Move Anything with Layered Scene Diffusion

Diffusion models generate images with an unprecedented level of quality, but how can we freely rearrange image layouts? Recent works generate controllable scenes via learning spatially disentangled latent codes, but these methods do not apply to diffusion models due to their fixed forward process. In this work, we propose SceneDiffusion to optimize a layered scene representation during the diffusion sampling process. Our key insight is that spatial disentanglement can be obtained by jointly denoising scene renderings at different spatial layouts. Our generated scenes support a wide range of spatial editing operations, including moving, resizing, cloning, and layer-wise appearance editing operations, including object restyling and replacing. Moreover, a scene can be generated conditioned on a reference image, thus enabling object moving for in-the-wild images. Notably, this approach is training-free, compatible with general text-to-image diffusion models, and responsive in less than a second.

Hyper-VolTran: Fast and Generalizable One-Shot Image to 3D Object Structure via HyperNetworks

Solving image-to-3D from a single view is an ill-posed problem, and current neural reconstruction methods addressing it through diffusion models still rely on scene-specific optimization, constraining their generalization capability. To overcome the limitations of existing approaches regarding generalization and consistency, we introduce a novel neural rendering technique. Our approach employs the signed distance function as the surface representation and incorporates generalizable priors through geometry-encoding volumes and HyperNetworks. Specifically, our method builds neural encoding volumes from generated multi-view inputs. We adjust the weights of the SDF network conditioned on an input image at test-time to allow model adaptation to novel scenes in a feed-forward manner via HyperNetworks. To mitigate artifacts derived from the synthesized views, we propose the use of a volume transformer module to improve the aggregation of image features instead of processing each viewpoint separately. Through our proposed method, dubbed as Hyper-VolTran, we avoid the bottleneck of scene-specific optimization and maintain consistency across the images generated from multiple viewpoints. Our experiments show the advantages of our proposed approach with consistent results and rapid generation.

GenTron: Delving Deep into Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation

In this study, we explore Transformer-based diffusion models for image and video generation. Despite the dominance of Transformer architectures in various fields due to their flexibility and scalability, the visual generative domain primarily utilizes CNN-based U-Net architectures, particularly in diffusion-based models. We introduce GenTron, a family of Generative models employing Transformer-based diffusion, to address this gap. Our initial step was to adapt Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) from class to text conditioning, a process involving thorough empirical exploration of the conditioning mechanism. We then scale GenTron from approximately 900M to over 3B parameters, observing significant improvements in visual quality. Furthermore, we extend GenTron to text-to-video generation, incorporating novel motion-free guidance to enhance video quality. In human evaluations against SDXL, GenTron achieves a 51.1% win rate in visual quality (with a 19.8% draw rate), and a 42.3% win rate in text alignment (with a 42.9% draw rate). GenTron also excels in the T2I-CompBench, underscoring its strengths in compositional generation. We believe this work will provide meaningful insights and serve as a valuable reference for future research.

FLATTEN: optical FLow-guided ATTENtion for consistent text-to-video editing

Text-to-video editing aims to edit the visual appearance of a source video conditional on textual prompts. A major challenge in this task is to ensure that all frames in the edited video are visually consistent. Most recent works apply advanced text-to-image diffusion models to this task by inflating 2D spatial attention in the U-Net into spatio-temporal attention. Although temporal context can be added through spatio-temporal attention, it may introduce some irrelevant information for each patch and therefore cause inconsistency in the edited video. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce optical flow into the attention module in the diffusion model's U-Net to address the inconsistency issue for text-to-video editing. Our method, FLATTEN, enforces the patches on the same flow path across different frames to attend to each other in the attention module, thus improving the visual consistency in the edited videos. Additionally, our method is training-free and can be seamlessly integrated into any diffusion-based text-to-video editing methods and improve their visual consistency. Experiment results on existing text-to-video editing benchmarks show that our proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. In particular, our method excels in maintaining the visual consistency in the edited videos.

