AttriStory: Fine-grained Attribute Realization for Visual Storytelling with Diffusion Models

Visual storytelling with diffusion models has made impressive strides in maintaining character consistency across narrative scenes. However, a critical gap remains: while these methods ensure a character remains consistent across scenes, they provide no systematic method to ensure if fine-grained attributes such as color and textures of clothing, accessories are faithfully rendered in the generated images. Towards this goal, we introduce AttriStory, a benchmark enabling attribute realization in visual storytelling. We curate 200 multi-scene stories across 10 distinct artistic styles using Large Language Model. Each scene is constructed with detailed attribute specifications to enable rich visual narratives. Further, to address attribute realization, we propose a plug-and-play latent optimization module that operates during early denoising steps, when the model establishes structural and semantic content. We achieve this through AttriLoss objective designed to maximize alignment between the cross-attention maps for desired attribute-object pairs while suppressing spurious associations, guiding models to localize attributes correctly. This approach operates orthogonally to existing consistency mechanisms, integrating seamlessly with current story generation pipelines without requiring architectural modifications. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements on incorporating AttriLoss across all baselines. This work positions attribute realization as a distinct, complementary dimension of visual storytelling, alongside character consistency, advancing the field toward fine-grained attribute-controlled story generation. Project-page:https://manogna-s.github.io/attristory/

Segmentation Assisted Incremental Test Time Adaptation in an Open World

In dynamic environments, unfamiliar objects and distribution shifts are often encountered, which challenge the generalization abilities of the deployed trained models. This work addresses Incremental Test Time Adaptation of Vision Language Models, tackling scenarios where unseen classes and unseen domains continuously appear during testing. Unlike traditional Test Time Adaptation approaches, where the test stream comes only from a predefined set of classes, our framework allows models to adapt simultaneously to both covariate and label shifts, actively incorporating new classes as they emerge. Towards this goal, we establish a new benchmark for ITTA, integrating single image TTA methods for VLMs with active labeling techniques that query an oracle for samples potentially representing unseen classes during test time. We propose a segmentation assisted active labeling module, termed SegAssist, which is training free and repurposes the segmentation capabilities of VLMs to refine active sample selection, prioritizing samples likely to belong to unseen classes. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the potential of SegAssist to enhance the performance of VLMs in real world scenarios, where continuous adaptation to emerging data is essential. Project-page:https://manogna-s.github.io/segassist/

Effectiveness of Vision Language Models for Open-world Single Image Test Time Adaptation

We propose a novel framework to address the real-world challenging task of Single Image Test Time Adaptation in an open and dynamic environment. We leverage large scale Vision Language Models like CLIP to enable real time adaptation on a per-image basis without access to source data or ground truth labels. Since the deployed model can also encounter unseen classes in an open world, we first employ a simple and effective Out of Distribution (OOD) detection module to distinguish between weak and strong OOD samples. We propose a novel contrastive learning based objective to enhance the discriminability between weak and strong OOD samples by utilizing small, dynamically updated feature banks. Finally, we also employ a classification objective for adapting the model using the reliable weak OOD samples. The proposed framework ROSITA combines these components, enabling continuous online adaptation of Vision Language Models on a single image basis. Extensive experimentation on diverse domain adaptation benchmarks validates the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Our code can be found at the project site https://manogna-s.github.io/rosita/

pSTarC: Pseudo Source Guided Target Clustering for Fully Test-Time Adaptation

Test Time Adaptation (TTA) is a pivotal concept in machine learning, enabling models to perform well in real-world scenarios, where test data distribution differs from training. In this work, we propose a novel approach called pseudo Source guided Target Clustering (pSTarC) addressing the relatively unexplored area of TTA under real-world domain shifts. This method draws inspiration from target clustering techniques and exploits the source classifier for generating pseudo-source samples. The test samples are strategically aligned with these pseudo-source samples, facilitating their clustering and thereby enhancing TTA performance. pSTarC operates solely within the fully test-time adaptation protocol, removing the need for actual source data. Experimental validation on a variety of domain shift datasets, namely VisDA, Office-Home, DomainNet-126, CIFAR-100C verifies pSTarC's effectiveness. This method exhibits significant improvements in prediction accuracy along with efficient computational requirements. Furthermore, we also demonstrate the universality of the pSTarC framework by showing its effectiveness for the continuous TTA framework.

SATA: Source Anchoring and Target Alignment Network for Continual Test Time Adaptation

Adapting a trained model to perform satisfactorily on continually changing testing domains/environments is an important and challenging task. In this work, we propose a novel framework, SATA, which aims to satisfy the following characteristics required for online adaptation: 1) can work seamlessly with different (preferably small) batch sizes to reduce latency; 2) should continue to work well for the source domain; 3) should have minimal tunable hyper-parameters and storage requirements. Given a pre-trained network trained on source domain data, the proposed SATA framework modifies the batch-norm affine parameters using source anchoring based self-distillation. This ensures that the model incorporates the knowledge of the newly encountered domains, without catastrophically forgetting about the previously seen ones. We also propose a source-prototype driven contrastive alignment to ensure natural grouping of the target samples, while maintaining the already learnt semantic information. Extensive evaluation on three benchmark datasets under challenging settings justify the effectiveness of SATA for real-world applications.