Training-Free Semantic Video Composition via Pre-trained Diffusion Model

The video composition task aims to integrate specified foregrounds and backgrounds from different videos into a harmonious composite. Current approaches, predominantly trained on videos with adjusted foreground color and lighting, struggle to address deep semantic disparities beyond superficial adjustments, such as domain gaps. Therefore, we propose a training-free pipeline employing a pre-trained diffusion model imbued with semantic prior knowledge, which can process composite videos with broader semantic disparities. Specifically, we process the video frames in a cascading manner and handle each frame in two processes with the diffusion model. In the inversion process, we propose Balanced Partial Inversion to obtain generation initial points that balance reversibility and modifiability. Then, in the generation process, we further propose Inter-Frame Augmented attention to augment foreground continuity across frames. Experimental results reveal that our pipeline successfully ensures the visual harmony and inter-frame coherence of the outputs, demonstrating efficacy in managing broader semantic disparities.

Context-based Transfer and Efficient Iterative Learning for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Unbiased Scene Graph Generation (USGG) aims to address biased predictions in SGG. To that end, data transfer methods are designed to convert coarse-grained predicates into fine-grained ones, mitigating imbalanced distribution. However, them overlook contextual relevance between transferred labels and subject-object pairs, such as unsuitability of 'eating' for 'woman-table'. Furthermore, they typically involve a two-stage process with significant computational costs, starting with pre-training a model for data transfer, followed by training from scratch using transferred labels. Thus, we introduce a plug-and-play method named CITrans, which iteratively trains SGG models with progressively enhanced data. First, we introduce Context-Restricted Transfer (CRT), which imposes subject-object constraints within predicates' semantic space to achieve fine-grained data transfer. Subsequently, Efficient Iterative Learning (EIL) iteratively trains models and progressively generates enhanced labels which are consistent with model's learning state, thereby accelerating the training process. Finally, extensive experiments show that CITrans achieves state-of-the-art and results with high efficiency.

ProS: Prompting-to-simulate Generalized knowledge for Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval

The goal of Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval (UCDR) is to achieve robust performance in generalized test scenarios, wherein data may belong to strictly unknown domains and categories during training. Recently, pre-trained models with prompt tuning have shown strong generalization capabilities and attained noteworthy achievements in various downstream tasks, such as few-shot learning and video-text retrieval. However, applying them directly to UCDR may not sufficiently to handle both domain shift (i.e., adapting to unfamiliar domains) and semantic shift (i.e., transferring to unknown categories). To this end, we propose Prompting-to-Simulate (ProS), the first method to apply prompt tuning for UCDR. ProS employs a two-step process to simulate Content-aware Dynamic Prompts (CaDP) which can impact models to produce generalized features for UCDR. Concretely, in Prompt Units Learning stage, we introduce two Prompt Units to individually capture domain and semantic knowledge in a mask-and-align way. Then, in Context-aware Simulator Learning stage, we train a Content-aware Prompt Simulator under a simulated test scenarios to produce the corresponding CaDP. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance without bringing excessive parameters. Our method is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProS

Make-A-Storyboard: A General Framework for Storyboard with Disentangled and Merged Control

Story Visualization aims to generate images aligned with story prompts, reflecting the coherence of storybooks through visual consistency among characters and scenes.Whereas current approaches exclusively concentrate on characters and neglect the visual consistency among contextually correlated scenes, resulting in independent character images without inter-image coherence.To tackle this issue, we propose a new presentation form for Story Visualization called Storyboard, inspired by film-making, as illustrated in Fig.1.Specifically, a Storyboard unfolds a story into visual representations scene by scene. Within each scene in Storyboard, characters engage in activities at the same location, necessitating both visually consistent scenes and characters.For Storyboard, we design a general framework coined as Make-A-Storyboard that applies disentangled control over the consistency of contextual correlated characters and scenes and then merge them to form harmonized images.Extensive experiments demonstrate 1) Effectiveness.the effectiveness of the method in story alignment, character consistency, and scene correlation; 2) Generalization. Our method could be seamlessly integrated into mainstream Image Customization methods, empowering them with the capability of story visualization.

F3-Pruning: A Training-Free and Generalized Pruning Strategy towards Faster and Finer Text-to-Video Synthesis

Recently Text-to-Video (T2V) synthesis has undergone a breakthrough by training transformers or diffusion models on large-scale datasets. Nevertheless, inferring such large models incurs huge costs.Previous inference acceleration works either require costly retraining or are model-specific.To address this issue, instead of retraining we explore the inference process of two mainstream T2V models using transformers and diffusion models.The exploration reveals the redundancy in temporal attention modules of both models, which are commonly utilized to establish temporal relations among frames.Consequently, we propose a training-free and generalized pruning strategy called F3-Pruning to prune redundant temporal attention weights.Specifically, when aggregate temporal attention values are ranked below a certain ratio, corresponding weights will be pruned.Extensive experiments on three datasets using a classic transformer-based model CogVideo and a typical diffusion-based model Tune-A-Video verify the effectiveness of F3-Pruning in inference acceleration, quality assurance and broad applicability.