Mindstorms in Natural Language-Based Societies of Mind

Both Minsky's "society of mind" and Schmidhuber's "learning to think" inspire diverse societies of large multimodal neural networks (NNs) that solve problems by interviewing each other in a "mindstorm." Recent implementations of NN-based societies of minds consist of large language models (LLMs) and other NN-based experts communicating through a natural language interface. In doing so, they overcome the limitations of single LLMs, improving multimodal zero-shot reasoning. In these natural language-based societies of mind (NLSOMs), new agents -- all communicating through the same universal symbolic language -- are easily added in a modular fashion. To demonstrate the power of NLSOMs, we assemble and experiment with several of them (having up to 129 members), leveraging mindstorms in them to solve some practical AI tasks: visual question answering, image captioning, text-to-image synthesis, 3D generation, egocentric retrieval, embodied AI, and general language-based task solving. We view this as a starting point towards much larger NLSOMs with billions of agents-some of which may be humans. And with this emergence of great societies of heterogeneous minds, many new research questions have suddenly become paramount to the future of artificial intelligence. What should be the social structure of an NLSOM? What would be the (dis)advantages of having a monarchical rather than a democratic structure? How can principles of NN economies be used to maximize the total reward of a reinforcement learning NLSOM? In this work, we identify, discuss, and try to answer some of these questions.

Boundary-Denoising for Video Activity Localization

Video activity localization aims at understanding the semantic content in long untrimmed videos and retrieving actions of interest. The retrieved action with its start and end locations can be used for highlight generation, temporal action detection, etc. Unfortunately, learning the exact boundary location of activities is highly challenging because temporal activities are continuous in time, and there are often no clear-cut transitions between actions. Moreover, the definition of the start and end of events is subjective, which may confuse the model. To alleviate the boundary ambiguity, we propose to study the video activity localization problem from a denoising perspective. Specifically, we propose an encoder-decoder model named DenoiseLoc. During training, a set of action spans is randomly generated from the ground truth with a controlled noise scale. Then we attempt to reverse this process by boundary denoising, allowing the localizer to predict activities with precise boundaries and resulting in faster convergence speed. Experiments show that DenoiseLoc advances %in several video activity understanding tasks. For example, we observe a gain of +12.36% average mAP on QV-Highlights dataset and +1.64% mAP@0.5 on THUMOS'14 dataset over the baseline. Moreover, DenoiseLoc achieves state-of-the-art performance on TACoS and MAD datasets, but with much fewer predictions compared to other current methods.

Multi-Modal Few-Shot Temporal Action Detection via Vision-Language Meta-Adaptation

Few-shot (FS) and zero-shot (ZS) learning are two different approaches for scaling temporal action detection (TAD) to new classes. The former adapts a pretrained vision model to a new task represented by as few as a single video per class, whilst the latter requires no training examples by exploiting a semantic description of the new class. In this work, we introduce a new multi-modality few-shot (MMFS) TAD problem, which can be considered as a marriage of FS-TAD and ZS-TAD by leveraging few-shot support videos and new class names jointly. To tackle this problem, we further introduce a novel MUlti-modality PromPt mETa-learning (MUPPET) method. This is enabled by efficiently bridging pretrained vision and language models whilst maximally reusing already learned capacity. Concretely, we construct multi-modal prompts by mapping support videos into the textual token space of a vision-language model using a meta-learned adapter-equipped visual semantics tokenizer. To tackle large intra-class variation, we further design a query feature regulation scheme. Extensive experiments on ActivityNetv1.3 and THUMOS14 demonstrate that our MUPPET outperforms state-of-the-art alternative methods, often by a large margin. We also show that our MUPPET can be easily extended to tackle the few-shot object detection problem and again achieves the state-of-the-art performance on MS-COCO dataset. The code will be available in https://github.com/sauradip/MUPPET

