achieves transferable effectiveness across different datasets and model architectures. Furthermore, it can resist JPEG compression, adversarial training, and some standard data augmentations.

IntentDial: An Intent Graph based Multi-Turn Dialogue System with Reasoning Path Visualization

Intent detection and identification from multi-turn dialogue has become a widely explored technique in conversational agents, for example, voice assistants and intelligent customer services. The conventional approaches typically cast the intent mining process as a classification task. Although neural classifiers have proven adept at such classification tasks, the issue of neural network models often impedes their practical deployment in real-world settings. We present a novel graph-based multi-turn dialogue system called , which identifies a user's intent by identifying intent elements and a standard query from a dynamically constructed and extensible intent graph using reinforcement learning. In addition, we provide visualization components to monitor the immediate reasoning path for each turn of a dialogue, which greatly facilitates further improvement of the system.

Real-Fake: Effective Training Data Synthesis Through Distribution Matching

Synthetic training data has gained prominence in numerous learning tasks and scenarios, offering advantages such as dataset augmentation, generalization evaluation, and privacy preservation. Despite these benefits, the efficiency of synthetic data generated by current methodologies remains inferior when training advanced deep models exclusively, limiting its practical utility. To address this challenge, we analyze the principles underlying training data synthesis for supervised learning and elucidate a principled theoretical framework from the distribution-matching perspective that explicates the mechanisms governing synthesis efficacy. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our synthetic data across diverse image classification tasks, both as a replacement for and augmentation to real datasets, while also benefits challenging tasks such as out-of-distribution generalization and privacy preservation.

Multiview Transformer: Rethinking Spatial Information in Hyperspectral Image Classification

Identifying the land cover category for each pixel in a hyperspectral image (HSI) relies on spectral and spatial information. An HSI cuboid with a specific patch size is utilized to extract spatial-spectral feature representation for the central pixel. In this article, we investigate that scene-specific but not essential correlations may be recorded in an HSI cuboid. This additional information improves the model performance on existing HSI datasets and makes it hard to properly evaluate the ability of a model. We refer to this problem as the spatial overfitting issue and utilize strict experimental settings to avoid it. We further propose a multiview transformer for HSI classification, which consists of multiview principal component analysis (MPCA), spectral encoder-decoder (SED), and spatial-pooling tokenization transformer (SPTT). MPCA performs dimension reduction on an HSI via constructing spectral multiview observations and applying PCA on each view data to extract low-dimensional view representation. The combination of view representations, named multiview representation, is the dimension reduction output of the MPCA. To aggregate the multiview information, a fully-convolutional SED with a U-shape in spectral dimension is introduced to extract a multiview feature map. SPTT transforms the multiview features into tokens using the spatial-pooling tokenization strategy and learns robust and discriminative spatial-spectral features for land cover identification. Classification is conducted with a linear classifier. Experiments on three HSI datasets with rigid settings demonstrate the superiority of the proposed multiview transformer over the state-of-the-art methods.

Latent Diffusion Model for Medical Image Standardization and Enhancement

Computed tomography (CT) serves as an effective tool for lung cancer screening, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis, providing a rich source of features to quantify temporal and spatial tumor changes. Nonetheless, the diversity of CT scanners and customized acquisition protocols can introduce significant inconsistencies in texture features, even when assessing the same patient. This variability poses a fundamental challenge for subsequent research that relies on consistent image features. Existing CT image standardization models predominantly utilize GAN-based supervised or semi-supervised learning, but their performance remains limited. We present DiffusionCT, an innovative score-based DDPM model that operates in the latent space to transform disparate non-standard distributions into a standardized form. The architecture comprises a U-Net-based encoder-decoder, augmented by a DDPM model integrated at the bottleneck position. First, the encoder-decoder is trained independently, without embedding DDPM, to capture the latent representation of the input data. Second, the latent DDPM model is trained while keeping the encoder-decoder parameters fixed. Finally, the decoder uses the transformed latent representation to generate a standardized CT image, providing a more consistent basis for downstream analysis. Empirical tests on patient CT images indicate notable improvements in image standardization using DiffusionCT. Additionally, the model significantly reduces image noise in SPAD images, further validating the effectiveness of DiffusionCT for advanced imaging tasks.