MotionZero:Exploiting Motion Priors for Zero-shot Text-to-Video Generation

Zero-shot Text-to-Video synthesis generates videos based on prompts without any videos. Without motion information from videos, motion priors implied in prompts are vital guidance. For example, the prompt "airplane landing on the runway" indicates motion priors that the "airplane" moves downwards while the "runway" stays static. Whereas the motion priors are not fully exploited in previous approaches, thus leading to two nontrivial issues: 1) the motion variation pattern remains unaltered and prompt-agnostic for disregarding motion priors; 2) the motion control of different objects is inaccurate and entangled without considering the independent motion priors of different objects. To tackle the two issues, we propose a prompt-adaptive and disentangled motion control strategy coined as MotionZero, which derives motion priors from prompts of different objects by Large-Language-Models and accordingly applies motion control of different objects to corresponding regions in disentanglement. Furthermore, to facilitate videos with varying degrees of motion amplitude, we propose a Motion-Aware Attention scheme which adjusts attention among frames by motion amplitude. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our strategy could correctly control motion of different objects and support versatile applications including zero-shot video edit.

Class Gradient Projection For Continual Learning

Catastrophic forgetting is one of the most critical challenges in Continual Learning (CL). Recent approaches tackle this problem by projecting the gradient update orthogonal to the gradient subspace of existing tasks. While the results are remarkable, those approaches ignore the fact that these calculated gradients are not guaranteed to be orthogonal to the gradient subspace of each class due to the class deviation in tasks, e.g., distinguishing "Man" from "Sea" v.s. differentiating "Boy" from "Girl". Therefore, this strategy may still cause catastrophic forgetting for some classes. In this paper, we propose Class Gradient Projection (CGP), which calculates the gradient subspace from individual classes rather than tasks. Gradient update orthogonal to the gradient subspace of existing classes can be effectively utilized to minimize interference from other classes. To improve the generalization and efficiency, we further design a Base Refining (BR) algorithm to combine similar classes and refine class bases dynamically. Moreover, we leverage a contrastive learning method to improve the model's ability to handle unseen tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. It improves the previous methods by 2.0% on the CIFAR-100 dataset.

Continual Referring Expression Comprehension via Dual Modular Memorization

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) aims to localize an image region of a given object described by a natural-language expression. While promising performance has been demonstrated, existing REC algorithms make a strong assumption that training data feeding into a model are given upfront, which degrades its practicality for real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose Continual Referring Expression Comprehension (CREC), a new setting for REC, where a model is learning on a stream of incoming tasks. In order to continuously improve the model on sequential tasks without forgetting prior learned knowledge and without repeatedly re-training from a scratch, we propose an effective baseline method named Dual Modular Memorization (DMM), which alleviates the problem of catastrophic forgetting by two memorization modules: Implicit-Memory and Explicit-Memory. Specifically, the former module aims to constrain drastic changes to important parameters learned on old tasks when learning a new task; while the latter module maintains a buffer pool to dynamically select and store representative samples of each seen task for future rehearsal. We create three benchmarks for the new CREC setting, by respectively re-splitting three widely-used REC datasets RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg into sequential tasks. Extensive experiments on the constructed benchmarks demonstrate that our DMM method significantly outperforms other alternatives, based on two popular REC backbones. We make the source code and benchmarks publicly available to foster future progress in this field: https://github.com/zackschen/DMM.

CUCL: Codebook for Unsupervised Continual Learning

The focus of this study is on Unsupervised Continual Learning (UCL), as it presents an alternative to Supervised Continual Learning which needs high-quality manual labeled data. The experiments under the UCL paradigm indicate a phenomenon where the results on the first few tasks are suboptimal. This phenomenon can render the model inappropriate for practical applications. To address this issue, after analyzing the phenomenon and identifying the lack of diversity as a vital factor, we propose a method named Codebook for Unsupervised Continual Learning (CUCL) which promotes the model to learn discriminative features to complete the class boundary. Specifically, we first introduce a Product Quantization to inject diversity into the representation and apply a cross quantized contrastive loss between the original representation and the quantized one to capture discriminative information. Then, based on the quantizer, we propose an effective Codebook Rehearsal to address catastrophic forgetting. This study involves conducting extensive experiments on CIFAR100, TinyImageNet, and MiniImageNet benchmark datasets. Our method significantly boosts the performances of supervised and unsupervised methods. For instance, on TinyImageNet, our method led to a relative improvement of 12.76% and 7% when compared with Simsiam and BYOL, respectively.

Towards a Unified Transformer-based Framework for Scene Graph Generation and Human-object Interaction Detection

Scene graph generation (SGG) and human-object interaction (HOI) detection are two important visual tasks aiming at localising and recognising relationships between objects, and interactions between humans and objects, respectively. Prevailing works treat these tasks as distinct tasks, leading to the development of task-specific models tailored to individual datasets. However, we posit that the presence of visual relationships can furnish crucial contextual and intricate relational cues that significantly augment the inference of human-object interactions. This motivates us to think if there is a natural intrinsic relationship between the two tasks, where scene graphs can serve as a source for inferring human-object interactions. In light of this, we introduce SG2HOI+, a unified one-step model based on the Transformer architecture. Our approach employs two interactive hierarchical Transformers to seamlessly unify the tasks of SGG and HOI detection. Concretely, we initiate a relation Transformer tasked with generating relation triples from a suite of visual features. Subsequently, we employ another transformer-based decoder to predict human-object interactions based on the generated relation triples. A comprehensive series of experiments conducted across established benchmark datasets including Visual Genome, V-COCO, and HICO-DET demonstrates the compelling performance of our SG2HOI+ model in comparison to prevalent one-stage SGG models. Remarkably, our approach achieves competitive performance when compared to state-of-the-art HOI methods. Additionally, we observe that our SG2HOI+ jointly trained on both SGG and HOI tasks in an end-to-end manner yields substantial improvements for both tasks compared to individualized training paradigms.