Where is my Wallet? Modeling Object Proposal Sets for Egocentric Visual Query Localization

This paper deals with the problem of localizing objects in image and video datasets from visual exemplars. In particular, we focus on the challenging problem of egocentric visual query localization. We first identify grave implicit biases in current query-conditioned model design and visual query datasets. Then, we directly tackle such biases at both frame and object set levels. Concretely, our method solves these issues by expanding limited annotations and dynamically dropping object proposals during training. Additionally, we propose a novel transformer-based module that allows for object-proposal set context to be considered while incorporating query information. We name our module Conditioned Contextual Transformer or CocoFormer. Our experiments show the proposed adaptations improve egocentric query detection, leading to a better visual query localization system in both 2D and 3D configurations. Thus, we are able to improve frame-level detection performance from 26.28% to 31.26 in AP, which correspondingly improves the VQ2D and VQ3D localization scores by significant margins. Our improved context-aware query object detector ranked first and second in the VQ2D and VQ3D tasks in the 2nd Ego4D challenge. In addition to this, we showcase the relevance of our proposed model in the Few-Shot Detection (FSD) task, where we also achieve SOTA results. Our code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/vq2d_cvpr.

Negative Frames Matter in Egocentric Visual Query 2D Localization

The recently released Ego4D dataset and benchmark significantly scales and diversifies the first-person visual perception data. In Ego4D, the Visual Queries 2D Localization task aims to retrieve objects appeared in the past from the recording in the first-person view. This task requires a system to spatially and temporally localize the most recent appearance of a given object query, where query is registered by a single tight visual crop of the object in a different scene. Our study is based on the three-stage baseline introduced in the Episodic Memory benchmark. The baseline solves the problem by detection and tracking: detect the similar objects in all the frames, then run a tracker from the most confident detection result. In the VQ2D challenge, we identified two limitations of the current baseline. (1) The training configuration has redundant computation. Although the training set has millions of instances, most of them are repetitive and the number of unique object is only around 14.6k. The repeated gradient computation of the same object lead to an inefficient training; (2) The false positive rate is high on background frames. This is due to the distribution gap between training and evaluation. During training, the model is only able to see the clean, stable, and labeled frames, but the egocentric videos also have noisy, blurry, or unlabeled background frames. To this end, we developed a more efficient and effective solution. Concretely, we bring the training loop from ~15 days to less than 24 hours, and we achieve 0.17% spatial-temporal AP, which is 31% higher than the baseline. Our solution got the first ranking on the public leaderboard. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/vq2d_cvpr.

ETAD: A Unified Framework for Efficient Temporal Action Detection

Untrimmed video understanding such as temporal action detection (TAD) often suffers from the pain of huge demand for computing resources. Because of long video durations and limited GPU memory, most action detectors can only operate on pre-extracted features rather than the original videos, and they still require a lot of computation to achieve high detection performance. To alleviate the heavy computation problem in TAD, in this work, we first propose an efficient action detector with detector proposal sampling, based on the observation that performance saturates at a small number of proposals. This detector is designed with several important techniques, such as LSTM-boosted temporal aggregation and cascaded proposal refinement to achieve high detection quality as well as low computational cost. To enable joint optimization of this action detector and the feature encoder, we also propose encoder gradient sampling, which selectively back-propagates through video snippets and tremendously reduces GPU memory consumption. With the two sampling strategies and the effective detector, we build a unified framework for efficient end-to-end temporal action detection (ETAD), making real-world untrimmed video understanding tractable. ETAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on both THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3. Interestingly, on ActivityNet-1.3, it reaches 37.78% average mAP, while only requiring 6 mins of training time and 1.23 GB memory based on pre-extracted features. With end-to-end training, it reduces the GPU memory footprint by more than 70% with even higher performance (38.21% average mAP), as compared with traditional end-to-end methods. The code is available at https://github.com/sming256/ETAD.